Savor the Rich
Chew thoroughly and enjoy every mouthful.
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
We confront serious problems here in the smoking remains of Trump’s United States. Fox, OANN, The Blaze and many other well-funded Regressive propaganda outlets are sewing falsehood and fear for the purpose of profit. Wealthy oil companies, like ExxonMobile, are buying Representatives and Senators in order to assure a continued world-threatening carbon glut. The Supreme Court has been curated by wealthy activists who make up rules as they go along in order to assure that they always win. Wealthy drug companies buy Congresspeople in order to assure constant high profits on drugs they must sell at moderate profit elsewhere. Wealthy providers of music, ebooks and housing corner the market in order to assure an inexhaustible store of renters for the properties that only the rich may actually own.
A Monopoly of Manipulation
Many remember when a television, once it failed, could be taken to a repair shop where it could be restored to working order. This was true for many household products. Ovens, watches, furniture and computers could be repaired. An ordinary person could collect repair manuals and open a repair shop where ey could make a decent living assuring that the neighborhood’s appliances were all functioning properly. Now, very few common devices are repairable. This leads to waste and pollution, and it identifies the product you think you own as a product you have merely rented for a few years. When it fails, you throw it away and pay the capitalist rent for a few more years of use.
Large institutions, run by wealthy families like the Koch Family Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, serve as repositories for the unfathomable wealth accumulated through lives of exploitation. Certain of these foundations support worthy remedial programs; many, on the other hand, sponsor such regressive programs as climate-change denial, Christian fundamentalist agitation, corporate control of government and regressive voting restrictions according to the tastes of the primary benefactor.
Local radio has been monopolized by such wealthy families as the children of Julian Sinclair Smith who captained the Sinclair Broadcasting Group which is replacing local radio and television stations with propaganda repeaters all over the United States. Comcast is monopolizing and rightifying media outlets and entertainment venues assuring, through NBC, Xfinity, USA, Syfy, DreamWorks and others, a long-lived infiltration of the American mind and pocketbook by rent-seeking capitalism.
Rupert Murdoch, through Fox News, and Jeff Bezos, through The Washington Post, disseminate the beliefs that promote their world views to those who will be influenced. Through these massive misinformation megaphones, the wealthy promote their favorite tropes.
Long-standing charitable foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment distribute funds in support of numerous important and laudable causes. They strive to assure that these problems are being addressed piecemeal. They are rarely involved in actually resolving the root cause of the problems which they tout as their defining campaign. There is, of course, a reason for this: To actually solve the root cause of the problem would cost their sources of funds money. As exemplified by our U.S. Pharmaceutical companies, it is more profitable to convert a fatal disease into a chronic disease than it is to cure a disease.
While massive accumulated wealth is less egregious when distributed to the masses, all of these benign non-profit stores of value fail to address or to strive in the direction of the real problem. Massive sequestration of wealth is the actual problem to which a wealth-driven foundation is merely a belated apology for shameful hoarding.
The wealthy discovered, in the early years of the Twenty-First Century, that competition was no longer required. As I explore in Famine in the Bullpen, large corporations now simply acquire their competition and dismantle it before an actual challenge is levied. Competition has become passé since it is no longer required. In support of excessive profits, innovation and actual solutions to the problems of real people are now deprecated.
A Common Thread
There is a common thread here. It invades and corrupts everything. It makes freedoms and joys remembered from the old days by modern sexagenarians inaccessible today. It is extreme wealth. Extreme wealth is a disease that must be eradicated. It is the disease that underlies the vast majority of modern problems. It is a curable disease that requires only determination and moral courage.
This wealth is a threat to the United States as a whole and to the U.S. citizen in particular. It translates into speech which translates into power which translates into unassailable control. That control defines our political system as an oligarchy. In other words, to support capitalism is to glorify oligarchy. To defend unlimited wealth is to surrender to the control of the pampered, undeserving elite.
The basic problem is not that certain rich people may provide money to worthy causes. The basic problem is that by hoarding money, certain rich people may determine what essential projects may be funded. Becoming wealthy is not a magical designation that you have become a genius capable of solving the world’s problems. It is merely an indication that, through sheer luck or inheritance, you found yourself inundated by a massive flow of money that you decided to keep.
The Supreme Court has made it clear that those with wealth have the power to take whatever they want for any reason they choose. The U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by our current Supreme Court, does not define a country governed by the people but instead by the wealthy and powerful. The people are merely the fuel by which the wealthy may propel themselves to their preferred stratospheric Utopia. You, my reader, are merely consumable propellant.
If we take the latest Supreme Court decisions seriously, we may conclude that wealth is a basic impediment to freedom. As long as the wealthy may hoard as much money as they choose, all other speech is irrelevant. If no speech has value, then your beliefs and choices also have no value. This is the very definition of an unhealthy democracy craving remedy. For this reason, the correct solution to this world-wide problem is simply to vaccinate against that disease. All wealth greater than (let’s suggest) $10 million is simply not permitted. We tax income and wealth in order to assure $10 million as an ultimate limit of wealth for any person, whether an individual human or a fake person in the form of a corporation.
The rich are not to be respected. They are not to be revered as superior to all others. They are not to be accepted as the pinnacle of human society. They are to be understood as lucky, sociopathic, hoarders of value. They exploit the unlucky in order to extract value from them like a mining company extracts value from the earth, leaving only mine tailings in their wake. The wealthy are the wretched refuse of a culture that has failed, the bloated pustules of a diseased world that has misdirected its resources to those who do not provide value. It has misunderstood value by basing it on quantity as opposed to quality.
Value is a complex. It is a measure of benefit provided to the world. If it is provided to a small number of elite recipients, the actual value is very small. If provided to the general public, it is of much greater value. Value is the ultimate goal and if value is to be maximized, wealth must be minimized. Wealth defines an inefficient sequestration of value which isolates it from the actual pools of need where the money could do the most good.
Money held by the wealthy is wasted. Money held by the needy cycles back into the economy and is amplified through the supply chain. It rewards suppliers and their suppliers and their suppliers amplifying the value throughout the entire economy. Accumulated wealth is an addiction and we all have an obligation to help the addict to shed his addiction. We do that by depriving the addict of his supply. We must eat the rich by devouring their unfathomable store of isolated value and disbursing it throughout the real economy.
The wealthy are a real threat that must be addressed through positive action. We must locate the cancerous pockets of wealth and excise them for the good of the entire world.
We must make it impossible for an individual to control a culture.
We must make it impossible for an individual to control a government.
We must make it impossible for an individual to control the world.
Julian S. Taylor is the author of Famine in the Bullpen a book about bringing innovation back to software engineering.
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This work represents the opinion of the author only.
