Plutocrats, Kleptocrats, Broligarchs and the New World Order
Haircuts for Thee but Not for We!
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means. That necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
“President Trump is supportive that everyone’s taking a haircut here because America’s got to live within its means, and we can’t be a wastrel.”
“wastrel noun
someone who dissipates resources self-indulgently
type of:
prodigal, profligate, squanderer
a recklessly extravagant person”
“A wastrel is someone who tends to waste things, careless with anything from money to time, and everything else, too.”
I think it’s important to understand how the Plutocrats, Kleptocrats, and BrOligarchs see the rest of us, the plebeians. ‘Us’ is a broad cross section of the population. I think a lot of folks overestimate their access to the upper echelons of the new social stratification. To simplify, you have to be really, really, really fucking rich to get a seat at the table. If you think yourself worthy of the invitation but you lack the considerable resources needed to apply, the really, really, really fucking rich folks will soon enlighten you as they dip their chips into your reserves and leave your coffers barren. Get ready for that haircut, it’s going to be a doozy!
Understanding their motivations will help us as we move forward.
It’s interesting how much of their view of us is a reflection and projection of their own questionable behavior. They justify it by virtue of their wealth, position, and power. They could never be a wastrel no matter how wasteful they may be. They will never spend every dime they have, because they have enough dimes for centuries of frivolous behavior. Well, some of them do. The others need to get by with a little help from their ‘frenemies’, until those frenemies don’t need them anymore. Gain enough power and you can empty the pockets of the plebeians while humiliating them further through suggesting they’re to blame for their own misfortune.
“Neither a beggar nor borrower be.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
When the ruling class speaks of long-term prosperity, you can be certain that this is for them and not for you. In the corporate neo-feudal society they envision, their creepy version of the Dark Ages, only the few at the very top of the corporate structure will have money and power. Our subsequent struggles are meaningless to them.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatbsy
This begs the question: If there is no one to buy their cars or fly on their planes or pay for their internet or use their streaming services or talk on their cell phones or wear their fast fashions…how will they continue to thrive?
Who will the grifters grift if there’s no one left to grift?
Logic! Absurd! Sit down, peasant!
We plan to set it on fire and watch it all burn while we hide out in our billionaire bunkers. We’ll build modern castles, surrounded by oceans, free from taxes and regulations. We’ll unleash plagues and war and pestilence. We’ll tax and surveil and sicken you into submission or better yet find a final solution to rid ourselves of your resistance and persistence.
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating, the let them eat cake of it all is astonishing. Yet, we must get over our astonishment. Chaos is a game plan. They have no shame. They don’t even have cake for us, they have nothing for us but disdain.
The thing about corruption is it corrodes. That corrosion creates decay. That decay creates destruction. Dragons hoard until they run out of new things to hoard. They are paranoid, fearful, insatiable creatures. They lack empathy and self-awareness. They get weird and weirder and eventually, they eat each other.
“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.”
.jpg){kind=link}
There are millions of us and a handful of them. They hope our anger and fear will drive us forward, but I hope it is our fortitude, tenacity, and grit that carries us through the coming days. We are in this together and the sooner we stop letting ourselves be deluded, distracted, and divided, the sooner we will realize that we, the people have considerable collective power. What we do with that power will determine the future.
Brilliantly stated. I wish this could be required reading for all of us! Thank you for this.
I like the idea of "us" having power, but after fighting the good fight for the past 50 years I am bone-weary, and this last election with the resulting show of stupidity has dimmed my usual optimistic glow of hope.
I feel that the bad guys have finally overcome.