There’s something deeply wrong in the world. The New York Times is reporting that the rich are stratifying into the merely obscenely rich, and the absurdly pornographically rich.
Philip Rushton has been selling private jets to the global rich for more than three decades. In just about every economic cycle, sales of small jets and big jets tended to move together — rising and falling with financial markets and fortunes of the wealthy.
Now, however, the jet market is splitting in two. Sales of the largest, most expensive private jets — including private jumbo jets — are soaring, with higher prices and long waiting lists. Smaller, cheaper jets, however, are piling up on the nation’s private-jet tarmacs with big discounts and few buyers.
And it’s not just private jets! There is, of course, the private yacht market.
For decades, a rising tide lifted all yachts. Now, it is mainly lifting megayachts. Sales and orders of boats longer than 300 feet are at or near a record high, according to brokers and yacht builders. But prices for boats 100 to 150 feet long are down 30 to 50 percent from their peak.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, read this photoessay about people’s toilets.
I don’t mind people being wealthier than I am, but there ought to be a limit — when some people have to shit in a hole in the ground in public, while others are spending tens of millions of dollars on their very own personal luxury jet, there is a disparity that must be corrected, preferably with political, legal, and social adjustments…but given the unthinking entitlement of the disgustingly rich, it’s probably going to require blood.
I wish I remembered the provenance of this statement, but did read it somewhere: “When taxes are raised on the rich, no one dies. When services are cut to the poor, people die.”
“pornographically rich”. Now there’s good wordsmithing.
It is disturbing how clueless the pornographically rich seem to be about the world. They’re always claiming victimization and persecution.
There can’t be that many pornographically rich people. Surely seizing just their assets while leaving those of the middle class, rich, and obscenely rich alone wouldn’t be too unpopular, would it*? Or even just enough of their assets to knock them back to the obscenely rich category. No need to get all uncivilized and suggest bringing out the guillotines or anything. Why, I would never suggest such a thing! Of course, I can’t speak for all those other unreasonable people who might get angry at the hyper-rich, so truly the seizure of assets is for their own good…
*If it is unpopular due to the dependents of the porno wealthy, how about setting aside, say, 30% of assets seized for the compensation of those who lost jobs in the seizure? Can’t get to the porno wealth due to their lackies getting in the way? Offer a bigger bribe!
But we wouldn’t want to upset the Job Creators (TM).
(/s)
At least the supremely rich aren’t hoarding their money! They are giving it back to the economy! Primarily, the parts of the economy selling private jets, megayachts, escargot, Rolls Royces, and golden toilet seats! Trickle down, trickle down!
I would say that it would almost certainly require blood if we expect any possibility of change in the short to medium term; such entrenched privilege is unlikely to yield to anything else (especially since political and legal measures are so easily subverted by those with sufficient wealth and influence). And given the fact that with money you can buy the services of mercenaries (oh, I’m sorry, I hear the preferred term these days is ‘private military companies’) who have already demonstrated their preparedness to ignore all international standards in the conduct of operations in pursuit of their payday in Iraq and other combat zones, I imagine that plenty of the 0.01% would be quite happy with that outcome, confident that all it will cost them to retain their unfettered Olympian privilege is the blood of a few thousand mere mortals and the, from their perspective, quite manageable monetary costs associated with shedding it.
Not to mention that, if you are really wealthy and connected, you wouldn’t even need to bother with PMCs or other security firms, since your thugs for hire will come in national police and/or military uniforms, as was evidenced in the grossly disproportionate official response to the Occupy Wallstreet protests.
As of right now, political power is still wedded to the use of force or the threat of its use, and the wheels of politics are still moved primarily by money (and thus turn at the will of those few who have truly obscene quantities of it), even for those of us who live in what may on the surface appear to be representative democracies. Until that changes, the rich will keep on buying ever bigger boats while the poor continue to perish from starvation and preventable disease, and anyone who tries to change the status quo will find that the privileged have no problem shedding blood to protect their privilege, just so long as it is your blood.
