Episode 48
[Norbert Wiener:]
I am by profession a working mathematician and natural scientist. I was brought up outside a formal religion, and I have never been able to bring myself to a thorough acceptance of any religion, not even that of the militant atheist.
But I have realized, through my own experience, that no life can be satisfactory to me which does not recognize the intrinsic dignity of other human beings, whoever and wherever they may be, and which does not insist on the recognition of my own dignity by others.
I say dignity, but what I mean by the word has nothing whatever to do with pomposity, and is indeed its deepest enemy.
Neither is dignity in any way inconsistent with humor and a cheerful attitude to life.
I cannot, indeed, claim any thoroughgoing cheerfulness in these days of the external threats of Armageddon and the destruction of civilization, and of the internal threats which tend to put us in spiritual blinders.
It is easy to maintain a calm philosophy of life and a spiritual equanimity in a vacuum or in an ivory tower.
But whatever equanimity is left to us today is one which has to support itself against the shocks and alarms of a spiritual battle.
We are living in a world where there are many powerful forces definitely hostile to scholarship and to human dignity.
If, like myself, a scholar happens to work in a field with engineering implications, which may pay off in industry or in the weapons of war, he is likely to find himself reduced to an impersonal place in a scientific machine which blunders along by its very mass and bulk.
I cannot and do not accept such a life, for I prefer the right to make mistakes on a piece of paper and to come out of them with a better understanding of the truth.
The goose that lays the golden egg has become a Strasbourg goose, nailed down by its feet to the floor of its coop, and crammed with information to the end that from the degeneration of its brain, a profitable commercial commodity may be drawn.
[Peter Joseph:]
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody.
This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now Episode 48.
The opening audio was from polymath and cybernetician Norbert Wiener, speaking about a few things, notably the misuse of science in our misguided culture.
It was from a mid-20th-century recording with Edward R. Murrow and part of a collection at Tufts University.
And I like the final line. For those who didn't catch the reference: "The goose that laid the golden egg has become a Strasbourg goose, nailed down by its feet to the floor of its coop, crammed with information to the end that from the degeneration of its brain, a profitable commercial commodity may be drawn.”
A Strasbourg goose is an old-world analogy of a goose being overfed to inflame and enlarge its liver, which is then taken out as a food delicacy.
A rare term, but sometimes you still hear it used to describe something being crammed, often to its demise.
And his punctuation with the concept “to the end that, from the degeneration of its brain, not its liver, a profitable commercial commodity may be drawn”—I really like that.
But more important than that quote, which I want to talk about for a second, is the misuse of science and technology once again.
What Russell Ackoff would say is getting really good at doing all the wrong things.
Of course, on one side you have a Luddite perspective that argues that the constant application and development of science and technology has an endogenous flaw and there's a negativity that is built in, outside of human motivation, which of course is untrue.
But put into context, we should all be terrified.
For example, the rise of artificial intelligence—not in the science fiction notions perpetuated by ignorant people like Elon Musk—but how it will be incorporated into the system, into our scarcity-exploiting, structurally competitive, infinite growth, and atrociously immature society.
And if you think things are difficult now, just wait until the engines of decision are driven by self-learning artificial intelligence, slanted in their programming towards a particular angle, where we wake up one day and executions are happening socially, economically, politically, and our poor brains have no clue what is actually happening anymore or what's going to happen because of the sheer complexity we have introduced, haphazardly.
Moving towards the development of what Stafford Beer refers to as "incipient instability" of complex system behavior, because all it takes is an appropriate number of simultaneous crises to occur basically at once, and there will be no settled stage.
The ripple effect will only build more ripples, generating larger and larger waves of disorder by which human intervention, if it's even possible at all, will be feeble in its attempts to try and tame what it's created.
And if that sounds a little extreme already, well, just look at the complexity of our economy now, this enormous network driven by the incentives of money and profit that has nothing to do with sustainability; nothing to do with doing the right thing in regard to the development of good services through a macro-micro design.
And as we move foodstuffs and just everything, resources and this enormous complexity around the world, unnecessarily, you will notice economists, businesses, technicians are increasingly unable to get a handle on what actually is going on.
And that globalized factor is just the mainstream economy.
The chaos of it all is also ever-present in the financial system, as has been discussed before—stocks, futures, derivatives, crypto markets, and so on. These completely irrelevant abstractions that serve no fundamental utility, including crypto, introduce enormous amounts of instability.
