Elite Social Class

Power Elite Series

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, 1956, Excerpts

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves ‘naturally’ elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

In so far as the elite flourish as a social class, it will select and form certain types of personality, and reject others. The kind of moral and psychological beings these men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to play.

The power elite is composed of men of similar origin and education, the careers and their styles of life are similar. There are psychological and social bases for their unity, They are of similar social type leading to easy intermingling. Behind such psychological and social unity are the structure and the mechanics of those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich and the high military now preside.

Skull and Bones

Mitt Romney Secret Video Transcript, Excerpts

17 May 2012

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.

You know that I'm as poor as a church mouse. [Audience laughter]

The Ponce Massacre Museum

Puerto Rican Series

22 Dec 2016
Visited Puerto Rico

We made our way to the Ponce Massacre Museum located just off the square. Fantastic little museum, wandered through the well thought out exhibits. At the end, the museum curator engaged with us and gave a great synopsis of the events of that tragic day. I was somewhat familiar with the event having recently read Denis’ book – War on All Puerto Ricans. Debi, Cole and Keilyn were new to it and it made a big impression on them. Wish I had gotten the curator’s name; he was passionate about this bit of history. We talked a bit about the current debt crisis, and he sees this next year as a pivotal year. I told him we’d be looking for him on the news, and he said, you never know.

Puerto Rico Series

This is a series about another country getting into financial difficulties. I previously chronicled Zimbabwe as it went through a massive inflationary period that lasted years into the realm of ridiculousness and is still suffering the aftermath. Greece is still dealing with the impact of austerity measures to pay debt [Greek Series]. Puerto Rico is referred to as the “Greece of the Caribbean”, somewhat ironic.

Before the 2020 earthquakes and even before the 2017 hurricane that largely destroyed the island's electrical grid, Puerto was on the horizon as the next candidate for debt default, and the debt still exists even after hurricanes and earthquakes, no forgiveness. The Puerto Rican debt crisis is still a dominating issue.

In this series, I’ll excerpts from a few books [War Against All Puerto Ricans being a primary source] and laying some groundwork of historical reference. There are significant Puerto Rican communities in the United States, especially in NYC, Bay Area, and Hawaii. Puerto Ricans span all ethnicities, all colors. Puerto Ricans have clashed with the United States before, an assassination attempt of President Truman and fired shots in the House of Representatives, wounding five lawmakers. This should prove to be an interesting series. The Battle for Paradise.

Lolita Lebron

Puerto Rican Debt in the News

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Spanish Rule 1493-1897

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, 1971, Excerpts

Sugar Conquest

War Against All Puerto Ricans

Charter of Autonomy 1897 – Spanish American War 1898

Hurricane Ciriaco 1898 – Disaster Capitalism

First Civilian Governor 1900 – King of Sugar

Nationalist Party Founded 1912

Pedro Albizu Campos – Harvard Law 1921

Pedro Albizu Campos – Rise of a Nationalist

Cancer Transplanting 1931

Pedro Albizu Campos – Nationalist Party President - Speech January 1934

Albizu Meets Chief of Police Riggs – January 1934

Governor Winship Strike Breaker - January 1934

The Rio Piedras Massacre 1935

Police Chief Riggs Assassinated 1935

Female Sterilization 1937

The Ponce Massacre - Palm Sunday March 21,1937

The Ponce Massacre - Photographed and Filmed

The Ponce Massacre Museum

Albizu Imprisonment – 1937 to1943

Albizu Returns to Puerto Rico – 1947

Gag Law 1948

Battle for Paradise Series

Puerto Rican Series

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, 2018, Excerpts

Before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans were already in a state of shock and severe economic policies were already being applied there. The government had already been whittled down. By early 2017, parts of San Juan looked very much like they had been hit by a hurricane – windows were broken, buildings were boarded up. But it wasn’t high winds that did it, it was debt and austerity. The island had/has an extreme dependence on imported fuel and food; had/has an unpayable and illegal debt that has been used to impose wave after wave of austerity; and has a 130-year-old colonial relationship with a U.S. government that has always discounted Puerto Rico.

Post-Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico finds itself locked in a battle of utopias. The Puertopians dream of a radical withdrawal from society into their privatized enclaves. The other group’s dreams is grounded in a desire for people to exercise collective sovereignty over their land, energy, food, and water.

At the core of this battle is a very simple question: Who is Puerto Rico for? Is it for Puerto Ricans, or is it for outsiders? And after a collective trauma like Hurricane Maria, who has a right to decide?

Puerto Rican Exodus – Post Hurricane Maria

Puertopia

Puerto Rico Organizing

Puerto Rico Agronomics

Puerto Rico Tax Haven

Puerto Rico Tax Haven

Battle for Paradise Series

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, 2018, Excerpts

You don’t have to relinquish your U.S. citizenship or even technically leave the United States to escape its tax laws, regulations, or the cold Wall Street winters. You just have to move your company’s address to Puerto Rico and enjoy a stunningly low 4 percent corporate tax rate. Any dividends paid by a Puerto Rica-based company to Puerto Rican residents are also tax-free, thanks to a law passed in 2012 called Act 20. The conviction that taxation is a form of theft is not a novel one among men who imagine themselves to be self-made.