In order to make things meaningfully better, we need to think long term, and what is required is a sea change in attitudes and in the structure of society with regards to the ethical distribution of wealth and the responsible use of resources, and that cannot be acheived by violence – blood is not enough. Such a fundamental change will take advocacy, campaigns of education and, tragically, time – time that all too many of the poor and vulnerable simply don’t have. All we as ordinary citizens can do is try to minimise this epidemic of human suffering and death by any means available to us until such time as those changes can be made, but with the best will in the world ordinary people don’t have the wealth or power to mitigate more than a fraction of this iniquity, and I think that future generations will justifiably judge us harshly for letting the situation get so heinously bad.
Full of win.
dianne:
That’s exactly the problem: the Republicans, rich and poor, are the fanboys of the super rich. Their response to this question would be a completely tone deaf rendition of “First they came for the Jews, and I said nothing….” or something along those lines, with no hint of irony, not an ounce of nuance. They will frame it as class warfare, of course, or as persecution of a minority group. They will say or do anything to defend the super rich, because they all fear change, and they all believe in a Just World where they too might become super rich and all the super rich got their riches through entirely fair means, by talent and effort alone.
In theory it shouldn’t be that unpopular. But that is only if half of society wasn’t fucking unhinged from reality.
Also, Warren for president.
Well, in terms of the market that seems to be perfectly sensible to me. One man can only fly around in so many jets at any given time. One jet, that is. Now assuming an average family – two adults, two children – the maximum opulence you can get is four private jets flying in formation. (Sharing one plane is something reserved for the plebs)
Presumably the average jet lasts for quite a while and you won’t have an excuse to get a different model every month because planes are a bit trickier to design than cars. Once you have all the jets you can handle, going jumbo is your only option. Of course at some point these people will have four jumbo jets flying in formation whenever the family goes on a road trip. We can only hope – for their sakes – that rocket ships finally become available at this point. Otherwise there really is nowhere to go from there.
Although … ladies and gentlemen, we have just three space shuttles left. The price is 100 billion dollars each or best offer. Offers over 150 bn will also receive an external tank and a set of SRBs at no extra cost.* Please note, we are also auctioning off our crawler and the barge used move shuttle and tank around. Both are must-haves for any self-respecting collector and shuttle-owner.
Proceeds go to fixing world hunger, economic disparity and the ozone layer and to ridding us of fossil fuel dependence. Leftovers will be spent on a perpetual motion device or disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner.
And yes, I am absolutely a licensed dealer and auctioneer. Once your payment has been confirmed you simply print out the receipt and take it to your local museum where they will hand the orbiter over to you.**
*Fuel, ground crew and manual not included. For instructions and support please consult kerbalspaceprogram.com
**Photo-ID may be required. Minors must be accompanied by an adult.
anteprepro @ 9;
Exactly; it all boils down to a lie reponsible for a level of inequality second only to that propagated by that other great lie known as god – the lie called the ‘American Dream’. The laughable notion of a magical land of limitless opportunity where anyone can join the ranks of the obscenely super rich so long as they work long enough hours, pray hard enough, and dream big enough (not to mention keeping vulnerable minority groups sufficiently crushed underfoot, though that part is rarely said out loud). The fact that the only way in which a handful can be incredibly wealthy is if the majority are relatively poor, and if a subset of that poorer majority live in absolutely crushing, life-destroying poverty, is quietly ignored or simply written off as either the machinations of ‘ebil libruls’ or the excuse of the feckless and lazy.
The trouble is that all too many of the people who live under the heel of the privilged elite of society spend all their time looking up and fantasing about the imagined day when they will be the ones wearing the boots and stamping on the little guy, and never spare a coherent thought for why it is supposedly necessary for anyone to stamp on anyone else at all. To such people, the greedy arsehats who make everyone elses’ lives as miserable as possible in order to become even more ridiculously wealthy are heroes to be admired rather than exemplars of all that is wrong with humanity. That is the hook that the Republicans sell – you too can be a corrupt and greedy plutocrat idealy positioned to defecate all over those too ‘weak/stupid/lazy’ (because the playing field is naturally entirely level in all cases and all that seperates the demigods of the elites from ordinary mortals is native talent and determination amiright?) to be right there with you letting fly! – and sadly that pitch has proven to sell all too well.