And the more they overlap through the investment banks, the more the whole system adapts as one, the more difficult they will be to understand in their behavior, always gravitating towards collapse.
And as I've said many times over, abolish Wall Street if you want to improve conditions substantially.
I mean, the globalization chaos is bad enough with the profit incentive moving everything around as opposed to true considerations of design and efficiency.
But Wall Street poses just that extra layer of insanity to make sure that everything is always on the brink.
Anyway, back to Norbert Wiener, which we've discussed before, famed author of “Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.”
He was the first to really recognize feedback systems or systems of circular communication by which system self-regulation is achieved, which, as we have talked about before, is deeply important technically but also philosophically, because superimposing these concepts upon man-made systems is critical.
Moving toward the ultimate goal of a viable economy or government, which is societal self-regulation. We all know that old term anarchy, which in the purest sense is not disorder, but organization without government, or without some kind of imposing coercive force.
Of course, there's a subjectiveness there about what coercion means.
I've done long tangents on that and how the system we have today is structurally coercive versus a group or institution that's fostered that imposes itself like a police force.
But generally speaking, we all aspire towards a free society that takes care of itself without anyone being interfered with.
In fact, that's something probably everyone across the entire political spectrum could agree with.
Even though it's divided into this false duality of government versus free markets, or this other term you often hear, the ‘administrative state’; that's replete in the literature in this propagandized culture.
So that's what we're kind of up against, right?
We're up against this Milton Friedman, FA Hayek, Austrian School laissez-faire, free market religion that has convinced itself, the culture, that this is a self-regulatory system and the true flaws we see must be coming from external interference, as the clichés go.
And one thing I'd like to bring up, which I find kind of fascinating, even though it's subtle and kind of obvious: a system is a system regardless.
Even though it's conceptual, meaning if we decide that a system doesn't work a certain way, it doesn't mean it's not a system that's working a different way.
Sorry if that sounds self-evident.
But instead of slapping a label on something that says this system is dysfunctional, how about looking at it objectively to say, "Well, what is the function of the system?”
“What is it doing?” as opposed to what we see it not doing properly because we assume the system is supposed to do this or that, right?
I've often referred to, along with others, market capitalism as an anti-economy because even though it produces like crazy, it has none of the other features that could define it as an economy whatsoever.
Sustainability, reduction of waste, efficiency in general.
And from that perspective, you say, well, “market economy is an insufficient model.”
Okay, fine. For the purposes of sustaining humanity.
So if we adjust the mental model and say, "Okay, forget humanity, what is the system just doing?”
We realize we have a reinforcing feedback system that is a cancer system.
It's constantly building and expanding without any limits.
And all the incentives and procedures of the structure fuel that across millions, billions of hands and transactions.
And in this frustration, we all share in an attempt to communicate the flaws of this system.
It's worth taking that angle: to talk about what the system actually does:
A system fueled by income to support jobs and any drop of income means a drop in demand and hence the reduction of jobs, hence recession by association, at least when a large-scale reduction of jobs occurs.
And since the incentive of business exists to grow in the interest to cover its bases to prevent its own contraction or endure contraction that might occur in the future, there's no interest in some stable level of profit attainment.
Everything pushes to grow.
And then you factor in the debt system and the scarcity exploitation basis of the entire economy, which leads to planned obsolescence and intrinsic obsolescence, and such direct inefficiencies.
And you realize that not only is the system structurally incentivized to constantly expand, there is this endless looming influence of deficiency coming from the structure that also pushes increased economic activity once again.
Not only are people digging themselves out of the hole constantly, the very process of endlessly digging themselves out of the hole hence drives economic growth once again, along with other aspects that push consumption and growth such as the hedonic adaptation neuroses, revealing the structure of a system that is constantly pushing to expand unsustainably, with of course no interest to actually meet human needs.
Paradoxically, it can't have a satisfied society.
It would be different, of course, if the kind of adjustments that have been talked about by numerous positive thinkers for years actually came to fruition, balancing the need for consumption with increases in productive efficiency.
From John Etzler in 1833, who described more or less the same post-scarcity adaptation that John Maynard Keynes talked about in 1929 in his essay “for our grandchildren,” if people are familiar: the idea of reducing the work week, poverty ending, we achieve a workable abundance, the strain of survival is lifted.
