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The American ruling class
- Text size
Tom Eley
Global Research
February 8, 2009
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced measures that purport to restrict executive compensation to $500,000 at financial institutions receiving billions in government assistance. The figure does not include stock options, which could be redeemed after financial firms pay back loans from the federal government. Nor does it apply to the original recipients of tens of billions in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money.
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| Obama’s servility before the financial aristocracy was summed up by the reassurances he gave it in announcing his limits on executive pay. “This is America,” Obama said. “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.” | |
The measures are essentially a public relations exercise. Their aim is to provide political cover for a new and even larger Wall Street bailout, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will unveil next week.
Yet the discussion that has emerged in the wake of Obama’s announcement sheds light on the domination of government by a tiny financial elite and the increasingly threadbare pretense of democracy in the US. This financial aristocracy, the episode reveals, is a power to be approached on bended knee.
The media have responded to Obama’s proposal of a $500,000 limit on executive compensation, which would affect only a handful of firms, as though this were a severe and astonishing punishment. Yet the figure represents approximately 12 times the annual salary of the typical worker. To the majority of the population, a salary of a half million dollars is a staggering amount of money.
Obama’s servility before the financial aristocracy was summed up by the reassurances he gave it in announcing his limits on executive pay. “This is America,” Obama said. “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.”
Such a vision of America is at odds with both its present circumstances and its history, which has been characterized by deep democratic and egalitarian traditions that date back to before the Jeffersonian democracy of the early Republic. And while liberals are busy attempting to equate Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the latter, in the midst of the Great Depression, attempted to capitalize on the tremendous contempt for the rich in the population at large by regularly issuing bromides against the “money changers.”
Indeed, Obama’s obsequiousness stands in sharp contrast to the anger of the working masses, who find it incomprehensible that the same executives who are responsible for ruining the economy and squandering trillions in taxpayer money are now presented with pay “limits” of a half million dollars. Workers are wondering why there haven’t been criminal indictments and television scenes of handcuffed executives frog-marched from their offices.
But on Wall Street, $500,000 is considered a pittance. The New York Times reports that executives felt cheated by taking home “only” $18 billion in collective bonuses in 2009. “I feel like I got a doorman’s tip, compared to what I got in previous years,” an investment banker with Citigroup told the Times.
The Financial Times reported on Wall Street’s opposition to the largely token measures. “Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a ‘brain drain’ from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye,” it wrote. “Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money.”
“‘The cap is a lousy idea,’ complained one top Wall Street executive. ‘If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?’”
Andrew Ward, a University of Georgia professor and specialist on corporate boards and management, told the Financial Times that executives could respond to Obama’s measure by calling his bluff—refusing to allow their firms to accept a bailout that would in any way limit their personal enrichment. “One of the potentially unintended consequences is that executives might try and hold off asking for government assistance until it is too late,” Ward said.
Media and academic figures who have tried to argue that the massive pay packages of the Wall Street executives are somehow legitimate, or even rational, succeed only in revealing the rot that characterizes intellectual life in the US. Their central argument—that the same CEOs who have driven their companies and the economy as whole into the ground are worthy of remuneration in the tens of millions—is so absurd it is almost an embarrassment to answer.
The immense power of the financial elite is revealed by the case of Bernard Madoff, the investor who squandered more than $50 billion in wealth in a giant Ponzi scheme. While working class Americans are arrested and spend years in prison for far lesser offenses, Madoff remains ensconced in his Manhattan penthouse.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
For nearly a decade, a whistleblower named Harry Markopolos, who had uncovered Madoff’s scheme, attempted to draw the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal regulatory agency ostensibly tasked with policing the securities and stock industries. Instead, the SEC ran interference for Madoff. Rather than being applauded for his efforts, Markopolos feared for his safety. “We knew that he was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse,” he said.
The social psychology and physiognomy of the financial elite—with its wealth, special privileges and its control over the organs of public opinion—resembles nothing so much as a modern aristocracy.
Any discussion of a rational attempt to find a solution to the economic crisis runs immediately into the ferocious opposition of this elite. Similarly, in the 18th century the aristocracy of the French ancien regime precipitated a financial crisis through its avarice and wars. When the aristocracy convened the Estates General in 1789, it was to demand that the Third Estate, the commoners, bail the aristocracy out of the crisis of its own making. But the monarchy and nobility refused to cede a bit of its power and privileges. This set the stage for the great French Revolution.
The odious subjective characteristics of the US financial aristocracy—its greed, arrogance, stupidity and decadence—are themselves deeply rooted in objective historical developments, the social expression of an underlying economic process. The rise of this narrow social layer with its obscene levels of accumulation is inextricably bound up with the decline of American capitalism in the world market and the gutting of its domestic industrial base. Indeed, what makes the whole process so filthy, what imparts to it such a decadent and repulsive character, is the degree to which this wealth is unconnected to any progressive economic process. It is in every sense destructive and reactionary.
