| Taxes - It's a matter of defl ecting taxes to those at the bottomand near the bottom of the income gap |
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| Oligarchy for Kids Oligarchy as an idea. |
| Crime Scene Cleanup an Oligarchy? Civil Government |
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| Voter Turnout |
A definition of oligarchy goes something like this: The guys at the top of the food chain got there and remain there by controlling power and information. For power they use military forces and brute force. By information they create stories to mystify and bedazzle the unlearned or misinformed. They consist of a ruling class, a 1 percent nobility, aristocracy, sultan-like group, billionaires owning sources of information and politicians.
Oligarchs began to arise soon after humanity got the agricultural revolution underway, somewhere in Fertile Crescent territory, Mesopotamia. Nature has a way of spilling its wealth, its resources, upon those fortunate enough to have residence in the right place at the right time. This time, the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran, shared its wealth. Organizing human labor to extract wealth from the yearly flood enriched soil paid great dividends. A ruling 1 percent emerged. As it happens with most ruling classes, they needed a ruling army to keep their great wealth amidst great poverty and great scarcity, two distinctly different, social conditions. One a matter of social power, the other a matter of poor natural resources. In this place we still have soldiers protecting our "national interests." Which means protecting the wealth and power of our nation's 1 percent, its oligarchs. Ironic, isn't it. In the land of Saddam Hussain, wealth and power centralized in the hands of an ancient 1 percent. For centuries, oligarchs obviously controlled great wealth up to the present. Nothing's really changed for the 1 percent. An elitist social theory of the nineteenth and early twentieth century muddied our social perception of the 1 percent. As a result this 1 percent slid from popular awareness. The common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines and empowers them. Wealth also exposes the 1 percent to brutes with clubs and pitchforks; now AK-47s seem to help with the redistribution of their wealth when they slide back into popular awareness at the wrong time in the wrong place. Whatever their time, wherever their place, oligarchs claim the defense of their wealth to subdue those with less, the historically and recently disempowered.
Whether in Athens or Rome, oligarchs dominate the masses with strong-arm tactics, bread-and-circuses, and now mass media. The beauty of mass media shows us oligarchy has a new, dominator-friendly manipulation device, the sources of society's production and reproduction, ideology. Crime Scene Cleanup OligarchyAnyone familiar with my writing suspected long ago that an oligarchy exists in crime scene cleanup. That is, anyone giving me a moment of their time and taking my test believes me about this oligarchy. Perhaps, though, this class of government employees represent a monopoly, rather than an oligarchy. They do indeed have guns and badges behind them. And they do indeed control the sources of information and its means of distribution. All this makes them sound like an oligarchy, a state supported oligarchy. Either way, they suck. Civil government came into existence to protect property for those with property. Our Orange County Sheriff-Coroner's Department, for one, brings a new twist to this arrangement. Position leads to wealth, property if desired. One need not hold a top position to profit from homicide, suicide, and unattended deaths; it helps, though. A solo brokering position, investigator duties, leads to profit. As for the sheriff, the coroner, the county administrator, I leave these positions to the reader's imagination. Nepotism in county ranks must grow. The inducement for such an arrangement moves children, siblings, and spouses into positions of power. Families now become government-business networks. In short order they route price takers (like me), the free enterprise cleaning companies. Survivors of this assault remain because they have other businesses or working spouses. Otherwise, their janitorial work returns to routine cleaning or ceases to exist. A second relationship common to this most recent county corruption follows. Family-centered political power at the county government level. Now with millions of dollars at stake each year, political payoffs become standard operating procedure. Especially in Orange County, California, ensuring board of supervisors, sheriff, administrator, and others receive needed cash for election becomes a family affair. The district attorney, for example, holds a position. With her/his power to investigate throughout the county civil and private communities, we know which way the wind blows. It does not blow in the direction of uncovering coroner and related death administration criminal conduct. In these cases, civil government defends an elite county hierarchy of privileged positions to impose their will upon an unknowing citizenship. Those in the know either turn their heads and ignore fraud against families, or they willigly take part in it. When oligarchs benefitted from the emergence of the nation-state's police powers, they no longer needed their paid security. Now when county employees have the death and police investigative powers in their pockets, they need not worry about the breadth and debth of their corruption. The two tendencies in county governments exist between the maniplating cronies and those with knowledge of the cronies. For the remaining majority of county employees, it's work as usual. They remain in the dark while those with the real income generating power keep it that way. The most common and durable source of their continuing corruption shows itself in their unequal positions of power. For example, a coroner's investigator has a direct one-to-one reationship with families of the decedants. Here we find some of the greatest power-brokers in county government. By directing families to pay-back friendly crime scene cleanup companies, these county employees command millions of dollars per year, in some cases. A percentage of 10 percent for $300,000 comes to $30,000 added to a yearly income. It's done with a simple piece of paper printed at county expense. Add the number of county coroner investigators to these figures, and readers can figure out what's going on. Is it any wonder my telephone does not ring with Orange County cleaning requests? I receive more calls from Orange County, Florida, than my own county. Those without these direct one-to-one contacts pickup the scraps, so to speak. These price takers find work by chance, rather than design. Hundreds of web pages find these chance occurrences. Government employees profit from tax payer designed contacts with families. Not intended, but easily organized, a crony relationship grows |
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Rather than beat this government fraud drum over and over, I defer to oligarchy here. Here I continue my monolauge on oligarchy.
