Conspiracies of the 1%: Vast and Deep and Old

Quotation of the Day:

In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can't, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society [...,] they acquire the force of law. Thus an unscrupulous minority is led by its insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the needs of the whole population.

The speaker here is Raphael Hythloday in Sir Thomas More's — St. Thomas More's, if you're Catholic — Utopia, published in Latin in 1516, here in the translation by Paul Turner in the Penguin edition of 1965.

Utopia has been available in English since 1551 and can be picked up cheaply on Amazon.com. So English-reading grownups have no excuse not to know that there can be "a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests" without meetings of The Elders of Plutocracy or a whole lot of explicit plotting among "the 1%" and their minions and somewhat less obscenely rich associates. The superrich quietly play the game, after rigging it. In More's day the game was more open and, where visible, conspicuous: "privilege and the class system" constituted the ruling ideology. In our day, however, we have incessant media coverage of the lives of the less prudent rich, so we're back to no excuses.

Sir Thomas both was and was not modern here; for sure, Saint Thomas knew the competing and complementary teachings of the Latin Church, Radix malorum superbia est, and, as Chaucer's thoroughly corrupt but here doctrinally correct Pardoner puts it, "[...] my theme is yet, and ever was, / Radix malorum est Cupiditas. That is, the root of all evils is either Pride or Greed, or, frequently, a combination. Such an idea may be overstatement and oversimplification, but it's still legitimate and crucial. Pride and greed are constants, and they are threats in the hands of the powerful. Which is why, more often than it gets done, society needs to be shaken up and the "conspiracy of the rich," for a while, at least a bit, rolled back.

Colonel Blimp, the 1%. and the Continua of Contempt (23 Nov. 2013)

 "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave 76!" —

Mel Brooks, Two Thousand Year Old Man

            Here's a word and a concept you need to understand politics: "Wogs." More specifically, you need to understand the terms as pronounced by Colonel Blimp, sometime between, say 1897 and the early 1920s, when the British Empire was at its peak.

            Now Colonel Blimp — a stereotype I will use shamelessly — is a variety of British Upper Class Twit but in all surface ways the opposite. Whereas the Monty-Pythonesque twit is weak and withdrawing, when not kicking beggars, Colonel Blimp is grotesquely robust and healthy: Teddy Roosevelt with a "public school" British accent but without Teddy Roosevelt's actual education and intelligence or need to ever — not ever! — overcome disability. When Colonel Blimp's regiment were shitting themselves to death from cholera and wasting away from tropical diseases, the Colonel himself was in tip-top health and thoroughly enjoying a full-on English breakfast (lunch, high tea, dinner, supper, postprandial snack — then cheese with port) before going out to harangue his men for their laziness and lack of good British pluck.

            Got the picture? Now concentrate on the sound as Colonel Blimp heads out for a day of fox hunting and poacher thrashing and pronounces the sentence, "The wogs begin at Calais." That's "Calais," as in the French coastal city across from Dover, England, but pronounced to rime with "malice": like "callous."

            Colonel Blimp's point is that the inferior people's of the Earth begin when one leaves "this sceptered isle […] this England" (Richard II 2.1) and encounters the Others, in this case the French, and then the great land masses of the Old World and their human masses of increasingly wretched refuse of increasingly negligible peoples.

            Colonel Blimp sees himself as good, sound, Anglo-Saxon stock, though he might overlay that with the conviction that his people weren't Anglo-Saxon really but their Norman conquerors. In any event, he was of the English race — a term Winston Churchill could use as late as 1950 — and the English race is superior to the duskier peoples or the "lesser breeds without the law," to appropriate a phrase from Rudyard Kipling "Recessional," but removing any of the nuance or distrust of hubris you might find in Kipling; Colonel Blimp doesn't do nuance, or humility.

            However, as the Python people properly observed about upper-class twits more generally, Colonel Blimp's wogs begin long before Calais, for example a couple or three neighborhoods away in London, when the Colonel and Lady Blimp condescend to travel to London — or among the peasantry in the village on the Colonel's ancestral estate.