In an earlier period of history the US had its “robber barons,” such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. As brutal and greedy as these men were, their wealth was bound up with the creation of enormous industrial empires. The latter-day robber barons of Wall Street, on the other hand, have made their billions from the destruction of the industry and productive capacity built up over decades.
The staggering wealth accumulated in the top one percent of American society over last 25 years is directly bound up with the deterioration of the economy, the decline of industry and the impoverishment of the working class. The enormous personal fortunes of the elite have been built up on hedge funds, the leveraging of debt and other forms of financial speculation. This has entailed an enormous transfer of resources out of manufacturing and into finance, and out of the working class and into the pockets of those who have played the critical role not only in destroying living standards, but in setting the stage for the present disaster.
The fortunes that grew on this basis at a certain point assumed a dynamic of their own. Their sheer scale assumes a malignant character that becomes an insurmountable obstacle to any rational policy coming from within the confines of bourgeois politics.
It follows that there is no solution to the crisis without a direct and massive assault on social inequality, and thus the wealth and privileges of the financial and business aristocracy. This cannot be carried out by pressuring the Democratic Party. The Obama administration’s meager rules on executive pay shows that it will not consider any policies that even hint at the redistribution of wealth.
The American political elite, Obama included, is tied by a thousand strings to the financial aristocracy. The Obama administration is populated by individuals who have parlayed their political positions into lucrative positions in finance. Virtually the entire cabinet fits this billing—not only Tom Daschle, the former senator who withdrew his nomination for the Secretary of Health and Human Services amidst revelations that he had withheld tens of thousands in taxes owed on payments he received from his corporate sponsors.
Yesterday it came to light that Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, took home more than $1 million last year through payments from corporations for consulting, speaking appearances and through his membership on corporate boards. He was paid handsomely for speeches by financial firms that have since collapsed, including $56,000 by Merrill Lynch and $28,000 by Wachovia. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have also used their political connections to make millions from the same financial elite that would ostensibly be targeted by Obama’s rules on executive pay.
Obama knows very well that when he leaves office he will be able to make millions of dollars, as Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, and countless other leading politicians have done. Nor would this be a departure for Obama, whose career was taken into hand early on by leading financial and political figures in Chicago.
The subordination of the whole of society to the financial aristocracy is most clearly expressed in the massive bailout of Wall Street. Its political representatives, Democrats and Republican alike, hand over trillions to the biggest banks, while providing no provisions for the masses of people who have lost their jobs and homes.
Millions of workers who voted for Obama are now coming face to face with the fact that his administration will defend the interests of the financial elite every bit as ruthlessly, if with a slightly different presentation, as the Bush administration.
The solution to the economic crisis is not a technical question but a social, political and revolutionary settling of accounts, and a historical necessity. At a certain point in the late 18th century, it became necessary for the oppressed classes of France to rise up and destroy the power and privileges of the nobility. In the America of the 1860s, the only resolution to the “irrepressible conflict” was the destruction of the “slave power” in the South.
At this point it is necessary to destroy the political and economic power of the financial aristocracy. A resolution to the economic crisis can only begin with an independent mass movement of the working class that aims to break the political stranglehold of the financial elite over society; the development, to be blunt, of a revolutionary movement.
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February 8th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
outsource top executive jobs to indians and mexicans. im sure they could do the job just as well, and at a fraction of the salary.
gregkdc Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Don’t stop there we should also outsorce attorneys, politicians, judges and doctors.
February 8th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
“Excess and arrogance lead to decline.” Wall Street scum are bleeding that which they feed off of. Hopefully, some nut will hit Wall Street with a dirty bomb. Only time will tell. In the last depression, it was not the poor jumping out the windows, it was the kind of people living on Wall Street. The elite are overconfident that they can quench a revolt of the people which they expect out of hidden guilt (for they know what they do.) My theory is that the accusations and convictions of people labeled as terrorists is already being abused. They will fill up their anti terrorist resource facilities out of this abuse, and then the big wave of revolt will follow. I believe it will be bigger than they expect. I hope so anyway. When these arrogant bastards are jumping out of windows, I’ll be cracking open a cold one, that’s for sure.
February 8th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
The answer is simple. If the CEO or the board objects to the terms, well then just refuse the bailout money then you can go back to paying your executives anything you like.
Now of course if any of these overpaid half-wits drive their companies into insolvency and liquidation, well that’s the way it goes. Then the stockholders can come after you for violating your fiduciary responsibilities and sue to get back all that money, but hey it was fun while it lasted.