To my critics, I offer a first criticism of my oligarch writing.
"OK, Evans, you're just jealous because people accquire great sums of wealth and pass it onto their children. So what?".
My reply includes a reminder to my above writing. Oligarchs gain control over political processes. Now, with a Supreme Court case, Citizens United vs. The United States. Here the Supreme Court ruled that any person, which includes personhood for corporations, may contribute whatever they feel pleased to contribute to a political party, politician, and related political activities. In doing so, no one need report or expose their actoins.
With oligarchs on the loose, how do working class people compete with this monied political system; it's not a democracy by any reach of the imagination and not a representative government, republican.-like.
Here I refer readers to my writings on Social Darwinism. There I write about the threats of Social Darwinism upon working class politics as well as so many areas of our lives.
Here, oligarchy continues its influence over the reins of power. "At its very fundamental core, the history of the US has not been one of national community, but of conflict across class, race, and gender lines." Without a unified nation to reflect upon, it's impossible to cover the entire range of any national history from a general perspective.
We generaly find the national identy of white male hegemony shaping the United States over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Especially in Florida, we find crime scene cleanup following disregard for indigenous people with the expansion of slavery. For the white male without an apparent oligarcy, life remained an exploration in human exploitation.
Resistance to the US military helped to define the blacks and Seminoles of Florida. Their resistance helped to define Florida as a microcosom of what followed for the nation. Constittional law meant little outside of white society. Women, indigenous people, slaves, and the dispossed.
Black Seminoles fought three wars with the United States as it sought to dislodge them from Florida's territory. As a guerilla army the Seminoles brought the US military's superior technology and superior numbers failed against a committed population. Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan show us similar outcomes. We must recall Jamaca as another enclave of successful guerill warfare agains the colonial slave trade. We don't see these points in history books, though. Apparently, West Point ignores them too.
So we find American exceptionalism betrayed by its drive to seize fugitive slaves in the Seminole nation. We might wonder which southern states' oligarchs stood to profit from destruction of the Seminole slave refuge. Therein we also find a source to corrupted historical reporting as we do today.
Today, a sophisticated Income Defense Industry protects the oligarchs' power. Southern oligarchs need no longer rely on the US military for dislodging indigenous, grassroots resistance movements. Control over the media ensures subdued populations. Defending their billions comes more cheaply with their control of information and their income Defense Industry. Manipulating the media for favorable public opinion and political ends, tax avoidance ensures continued growth of oligarchs' fortunes. So and so reports the "wealthiest fraction of a percent at the top consistently deflects the tax burdens downward to those whose wealth is insufficient to buy an effective defense."
Voter turn out will not end the oligarchs' power, but it may change the terrain the 99 percent move upon. Womens rights, civil rights in general, produce no threat to the 1 percent's goal of income concentration and protection. In effect, oligarchs have the power to cause outcomes as they wish, in part. Where their money fails to garner power needed for a specific outcome, their Income Defense Industry ensure their growing income continues.
What about personalities?
So why, how does humanity reach a point at which a 1 percent chooses to expand its wealth beyond enough?
They .
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