Plan B Forum

Posted: **Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:09 am**

At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state.

Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained. I discussed this with a radio host who recounted a story about Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury as well as an executive at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Rubin was being chauffeured through Manhattan to reach some event whose attendees consisted of the Great and the Good such as himself. Along the way he encountered a traffic jam, and on arriving to his event—late—he complained to a city functionary with the power to look into it. “Where was the jam?” asked the functionary. Rubin, who had lived most of his life in Manhattan, a place of east-west numbered streets and north-south avenues, couldn’t tell him. The super-rich who determine our political arrangements apparently inhabit another, more refined dimension.

Read on here...

Posted: **Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:04 pm**

The world is full of mini-communities who are absorbed in themselves and are unaware of other similar mini-communities - or the main community around them.

In this political season, one cannot help but sit in amazement at how disconnected Washington, D.C. is from the rest of America. And I'm not just talking about what these people do in the office - the suburban communities around DC. are totally unaware and oblivious to things like crumbling schools, unemployment, eroded property values, the struggle to pay for kids' college educations.

And having just visited the Biltmore Estate a couple weeks ago, I can attest to the fact that the Rich have always been able to live in places and manners that are completely divorced from reality.

And dare one mention, "Hollywood"? Talk about out of touch.

Posted: **Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:04 pm**

There have been other articles on a similar theme recently. The Rich have lost the idea that we can only prosper as individuals when our community prospers as well. That is why they are indifferent to the fact that their polices have increased poverty and suffering and promise to do so indefinitely. :

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/08/d ... ville.html

Does Tampa Mark the End of the Exceptional America of Alexis de Tocqueville?

We are live at Project Syndicate:[1]

When French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought his France was in big trouble--and had lots to learn from America.

The grab for centralized power by the absolutist Bourbon monarchs followed by the great French Revolution and Napoleon's Empire had destroyed the good parts of the French neofeudal order as well as the bad. In Tocqueville's imagination, at least, the subjects of the neofeudal order had been eager to protect their particular liberties and jealous of their spheres of independence. They had understood that they were embedded in a nationwide web of obligations, powers, responsibilities, and privileges.

But for the Frenchman of 1835, Tocqueville thought, adopting:

the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions… [has produced] egotism… no less blind…. [W]e have destroyed an aristocracy, and we seem inclined to survey its ruins with complacency…"

To sick France in 1835 de Tocqueville counterposed healthy America, in which attachment to the idea that people should pursue their self-interest was no less strong, but was different. It was, he thought, because Americans understood that they could not flourish unless their neighbors prospered as well: they thus pursued their self-interest, but their interest "rightly understood".

"Every American", Tocqueville writes, understands that to get prosperous neighbors he needs to "sacrifice a portion of his private interests to preserve the rest. "Americans", he wrote:

are fond of explaining… [how it is] regard for themselves [which] constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the general welfare.

In France, by contrast, Tocqueville fears a future in which:

it is difficult to foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead them… into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves, lest they should have to sacrifice something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their fellow-creatures.

De Tocqueville saw the roots of France's sickness and America's health in 1835 in France's inheritance from the Bourbon kings of a top-down administrative command-and-control government, and in America's possession of a bottom-up grassroots-democratic spontaneous-order government. Give the local community enough control over its own affairs, Tocqueville wore, and:

he will see at a glance that there is a connection between… small public affair and his greatest private affairs… the close tie which unites private to general interest…. Local freedom… which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them.

Two centuries pass.

See link for the rest of the article.

__________________________-

yrs,
rubato

Posted: **Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:10 pm**

One divide illustrates a part of the change. Romney's father knew that it was a measure of his obligation to the country to show where his money came from and how much of it there was. To say 'yes, I am a rich man and this is how I became rich and how much I have.' to prove that he did nothing criminal, or even shameful, to enrich himself. Romney Jr's contempt for the populace and any sense of morals is so complete that he knows much of his wealth came in ways which are shameful but he should be allowed to get away with it.

yrs,
rubato

Plan B Forum

Revolt of the super rich.

Revolt of the super rich.

Re: Revolt of the super rich.

Re: Revolt of the super rich.

Re: Revolt of the super rich.