To, of course, later in the 20th century with numerous other individuals, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who talked about the Poor People's Campaign; economic bill of rights.
We can reduce labor, we can reduce prices, consumption does not need to be as high.
And of course, on and on it goes, Buckminster Fuller or Jacque Fresco to even the techno-capitalist apologists we're all familiar with in the modern era, such as Peter Diamandis or even Ray Kurzweil.
It's all the same train of thought, at least for the techno-capitalist apologists, going back to John Maynard Keynes, in fact, because Maynard Keynes felt that this was a natural adaptation of market capitalism as does Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, etc., once again.
But it hasn't.
It hasn't happened, and it won't.
And the system dynamics of why it won't have only come to the surface fairly recently, rooted in power and procedural practice, that simply sees no incentive on the individual or business level to move toward any of those goals.
And I would say it's pathological, in fact.
There is a social goal that people will talk about, but the short-termism, if you will, is so powerful, they will step by step sabotage that social goal by adhering to the incentives of the system.
So much so that the system can be said as simply not designed to adapt in that direction, no matter what the intention of the population is within it.
We are not defining the system.
The system is defining us.
Just go up to any business and ask them if they're willing to make themselves obsolete by producing such efficiency and durability that they produce less and less, at lower costs, with less and less needing to be produced.
Apple, one of the most wealthy corporations in the world, with more wealth than many countries combined, is a perfect example of the exploitation inherent to the system where they push through their arms of advertising and cultish loyalties, the hedonic adaptation, once again, to make people always expect something more from their little gadgets while superficially professing higher costs.
Well, I say superficially because it's not just Apple, it's the supply chains.
In other words, if Apple Corporation or more accurately the entire economy and its supply chains that create the supply and demand cost basis, in part, cost results, in part—the price mechanism.
If they're actually concerned about meeting more needs at lower costs, respecting this ephemeralization, more with less phenomenon, those incentives, as moral as they are, would be the exact opposite of what the economy, what the system, actually expects to maintain itself.
Which is why anytime some company or entrepreneur says they're going to do something to make it cheaper to have more access for everybody, it's all marketing and lip service.
Things only become notably cheaper in this system when there's a way to subsidize and replace the profits lost from making that cheaper.
Now, this is a bit risky on my part because things are not entirely finalized and I guess there are spoilers, but I'm going to play some sections of my new film that I think have merit to go through audio here in the podcast and since so few people, at least by proportion to many other podcasts, listen to this. And you're all my friends here, I want to kind of share with you what I've done with certain sections of the film.
And I'm going to actually present two sections.
The first is going to be the Integral parallel economy project.
This is about six minutes of audio that describes what will be actually built in simulation on the website that will complement it, which hopefully will develop into the app and everything else.
All this stuff that I've alluded to throughout the years.
And the point of it, as it was with certain sections of my prior film Interreflections, is to give a sense of future hindsight.
So, what you're going to hear right now is a fake “60 Minutes” style—news magazine style presentation that starts off with a traditional guy speaking, then it goes to little interviews, and it cuts away to this and that, and then it goes to different people, and then it comes back for a conclusion.
And part of the stylistic design of this is it's supposed to be generated by artificial intelligence in the same way we have Dalle and ChatGPT and all sorts of other things that are basically taking prompts and turning them into content, visual, audio, and so forth, which of course in time, and this is what it plays on, you will have AI start to generate full episodes of TV shows and things like that.
So this is the idea—and in fact, it's a joke in the I say, "Oh, I'm sick of this movie.
I'm gonna let AI finish the rest of it” and I type into a little prompt.
And I hit return, and this is what you hear.
[SCENE:]
Host: Immoral and unsustainable.
That's what a growing global community says of our modern market economy.
And they've decided to go a different way.
Not by the overthrow of a country like the Bolshevik Revolution or removing themselves to some distant agrarian commune.
Rather, the revolution they embrace is emerging all around you.
In a new economic network, they call Integral.
Meet Ellis Anders, one of many coordinators assisting a base of over 100 million across 60 countries.”
So, what does this project hope to achieve?
Ellis: Viability.
Host: Viability?
Ellis: Yes. What's been happening in our market-driven world, regardless of our technology or standard of living increases, simply cannot be sustained.
It's that simple.
Host: So, you're saying the more we continue, the more damage we're going to cause?
Ellis: Correct.
Host: Well, as you know, many economists would disagree with you.
