[P2P-F] Fwd: Historical Patterns - Can we ( please ) learn from the past ?

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:40 AM
Subject: Historical Patterns - Can we ( please ) learn from the past ?
To:



In relation to the United States.

Europe and much of the world is undergoing similar patterns ( if not at a
more "advanced" state ? )...



Monday, 21 October 2013 09:34By Chris
Hedges<http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/44723>
, TruthDig<http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/lets_get_this_class_war_started_20131020>
|
Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19527-lets-get-this-class-war-started


It is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to
subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history,
have cyclically awoken to throw off their chains. The ceaseless fight in
human societies between the despotic power of the rich and the struggle for
justice and equality lies at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, which uses
the story of Gatsby to carry out a fierce indictment of capitalism.
Fitzgerald was reading Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” as he
was writing “The Great Gatsby.” Spengler predicted that, as Western
democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs” would replace the
traditional political elites. Spengler was right about that.

“There are only two or three human stories,” Willa
Cather<http://www.willacather.org/about-willa-cather/willa-cather>
wrote,
“and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never
happened before.”

...


The blanket dissemination of the ideology of free market capitalism through
the media and the purging, especially in academia, of critical voices have
permitted our oligarchs to orchestrate the largest income inequality gap in
the industrialized world. The top 1 percent in the United States own 40
percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent own only 7
percent, as Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in “The Price of Inequality.” For
every dollar that the wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980 they had an
additional $3 in yearly income in 2008, David Cay Johnston explained in the
article<http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html>
“9
Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes.” The bottom 90 percent,
Johnson said, in the same period added only one cent. Half of the country
is now classified as poor or low-income. The real value of the minimum wage
has fallen by $2.77 since 1968. Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice
for the common good. They never have. They never will. They are the cancer
of democracy.


...


The public face of the oligarchic class bears little resemblance to the
private face.  I, like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the embrace of the upper
crust when young. I was shipped off as a scholarship student at the age of
10 to an exclusive New England boarding school. I had classmates whose
fathers—fathers they rarely saw—arrived at the school in their limousines
accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so
the press could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of
good fathers. I spent time in the homes of the ultra-rich and powerful,
watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men and
women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants. When the
sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there are always
lawyers, publicists and political personages to protect them—George W.
Bush’s life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the
rich. The rich have a snobbish disdain for the poor—despite well-publicized
acts of philanthropy—and the middle class. These lower classes are viewed
as uncouth parasites, annoyances that have to be endured, at times placated
and always controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred
of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and
sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged.
It was a deeply unpleasant experience. But it exposed me to their
insatiable selfishness and hedonism. I learned, as a boy, who were my
enemies.

The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our
gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite
by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work on behalf
of corporations and the rich. Compliant politicians, clueless entertainers
and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which holds up the rich as
leaders to emulate and assures us that through diligence and hard work we
can join them, keep us from seeing the truth.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy
couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other
people clean up the mess they had made.”

Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl
Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the
rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune,
strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to
submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at
home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are
brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.”
Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of
manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their
wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control
is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established
intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case free market
capitalism and globalization—that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas
are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material
relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as
ideas.”





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