            Such common folk are White, almost always in classic Blimp (Victorian) times, and usually Protestant and Anglo-Saxon: WASPs in American terms. But really! The lower orders are, well, lower, as God made them. So, under most conditions, figurative wogs can begin down the hill, among the middle, working, and lower classes.

            Mel Brooks's 2000-Year-Old Man gave as the first national anthem, "Let em all go to hell / Except Cave 76!", and this is quite right as a summary of the essence of patriotism, loyalty to the nation. But the nation isn't always sufficiently threatened that one can see millions of strangers as fellow members of "Cave 76." Indeed, Cave 76 can be very small and not defined geographically. For Colonel Blimp, at various times and under various circumstances, Cave 76 could be the small power-elite sharing his class and accent and illusions of pure Anglo-Saxon or even purer Norman origins.

            Okay, sometimes "Cave 76" can be pretty arbitrary, as when, our paper-delivery boy explained to us, what the grownups saw as a race riot in his high school was more of "a bunch of thugs who wanted to fight," and "Instead of dividing up 'skins' and 'shirts,' they divided Blacks and Whites." That can be dangerous enough, but the result at the high school was only a brawl. When "Cave 76" starts getting sophisticated, those brawls can become feuds, then tribal armed conflict, and then large-scale, full-scale wars.

            When "Cave 76" goes into its Blimpish mode, there is the danger not only of conflict with fairly obvious Others, but an equally pernicious ignoring of the suffering of one's own neighbors.


            We in the US have never seriously competed with our British cousins in the production of upper-class twits, primarily, I think, because of our prejudices against inbreeding. But we are starting to develop our own varieties of Colonel Blimp, whose figurative caves are communities of the rich looking out upon a sea of inferiors, and wishing to hell all of us wogs, 99% and more.

Divide, Distract, and Rule (7 March 2014 [20 March 2015])

           The current crisis when I first wrote this blog in in early March 2014 was Russian troops pretty well taking over Crimea and threats and posturing over the fate of Ukraine. A year and a bit later, the crisis continues. 

            This is an important crisis, and one with, as they say in theatre, "legs," but I'd like to put it into a couple or more larger contexts and then get to the necessity of regaining focus.

            The first bigger context is nuclear.

            The US-led invasion of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait was not matched by anyone invading China when China seized and then periodically cracked down on any moves toward independence, or even dissent, in Tibet (e.g., 1959, 1978, 1989, 1998). Now there are many differences between Iraq and Kuwait on the one hand and China and Tibet on the other. China is very large and populous and very far away from the USA, and Tibet doesn't export oil; since the time of the Silk Road China has been off-and-on a major producer and potentially huge market for the world's goods, and in recent years has been the source of a significant amount of the funding of the economy of the United State. Countries like Iraq, however, are where they are geographically and probably don't want to push their populations up a lot; and they either have oil or they don't. Iraq has oil — oh, boy, does it have oil! — and what it didn't have that China had since 1964 is nuclear weapons. A dangerous lesson world leaders could find in the invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I (1990-91), strongly reinforced by "Gulf War II," the 2003 Iraq War, could be summed up in the line Tom Lehrer assigned to Israel in his song "Who's Next": "The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm; / But, just in case — we'd better get a bomb."

            Arguably — and more respectable folk than I are arguing it — Russia's threats to Ukraine can teach that lesson in spades: the Ukrainians had nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR and, to their credit, gave them up in the deal sealed with The Budapest Memorandum and Trilateral Statement of 1994. Russians have strong cultural roots in Kiev and as good a claim to Crimea as anyone who isn't Crimean Tartar, but an invasion of Crimea and threats to Ukraine proper suggest a horrible principle in a world already overstocked with nukes. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the other points on "The Axis of Evil" either got a bomb (North Korea) or set themselves on the way to getting a bomb (Iran).