At first I was against the pay cap, but when I think about it in greater depth I think it’s a marvelous idea. Like in my personal investing I’d never buy a company run by an overpaid moron, granted that doesn’t leave too many left, but my IRA is actually up using thie philosophy. I never bought Countrywide, Wells, Citi, BOA, and especially companies like GE. So if “I” buy these companies with my tax money I should in effect support the some criteria I’d use when buying them personally.
Jack Welch at GE is one of the ringleaders of the “pay the execs hundreds of millions while laying off tens of thousands and offshoring the whole company to India” – club.
I sold every share of GE I had after Welch got started on his “reshaping” of GE. now GE is hollow shell of a company hawking Chinese flashbulbs and manufactures nothing. Their electrical control products are the worst garbage in the industry and the technology is all 25 years old.
Overall if you look at the companies that pay their execs the most, they are always in worse shape than the ones that actually pay for real performance. There is an inverse relationship between pay and the performace of the company in virtually every industry not just the financials.
February 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Demons are devoted to money and sex , period !!! These days , even phoney money and
sex with hookers will do , while in the past ( many thousands of years ago ), big demoniac leaders
where more discerning , they knew about the laws of Karma , one of them being that the King
gets 1/7th ( one seventh ) of the Karma of the whole population , and since these days the
population produces practically only bad Karma , they’re are in it real deep !!! Suckers !!!
February 8th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
people who uphold wealth as the ultimate expression of success should not be suprised by a world based on greed and corruption,should not be suprised by those pursuing wealth sacrificing anything and everything to aquire it,should not be suprised when it bites you in the ass,rest assured when they are done with you they will start on each other until the grand nagus comes forth to rule the ferengi nation.
goods--- Reply:
February 8th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
If these are your own words, then hats off to you. If they are not , hats off for repeating them. This is indeed the best “reply” I’ve heard concerning greed, money, and power. This is exactly how these vultures act
February 8th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
This guy nailed it, the salary cap… which won’t be retroactive, to the big dogs who already got the real, Bush bailout….. is meant to decimate the mid-level banking industry… and speed up consolidation, as banks on the fence of insolvency, are being bullied into kepeing the loot and going bust, or coming under state control. Funny how the media acts as if it’s too late, or impossible, to go after any of those sweet deal the big banks already got. As someone said on the show, maybe Max Keiser… the Trillionaires are now at war with the Billionaires…
Seems like a good time for the American people to band together and figure out… what chips they have left (if any) at the table…and go all in. I mean can you imagine the s---storm that would get started on the hill, if the American people decided to boycott mortgage, auto and credit card payments…until some real solutions werre enacted… I mean what’s a credit rating, really, when families are starving on the street. You can bet that if the American suckers quit paying their loan sharks for more than a month or two… their own Madoff style Ponzi schemes would come crashing down in a matter of months…
February 8th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
“Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a ‘brain drain’ from the profession…”
As it turns out we woulda been better off with some somewhat stupider execs at much lower pay, for the past ten years.”
Asshole!
February 8th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Let them eat cake.
February 8th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
If the guy who only made 18 Billion in 2009 think that anyone would gripe about being in his shoes…he can trade if it is so embarrassing for him..
That is more than anyone needs including him…
February 8th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
THEY are holding a very pissed off wolf by the ears! They work for US!
February 8th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
All you need to do is strip the bankers of their ability to create and claim ownership of the nation’s credit. New credit should be injected into the economy at the bottom, to the consumerate, rather than at the top.
In general, violent revolutions have a poor record for decentralizing power.
For more information, look up “Social Credit” on Wikipedia.
February 8th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Brzezinski on CFR, Bilderberg, and Trilateral Commission – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOk6ENxyAh0
February 8th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Brzezinski on CFR, Bilderberg, and Trilateral Commission
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOk6ENxyAh0
February 8th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
As he points to an admirality (war)( the gold fringe) flag. War on the middle class. Nothings changed there. I asked a judge in court why he flew that flag. He got pissed! “I’ll fly any flag I want in my court!”. The look on his face was he was surprised that anyone knew what it stood for. I guess I insulted him. Well he insulted me by having it. I hate the amerikahn flag and everything it stands for. ( I mean what it really stands for, not what people think it stands for).People see the flag and think of unicorns and butterflies. I see tyranny, deciet, robbery, death of millions of innocent men, women and children, oppression, lies, slavery of all its citizens.
February 8th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I’ve lived in DC and NYC.
