The Suicide Of The Upper Class

If you blog on a regular basis, then you know that no one can produce a really great post every day. You just try to stay interesting so people will keep coming back, and hope that every now and then you knock one out of the park. And that's what I think my fellow blogger, The Omnipotent Poobah, did a few days ago. He wrote a great post and I hope he doesn't mind my reposting it, because I think as many people as possible should read it. Here is what the great Poobah had to say:

To hear the 1 percenters and those 99 percenters bent on voting against their own economic self-interests tell it, you could slap a bushy beard and crazy wig on Barack Obama and he’d be the new Karl Marx. That Karl Marx could take a Viennese sachertorte-sized chomp out of their ass and they wouldn’t know him is beside the point.

Even Karl or Barack tarted up like Karl know most people in a society must work to live and the oligarchy needs workers to keep their class alive. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and rich people don’t create jobs – only other people with jobs create jobs.

Many Americans don’t have jobs because the upper class is so greedily incompetent they are ruining things for everyone, including themselves. They want to remove regulation falsely thinking they can trust each other to do the right thing. But capitalism is an economic system based on greed and hoping greedy people will also be honorable people is counter-intuitive, stupid, and criminally naive.

The upper classes also believe they are magic job creators – cheapster pixie Gods who can live tax free, transfer all their money to the Caymans, and send all the American jobs overseas yet still create jobs. That is why the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says Mitt’s economic plan is “mathematically impossible“. It relies on hopelessly optimistic tax and employment rates coupled with insane budget deficit reductions.

Folks without tax accountants to find ways to avoid taxes and balance clients’ checkbooks, can tell you that if little money comes in and all the money left goes to essentials like food and a roof, the checkbook won’t balance…ever…not even if you cut everything except the food and roof.

If you aren’t working, all the money disappears fast and if you can’t find a job, it isn’t coming back. This is not called bankruptcy. This is called up Homeless Creek without a paddle and heading over the lip of Niagara Falls.

When this happens to enough people, not even rich folks can make money. Sure they can steal some, but that only lasts for a while. Stealing money from people with no money is, again, counter-intuitive and stupid. Yes, they can steal from each other, but not only does that blow the whole greedy but honorable thing out of the water, but you can’t do it for long and you need regular people to carry out your schemes.

But uh oh, you fired them. Left to carry out the details for themselves, 1 percenters like Mittens couldn’t find the pen to sign the robbery agreements.

We are in the beginning stages of serious income inequality that is galloping like an expensive Olympic show horse. Unwilling to take pay cuts, the rich become more desperate and increase the disparity out of a sense of entitlement and because the most valuable skill a thief or grifter has is how to steal or grift. It is what they do. It is their career. And like most crackheads, they are addicted to money and will shamelessly do anything to get it – even eat their own.

Lots of people claim objecting to income inequality is class warfare – that’s why Mitt only wants to talk about it in ‘quiet rooms‘. And it is class warfare – a holy class war.

Most people don’t hate success or begrudge those with lots of money. After all, most of us believe it is a virtue that anyone can accomplish with some grit and determination. What people do object to is stealing the grit, obviating the determination, and stealing the food out of your kid’s mouth while you pay for the privilege.

But even if  99 percent of us walked around with a chip on our shoulder simply hating the rich for being rich, like we hate liver for being liver, the end result is the same – a collapse of our economic system.

Since this is a holy war all of us better be in it to win – Lord and serf alike. If the serfs all starve, income equality will flow away from the Lords right into the castle outhouse pit where it will be useless to anyone. The Lords will become the new lower class. They will stay there until a handful of neo-serfs become greedy enough to use their newly restored grit and determination to rise above and start the process all over again.

But like serfs, Lords don’t live forever. The cycle is long and devastating and the mansions, and yachts, and multiple summer homes – even the Lords themselves – will be dust before it comes full circle again.

So I have some advice for the 1 percent. Come join the class war before you get what you ask for.

There is nothing so sad as a person who loses to himself and takes the rest of the team with him.