If We Eat the Rich, Who Will That Inconvenience?

Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality.  Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later.  That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions.  The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice.  There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides.  Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces.  If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything.  It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on. 

 

 

Elmo Musk is back out there challenging the average numbskull to imagine what the world would be like without billionaires.  This is the funniest part of the whole AI panic: the idea that when AI becomes prevalent, the average worker, skilled-laborer, healthcare workers, and everyone who keeps the wheels turning will be out of work and the hedgefund goobers will be at the top of the stack. 

Elmo hasn’t made a useful decision in his whole pedophile, nepobaby life and he’s the poster boy for the useless rich kid.  He thinks his money and intellectual “contributions” are what make his “businesses” work, but the actual business relies on the people who know how to code, design and build cars and rockets, can do the accounting and pay the bills, and sell the crap his companies build.  Every AI program in existence today would do Elmo’s “job” better than him in a heartbeat.  AI could easily be programmed to behave like an entitled, racist, selfish asshole, so it could replace Elmo in every aspect of what passes for his “life.”  Likewise, the hedgefund banksters don’t “contribute” anything useful to the businesses they gobble-up, sell off the functioning divisions and assets, and overpay themselves (as “consultants”) and the deadbeat mismanagement they bribe into allowing the barbarians into the corporate castle.  Like Musk and the rest of the billionaires, they are leaches draining the life from the businesses they contaminate and the nation they are destroying. 

Americans heard this “you can’t survive without us” nonsense from “businessmen” who created government-funded monopolies back in the 1890s.  Luckily, after repeated economic crashes, depredations from the overbearing overlords of wealth that caused entire states’ economies and populations to collapse, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. became the 26th president of the United States and put a temporary end to the American Oligarchy.  It wasn’t the intention of either the always-flawed Republican Party or the Marching Moron American public to either elect Roosevelt or to stand on their rarely-used hind feet, it was pure and simple luck.  It was a well-placed bullet that took out the Republican establishment’s President, William McKinley, and dropped the right man into the right job at the right time for one of the few, brief, good moments in American history.  The inflation-adjusted “billionaires” of the day (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, Hetty Green, Jay Cooke, James Hill, and a few lesser-known figures of American “royalty”) were just as convinced as Musk that the country couldn’t survive without them.  And they were also wrong.  

Labor, invention, science, and the necessities of life, culture, economies, and progress do not need the “influence” of gross wealth, they struggle to survive in the presence of them.  In spite of the “conservative” interference from stagnate, paralyzed capital held closely and selfishly by the entitled rich, actual progress can barely keep its head above the sewage.  Whether that wealth was inherited (Musk, Gates, Theil, Bezos, etc) and, occasionally, expanded on through luck and/or skill or initiated through hard work, luck, and innovation, once it is captured and hoarded by the rich and powerful it becomes a roadblock for everyone else. 

The uneducated MAGA crowd, who keep babbling about a time when “America was great,” are likely talking about the post-WWII era when the top income tax bracket was more than 90%.  That was when the United States, representing a few ideals that the rest of the world wanted to emulate, was at its most productive, creative, and optimistic.  Of course, the part of the 1950s that MAGA wants to return to is the Jim Crow racist bullshit because, even 1950s technology and education levels is beyond the capacity of Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” 

Obviously (I hope), the best way to “eat the rich” is to tax those useless deadbeat hoarders into insignificance and put all of that idle capital back to work rebuilding the country they tried to destroy.  When America was great, in 1950, the top federal estate tax rate was 77%, applied to net estate values that exceeded $10 million, working down to as little as 3% for smaller estates with a $60,000 estate tax threshold.  The purpose of inheritance taxes was to prevent an idle aristocracy from becoming powerful. Reagan convinced the Marching Morons that estate taxes were “death taxes” with a math-free argument that only made sense if you were either on the receiving end of the estate or too stupid to know how taxation worked (every MAGAot who ever lived).  It’s hard to imagine today, but those taxes were intended to pay off the World War II national debt (to itself and US citizens, not foreign investors) and to rebuild and catch-up on the time, prosperity, and progress lost during that war.  Since Nixon, US voters have been convinced that passing responsibility on to future generations is not only a right and privilege, but some kind of magical get-out-of-responsibility-free card in perpetuity. Without exaggeration, that is how fuckin’ stupid American voters are today.  

 Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality.  Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later.  That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions.  The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice.  There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides.  Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces.  If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything.  It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on. 

Wrong, Again

  

About 20 years ago, a good friend speculated that “We’ll be the last generation to enjoy global warming.”  As I’m sure you’d assume, we’re both Boomers and were expecting a sooner-than-later use-by-date, too.  The fact is that, regardless of Republican and Religious Right denials, the climate is changing at a record only beaten by giant asteroid planet-killing extinction event.  Of course, with Trump and Musk’s decimation of NASA and their Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) and the SpaceX and Starlink clutter, we could be in for a planet killer strike, too, and won’t know it until we see the billionaires heading for their rabbit holes.  This summer, if it is an example of what we’re heading into, has not been enjoyable.  It has been hot, dry, and even our semi-rural Minnesota city’s air has been as polluted by smoke and factory emissions as the worst I ever experienced in L.A. in Reagan’s environment-denying-and-defiling 80s. 

Seeing these kinds of environmental changes in my own lifetime is (and should be) startling.  For example, in the late-1970, I was working for an agricultural equipment company that maintained test plots in northern-central Florida.  Having grown up and suffered the “real Midwest” for all of my life, at that point, the only running water I’d ever seen that had any visibility at all came out of a tap and, even that, was cloudy.  One weekend off, one of the welders I worked with and I decided to canoe the Ichetucknee River, which was at that time the source of the most pure water in the country.  It was, in fact, like canoeing in a really large bathtub or aquarium.  We were surrounded by tropical plants and animals (especially the occasional alligator and snapping turtle and, often, several water moccasins) and, when our boat drifted over a spring outlet we could see scuba divers 30-40 feet down as clear as you can imagine.  That was my first experience with a canoe and it became one of my favorite, regular activities for the next 50 years.  However, in those same 50 years, Florida’s clear water springs and creeks have been decimated by agricultural pollution and over-development.  Florida is not and has never been a place anyone sensible would call “environmentally responsible,” but with 1,000 new residents every day the place is in need of a new, much larger handbasket in which to travel to hell.  You have to wonder if the dinosaurs were this irresponsible and that is what attracted the Chicxulub asteroid that hit the Gulf of Epstein 66 million years ago and put an end to their overpopulation? 

One of the less-often-discussed reasons for climate change denial, not just in the uneducated, dumbed-down United States but in other declining and fool-filled civilizations, is that nationalism eliminates any possibility of international action to preserve a climate that humans can live in.  In fact, nationalism has zero answers for all complicated world-wide problems, so the only “logical” approach is to call those problems “a hoax” and ignore them until they are impossible to ignore and way beyond the point of no return.  That kind of “solution” works for bills that we can’t afford to pay, like the national debt or balloon payment home loans, why not for world-wide catastrophes?  Since the Nixon Regime, Americans have grown so used to putting off responsibility to the next generation that it’s just a reflex now.  We haven’t even begun to pay off the Vietnam War debt and Reagan treated the national debt like it was a pile of chips someone had given him to play with at a casino.  Carter, Clinton and, to a lessor extent, Obama made an attempt to convince Americans that either taxes had to increase or spending had to decrease before the debt became unsustainable (which it is far past today), but Reagan’s gift to the 1% of control of the national media kills that discussion before it gets real.  And, like global warming, we’re just going to let that problem creep up on us until someone with a bigger stick calls the debt due.

If we’re lucky, we might be the last generation to enjoy spending the American dollar, too. 

Happy 4th?

