reactive change and economic extraction

"the form was still the same but the animating health and vigour were fled. the industry of the people was discouraged and exhausted by a long series of oppression." gibbon. the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire________________________ "in rome's late republic, as in any plutocracy, it was a disgrace to be poor and an honor to be rich. the rich, who lived parasitically off the labor of others, were hailed as men of quality and worth; while the impecunious, who struggled along on the paltry earnings of their own hard labor, were considered vulgar and deficient." michael parenti. the assassination of julius caesar: a people's history of ancient rome______________"plebs urbana sordes urbis et faecem est" cicero__________________________comparisons with rome are probably built on shaky ground...however, if you spend much time looking into the history of the late republic and the empire and its demise you cannot help but find some unmistakable parallels...expansionist, but willing to rule through the fiction of local sovereign dependent on rome...experts at the tactic of divide and rule that they had mastered through domestic experimentation with their own populace ( a hint: the cicero quote roughly translates as "the common people are city dirt and filth"...parenti has rome's number and cicero worshiped wealth and power )..politicians here grudgingly submit to the "voters" and pay lip service to their "constituents" but they serve a distinctly different class...the framers of the constitution wrote openly about "empire" and while they may have been thinking in terms of a westward expansion across the continent the term expanded with it...

and from the fasces in congress ( which, by the way, date from well before the advent of twentieth century fascism...congress was not declaring solidarity with mussolini or his heirs...although the current denizen of the white house may be misinterpreting this )...

to the neo-classical kitsch sprinkled around whoretown they and their successors clearly saw themselves as heirs to roman exceptionalism...and they prove it consistently by their approach to a social system with distinct class lines and a one-way flow of class warfare that would gratify even cicero...

that economists could be confused about ( if not oblivious to ) the cause of an increasingly precipitous divergence in the material wealth of the haves and have nots is not surprising...those justifiers of greed have a habit of overlooking inconvenient facts and should be dismissed for the class toadies they are...anyone who works for an hourly wage is attuned to the causes and they all relate back to the extractive greed of the oligarchs who run the politicians...not only are wages diminished to the point of penury, the concept of "full-time" employment is on life support at best...why? no full-time employment = no benefits...none of the costs to capital associated with administering the social support like health insurance that bring no direct profit to the corporate entity burdened with them...a savings that goes straight to he bottom line and ceos love a bottom line that allows stockholder dividends and justifies their obscene salaries and options...what does a "worker" ( or, better still, "associate" or "contractor" ) matter in that...not much...and all this leads to a dysfunctional social system that holds wealth as the ultimate ethical good and has people amassing huge debt in an effort to live up to that ethic by , at least, putting on a display of wealth that has the bonus effect ( in the elite's view ) of creating new money for the oligarch that own the debt...win/win...you get to look wealthy...they get to be wealthy...this ethic of wealth may also help to explain why so many chase after that elusive ( and we will get to just how elusive in a moment ) "mega millions" lottery win...the one this week had odds against wining of something on the order of 260 million to 1...that didn't stop the inveterate players even though actuary tables tell us that these are things with better odds than winning the lottery: dying in a vending machine accident 1 in 112 million, dying in an airline terrorist attack 1 in 21 million ( even though that does not seem to have happened since 11 september 2001 ), dying from bee, hornet, or wasp stings 1 in 6.1 million, being struck by lightening 1 in 1 million, dying in a bathtub accident 1 in 840,000, dying in an auto accident 1 in 6700..still millions gamble on ( of course, most drive every day as well )...all this focus on an ethic of wealth leaves the impression on many ( since they are not wealthy and stand little chance of ever being so...rather they will remain the "impecunious who struggled along on the paltry earnings of their own hard labor"..it is an extractive system and if you have something then the oligarchical elite does not...they frown on this...they would like to have it all...even if it kills you )that some undefined element is "wrong"...that the system is broken some how and needs to be fixed...that perception, along with the worship of wealth ethic is why...

this fucking clown is president..the ethic says he is wealthy so he must be both smart and good...he can show us the way to fix it, right? wrong...he is the problem incarnate...his whole maga fiction is based on a system of class extortion he benefits from..the reality is the system was always rigged to favor wealth from 1789 or before...there were simply less greed riven times which offered the possibility of something of a better life...francis fukyama's "end of history" and that miserable harpy thatcher and her tina, and that dotard reagan meant that mercantile capitalism had won and greed was unleashed...and with that we all became its targets...the issues are not external...they are internal...things will become unsustainable...they will come unglued...we will reach tainter's collapse because there is never enough to satisfy greed that has become a systemic need...if the climate doesn't get us first.