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>A fluffy feel good piece about how the elite are on your side. Bullshit through and through. These guys aren't the elite. The elite are from a different gen

>A fluffy feel good piece about how the elite are on your side. Bullshit through and through. These guys aren't the elite. The elite are from a different generation, and different industries. This is part of their play to replace them with the new generations. And this is the US system "functioning as intended", btw. > Yes we live in a Representative Democratic Republic. But I don't remember voting for the board of directors. You don't have to vote for the board, the supreme court and constitution ensures the elite is always to have more say than you. The US government was structured specifically to contain the power of the propertyless majority against the new propertied elite. You couldn't even vote if you weren't a property holder until at least 1850. The founding fathers didn't like the UK aristocracy because it was hereditary and corrupt, but they certainly wanted to protect and grow that they and other minority "gentlemen" had collected. There was a swing to more populist influence for the past century, but now with bipartisan distrust at a high, the Citizens United decision, and the very slow uptake of issues like Lessig's Mayday PAC, we are decades away from having any substantive progress on this. I'd underscore: by design. Give the power to the people, but not so much that the elite aren't first among equals. (EDIT: clarity)

xnull2guest 12y ago
I would add here that the current compression of wealth into top tiers has exacerbated the situation. The top 1% currently own approximately 70% of assets in America (Piketty); the Walton family's brood will be inheriting wealth that amounts to the combined holdings of the bottom three quarters of black households. The steeper the gini curve (or better metric), the fewer families compose the elite. The last time America was squeezed this tightly we found ourselves in a Great Depression and tens of millions of people marched the streets. This resulted in a 94% tax on the rich (among other things). We're finding ourselves there again - slowly. Our Great Recession isn't the final expression of these systematic pressures - Keynesianism can only do so much when macroeconomic failures are but a symptom of societal issues. The other day I spoke on a bus with a very well-spoken yet disillusioned man who had internalized that no matter how hard he worked he would never be able to join the class of people around him, who were mostly amusing themselves with smart phones. He was antagonistic - a little of it misplaced toward those who had inherited rather than designed class separation - and he was agitated. He struggled to understand how the "land of the free" TM could fix him into a modern equivalent of indentured servitude and who he should be angry at that this condition was his at birth. The point is well taken that America's roots in Jeffersonian Democracy blesses those who are fortunate enough to arise from the correct vagina or who are given a leg up or are married to such a person. In context of the past four and a half decades there are fewer and fewer blessed vaginas to be born from and more for us chumps.

xnull2guest 12y ago

I would add here that the current compression of wealth into top tiers has exacerbated the situation. The top 1% currently own approximately 70% of assets in America (Piketty); the Walton family's brood will be inheriting wealth that amounts to the combined holdings of the bottom three quarters of black households. The steeper the gini curve (or better metric), the fewer families compose the elite. The last time America was squeezed this tightly we found ourselves in a Great Depression and tens of millions of people marched the streets. This resulted in a 94% tax on the rich (among other things). We're finding ourselves there again - slowly. Our Great Recession isn't the final expression of these systematic pressures - Keynesianism can only do so much when macroeconomic failures are but a symptom of societal issues. The other day I spoke on a bus with a very well-spoken yet disillusioned man who had internalized that no matter how hard he worked he would never be able to join the class of people around him, who were mostly amusing themselves with smart phones. He was antagonistic - a little of it misplaced toward those who had inherited rather than designed class separation - and he was agitated. He struggled to understand how the "land of the free" TM could fix him into a modern equivalent of indentured servitude and who he should be angry at that this condition was his at birth. The point is well taken that America's roots in Jeffersonian Democracy blesses those who are fortunate enough to arise from the correct vagina or who are given a leg up or are married to such a person. In context of the past four and a half decades there are fewer and fewer blessed vaginas to be born from and more for us chumps.