Why bother? We’re fucked.
I still don’t get it, though. There are many, many policies which are wildly unpopular, yet that doesn’t seem to prevent our “democratic” government from doing them. I mean, Obama did in fact raise taxes on the wealthy somewhat, and many people are of course angry about that already and making all sorts of incoherent and/or irrelevant arguments. So, the thing I want to know is why it wasn’t raised even more. What, exactly, was the sticking point that prevented it? Or what kind of backroom dealings were involved that meant we didn’t get much fairer taxes, eliminations of more loopholes, etc.? If that was what was at stake, and somebody simply exclaimed “but it’s unpopular!!!” or “there will be blood!!!” I would feel a very strong urge to slap some sense into them, or I suppose go on fixing these problems without them because they’re huddled into a little ball of fear on the floor. But what apparently happened was that something was enticing enough for the Dem leadership that they didn’t go through with their plans, or that wasn’t a part of their own plans to begin with.
Well, that’s a kind of ‘rising tide’ I suppose. But it’s not really rising in the right places…
@13
I agree with you, but I think that the typical republican/conservative doesn’t just look up with the deluded expectation that he or she can attain wealth: the typical believer also spends a lot of time looking down, at the classes of people that the conservative propaganda say are the ones trying to pull everyone down to their level…the 47%’ers, the welfare bums, the illegal immigrants stealing our jobs and driving wages down, and so on. It’s like that joke that was circulating a few years back about the rich guy, the voter and the union organizer sitting down at a table, on which there is a plate of 12 cookies. The rich guy takes 11 of them and then warns the voter to be careful: the union guy is trying to steal your cookie. Divert the masses by giving them an enemy far more accessible/visible than the mega-wealthy.
Maybe, but maybe not. The rich are, first and foremost, cowards. All it would probably take is fear. OTOH, the rich are also supremely greedy and there probably is no emotion other than fear that will make them give up even a little bit of their money. They simply don’t have any ability to empathize or, frankly, enough brains to understand the consequences of their actions otherwise.
Well, from the grinding poverty point of view, I’d be all over the pitchforks and torches kind of correction, but I couldn’t afford a board with a nail in it. At some point, you’ve got to throw your body on the gears and levers of the machine. /savio
I wish our policymakers understood stuff like data and graphs: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en#t-637209
Blood is spilled at big protests. Not the blood of the rich, but the blood of the protesters and to a lesser extent that of the underpaid security forces who are for some reason defending the interests of the rich.
In Quebec, the police are now under the axe of austerity, and suddenly, they’re starting to realize that maybe the students they’ve been beating up for the past couple years might have a point.
As it happens, the French Wikipedia has a “Did you know” (“Le saviez-vous ?”) on the Azzam. At 180 m, it’s the largest yacht in the world and cost around €470 million. It’s owned by Sheikh Khalifa, emir of Abu Dabi. I assume this is the same Sheikh Khalifa for whom the Burj Khalifa is named. That building cost a measly $1.5 billion, but it’s probably not technically his personal property.
I assume it costs millions of dollars a year to operate yachts and jets like this because you need a professional crew to run them. I would guess a 747 pilot costs in the order $250k a year or more, and roughly 3x because you need a co-pilot and flight engineer. With other crew, ground maintenance, and fuel, those guys are spending more each year than most of us will earn in a lifetime. And just so they can fly around without having to go through TSA checkpoints. Bastards!
This is why I feel that security forces should be greeted with cookies and flowers whenever possible: Get them to desert the super rich and the rich will be only small numbers of rather stupid people and it’ll be no trouble at all to get their money.
The best part about tear gas, rubber bullets, and LRADs is that the police don’t need to ever get in cookies-and-flowers range, so they can just deny the humanity of those they oppress.
robro #22
I remember a story years ago about one of the oils sheikhs who was upset that he couldn’t have solid gold plumbing fixtures in his private jet. Not because he couldn’t afford them, he could; but because they would weigh more than the plane structure could handle.
Cowards who can afford to buy politicians and personal armies.
stillacrazycanuck @ 17;
Absolutly true – it is divide and conquer tactics at their finest, and the more reviled and easy to ‘other’ the chosen target of popular ire is, the better. That is why there is such a roaring trade in delusional and inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric, and why the murderous fanatics of islamic state might just be the best thing to happen to the mega rich, and the governments that suck up to them, in years. You couldn’t ask for a better distraction from pressing social justice issues, though manufactured fear of a major ebola outbreak sweeping through American cities did admitedly come close.
And as you say, elitist class bigotry is another long standing weapon in the Republican armoury. The message is always that Republican poor are honest, decent poor who have just had a bad hand delt to them, but will turn it around because they are Republican, and thus chock full of extra strength Christian Moral Fibre(TM). Not like those filthy welfare bums/job stealing immigrants/immoral single mothers/*insert preferred rightwing punching bag of the moment* who parasitise society (in a way that the ultra rich who do all they can to dodge out of paying a fair share of their earnings – that they made at least in part due to public services – in tax do not, because reasons). Nothing unites the religious right like the opportunity to bask in a false sense of moral superiority over others.
dianne @ 18;
As pointed out by Jackie @ 26, it doesn’t take much courage to pay someone else to brutalise your opponents, and when you and your buddies can buy and sell governments with ease and you have a private army of heavily armed security to back you up, there really isn’t much to fear from protestors or wannabe revolutionaries.
There is also the point that there is nothing stopping cowards from using fear as a weapon against others, and it is often a favoured tactic. When protestors start getting tazered or sprayed with bear mace considered illegal for use in warzones (if not simply shot); when their chants are responded to with water cannon, rubber bullets, tear gas and batton charges; when they risk having their entire lives ruined for simply standing up and being counted – then fear is very much a weapon in defence of the status quo.
@ 23;
As pointed out by numerobis @ 24, modern technology obviates the need for the oppressor to get within flowers and cookies range. And even if they were close enough, lets say you are offering flowers and cookies; that is nice and all, but the other guy is offering money, and potentially quite a lot of it, to the people in charge of the security forces. Even if you get through to a few of the frontline troops, there will be plenty more to remove the one’s who have become sympathetic and continue the oppression with barely a pause, and soon enough the penalties for refusing to ‘do one’s duty’ will become severe enough to stop most security officers from even considering it.
And then there is the simple point that not everyone can be reached with flowers and cookies – some people simply enjoy the opportunity to engage in violence against others with official sanction and thus no fear of consequences , and join law enforcement agencies with the mindset that this is one of the ‘perks of the job’.
It really isn’t so simple as simply intimidating the rich into submission. That path could well lead to the massacre of protestors for no gain (and potentially huge costs not only in lives lost but in the further erosion of civil liberties), and even in the unlikely event that it somehow worked, it is a dangerous precedent to set to allow a society to be ruled through fear, since in such an enviroment the most brutal and ruthless will inevitably rise to power, and that outcome is even worse than our current troubles.
I think I’ll corner the market in pitchforks, & make my fortune…….oh, wait…….
As for blood, unfortunately, the contribution will come more than 99% from the 99%.
@28, Gregory Greenwood
Not quite.
We’re already “ruled by fear” in a sense, and in order for there to be any order, there needs to be some level of fear of the consequences.
Instead, what needs to be prevented is undesirable wielders of that power from rising. Stuff like that. And this also requires the threat of force, otherwise some random person who wants to rule the country is going to do just that.
All you liberal whiners….
This is an opportunity to get in on the small jet and small yacht club!!
[Today’s snark brought to you by the letters G.O.P. and F.U.]
Gregory @28: “bear mace considered illegal for use in war zones”
Human rights law and humanitarian law (aka the laws of war) are pretty much orthogonal.
Humanitarian law is largely about who you can kill, when, and how. Humanitarian law says that if you’re in a war zone, and you’re an enemy combatant, tear gas is RIGHT OUT. But a 2,000lb bomb, that’s fine, as long as only a “reasonable” number of innocent civilians are blown up alongside you.
The reason tear gas is out for war is that it’s a nerve gas, and all nerve gases are out by treaty. A good treaty throws out babies with bathwater because otherwise a signatory (someone unscrupulous, like the US) would make something that should obviously be banned but is defined as a baby under the treaty.
If you’re in a civilian crowd control context, humanitarian law doesn’t apply. Thank goodness.
political power, by definition, is the power of force. It’s an analytic truth that political power is the sword. What the hell?
brianpansky @ 31;
A good point, but the means by which we try to prevent the undesireable wielders of power from rising to authority is by the monopoly on the legitimate use of force by a notionally accountable entity like the state, but in practice the state is simply much, much more accountable to the ultra wealthy than to anyone else, and so in order to prevent any would be warlord with more thugs to his name than the other guy from seizing power, we end up with a formalised system of power that mitigates the state of nature to some degree but that is vulnerable to the ‘soft power’ of the rich elites being used to effectively disenfranchise everyone who isn’t wealthy enough to own their own jumbo jet. It is something of a catch 22 with no obvious way out.
There is also the point that we are only ruled by fear of consequences up to point, there is at least lipservice paid to the idea that democracies are ruled by consent – otherwise we would just live in a dictatorship or under an authoritarian junta and be done with it. Once you start trying to restructure society through the use of fear in a bid to create something more equitable, all the checks and balances (such as they are) go out the window, and the liklihood of the most violent thug(s) simply taking power because (s)he/they can increases exponentially. Any number of revolutions with initially high minded ideals have foundered in just this manner.
numerobis @ 33;
Still, using a high concentration irritant originally created for use on large predatory animals to ‘control’ protestors even when they aren’t being violent is pretty indefensible however you slice it. Better than sarin, I grant you, but not exactly the benchmark for responsible law enforcement.
michael kellymiecielica @ 34;
Carl von Clausewitz may have famously stated that politics is war continued by other means, but it is most certainly not accurate to claim that all political power is the power of the sword. Nelson Mandella’s greates political power came after he was released from prison and long after the ANC repudiated all forms of violence – how was that power of the sword? Many activists, including avowed pacifists such as Martin Luther King, have wielded great political influence and ‘soft’ power; I imagine they would be astounded to hear that their power was the power of the sword they had so totally rejected.
Money still influences politics, and our political systems still hinge on the use or threat of force, but I see no compelling argument that this is some inescapable destiny of humanity. We can and must create a better politics predicated on something other than who is better at spilling blood. If not, then it really is all hopeless, and we may as well just quit right now.
#30, davidnangle
Y’know, totally drug resistant TB is no respecter of socioeconomic status. Oh sure, could prevent its spread with decent social medicine, but there’s a bit of a correlation between extreme social inequality and lousy provision of medical care to the poor.
So it might not all end with tumbrels, but perhaps a modern day equivalent of the old siege warfare tactic of flinging dead bodies over castle walls to spread disease, only with cheap drones and gated compounds…
@23
One major problem is that once one gets to the military forming part of the response, one is dealing with people who, when still adolescents or young adults, were methodically broken down as people and rebuilt with a tendency to obey orders. That’s what basic training is all about and as with most social mechanisms it was evolved over the years since some bright guy figured out how to create ‘better’, aka ‘more disciplined’ soldiers.
In addition, while police officers, at least in those societies with which I can claim familiarity, aren’t trained in quite the same way, at least some departments use psychological screening to ensure that only suitable candidates are chosen. I am not suggesting that the police are looking for people who would hurt members of the public….indeed, the departments with which I am familiar (all Canadian) are looking for people who won’t gratuitously hurt members of the public. But I do think that they are also looking for people who can operate within a hierarchical environment, which is actually reasonable in many ways. The problem arises when the people at the top (and I am referring to the societal leaders, not the people in charge of the police, who are often well-intentioned) give orders. People selected for a tendency to follow orders tend to follow orders. This includes the chief constables.
The more a society is inclined to be governed by or for the benefit of the few, the more likely it is that the flowers and cookies approach won’t work. I am not, I think, naïve, but I do think that in Canada, we aren’t as badly off in that regard as the US. I am not a socialist, and not even a full-on social democrat, but I do think the prominence of our NDP parties, federal and provincial, help to keep us a little saner than the US, where even the moderate Democrats sometimes strike me as conservative lunatics.
Your analytic truth isn’t very useful, when in the real world people have things other than swords to use. So, change your definition … or don’t, I guess. Maybe just leave the definition as is and stop caring about it. That would work too. In any case, it doesn’t affect anything.
anym @ 38;
It would only be totally drug resistant to the current generation of drugs. if it became enough of a threat to the privileged, developing new drugs would become a priority, and when new drugs were developed that could tackle it, they would likely be expenive,a t least initially, and so only the rich would have ready access to them… and so the resistant TB winds up principally effecting the poorer segments of society.
Disease may not respect socioeconomic status. but the availability of drug treatments does.
I agree that the most likely blood to be shed will be from the 99% and not from the rich. They have tools on their side toward maintaining the unequal distribution of resources, the greed and resentment of people and always fear.
It is all to easy to use greed to get a few others to do what you want and even easier to fan the fear and resentment of the many to distract them for their real plight and the true nature of the reality of their situation.
It has always been these tools that the ruling classes to maintain control. I doubt very seriously if anything like a real just solution will occur in my life time unless it gets much worse.
Not when the conservatives can bash the Chinese for stealing our manufacturing jobs when it is the people from the same class and party of Mit Romney that are one s primarily profiting from it and are even listened to.
uncle frogy
#41, Gregory Greenwood
New antibiotics don’t pop up on demand; developing new ones will not be trivial or quick. Sure, the invisible hand might sort you out eventually, but right now it is more interested in increasing livestock yields by feeding them next-generation antibiotics than it is funding next-generation chemists.
Also, nothing will pacify the lumpen proletariat quite as effectively as telling them that they should all be happy with coughing up their own lungs, and even though the only thing they have to lose is a slow and lingering death they should totally not make any attempt to get the cure from any rich folk.
michael kellymiecielica
That’s ‘from the barrel of a gun’, old bean. “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.”. Also, argumentum ad Mao is pretty amusing coming from you.
Gragory Greenwood @36:
Gassing peaceful protestors is indeed a violation of human rights. Gassing rioters, I’m amenable to accepting in certain rather strict bounds — and what I see in Montreal is roughly that (when the Canadien plays, win or lose, we’re always on the edge of a riot). However, the police bring out the less-lethal weapons against peaceful protesters (and against the distressed and the mentally ill) much too quickly.
My nit was just that “banned for military use” is unrelated to its use in a civilian context. It’s banned not because it’s a horrible weapon, but because it’s similar to one class of horrible weapons that we’ve decided to ban, whereas other classes of horrible weapons are OK. And it’s banned only in the context of an armed conflict; an occupying army is OK to use tear gas for riot control, as long as the riot isn’t part of an armed conflict (at least, I think that’s how it goes — at the very least, they can gas at home as long as there isn’t an invasion or an internal armed conflict going on).
Attributed to John Steinbeck
anym @ 43;
So the rich only get the best non-antibiotic secondary care, umbrella treatment against secondary infection, and nursing money can buy, along with the ability to pretty much entirely isolate themselves from potential sources of infection if they wish, while the ordinary citizen just rolls the dice on whether they will be alive next week. Still not a great deal for the average Joe.
Those being the same rich folk who still control the government and have access to private, heavily armed armies? Trying to take the cure from an opponent who holds all the levers of power may not be as easy as all that. Also, you assume that the ordinary citizen would see what was happening to them, rather than being placated by slick lies told by a government who are totally doing all that is possible to control the outbreak, dontchaknow. just stay in doors and watch the Faux News emergency broadcasts and everything will be fine…
Then there is also the no doubt immensely tempting possibility of going out to join a mass protest to stick it to the rich during an epidemic outbreak of a difficult to treat, highly contagious, highly lethal disease. I’m sure the still healthy would be positively lining up for that one, and the already sickly are of course in fine fettle to storm the barricades…
If pandemic disease is supposed to be the the answer, we are already lost.
The most successful poverty reduction program in the history of the world took place in:
a) China, 1948-1976
b) China, 1976-Today
The largest correction of wealth inequality “with political, legal, and social adjustments”… and “blood” in the history of the world took place in:
a) China, 1948-1976
b) China, 1976-Today
Old China was certainly poorer than modern Mozambique.
numerobis @ 45;
Fair points, and I see where you are coming from. I definitely agree that police in many countries are altogether too willing to pull out the ‘less lethal’ option at the first opportunity and with scant provocation, especially against vulnerable groups. It is all of a part with the increasing militarisation of policing, especially in the US.
I mean, police forces obviously need military grade armoured vehicles…
#47, Gregory Greenwood:
What about the doctors? What about the nurses? What about all the technical staff that support them? What about their families?
Ahh, so now you need to extend care to the police and the bodyguards and the soldiers and all the supporting infrastructure!
“Sticking it to the rich”? That’s an interesting way at looking at social unrest driven by sheer desperation.
Is this like the difference between opportunistic looters, and brave scavengers trying to feed their families after a disaster?
This is not an answer, this is an observation. There’s a possibility that the unrestrained flood of greed will sink all ships. This is not a good thing.
anym @ 50;
Medical personnel and their dependents always get high priority access to treatment in outbreak scenarios, for obvious reasons.
If they are how you maintain your power, it would be a necessary step.
OK, poor word choice on my part. The point I am making is that attending a protest where there are lots of other potentially infected people is going to be something that people will not be very inclined to do, especially if they are still asymptomatic themselves. It may be selfish, even shortsighted, but the threat of imminent death can bring that out in people.
Sorry. I misinterpreted your point. Apologies.
#51, Gregory Greenwood
My point is that if this happened, you cannot just buy your way out of it. You can’t suddenly provide a few percent of the population with high quality medical care and isolation from the virulent masses because the people supporting you are the virulent masses; by the time you’ve realised you have a problem it is too late to do anything about it. Shooting the brown ones won’t cut it.
Better hope that someone deigns to spend a few bucks on phage therapy research, eh? Cos it’ll be a while before strains vulnerable to the old drugs start popping up again.
If people learned history, we’d have known how a popular uprising would be handled by the ruling elite. I mean, the Pinkerton Agency is still alive and kicking, and it’s not exactly difficult to learn about their… uhm.. checkered history.
This increasing concentration of power is the most worrisome issue I see currently.
Our elected representatives do the bidding of the few rather than the interests of the many, and we’re happy to keep them in power because they own the media and decide what makes noise and what doesn’t.
The super rich don’t give a shit about climate change because it won’t touch them, and nether of social issues.
Ignorance, hunger and war are just means to further consolidate their power, so more is better.
The only thing that would scare them would be more and more of us starting to think that we can actually do something about it, that we are not powerless.
sigh.
straw enemy.
That order has its basis in force does not equal “who is better at spilling blood”.
But your main problem is that you fail to see the inescapability of this. Force exists. And it can only be kept in check by more force. Offer another option if you don’t like it.
@37, Gregory
I’m going to cut off your run-on sentence right there, and say I agree with the above. If you thought I didn’t, you were wrong.
Sure, currently. And this is where improvement needs to occur. Thanks for that thought.
The above is difficult for me to interpret. But I think you are attempting to say that there is a contradiction between saying fear of the consequences keeps order and consent of the people keeps order. There is no contradiction.
This is called rule by fear of the consequences and consent of the people at the same time. Because the consequences happen when the people no longer give their consent. It’s the only stable system.
Straw enemy.
I’m not proposing to “start” using fear, and getting rid of checks and balances. The key to what I am saying is that checks and balances are already only maintained through fear of the consequences. And this is the only way to prevent them from “going out the window”.
I remember when Captain Unelected got the infamous tax cuts passed and word spread that they only benefited the richest 1 %. Somebody made a poll to see how many Americans believed they belonged to the richest 1 %.
19 % did.