Ellis: That's because their field isn't grounded in reality. Not to sound disrespectful, but market economists have a very myopic view of our economic existence.
Think about it, when was the last time you heard proponents speak about efficiency as related to the real world? The physical science that defines our habitat?
Host: The perspective put forward by the Integral community is that the market lacks holistic efficiency. People operating in their own competitive self-interest, no matter how innovative, do not create positive outcomes for society as a whole.
On the contrary, it's argued that markets are now the main source of most all the destabilizing problems accelerating around us, from inequality to environmental destabilization, to even the rise of political authoritarianism.
Host: But consciousness to address such problems is all around us, right? No shortage of NGOs, global sustainability conferences…
Ellis: What's misunderstood is there's only so much you can do to regulate a system before it interferes with its very survival. Activists are pushing against outputs. They are actually not side effects.
They are part of the system's very function. Poverty and inequality is part of the system's output, as is the need for consumption and growth, which is entirely unsustainable.
Host: So, you're saying this kind of economy simply can't be regulated?
Ellis: Not in the ways that are required.
Host: Integral is a kind of hybrid of older community ideas such as time banks, sharing networks, and nonprofit cooperatives, while adding a high-tech twist where the seemingly indispensable purpose of private enterprise— invention, production, and distribution— is achieved through a decentralized network.
And if their theory holds true, it will make what we know as free market economics obsolete over time.
We met up with one of Integral’s programmers to give us a better understanding.
Host: So what are we working on here?
Programmer: In the process of updating our CAD system, getting some new efficiency filters going.
Host: Efficiency filters?
Programmer: So, in this program, anyone can design pretty much anything as a community.Cell phones, automobiles, houses, coffee cups, you name it.
Our current catalogue, I think, has about 50 million designs all freely accessible.
Host: Wow.
Programmer: So let's say you want to design a car. You have all the common considerations: personal safety, driving dynamics, and other goals of local efficiency, which our internal AI system helps calculate. But it goes much further. It also takes into account how well the system design fits into larger order systems, adjusting the design accordingly.
Programmer: In other words, what materials are ideal, accounting for things such as regional scarcities, life cycle maximization, and such things related to waste reduction. In other words, we're not just thinking about the individual car, we're thinking equally about its context as a subsystem, if you will, how it integrates on all levels of efficiency and sustainability.
In fact, I have right here a side project I've been playing with, approaching the problem of safety with driverless vehicles. For years, people were focusing solely on independent intelligence of the vehicle: cameras, and so on. But the only true approach is to have all the vehicles understand information about all the other vehicles around them, networked together with information flows. So, it becomes pretty much impossible for them to hit each other.
Anyway, in this system, any good design is seen as part of an integrated ecosystem, and everything about it from the resources used to how it's employed, to the environment it exists within, to even the production mechanisms involved to create it, attempts to be accounted for as a total calculation.
Host: And normal businesses don't do this?
Programmer: Not to any relevant degree, no, and really they can’t. The very structure of the market economy disallows such applied systems science.
Host: Integral participants access such tools and the overall network online and through an app. We spoke with some users in Detroit.
Host: So how long have you three been involved and how has it helped?
Participant: About two years. Great community. Integral allows for support that just doesn't exist in the normal economy.
Ellis: Now we're at 15% over the past 18 months which puts us on pace to generative degrowth in the next three to five years.
Host: So you've referred to something called generative degrowth, right, in the context of transitioning away from the market.
Ellis: Simply, for each person that doesn't spend into the market system using integral or any such alternative, economic growth is lost. Remember, that's the fuel of markets, consumption. And without it, the system falls apart.
Host: So if I understand what you're getting at, the more people that use your system, the faster capitalism collapses.
Ellis: And a sustainable system rises.
Host: Which brings me to my final question. Many critics see this work as yet another attempt at historically failed socialism, claiming that it will lead to less personal freedom and tyranny. What do you say to that?"
Ellis: Usually nothing. It's an ignorant trope. But I will say this. If people choose to believe in the philosophy of free market capitalism, then they should believe in free choice. If people wish to not participate in what they feel as a destructive, inhumane, and unsustainable economic system, they should have the voluntary right to create and engage an alternative.
And if enough people do join, expanding the system to a point, it becomes larger and stronger than what we have today, that is a natural democratic evolution. Will the billionaires like it? No. Will the power centers like it? Absolutely not. But the average person should welcome this change, as our current established trajectory is only going to destroy us.
[End scene]
Peter Joseph: And so you get the idea. Without the visual, it's a bit weak. Of course, I'm still kind of working on it. These films never end. In fact, I joked at the opening of the premiere of Zeitgeist Requiem. People asked me why it takes me so long to make a new movie or to finish a movie. And I say, well, 'who says I've ever actually finished one?' And it's true.
The artist inside me is never satisfied. And of course, this is complicated subject matter. But the Integral project, which we'll have the website and it'll be simulated initially. And then we'll try to build out this parallel economy through community effort and other approaches like grants and whatnot; it has to happen. Somebody has to put it forward.
And even if it can't materialize, I'm going to write a white paper for it that other people can build upon in open source and hopefully somewhere, somewhere along the way, somebody can get something like this going. I say that because it's extremely difficult. This is paradigm changing stuff.
But it does build on small nuances like the time banks and the sharing networks that already exist, which have been great symbolically. They are wonderful symbolically. They just have never been combined and maximized and put in the context of true revolutionary change.
So that's that. So, food for thought.
And to complete the podcast, I'm going to change gears into a comedic section that describes what I put into what I believe the second and third, it's the third and fourth chapter of my book, The New Human Rights Movement. It describes the 'structural classism,' the oppression system that is built into the structure.
And I do this through a satirical break that is very chaotic and random that happens out of nowhere, which is the point where a donut comes on screen and talks to an easel character, all animated, and they describe “how you’re fucked”. And that is the name of the sequence. So, I'm going to conclude the podcast with that. Enjoy. I hope you think it's at least somewhat funny even though it's not really funny at all.
Alright folks, I'll leave you with this. Take care of yourself and I'll talk to you soon.
[Scene]
Jimbo: Hi kids. And welcome to another episode of 'How You're Fucked!'
Audience: Yay!
Jimbo: You know how mommy and daddy never seem to be home, working all day long yet still barely able to make ends meet? Well, today we're gonna find out how it all works with our good friend Mr. Causal Loop diagram!
Mr. C: Hi Jimbo!
Jimbo: So, tell us Mr. C, why are most people today completely and totally fucked?
Mr. C: I'm glad you asked. Let's start off with money itself. Believe it or not, virtually all currency in the world is made out of debt. Weird, huh? You know, when your parents get all those loans from the bank to buy things like that old car that keeps breaking down?
Well, as strange as it sounds, that money comes into existence just by signing a loan contract. But not only that, so does the debt the money is based on, which folks who take the loans carry the burden for. And you know what part of society puts the most money into circulation, hence taking on all those loans and the resulting debt burden?
The lower classes.
Which is interesting because the vast majority of the total money supply is actually owned by 5% of the population. Meaning the rich, through all sorts of mechanisms we're gonna be talking about today, have been able to extract most of the money that the poorer folk created and hold the debt for.
Interesting, huh?
But hold on now, we're just getting started. Not only is all money made out of debt through loans, the banks charge this thing called interest, forcing the debtor to pay back even more than the borrowed. And the funny thing is, the interest money doesn't even exist in the society's total money supply!
Which means it's literally impossible for the whole of society to ever get out of debt. Which then means, like a game of musical chairs, one way or another, some folks are going to default. Having their homes and property repossessed, going bankrupt, and so on and so on. And guess who that harms the most kids? That's right, the lower classes once again, as they are never able to get out of the hole.
Jimbo: And don't forget, Mr. C, that kind of downward pressure is super for keeping those wage slaves showing up at their stupid-ass jobs, being exploited even more for the benefit of the wealthy!
Mr. C: That's right! And you bring up a good point, Jimbo! It's interesting to think about the fact that the system of economics we got today is actually little different in principle than the debt slavery system that existed years ago. Only difference now is the masses get to choose their slave owners in an ever-consolidated field of corporations. Brainwashed to think this is somehow freedom!
Well, let's not get distracted now because we almost forgot about inflation. Now, as the money supply expands with the lower classes taking on more and more debt, being charged interest that doesn't exist in the money supply, while also being disadvantaged in the game of market competition overall, the net result is they're always having to take on even more loans to keep up to pay their bills.
