Who Exactly Are the "Rich" Who Should Be Removed from Power?
They're the ones who treat the have-nots like dirt--on the Forbes "richest" list or not
The "rich" who should be removed from power are the people who rule America today: the people who actually determine government and corporate policies. (For proof we live in a dictatorship of the rich, go here.) Who, exactly, are these people?
There are several ways to answer this question. One way is to read academic studies of who rules America; and a good place to start is to click here to go to the Who Rules America page of our sister website.
Another answer to this question is that the "Rich" who should be removed from power are the billionaires and the very highly-paid people who serve them at the top levels of government and corporate power. Who are the billionaires? It's no secret. Forbes Magazine lists them. Click here to see them.
Another answer to this question is this: If, when you call the White House and ask to speak to the president, you get a personal call-back from the president, then you are probably one of the rich who should be removed from power; otherwise you're just--at best--a relatively well off person in our unequal society and you don't actually have the power to determine the policies of the government and the big corporations.
What will happen to the rich who are removed from power?
Removing the rich from power means that they become like everybody else. If they contribute reasonably to the economy then they can take, for free, the products and services from it that they reasonably need or desire (or, in the case of scarce things, have the same chance as anybody else to have them when they are rationed equitably according to need.) It means that if they support equality (no rich and no poor) and mutual aid, then they can participate in their Local Assembly and have an equal say with others who support equality and mutual aid in determining the laws and policies that people in their local community must obey.
Most people would consider having this "equal with everybody else" status in society to be wonderful. People who think they deserve to hog most of the socially produced wealth for themselves, however, would feel "oppressed." And those who think that they--but not most other people--should have the real say in important decisions would feel "oppressed." Only the kind of people who rule America today would say it's morally wrong to make them be just like everybody else with respect to being able to enjoy the wealth of society and having a say in social decisions.
This disagreement about what is morally right and wrong is a disagreement between the values of egalitarianism and the values of capitalism, between the values of most people and the values of a small but powerful ruling elite.
Egalitarian revolution is the shaping of society on a large scale by the same values with which millions of ordinary people everyday try to shape the little corner of the world over which they have any real control. Egalitarian revolution is when ordinary people finally succeed in making the world be the way they think it ought to be, and the way they have been trying to make it be for a very long time.To succeed in this effort we need to remove the rich from power.​
The way we can remove the rich from power is discussed here. When this happens, then billionaires would find that their claims to own enormous wealth (for example John Malone's claim to own 2.2 million acres of land in the United States--more than twice as much as the entire state of Delaware!) are no longer honored, and there are no armed forces who will obey orders to force us to honor those outrageous claims anymore.
The rich have a very different morality from ordinary people
The very rich (the ones who are the problem, at least, although some are good people, as discussed here) have a morality, embedded in a culture, that is very different from that of most ordinary people. The morality and culture of most ordinary people is based on the Golden Rule, and the values of equality and mutual aid. In contrast, the morality of the very rich is the morality of a ruling class. It is a morality that says they must rule over society or else society will go to hell in a handbasket. It is a morality that says their dominance over the bulk of humanity and their wealth and privilege is required in order for the best of humanity--the human race's creation and appreciation of fine literature, art and culture, civilized refinement and elegance, exploration and scientific achievement, etc.--to flourish, even to exist. To allow the common masses, the riff-raff, the mob, to take over would be a sin, according to this morality.
This is why the very rich, with only rare individual exceptions, feel no guilt or remorse when, in the course of enforcing their dominance and protecting their wealth and privilege, they inflict brutality and violence and oppression on ordinary people. The very rich are trained from childhood to hold the values of their ruling class culture.
Slave owners in the slavery years of the United States, for example, virtually never exhibited any remorse or guilt for enslaving people. One reads in the book Southern History Across the Color Line by Nell Irvin Painter that, "In 1839 a Virginian named John M. Nelson described his shift from painful childhood sympathy to manly callousness. As a child, he would try to stop the beating of slave children and, he said, 'mingle my cries with theirs, and feel almost willing to take a part of the punishment.' After his father severely and repeatedly rebuked him for this kind of compassion, he 'became so blunted that I could not only witness their stripes [whippings] with composure, but myself inflict them, and that without remorse."
The same book in the next paragraphs goes on to talk about the views on slavery of a slave owner thought by many to be the most remorseful about being a slave owner: Thomas Jefferson. "Jefferson found Afrcian Americans stupid and ugly, a people more or less well suited to the low estate they occupied in eithteenth-century Virginia...[A]s a gentleman whose entire material existence depended on the produce of his slaves, he was never an abolitionist. In fact, his reluctance to interfere with slavery hardened as he aged. By 1819, as the Missouri Compromise was being forged, Jefferson was warning American politicians not, under any circumstances, to tamper with slavery."
Today one looks in vain to discover evidence that any but very rare individual members of America's ruling plutocracy, or the politicians and corporate managers or top-level academic advisors who serve them, feel any remorse or guilt for waging unjust wars of social control or violently oppressing pro-democracy and pro-equality movements. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who waged the Vietnam War, famously "apologized" for it in his old age, but his apology was not for waging an unjust war but, on the contrary, for his mistake in thinking that that JUST war was winnable. Former Secretary of State in the Bill Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, famously told Leslie Stahl that she thought the killing of 500,000 Iraqi childen by the U.S. imposed sanctions "was worth it."
[For more words from the horse's (ruling elite's) mouth, click here.]
The reason America's ruling elite exhibit the self-assurance and conviction and confidence that we naturally associate with having a clear conscience is because they do indeed have a clear conscience. They think what they do is morally right. These are not story book villains who know they are the "bad guys" and who know they are committing immoral deeds for which they should feel shame. These people feel no guilt or shame or remorse for doing what we know is disgustingly immoral, because in their culture and morality what they are doing is noble and perfectly moral.
This is why we need to remove the ruling class--the plutocracy and its obedient servants--from power. We'll never persuade them, as a class, to ditch their elitist morality any more than one can persuade a tiger to ditch its stripes.
Thanks John. A sobering and frightening post describing a cruel mindset of the elite.
The rich and powerful don't care what you think. They don't care what you say. They DO care what you (may) do. If "doing" means obeying the narrative and consuming their products then they continue smile when the bank statements arrive. But, they become VERY alarmed if "doing" means "don't"; such as DO NOT COMPLY and DO NOT BUY!! Dwindling profit margins are their worst news.