 I recently saw that half of Americans don't have any idea what they are celebrating on the 4th of July, “including 61 percent of Gen Z respondents.”  That is certainly consistent with my experience, with rural Americans and, especially, rural young people. On average, the "Proud to be an American" crowd doesn't have even the slightest idea what parts of American History they should be proud of and what parts should be causing deep shame and embarrassment. Worse, at least half of them don't have the capability of feeling shame or an obligation to make things better for anyone but themselves. 

 This is the crowd that, exemplified by Elon Musk, think that philanthropy, empathy, and community are obsolete concepts. If you want to put a circle around the people who have caused the United States to become a lawless trash can of fools and degenerates, this is the group you put your focus on.

 A few days ago, I was talking with a friend and we were trying to determine when our police departments quit cracking down on illegal exhaust systems. Where he and I live, the noise level is often bad enough to make us decide to pack up and move to someplace quieter.  When I was a kid, 60 years ago, every young man who owned a motorized vehicle, from scooters to cars, worried about the smallest pin-holes in their exhaust systems.  Any sort of unmuffled sound would get them stopped, ticketed, and it might even result in the vehicle being confiscated; if it was the second or third time they've been stopped for that offense. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s and early 2000s, most states performed emissions testing, which included visual inspection of vehicles’ intake and exhaust systems for illegal modifications.  When that ended, so did anything resembling law enforcement of vehicle noise laws. Today, it's impossible to tell the difference between a modified, aftermarket exhaust system and a straight pipe on a huge number of vehicles of all sorts, including vehicles that are absolutely illegal on public streets, regardless of exhaust system condition. Since I still read about cops making house calls when neighbors make a disturbing the peace complaint, I know the country hasn't gone stone deaf. We have just gone stone lawless. When, and why, did that happen?

 The answer to almost every question in these United States can be found by following the money. And there is certainly lots of money to be found in the illegal exhaust business. But that doesn't explain why people want that kind of lawlessness, and they seem to want it in large quantities.  First the Nixon Administration (with a major impeachment threat setback) and, then, the Reagan Administration demonstrated that the nation’s laws do not apply to the rich and powerful.  I will always believe that everything in human culture is driven top-down and that doubly applies for criminal behavior.  When the average Joe Douchebag saw that the people who run the federal government were unimpeded by any sort of ethics limitations and were filling their pockets with anything they could steal, he decided those same rules applied to him. 

 For more than 60 years, I thought the American Constitution was the closest thing to a sacred document, at least related to governments, that humans had ever created.  Then, I read it cover-to-cover several times in 2013 and 14, when I was trapped in a New Mexico Campground with a broken Volkswagen camper. Even not considering all the lines drawn through slavery protections, it's not a very organized or impressive document. The Declaration of Independence, the thing we are supposedly celebrating today, is even more flawed. Ignoring the fact that the document only acknowledges that "all (white) men" are "endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," a good bit of this celebrated document embedded vicious racism in the origins of the country.  The declaration’s final complaint being that the king refused to protect the European invaders from ". . . the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." The North American European invasion history that followed that document is best described as the largest, most ruthless, and blatantly racist genocidal campaign in human history. Add that to the lined-out provisions in the Constitution protecting and furthering slavery and we should probably be having a moment of silence rather than a raucous, drunken, fireworks-detonating celebration of 250 years of mortification and greed.

 That isn’t, of course, who we are today.  Instead, we are a nation divided and on the edge of another civil war.  Our federal government has been dumbed-down to accurately reflect the lowest-common-denominator in our culture.  After 250 years of trying to find the least-fit person to hold the office of Presidency, it’s hard to imagine moving that bar any lower.  Donny Trump’s rampant corruption, narcissism, mental deficiencies, and vile amoral behavior is a sad and scary reflection on who so many of our countrymen and women are today.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not celebrating this moment today.  I’m going to spend this day and evening at home with Ms. Day and my thoughts and hope that next year is better.  Or, at least, not worse.