With the news of Saudi and UAE meetings with the Trmp campaign, Jeet Heer, staff writer at the New Republic, points out that the “so called Russia story is a global plutocracy story” and I believe he is correct. In fact, the global plutocracy story is the key to many stories:
The global plutocracy story is also the story of fossil foolish companies burning everything they can now & soaking the public for “stranded assets” when climate change becomes undeniable.
The global plutocracy story is also the real estate story with kakistocratic kleptocrats buying multiple high-end properties in London, NYC, Boston, Cambridge, and other cities around the world as part of a money laundering operation and hollowing out once living neighborhoods on the side.
The global plutocracy story is also the story of media and audience commercialization with growing 24/7/365 surveillance capability now technologically available to governments, corporations, groups, & individuals.
The global plutocracy story is also …. ad almost infinitum.
The global plutocracy gives people what they want. That’s how it got to be so big.
A link to something would be helpful.
I’ve searched for the cited quote (“so called Russia story is a global plutocracy story”) and find only references to this diary (also on DailyKos and elsewhere).
I’d like to read the Jeet Heer piece before commenting.
This is a link to a twitter feed of “Ben Rhodes”. I see nothing from Jeet Heer.
And tell me please, what “skill sets” and levels of education do these plutocrats have to be so wealthy? (As so many of my fellow Democrats attribute ones wealth to ones skill set and level of education).
The irony of the rise of Brexit and Trump is that we need stronger supranational regulatory bodies capable of enacting a global finance tax as Piketty has proposed and truly global trade and labor regulations that allow employees to compete on a level playing field. Locally we need to tax the foreign capital gobbling up real estate and sitting on assets they refuse to improve (looking at you Gerry Chan!). We need to tax endowments and commercial properties for non profits, and apply the unprecedented global capital flowing through our own region to solve local problems like housing, transit, access to jobs, and education inequity. This isn’t hard, it’s been done before. We just need leaders with the courage to take on the wealthy.
There you go again. I think we all know that you oppose every effort to make education and training available to those working class men and women you so loudly claim to defend.
If there is any content in this diary — a bumper-sticker phrase like “global plutocracy” is not what I mean by content — then that content is irrelevant to your favorite rant.
Please stop this ugly rumor and personal attack. It’s getting old Tom.
The global plutocracy is no different from the state plutocracy or our our national plutocracy where the wealthy class is running things and the working class is told to “just improve their education and job skills” if they want any political power and justice in their lives.
I encourage all people to improve their education, rich and poor alike. I encourage all people, rich and poor alike, to practice their skills and pick up new ones.
But I will say, over and over and over until everyone get it that the great wealth divide that we have in this state, this nation and this globe is NOT the result of one group having better education and skills, but IS the result of a small group of people gaming the system for their personal benefit.
It is high time that Democrats identify these people as the problem and not the “poorly educated and low skilled” working class Americans.
While it’s on my mind, on this subject:
We do not need “affordable housing” in this state, we need justice in wage distribution so that all working class families can afford a home without a state subsidy or special zoning.
Indeed, you HAVE said this over and over. The point is that nobody makes the claim that you so relentlessly “refute”.
Actually, I have. And the point remains that Democratic office seekers continue to call for increases in education and skills training, presumably, to address the plight of working class Americans. Even Bernie Sanders was guilty of this.
As so many of us have attempted to clarify for you, it is your presumption that is incorrect.
Democratic office seekers — and an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters like me — call for making education and skills training available to the millions of working class men and women (and boys and girls) who cannot otherwise afford them.
The purpose is to improve their lives. The purpose is to help lighten the burden that society has laid on these people. Democrats also fight racism and sexism — not because it will address wealth concentration (because it won’t) but because racism and sexism harm everyone and cause the most harm among those who have the least wealth.
There is no guilt to cast for supporting these programs.
The question remains why any self-described Democrat opposes them.
Meanwhile, “justice in wage distribution” is never going to happen because we are in a post-industrial society. An immediate consequence of this is that we are, for better or worse, also in a post-wage economy.
The era when large swaths of American men and women worked a full-time job (often punching a time card) and in exchange were paid full-time wages (with overtime, holiday time, and so on) is over. It is not coming back.
I agree that “affordable housing”, at least in its current form, is unsustainable. Even it’s proponents implicitly agree, because a large portion of those “affordable housing” provisions actually only apply when the property is brand new.
We need a mechanism for taking wealth from the very wealthy (such as by taking equity by eminent domain) and transferring that wealth to working-class families.
The required wealth transfer will NEVER happen through any sort of wage distribution.
Followed by:
Yeah, we have that. It’s called the government. It’s called labor policy. It’s called tax codes. It’s called trade laws. All the aforementioned have largely favored the ownership class, the very, very wealthy.
If Joe and Mary Smith are working putting round metal discs in a plating tank that is part of a process of manufacturing hub cabs for cars that are sold to the public, that is the same act as when Joe and Mary Smith are putting round stoneware plates in a dishwasher as part of the process of serving dinners at a public restaurant.