Let me tell you if you haven’t been to these places: These psychopathic egomaniacal scumbag whackjobs are so far up their own assholes they eat and believe the bulls--- they spew. They have no humanity. They are miserable inside who hurt good and wholesome people to make their self-hate go away. They cheat on their wives. The wives go nuts(ever see the plastic surgery on the unloved rich spouse?) They abuse their families. Their money, mammon, their crude symbols of success are all dripping with sin, s---, and evil. If you tune in you can see past the appearance to the f---ed up insane psychopathic murderous masturbating monstrous demons they really are. Tune in and see. Like Linda Blair in The Exorcist x 10000000000. They are looney tunes bats--- crazy. The meek suffering good real humans will inherit the earth from these demon lords.
February 8th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
this is a great idea and all, but have you people not been paying attention? in the 1860’s the aristocracy and the regular joe shmoes both had rifles. now the elite have weapons that will enable their domination. i dont care how many americans have guns, they are no match for a weapon that can engage an enemy down to the square foot from space.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:41 am
Once upon a time, a kindly person would dip their hat to the corporate boss or bankster. Now that same person would dip their head and vomit. It is all too disgraceful and sickening. I bear the idea that they share our humaness and consider themselves part of the human species, with disdain, because I now know the truth.
If it was not for gutsy people like Alex, I would still not know the truth. I am grateful, so grateful for the education. May you blaze on, my friend. (and Geoff P …you are so right)
February 9th, 2009 at 1:55 am
well that’s too bad isn’t it geoff, because guns are all that’s left for the american people. nothing and i mean nothing else is going to work, the voting process is a absolute joke and writing the congressman and senators well that’s just……………………….BBBWWWWAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!
February 9th, 2009 at 2:33 am
swear aleigence to a man instead of an idea
and the plan always falls
for a man is part Gaia
hot windy sand can fray all he calls.
But an idea writen in words
Can be an unsmiten surge
from the man
and all he left to stand
(children to begin a purge
of the man who says he is all we need), to merge
with what is real
like huts of asteroid steal
stolen in secret
v/s hemp, void of dirty deals
rolling in, to keep it-
it: the idea of peace
that will seap
into the mangers of mothers
and change all the others.
this is why the old middle eastern culture covers and controls their women
back then they where sacred and powerful so the only way to make them objects was to make them too sacred
and the new western culture treats their women like objects
we are all bodies in a scientific world. Women were going to become free
so the culture(the parts manipulated) turned on them and makes them into side line entertainment
accessories.
but it is us men that are the accessories
flash light and blind fold
that is the two main ones
we scout out what might be real and our mothers/daughters/wives/sisters put it in action, mostly, during gestation. when women see what has become in mass levels, evolution will happen, possibly with slight physical changes to dna.
this is why they are trying to beat it to the punch with their own version, because truth humbles them, which they immediatly, with reaction-mind, reject. women are allowed to do their own magic in the elite, but it is all too perverted and mind numbed to even comprehend the true evolution that takes place when the human race, primarily women, conclude that a new truth is apperent. total speculation: i suppose the last one was that we were not exactly like most of the other animals and had a different calling, the hand and the mind became the symbols. this time i think it will be the heart. like learning something, sometimes you go back to the begining when you’re done. we could have always had the same dna and evolution is solely spiritual and consciousness oriented. either way, women hold the button. men hold their speculations and don’t mind a good debate. women feel what is and don’t need any one to tell them some logical crap.
February 9th, 2009 at 4:46 am
Hey infowarriors check out my new website and blog! Its pretty new and needs some work still.
Please visit and click on some of the GOO-GLE ads to support and fund my website, thanks!
http://www.info-warriors.com
February 9th, 2009 at 8:21 am
The elites will find some other way to get their millions. Just look how Dick Cheney did it !
February 9th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Good one Guess What. This indeed has the same insane feel of absurdity as the disconnection of Marie Antoinette and the aristocracy from the people of France. Some heads need to roll,… badly…
February 9th, 2009 at 9:50 am
GM is using taxpayer money from bailout to build plant in South America.
Why do I feel I have been hit over the head and robbed?
February 9th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Women have been reduced to sex slaves while thinking they are the most free in the world. Men in the West are smarter than in the East.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
2009 Infowars MONEY BOMB! February 12-22.
New Year, New Concept! Check it OUT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uns4n_Rd1do
http://www.liberateyourlincolns.com
February 9th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
The people will have the ‘US’ after the top 5% destroy it and move away.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
This is a very well-written article. The best so far on this website.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Anybody that still has faith in the Government and that Obama cares, then tell them if Obama really cared about the United States and its people he would issue currency directly from the treasury instead of going through a middle man like the Federal Reserve. That money would also be interest free and Debt free. This should show even a common house plant that Obama is bought and paid for, but since were talking about Americans I guess we’ll need to draw a picture and throw in a bunch of perky cheerleaders to get the point across.