            To repeat again the screamingly obvious but insufficiently absorbed: If there are enough nukes in human hands to destroy human civilization or bring on a nuclear winter and massive extinctions, that's many too many nukes, period. Nukes proliferating to different countries just increases the danger.

            On survival grounds, we need to be cooperating with the Russians for radical reductions in atomic weaponry, and then in conventional weaponry: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous, but they're just blips in the graph of the destruction caused in the Second World War; we need sharp reductions in armament period, for survival and for prosperity. As President Eisenhower pointed out, money spent on weapons isn't being spent on things more useful.

            The Ukrainian crisis —actions and words by US politicians as well as Slavic oligarchs — reduces the chances for reductions in weapons.

            The crisis is also hurting related areas where we need active and close cooperation with the Russians, and the Chinese and some Iranians and others.

            This side of an asteroid hitting Earth (or a comet), the threat of quick extermination of the human species and others is primarily that mere presence of so many nuclear weapons. A less cataclysmic threat lies not in a "Clash of Civilization" but a conflict of world-views of, on one side, various kinds of True Believers vs., on the other side, those of us with a stake in maintaining more or less the present world and retaining and expanding what was truly progress coming from the Enlightenment.

            There's a generalized Fundamentalist threat, primarily located in, but hardly restricted to, the Abrahamic religions and most immediately threatening in militant, jihadist, puritanical Islam.

            We need cooperation on this one, and coordination, starting with, say, both the US and Russian Federation swearing off invading Afghanistan for a while, and refraining from arming jihadists and from ham-fisted repression and other invitations to insurrections and mass movements.

            So let's keep focus there, and, for Americans, let us keep a whole lot more focus — keeping that eye on the prize — on events here at home.

            We do tend to get distracted.

            I. F. Stone says somewhere (translation: I couldn't find it on the first page of a Google search), I. F. Stone says somewhere that when the American Right pushed "roll-back" of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War what they most wanted to roll back was the New Deal.

            Things haven't changed much.

            There really was a quiet revolution in the 1980s and following, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher went beyond reining in overweening unions to pretty well break them, and between Thatcher and Reagan we got the start of a great movement of politics to the Right and the movement of money from poorer people to richer people — and then a whole big bunch of it to the very, very rich.

            The Ukrainian crisis must be muddled through to a compromise all sides can despise and live with. The conflicts of world-views — the big-ass Kulturkampfe "culture wars" and little battles of gay rights, women's rights, and human rights and civil liberties: these must be fought, and the twilight battles of identity politics pressed to their conclusions.

            But the old rule was, Divide et impera; if you want to get power and keep it, divide the opposition; "Divide and rule." And, of course, distract your opponents, and those you're screwing over so elegantly they don't even know that they are your opponents. (Distrahe et impera? Sorry, I only know enough foreign language for occasional pretentious pedantry.)

            The Radical Right still wants to roll back the New Deal, and they more successfully will block expanding the benefits of the New Deal to the "unworthy poor" who might vote for Democrats or non-racist populists. The ultra-rich, for their part, intend to stay ultra-rich and get richer.

            So, no, it isn't "class warfare,"but there is class conflict, and of a sort we haven't really seen in the US outside of the Gilded Age and slave economy in parts of the old South: that 1% and smaller vs. the rest, minus those in the top 10% with the delusion they'll make it to the ultra-rich in a generation.

            Focus, people, focus:
                        * Species survival, starting with major cuts in nuclear forces and with nuclear nonproliferation.
                        * Avoiding fanatical, fundamentalist mass movements of the European variety in the middle third of the 20^th century — or in the Wars of Religion of the 17^th century.
                        * Fairer and more stable allocation of wealth and income, starting with fairer taxes and economic policy in the US of A.


            Yeah, do divvy up the labor on different causes, and there's plenty of political and social-justice work to go around. But don't get divided into competing identity groups. Don't get distracted.