It's a kind of ponzi scheme, creating what we know kids as a reinforcing feedback loop! And in this process of circular reinforcement, with more and more loans expanding the money supply, this expansion ends up diminishing the value of existing money, causing the price of goods and services to rise, making things more unaffordable.
And that's called inflation kids, which is a hidden tax on poorer folk, because they don't have the means to hedge against it like the rich do, with their elite investment schemes and other shenanigans. Keeping that downward pressure going once again, stifling social mobility and personal freedom.
Jimbo: 'But hold on there, Mr. C!' Don't reinforcing feedback loops, ultimately self-destruct?
Mr. C: Very good, Jimbo, they do! Remember kids, a reinforcing feedback loop is something that keeps building on itself until it explodes! It's the most unstable condition of any system, reminding us that the market system of economics is about as stable as a house of cards on a trampoline.
Which brings us to the boom and bust cycle. Okay, so when the money supply expands, creating all this debt and inflation at the same time, that reinforcing feedback loop has to crash at some point, causing monetary contraction or recession, essentially resetting the system so it can start the unsustainable growth pattern all over again.
And so people lose jobs, companies go out of business, lots go bankrupt, and all kinds of poopiness. And you know who this poopiness fucks the most? That's right, needless to say, the lower classes once again.
But I gotta tell ya, what's most amazing about this boom and bust process is if you look at the big picture, the busts are really just one giant benefit to the rich in the long term. Because when the economy does go in the toilet, it's the rich with all their surplus that get to buy up all the failing small businesses, cheap, solidating market share and power, while also pushing down wages.
Because unemployed folks are desperate for jobs. Not to mention diminishing the power of unions and labor rights.
And as liquidity dries up and folks can't pay their mortgages, the banks, you know those big institutions that don't actually produce anything of value, they take the real physical property of the lower classes once again.
Pretty slick, huh? Just because mommy and daddy can't pay back that debt money the bank invented out of thin air to begin with, they lose their house! Heh-Heh.
But that's not all. You see, after the market crashes, all the corporate minions in the government get together and use their central banks to create even more money out of thin air, which they inject into the economy, calling it stimulus. And you know where all those billions of dollars of stimulus tend to go. That's right, the financial sector and big business. The sector is owned and operated by the upper 1%! Pretty sweet, huh?
All this to say that the boom and bust cycle, which is natural to the structure of the market economy, is a powerful force of class oppression. Keeping the rich, growing rich, while making sure the poor remain once again, completely and immutably fucked.
Jimbo: Sheesh! Poor folks really are just straight up fucked!
Mr. C: Six ways from Sunday, Jimbo!
Which brings us to our next issue, something we call negative market externalities.
You know all those social problems you hear about on the news. Water and air pollution, crime, illiteracy, lack of education, stress, disease, biodiversity loss, climate change and so on? Well, not only are they all products of the market economy, they harm the poor much, much more than the rich.
Keeping folks not only sick and unstable, but uneducated and ignorant too!
And hence far less able to compete with their rich overlords. Part of a phenomenon social dominance theorists call hierarchy accentuating. Which also helps explain why the average lower class person dies off many years before the wealthy folk do, a direct correlation between wealth inequality and mortality.
In fact, our good old friend Norwegian sociologist Johann Galtung, postulated years ago that about 18 million people die every single year from this relative poverty, a figure no doubt much higher today, making relative poverty the leading cause of death on planet Earth.
Something you kids also might know as structural violence.
And finally last on our list but certainly not least is the overall litany of general advantages the rich have to stay rich just because they're rich!
Jimbo: Lordy! A list as long as grandpa’s balls!
Mr. C: That' for sure. You see you don't have to be smart to be wealthy you just have to be lucky.
And the rest takes care of itself. And in this list of wealth attained advantage, not only do we have those elite investment opportunities, only the rich can't afford, having access to all kinds of better information, rubbing elbows with other rich insiders, rich folk also go to better colleges, engage fancy tax loopholes while being involved in the revolving door of government.
Lobbing for legislation; with political contributions because as we all know, money equals power in the market-based society, making democracy a goddamn joke!
Not to mention, the rich also control all the major media outlets, always working to shape public opinion in their favor, and on and on and on it goes.
And so, when you put all this stuff together, from the financial system to the effects of market externalities, to the grand advantages the wealthy have over all, what we discover is an powerful engine of class war.
And the rich will always win that war, kids. Because we all exist in a system literally structured to make sure the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich -- no conspiracy required!