Puerto Rico’s Agronomics

Battle for Paradise Series

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, 2018, Excerpts

As a legacy of the slave plantation economy first established under Spanish rule, much of the island’s agriculture is industrial scale, with many crops grown for export or testing purposes. Roughly 85 percent of the food Puerto Ricans actually eat is imported.

After Hurricane Maria, just as the upheaval revealed the perils of Puerto Rico’s import addicted and highly centralized energy system, it also unmasked the extraordinary vulnerability of its food supply. All over the island, industrial-scale farms growing mono-crops of banana, plantains, papaya, coffee, and corn looked they had been flattened with a scythe.

For 28 years, Organizacion Boricua has been publicly making the case that “agro-ecology” should form the basis of Puerto Rico’s food system, capable of providing adequate, affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food for the entire population. Agro-ecology refers to a combination of traditional farming methods that promotes resilience and protects the biodiversity, a rejection of the pesticides and other toxins, and a commitment to rebuilding social relationships between farmers and local communities. The group has been warning about the dangers of chokepoints in Puerto Rico’s highly centralized system, with almost all of its food imports shipping out of a single port in Jacksonville, Florida.

Puerto Rico Organizing

Battle for Paradise Series

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, 2018, Excerpts

Precisely because the official response to the hurricane has been so devoid of urgency, Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora have been forced to organize themselves on a stunning scale. With next to no resources, communities have set up massive communal kitchens, raised large sums of money, coordinated and distributed supplies, cleared streets, and rebuilt schools. In some communities, they have even gotten the electricity reconnected with the help of retired electrical workers.

Real-world Puerto Rico is densely habited with living, breathing Puerto Ricans.

One result of being forced to save themselves is that many communities have discovered a depth of strength and capacity they did not know they possessed. Now this confidence is rapidly spilling over into the political arena. There may not be rioting in the streets, but that should not be confused with consent.

Puerto Ricans now know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there is no government that has their interests at heart, not in the governor’s mansion, not of the unelected fiscal control board, and certainly not in Washington.

Puertopia

Battle for Paradise Series

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, 2018, Excerpts

“Puertopia” is a sweeping vision that sees Puerto Rico transforming itself into a ‘visitor economy,’ one with a radically downsized state and many fewer Puerto Ricans living on the island. In their place would be tens of thousands of high-net-worth individuals from Europe, Asia, and the U.S. mainland, lured to permanently relocate by a cornucopia of tax breaks and the promise of living a five-star resort lifestyle inside fully privatized enclaves, year-round.

Aggressively advanced by Gov. Ricardo Rossello in meetings with bankers, real estate developers, cryptocurrency traders, and the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected seven-member body that exerts ultimate control over Puerto Rico’s economy, Puertopia is being conjured up in the ballrooms of luxury hotels in San Juan and New York City. In February 2018, Gov. Rossello told a business audience in New York that Maria had created a “blank canvas” on which investors could paint their very own dream world.

It even seems to have its own religion: an unruly hodgepodge of Ayn Randian wealth supremacy, philanthrocapitalist noblesse oblige, Burning Man pseudo-spirituality, and half-remembered scenes from watching Avatar while high.

Vote Propaganda

Public Opinion Series

Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928, Excerpts

In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. But the American voters soon found that without organizations and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. We have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four. To avoid confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.

An entire party, a platform, an international policy is sold to the public, or is not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality. A charming candidate is the alchemist’s secret that can transmute a prosaic platform into the gold of votes. It is asked whether, in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can puff up a nobody into a great man.

Those whose position or ability gives them power can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses. They find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. The use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life. Given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means to lead is through the expert use of propaganda.

Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/04/cambridge-analytica-data-leak-global-election-manipulation

04 Jan 2020

An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles. More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to be released over the next months. It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.

Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.

“The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,” she said. “There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of control.”

Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43476762

22 March 2018

The company accused of using the personal data of millions of Facebook users to influence how people vote is not shy about its international portfolio. Political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is facing questions over whether it used personal data to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. But its reach extends well beyond the UK and US, with its website boasting of supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents.

Thirty countries use 'armies of opinion shapers' to manipulate democracy

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/14/social-media-influence-election-countries-armies-of-opinion-shapers-manipulate-democracy-fake-news

14 Nov 2017

The governments of 30 countries around the globe are using armies of so called opinion shapers to meddle in elections, advance anti-democratic agendas and repress their citizens, a new report shows. “Governments are now using social media to suppress dissent and advance an anti-democratic agenda,” said Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project. “Not only is this manipulation difficult to detect, it is more difficult to combat than other types of censorship, such as website blocking, because it’s dispersed and because of the sheer number of people and bots deployed to do it.”

Puerto Rico Exodus – Post Hurricane Maria 2017

Battle for Paradise Series

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, 2018, Excerpts

Since Hurricane Maria, some 200,000 people have reportedly left the island, many of them with federal help. This exodus was first presented as a temporary emergency measure, but it has since become apparent that the depopulation is intended to be permanent.

Instead of helping people here, providing shelters here, bringing in more generator power to the places that need them, getting the electric system up and running, they’re encouraging people to leave instead. The disappearance of so many people in such a short time operates as a political escape valve. The exodus also conveniently helps to create the “blank canvas” that the governor bragged about to would-be investors.