More Advice to Our Beloved Oligarchs

::sigh::

I don't know why I bother. You guys (and yes, the majority of you have a Y chromosome) never listen to me anyway. But, being a pacifist, I feel compelled to do the best I can to ensure that the transition to a post-hierarchical world is as bloodless as possible, so I continue to try.

You think I'm indulging in hyperbole.

I don't. I think that en route to a world in which power is decoupled from wealth and invested in community, we will see some violence, and if it escalates not even your wealth will be able to prevent some of the consequences from being very painful for you.

Let's start with the fundamentals:

YOU'RE

NOT

GETTING

IT

I am trying to be as clear as possible, here. Whether it is denial or ignorance or a need to whistle in the dark, you are in uncharted territory, and you don't even know it. So read carefully:

1. It does not matter that you control the monopolistic media congloms.
The propaganda you are trying to catapult with these once-powerful tools is now irrelevant. You have lost control of communications. To regain it, you would have to shut down the grid that supports your wealth and keeps you safe. You cannot do this. We have our own channels of communication and we know how to use them. Better than you and your paid helots, shills, and hacks in the Old Media world. The balance has tipped. You cannot put this genie back in the bottle.

2. You cannot divide and conquer.
You have no one to blame for this but yourselves. You chose to predate too indiscriminately and to do too much damage to the food chain that supported you. It may be difficult for you to hear this message from inside the bubble of paid flaks, sycophants, and enablers with which your power has encysted you. Nevertheless, if you wish to take any kind of constructive action, you would do well to pay attention, not to the "conventional wisdom" bleated at you by the crumbling shell of the "establishment," but to the voices in the streets.

3. You cannot "take out" our leaders.
You cannot co-opt them. You cannot corrupt them. You cannot de-fang them with character assassination. You cannot lock them all up and silence them. You cannot buy them, bury them, or bait them into self-destruction. THERE ARE NO "LEADERS" in the sense you understand. That is what this revolution is about. The old model of "leadership" has failed. A new model is being shaped right under your unheeding noses, and it will take another generation or more for you to develop strategies to counter and/or control it.

4. The application of force will not help you.
It will help us. See #1, above. We will not buy the spin your mouthpieces put on it if blood is shed. We will believe, not the spokesdrones and newsdroids, but the evidence that we, ourselves, will collect and review and examine. Dogs, firehoses, pepper spray and other "crowd control" measures will not make us go away. They might possibly overcome our best efforts to keep the revolution peaceful, but the results of that will not benefit you. Quite the opposite.

What, then, are you to do?

You can make a choice. This revolution is, at a core level, about the de-coupling of wealth and power. You may accumulate wealth, but you may not use it to control and degrade and deny those without wealth their basic human dignity and their share in self-government.

No matter how this revolution plays out, I can promise you this: Assuming you survive, you will never have less than one vote: your own. We may take away your ability to buy, subvert, or negate the votes of others with guile and deception and bribery and force. But we will not take away YOUR vote. You will have the exact same freedom that the daughter of a Latino field worker has to influence public process. You will have the same voice as the son of a Native American single mother on Red Lake reservation. You will play on a level field with a young Filipino-American college graduate and a gay African-American artist. If you accumulate or retain wealth in such conditions, good for you. Congratulations. Enjoy your yacht. It will no longer buy you the ability to control the infrastructure and social compact that support all of us, but you are welcome to it. Have fun.

Want power?

Well, that will be a little more problematic for you. Because the way the revolution is playing out, no one will have much power, but everyone will have some power. Those who have more than others will have it, not because they are able to buy or bully their way to the top, but because their work, their actions, as seen by ALL OF US on a naked, uncontrolled media stage, result in all of us being better off, more free, more powerful, healthier, more secure-- we and our children and our grandchildren. This is not a thing you will be able to deceive us about. You no longer have control of the message, remember?

So, Beloved Oligarchs, it is time to strategize. The harder you try to hang on to wealth AND power, the more you will lose.

The way to retain wealth is to give up power.

The way to accumulate what power it will be possible to accumulate, is to relinquish wealth and pour it into building a new, just, equitable social structure that benefits everyone.

There are no other options.

You won't get this, either, but I'm still trying.

wearily,
Bright

...who, for some reason, believe that I'm some sort of lefty pinko commie who wants to steal all the wealth from the rich guys and make sure that nobody ever gets rich again. I don't know how they got that impression, except from Fox and Rush telling them that.

I keep saying to them over and over and over and over again...

It's not the wealth that I object to, it's what SOME of the wealthy individuals do with their wealth that I have a problem with. You want to build a better mousetrap, put in the time and energy to sell a shit-ton of them and retire to the golf course? Good luck, and I wish you the best. Enjoy your yacht and your caviar and all the other stuff. However, when you then use your wealth to affect the political process so that you get subsidies for taking the manufacture of your mousetraps overseas, tax breaks as payoff for donating to certain candidates, and even take it to the point of helping take the country to war based on lies, simply so you can sell many more mousetraps to the military... Then we've got a problem.

And I don't know why I bother anymore, these 3 or 4 guys who I argue with about this stuff seem to willfully not want to get it. One fella always manages to bring it back around to abortion...

K&R!!!

That's when you say to them:

This is a cultural crisis and you are simply too stupid to understand.

I said to him at some point - "You know, you're just not very bright, and I'm getting bored arguing with you."

But then he decided that Herman Cain is da man, and it's been a whole new round of fun!

I would simply get new friends because the people who think like that enrage me and I cannot fathom their inability to understand even the most basic concepts of fairness and democratic principles like one man, one vote. I had a few 'friends' that believed the right wing mantra, but when they tacked hard right in '07/'08 and started blaming "those damn immigrants" I knew that the best thing to do was to disassociate from them.

Fight the good fight and try to convince them of the righteous cause, but I fear in the end they will be unmoved because to fully endorse and believe the Right Wing horseshit, one must be a fundamentally flawed human being to begin with and no amount of patience can change that!

is that wealth in a capitalist system IS power. You can no more separate wealth from power than you can separate economics from politics OR power. And vice versa. At least not over a long term. History has proven this over and over again.

The only way to separate wealth from power and politics is to take most of the wealth away from the people who have it and redistribute it to the ones that don't. Now, I'm not talking about some utopia where everybody has exactly the same level of wealth. BUT that type of wealth that can buy governments, presidents and Congresses MUST be controlled or you will be doing this over and over.

Perhaps it's time for you to think outside the "wealth=power" box...

I'll not answer snark with snark. I'll just say that, no matter what anybody thinks about this OWS thing, they're NOT reinventing the wheel. This kind of stuff has been happening since the advent of the capitalist system. Indeed, it was part of the feudal system. Wealth will ALWAYS equal power. Which is why wealth needs to be VERY well distributed.

To quote a 30s populist (NOT a commie), "Money is like manure. Spread it around and it makes the garden grow. Pile it up and it just stinks."

Mine was not a snark. I truly think you might benefit from thinking outside the 'wealth=power' box. I recommend "Stone Age Economics" by Marshall Sahlins, to start.

1) Moral authority, which the corporate-government complex has lost; and
2) Authority of position and power, in which wealth does equal power because the people with the wealth control the system and the guns used to defend it.

I like to think that the Occupy Movement is using moral authority to subvert and usurp the power that comes from wealth.

I agree with the post that, unfortunately, this revolution cannot remain nonviolent. Not because of the stones and pitchforks of the revolutionaries, but because those in power will ultimately resort to violence to defend their interests.

For example, if the masses use boycotts and general strikes as tactics, we will probably see such tactics defined as economic terrorism. In the end it won't matter--there simply aren't enough police and soldiers--but the 1% will not give up control easily.

Moral authority is all well and good, but it WILL NOT trump the guns and mercs of the ruling class, if and when the ruling class decides it's gone far enough. Has everybody not noticed that moral authority has lost it's effectiveness with the loss of the USSR? There's a reason for that. Moral authority only works if there is a realistic choice of systems that keep each other honest. As degenerated, Stalinized, and bureaucracized as the USSR was, it at LEAST, paid lip service to another economic model which kept the oppressors from going all out in their oppression. Without the USSR as a counterbalance, Gandhi and MLK would NOT have won.

Unfortunately, history has shown that the ruling class NEVER WILLINGLY GIVES UP POWER. You won't be able to "shame" them into anything more than cosmetic "reforms" that they'll take away the first chance they get.

The way forward now is to figure out how to MINIMIZE the violence from the other side because I don't believe we'll be able to avoid it all together.

that when Gandhi's followers were met with relentless, shocking violence from the British, they refused to retaliate in kind. The photo-journalists who documented the non-violent protesters being beaten bloody drew back the curtain and helped expose the British as the thugs they were. India won her independence with non-violence and Satyagraha.

I don't recall intimating that ours will be a bloodless coup. On the contrary, I and many like me fully anticipate madness and mayhem--and death.

However, I've consistently expressed the fervent hope that we will advocate for change using non-violence and Satyagraha (and, look at our brave protesters across the nation), that we will work together for the greater good (something the corporatists have tried to subvert by succoring racism, ageism, and all manner of other isms), and that we will use our astonishing intellects to create a heretofore unimagined economic paradigm (need I observe that the uber wealthy hedonists have long under-estimated the brain power of the Hoi Polloi?).

I am more hopeful than I have been since St. Ronnie ran our ship of state onto the razor-sharp rocks of corporate hedonism.

The Internet is the "new wheel," and the Occupy Wall Street Movement is going along for the ride.

One example of this wealth separating from power dynamic is the former Marine Sgt passionately imploring/scolding well over a dozen police officers to give the protesters more respect and not abuse them.

I have no doubt some of those police officers agreed with his point of view but I'm also convinced if this incident didn't face the prospect of instantly being piced and videoed to subsequently be aired over the Internet; aka wealth and power of the people, the police PTB would've quickly worked to shut him down one way or another.

of broadsheets, pamphlets, and newspapers. It's all communication. The advantage the internet has is the speed of communication, but no matter the speed, it's still communication.

But that's all right. You guys go ahead and think you're going to reinvent the wheel and social relations and separate wealth from power. It ain't gonna happen, but do your best and let's see where things are in a year or two or ten. My bet would be that things are pretty much the same as they are today. There MIGHT be some superficial reforms that will disappear when the storm blows over, but that will be about all.

Today's economic paradigm proves more than ever that Marx was correct.

from those points, the Internet introduces or magnifies the great intangible dynamics; democratization of information and participation with less debate subconsciously influenced by the messengers' age, appearance, physical disability, gender, nationality, race, region, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, etc. etc. unless the messenger chooses to disclose those personal facts.

To quote, Nathan Bedford Forest (of all people) when asked how he could win so many battles against overwhelming odds, he stated the essence of strategy was "To get there first with the most men."

The Internet's speed allows the people; whose real power lies in numbers as opposed to dollars to get there first, no one way, top down, pamphlet or newspaper can match that kind of speed, likewise no radio or television station (network) can match the Internet's eyes, ears and democratization of participation from the masses and that is revolutionary.

Let's all hope the super-wealthy come out of their torpor while folks are simply pissed and before too many get hungry all at once.

That's what the bastards want.

Awesome post, and spot on!

"...the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

I HATE to be the first to quote Star Wars, I really do... it's not one of my faves, not
by any means; but it does have that GREAT line in it, and I have this annoyingly
phenomenal memory for film trivia...

Splendidly said, Bright! Don't be weary now, when it's all starting to get interesting;
you have a wonderful way with words, and a lot of important ideas to contribute!

:hug:

K&R!

:bounce: :kick: :loveya:

They think they 'have the formula' this time.

Wait till they try. This outburst wasn't supposed to happen for almost 6 more years.

I'm not sure that wealth can be held onto, either, but I won't breathe a word of it. Most wealth is accumulated by less than above-board means, or as Balzac put it:

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime
oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait."

An English translation:

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account
is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly
executed."


discussion of said quotation: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=296588