Why Democrats cling to the idea that somehow “Manufacturing” is the reason we had a thriving middle class in the period 1940-1970 and not today because .
is part of the problem.
The working class creates wealth. Whether its though manufacturing, farming, housekeeping, repairing, it’s all the same. It’s the ownership class that decides how the wealth created by the working class is distributed and as long as we leave them in power, you are correct, nothing will change.
Things will change if we stop this nonsense that education, job skills, and manufacturing are the keys to improving the lot of the working class and stop playing footsie with the likes of Goldman Sachs and their ilk.
There was a story in the Boston Globe last week about a CEO from some Boston company angry that livable housing was going to be built within eyesight of his multi-million dollar summer home on Nantucket. This housing was to provide decent living quarters for the working class individuals who work to make this CEO’s life of luxury possible. Many of these people are currently living in their cars or sleeping in basements to survive.
The Globe incorrectly reported that this CEO “earned” $20 million last year. NO, he did not earn it. The board of directors took a look at the profits made by all the men and women who worked at that company and decided, on their own, that this one man would be given $20 million. Our government can stop such things,
“If Joe and Mary Smith are working putting round metal discs in a plating tank that is part of a process of manufacturing hub cabs for cars that are sold to the public”
If Joe and Mary Smith are still doing this today, they will not likely be doing this in a few short years. Tasks like this will be done by robots (if they aren’t already).
“The working class creates wealth”
A bromide that has been absolutely destroyed in the last few decades. Wealth in manufacturing sectors is created by those who design and then program the robots in use. Perhaps, to a lesser extent, by those who build the robots. I say “to a lesser extent” because there are far fewer of those workers and they’re paid the same as any other worker.
Like it or not, the numbers just don’t support the story you so badly want to tell. One robot designer and one robot programmer creates the same wealth today as tens of thousands of workers created in the 1970s.
You posit a dichotomy between “the ownership class” and “the working class”. This dichotomy is itself obsolete. In the context of this dichotomy, “the ownership class” already eliminated “the working class” years or decades ago. The entire focus of manufacturing technology development is to eliminate “labor” at every step of the way — and that focus has been far more effective than you admit.
Government is the answer, and we agree about that. We also agree that government has favored the wealthy.
We must force the government to take wealth from the uber-wealthy and distribute it among the 99%, and especially among the lowest 20% in a wealth distribution.
Education and skills training won’t solve this problem. I know of no Democrats (or anybody else) who claims differently.
Mariana Mazzucato would disagree with you.
I’ll wait for Ms. Mazzucato to speak for herself, if you don’t mind.
My guess is that she instead describes those who design and then program robots as “workers”.
She has several books in print, many on line “You Tube” talks and I am anxiously awaiting her new book “THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING”
The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been determined and reveals how the difference between value creation and value extraction has become increasingly blurry. Mariana Mazzucato argues that this blurriness allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they were just moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it.
The book uses case studies–from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma–to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, a difference that distorts the measurements of growth and GDP.
I guess I’m too terse for the room. Oh well. To me the implications of what I wrote are obvious but I guess it’s more like oblivious to most of the rest of the world.
Thanks for reading anyway. Feel free to ignore me from now on.
I like your commentary, this one just missed the mark for me.
It isn’t that I disagree with any aspect of it. I was put off by your reference to a piece by Jeet Heer (a widely published journalist) including an apparent quote — yet I can’t find any such publication.
It was a quote from a tweet by Jeet Heer not a piece by him so I gave you what he gave me and riffed out of it.
Russia story is a bust for Democrats. Plutocracy angle is another effort to turn a pile of waste into something usable.
Dems spent a year and counting on Russia to rally their own troops learning minute details about an issue that without impeachment they can never translate into a reason to vote D.
Trump actually helping his case by blowing up the issue weekly: keeps Dems from organizing around a middle class economic platform, making his opponents more shrill and desperate to continue, and when the investigation goes away he will come out stronger.
The “Russia story” is a debacle for America. A sitting president now directs Justice Department inquiries for political purposes, and GOP Collaborators help him along.
The “Russia story” is just starting. The investigation will not “go away”. We will see that Donald Trump — together with his family, his campaign, and his business interests — has been enmeshed with organized crime in general and Russian organized crime in particular for decades.
This week’s burst of even more out-of-control tweets demonstrates the increasing desperation of Mr. Trump. The most important question right now is just how much damage will he do to everyone and everything else while trying to escape the truth about his entire life and career.
If the Russia thing was going to take down Trump then why bring plutocracy into it.
It’s already a confused jumble where the only Russians indicted are 13 kids on Facebook.
This story is here to get you educated about the new talking point. Because the old one is a dead end.
I didn’t say anything about plutocracy.
I’ll check back with you about two years from now regarding the actual importance of “the Russia thing”. Watergate was “just a break-in” — until it was more than that.
Trump Doing deals with Russia was never gonna amount to much because we now have proof that Trump was also willing to do deals with the Saudis and the UAE…
… That’s your argument, is it? You might wanna quit while you’re ahead. Jus’ sayin.
I’ll never forget or forgive that he publicly asked for Russia’s help finding Hillary’s emails in the summer of 2016.