Eat the Rich

I just watched Richard Wolff's discourse on capitalism and it fanned some embers in me that, although not dormant, have not shot to full flame often enough.  Everything in western discourse should be touched by this fire and every rich man woman and child should be seared by the heat.  We are not talking about some Occupy tokenism here but a concerted class war that will result in the annihilation of the status quo and the destruction of the very fabric of current economic practice.  In the same way that, as of this writing, America totters on its fiscal cliff, so do we totter on the brink of marginalization, irrelevance, and economic subjugation.

I was one of the first teachers, in Edmonton in the mid seventies, to teach computers.  Even before I brought my TRS80 Model 1 into the school, I had been preaching the potential upheaval in the workplace that would naturally flow from the mass introduction of cybernetic slaves into an economy that had, heretofore, been people dependent.  Although scientists and futurists had been telling us for decades that computers would usher in unprecedented prosperity and leisure time for a majority of the population, I asked my students why a person who owned a business would have any interest in improving the lot of a workforce that had been obviated and made obsolescent by technology.

I gave as an example an accounting firm that employed 100 accountants and a corresponding pool of secretaries and other office staff.  If this firm brought in 10 computers, it had the choice of lightening the work load of the current staff (since each computer did the job of 10 flesh and blood accountants) or gaining a competitive edge by by downsizing (a word that did not exist then) and dropping the cost of its services to clients due to reduced salary costs.  My students decided that the answer lay somewhere in the middle because of the loyalty of the firm to its employees and the good public relations that would flow from "spreading the wealth".  Rather than tell them they were idiots (because I cared for them and they were quite bright otherwise) I advised them to keep their eyes open as the cybernetic revolution unfolded.

Sure enough, the workforces of the industrial world were decimated by the introduction of these tireless automatons into the workplace.  Where my friend's law firm had employed three legal secretaries, two typists and a pair of filing clerks; they now employed two legal secretaries who split the typing between them as well as an all around office worker/filing clerk with some rudimentary, learn-on-the-job computer skills.  This sort of attrition began to happen everywhere to a lesser or greater degree and the repercussions were immediate and severe.

In the 1970s we began to be obsessed with data.  I presume this had long been the drug of choice for scientists, economists, and the bespectacled denizens of university cybernetics labs, but now it was beginning to addict the society at large.  Newscasts, which had shared political and general items which concerned the public thirst for gossip and Schadenfreude, increasingly talked about THE ECONOMY as if it were some mythological entity which governed people's lives.  Other factors such as the real/manufactured oil crisis of the middle of the decade, the election of Ronald Reagan, and the concomitant shift from Keynesian economics to the rapacious evil that was the Chicago School of Economics under Milton Friedman, ushered in a new age of greed by the ultra wealthy.  Real income, the money that people who work for a living have in their pockets, allowing for inflation, has actually fallen since 1975 while the rich have made obscene gains.

That's all very well and good (or not) but my purpose in writing this is to promote a solution.  I think we need to mount a relentless campaign that will lead, ultimately, to the destruction of the monied elite. Although police forces and the military currently protect the interests of the rich, an effort must be mounted to turn these running dogs of the wealthy against their masters.  I'm not a violent man but the cancer of unbounded wealth must be excised if our children and rand children are to maintain their birthright and their dignity.

How wealthy is wealthy?  Let's start with billionaires.  There are 392 individuals worth $1.1 billion or more in the United States.  The top one hundred are worth between $66 billion and $4 billion apiece.  Did this money come from the sweat of their brows?  Did it come from the dangerous work that they do or from the reinvestment of profits in people?  Did it flow into their bank accounts because of their contributions to public wealth?  Or did it come from plundering that public wealth from the trough of low taxes and lax laws to govern the rich?

Let's take the example of the richest of the rich.  In the eighties and nineties, schools and other public institutions were falling all over themselves to provide computers and keep up with the startling rate of obsolescence.  Schools would buy 50 Apple IIe computers at some $2000 a piece.  12 months later they would be worth $60 apiece (if you were lucky).  Most schools bought PC's at a similar price with a similar write-off.  And whether Apple or PC, these computers ran an operating system that was licensed by Microsoft.  Software to run on those computers became outdated more quickly than the machines they ran on.  Schools bought word processing updates and spreadsheet updates and operating system updates which were quickly worth a small fraction of the schools' original investment.

A progressive tax system could have returned much of this wealth to the public purse but progressive taxes were seen as an impediment to investment and growth.  Under Reagan's presidency and the iron grip of the Chicago School "trickle down" economic model, the burgeoning wealth of the 'captains of industry' was seen as priming the pump for the rest of us.  That skewed theory is still being used in some sectors to keep the system from being fixed but, far from protecting the rich, it will exacerbate the inequity of wealth distribution to the point that the wealthy will no longer be safe from the wrath of the populace.  We have seen some of this in the Occupy movements and in some of the sound bytes of the 2012 American election.  Hopefully the voices will become louder.

So don't be angry that someone else has much more than you do but be angry that the future of your children has been stolen.  Don't be angry that you can't afford the lifestyle of the ultra rich - be angry that your heirs have nothing to look forward to but a life of wage slavery and an erosion of the social safety net.  Don't be angry that a massive portion of the nation's wealth is concentrated in the hands of .1% of the population - be angry that everything you do, everything you buy, every service you avail yourself of, and every fine that you pay either puts money into the pockets of these modern day swindlers and carpetbaggers or beggars you at a faster rate than it could ever impoverish them.  A $200 fine or a $100 registration fee may be significant to you at $20 per hour but is not even an annoyance to someone who makes a thousand times that or more.

The only effective course of action is an assassination bureau to eliminate a fairly small number and to bring about revolution in the streets. The sane course of action is to reintroduce and tighten progressive taxation - perhaps to 80 and 90 percent of the income of the ultra rich.  This would slowly bring some of the immense wealth plundered back to the public coffers.  This assumes that the buildings full of accountants and former government tax lawyers would be forbidden from finding loopholes and tax breaks and that money wouldn't wind up in off shore bank accounts.  All this is predicated on an informed electorate voting in their own best interests.

I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence.