Showing posts with label the plutocracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the plutocracy. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

UPDATED: Donald Trump Delivers His Punchline

But outside the wealthy minority whose interests he serves, few of the masses who supported his candidacy will find much to laugh about. Go to about the 1:25 minute mark of the following video to find out why:



His pronouncements about lowering corporate taxes and eliminating regulations, as you can see, brought hearty but predictable responses from the audience, but the fact that they cheered most lustily over his announcement that he will repeal Obamacare, for which they have no skin in the game, is the clearest indictment of both their ideological and moral bankruptcy.

It reminds me of this old Internet meme:



I envy them not a whit.

UPDATE: Thanks to Anon pointing it out, we now now that the follicly-challenged fellow looking so pleased as he stands beside Trump is Joseph "Joey No Socks" Cinque — a convicted felon with ties to notorious Gambino crime family boss John Gotti.
Beyond a 1989 felony conviction for possessing nearly $100,000 worth of stolen artwork, Cinque "used to be friends with John Gotti," according to a New York Magazine profile from 1995.

Cinque was also "shot three times and left for dead" in a 1980 incident that authorities described as "a hit," according to the profile.
Hmmm, seems I remember Mom telling me that one is judged by the company they keep. By that measure alone, given his appearance onstage with the president-elect, Joey No Socks must be condemned.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The Mind Of The Plutocrat



The other day I wrote a brief post on the Koch brothers, accompanied by a video highlighting some of their very nefarious involvement in the climate-denial business. Fellow blogger The Mound of Sound, who spends a great deal of time on the climate-change file, offered the following observation about the evil pair:

They are deliberately and quite knowingly condemning today's kids and their children to come to enormous hardship and suffering, perhaps even worse.

Reflecting upon his observation, at supper I said to my wife that those who pour millions into fueling the industry of climate-denial (and without question almost all of them do it, not out of conviction but for the selfish advancement of their own pecuniary and ideological imperatives) are truly evil; they almost seem to emulate the stereotypical villains found throughout the years in James Bond films. Think, for example, of Ernest Stavro Blofeld or Auric Goldfinger, both bent on world domination, and I don't think you are far off understanding the sheer malignity of those who would condemn future generalizations to hell on earth.

The other day, I talked to my friend Dom, enjoying a sojourn in Florida, and the topic turned to the Koch brothers and the general attitude of indifference that the plutocrats show towards the collective. Dom said that they are so used to having their own way, and, moving as they do in such rarefied self-reinforcing circles, see themselves and their actions as beyond reproach.

Fortuitously, at about the same time I talked to Dom, I read a piece by The New York Time's Paul Krugman echoing Dom's observation. Entitled Paranoia of the Plutocrats, Krugman offers the following observations:

... the rich are different from you and me.

And yes, that’s partly because they have more money, and the power goes with it. They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they’re being foolish. They’re accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can’t buy everything, can’t insulate them from all adversity.


Emblematic of their shock and their outrage, as cited by Krugman, is the recent letter the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sent to the New York Times, in which he made this odious 'comparison':

I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

...This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Yet this overblown, even hysterical rhetoric is not limited to Mr. Perkins. As Krugman pointed out in a piece last year, others in this 'persecuted' minority are speaking up as well.

Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of the American International Group (AIG), the giant insurance company that played a crucial role in creating the global economic crisis, felt ill-used over the public outrage that accompanied the continuation of large executive bonuses after its massive government bailout:

He compared the uproar over bonuses to lynchings in the Deep South — the real kind, involving murder — and declared that the bonus backlash was “just as bad and just as wrong.”

But wait; there's more! Back in 2010 Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

As Krugman points out, normal people in a democracy accept criticism, however grudgingly (clearly, he is not acquainted with Harper and his cabal - but he did say normal people, didn't he?):

Normal people take it in stride; even if they’re angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don’t cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me.

In addition to his earlier observation of how the ultra-rich are so insulated from real life as an explanation for their pique, Krugman offers this:

I also suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We’re not talking captains of industry here, men who make stuff. We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by. They may boast that they are job creators, the people who make the economy work, but are they really adding value? Many of us doubt it — and so, I suspect, do some of the wealthy themselves, a form of self-doubt that causes them to lash out even more furiously at their critics.

Perhaps John Steinbeck, in his great novel The Grapes of Wrath, said it best when referring to the wealthy landowners who exploited so many of their fellow human beings:

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich.