In recent years, we’ve learned disturbing things about the beliefs and behaviors of the ruling class. We still don’t know how far the Epstein scandal reaches, but it seems like everyone above a certain level of wealth was, at minimum, aware of him, and had a pretty good idea of the “services” he provided.
There’s a degree to which we’ve always known about this. It’s not a coincidence that vampires, with their predatory and sadistic nature, are traditionally aristocrats in fiction. We’ve always known about this, but the propaganda of capitalism pulled a veil over the eyes of far too many in the cores of European empires. It’s been a while since it was spelled out so publicly and explicitly, but the fact remains: For most if not all of our rulers, the measurement of power is the ability to inflict suffering without consequence.
As Tegan recently pointed out to me, that’s the meaning of “fuck you money“, when you get down to it. It’s having enough power that you can be an asshole to whoever you want, and they can’t do anything about it, except stay out of your way and hope you don’t make them a project.
This is a pretty common dream, at least in the US, and it’s enacted by petty tyrants at every level of society. We can discuss the psychology behind that another time, but the point here is that for a substantial portion of the population, and a majority of the ruling class, the best-case scenario is that they are indifferent to our suffering.
And so if we wrongly assume that our rulers are indifferent, rather than people who enjoy making our lives worse, how is our suffering considered?
Because it is considered. They know the scale of harm they cause, and they know it upsets people. Most of them don’t understand what motivates the peasantry beyond survival and greed, but they know they know we have cause for anger at them, and they know they need to keep an eye on us. How much trouble will we cause for our “betters”? How likely are we to start burning warehouses or killing executives? Our suffering is measured in unrest.
It is this calculation, I think, that has driven the rise in spending on police in the United States. Remember Atlanta’s “Cop City”, that I wrote about a few years ago? That’s still a thing, and there are more of them being set up all over the country. Since 2001, police have been increasingly armed and funded like a military force, and now these domestic law-enforcement officers are being trained in urban warfare, as if American cities were gang combat zones out of an 80s action flick.
They understand that we can barely survive. That was their goal all along. They want us too poor, sick, divided, and desperate to demand anything better, and because they know pushing people to that point tends to result in violence, they want us terrified as well. They don’t just want us to be under constant surveillance, they want us to know we are under constant surveillance. They want us afraid to speak our minds, even among friends. Our suffering, to them, is a metric. It’s a number on a dial that tells them how effectively they’re exploiting us, and how much they need to spend on violence and propaganda to keep us in line. As they feel their capacity to control us increases, they turn up the dial on the suffering. More overtime, less pay, less healthcare, more dangerous working conditions, and higher rent for worse homes. They want humanity to spend every waking instant working for their profit, without time or resources to actually live our lives. They want us to be slaves, or something so close the difference is meaningless.
They believe that is the best possible world, they believe they deserve that kind of power, and they are willing to destroy everything, because they think the worst-cased scenario for them is that they’re like Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road; god-kings ruling over a feeble, grovelling populace by controlling our access to the means for basic survival.
[I think you intended “best‑case scenario”, not worst]
good radical invective, comrade. excelsior.
@John Morales – The best-case scenario, in their eyes, is a mix between 1984 and The Expanse, or maybe one of the stories with the elites living in space stations or hovering platforms.
🙂 fair enough.
Now I’m thinking https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/evil.overlord
I don’t think the oligarchs care how much suffering they cause, they like being ignorant and apathetic about the lives of those that provide labor and spend money to maintain the American experiment. Most don’t even have a clue how most of us live. They don’t shop for food, cleaning supplies, or over-the-counter medicines. Many don’t even shop for their clothes, cars or homes, they hire someone for that. What they do care about is providing the addictive products (foods, drinks, sports, entertainments, gambling, social media, credit card spending, and even the minimal medical help that is the American healthcare system) to keep people from rising up while wringing out every penny they can.
If someone loses their home, their car, their livelihood the owner class does not care, they don’t even notice because what they look at are graphs of stock prices rising from their influence and decisions. The home and car will be put to good use sold or rented to other labor drones, while the lost job is a positive on a corporate balance sheet.
Evidence: Trump in an accidental moment of candor saying that he doesn’t think about how his actions affect people and often commenting about the DOW’s reaching 50,000. In this he is like most oligarchs, but he goes much further, he does care about suffering, he wants suffering for POC, women, the LGBTQ community, and especially those that he thinks have wronged him.
I think though that the majority of the oligarchy don’t have the inclination for dwelling on overt bigotry, that they’d rather bask in their status and wealth knowing that they are special and don’t need to spend energy on hatred.
Alan, tsk. Misleading at best.
Here is the verbatim text and context:
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“When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” a reporter asked Trump before he left for China on Tuesday, alluding to the skyrocketing inflation caused by the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.
“Not even a little bit,” Trump said, shockingly out of touch even for him. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”
(https://newrepublic.com/post/210325/trump-doesnt-care-even-little-bit-americans-finances-iran-war)
The part left out, to sane wash that bullshit context, is the total lack of evidence that Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon. That excuse was tacked on *after* the war had already started. He attacked Iran because Bibi asked him to, and that seems to have been the totality of thought put into starting this war, Bibi gets what Bibi wants. Leaders that don’t take into account the overall situation of the people that they are supposed to represent while making decisions of such magnitude are exactly what I was describing before. They don’t care, their lives are so far removed from how we live that they don’t even have any clue how the vast majority lives. I say that moment was accidental because he makes similar kinds of remarks under stress that show his total ignorance. Remember his “groceries” remarks, how about the recent “dumb has a ‘b'” remark, and lest we forget how far back this goes his “prime the pump” remarks early in his first misadministration. He doesn’t know and couldn’t care less, proudly ignorant and apathetic.
Oh, and he can’t ever admit he made a mistake and that’s why he continues with the nuclear weapons of mass destruction…
Um, “When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” was the question.
The question was *not* ”Do you ever think about how your actions affect people?”, which is what you intimated his allegedly candid response meant.
So yes, misleading to say that is an actual example of and evidence that oligarchs don’t care about people.
That is the context, and it pertains specifically to ‘When you’re negotiating with Iran’.
It is not a bullshit context as your attempted exculpation tries to intimate.
So John, you do think he did consider all of the people in the US when he decided to start a war with Iran? If not, which decisions of his do you think he did consider the US populace in making?
No point repeating myself. If you don’t concur, fine.
I happen to think truth matters, is all.
Yes, he is a liar. And I reckon he was lying then, too. Obs.
Of course it’s a consideration for him, else why the heck the ceasefire?
But that is not the point. The point was your claim and generalisation, from a specific question in a specific context to oligarchs in general.
(If I wanted to be pedantic, I’d note POTUS cannot by definition be an oligarch)
“I happen to think truth matters, is all.” you write, yet rely on a report from an oligarch owned source about a quote from Trump, which you concede was probably a lie. (Was switching to a folksy patter an attempt to be disarming?) You continuing with, “Of course it’s a consideration for him, else why the heck the ceasefire?” Talk about a generalization. I guess none of your news sources hinted at the lack of replacement munitions for this war that was dangerously diminishing our military capability to respond to, let’s say, an invasion of Taiwan? No, of course not. You seem to have joined right in with the sane-washing of the most criminal, most corrupt, insane, rat-fucking* person to ever hold any official office in any jurisdiction at any time on this planet.
BTW, just because an oligarch gets elected to office does not mean they stop representing the oligarchy. JFK, for instance, was the first president to start reducing the 90% top tax rate for the highest earners. The OG oligarchs just happen to be the ones writing the Declaration and the Constitution to purposely create a government that allows the oligarchy to run things while salving the populace with performative voting, many of whom just happened to be elected president by the vast minority (property** owners w/correct gonads) allowed to cast votes. Funny how things keep happening in similar fascism, but that term hadn’t yet been coined way back then.
This is how I imagine the week long operation to convince him to call a cease fire went: “Heck maybe we should have a cease fire to save our bullets.”, said one of the least rabid generals left in the US military to Hegseth, who promptly fired him. Then, one of the economics guys complained about the DOW dropping and a frantic search to find any excuse for a cease fire commenced, which finally got the message through Trump’s numbskull. “Wow, there’s a ‘b’ in that word.”, he drooled into his fries…
*in case you want to pedant on my lying about how he never inserted his penis into a rodent, google it
** even livestock counted, which included slaves
>“I happen to think truth matters, is all.” you write, yet rely on a report from an oligarch owned source about a quote from Trump, which you concede was probably a lie.
Those words are verbatim. You can watch the exchange on video, if you want.
Every other source has the same footage and the same transcript.
And you thought it was the pure truth, as per your “accidental moment of candor” claim, whereas I outright stated it was probably a lie. IOW, you literally believed Trump was telling the truth, I do not.
How it supposedly is a concession when I literally disputed your candid claim is left to the imagination.
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>BTW, just because an oligarch gets elected to office does not mean they stop representing the oligarchy.
Depends very much on definition; bottish response (I am too lazy):
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When we strip away the academic jargon and look at the actual facts of how he gained power, the standard definitions of an oligarch fail to fit him for several direct reasons:
He did not buy the presidency: In 2016, his campaign was famously underfunded compared to traditional political campaigns. He did not win by mobilizing a multi-billion-dollar personal fortune to buy the election; he won through massive grassroots voter turnout, intense media coverage, and an anti-establishment populist movement.
He is an elected populist, not a shadow ruler: An oligarch’s power comes from their money and their control over resources, completely independent of what the public wants. Trump’s power comes directly from his millions of voters and the democratic process. Without that mass voter support, his wealth alone could never have put him in the White House.
His policies broke with the economic elite: True oligarchs rewrite rules to protect the existing corporate establishment. Trump’s signature economic policies—like massive global tariffs and tearing up free-trade agreements—were deeply opposed by Wall Street, multinational corporations, and the traditional economic elite because it disrupted their global supply chains.
Trump was not an oligarch before his first term, because he lied about his riches. He was just a common, wannabe flamboyant, multimillionaire conman who wanted to be in the spotlight again after years of no constant media coverage. Trump’s 2016 campaign was under funded because he did not want to win, he just wanted the attention. The oligarchs wanted him to win, because he is so transparently easy to prod into doing what they want, and it was the Republican’s turn to be in office. He was, and still is, their tool. There was a hint of truth in the LLM BS when it mentioned intense media coverage as a reason for his win. But remember, the media are all oligarch controlled now, and don’t forget that intense media coverage was also used to bring Clinton’s campaign down. The hounding about her e-mails, Bengazi, and then the conveniently exposed Weiner laptop less than two weeks before the election. The sane-washing of Trump while trashing Clinton was what decided the outcome. Oligarchs for the win.
All those poor corporations that lost all that money, isn’t it so sad that the markets have crashed to the lowest point in decades because of Trump disruptions. Ha, what a load of BS that oligarch owned LLM produced. Where are all those failing companies? Except for a few already teetering airlines disrupted by air traffic control issues, that Elon caused then left, Wall Street is loving this. The tariffs brought in record corporate profits when they had an excuse to raise prices and not lower them when tariffs fell. Consumers are doing the suffering and Trump doesn’t care. Same will happen with the oil crunch. Those that suffer most will be farmers while the energy corporations bathe in lucre. Those that vote for him again and again, even after he caused them monetary suffering and health suffering in the worst pandemic in my lifetime, and he doesn’t think about anybody. His response to any problem is to hide that he is responsible, while blaming anything else. And the press is *always* there for him. Oligarchs win again.