Wealth Gap Correction - War

Wealth Gap Series

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, 2014, Excerpts

Inequality on the eve of WWI was as great as it had ever been. The two world wars played a central role in reducing inequalities in the twentieth century. It was the chaos of war, with its attendant economic and political shocks, that reduced inequality in the twentieth century. There was no gradual, consensual, conflict free evolution toward greater equality. In the twentieth century it was war, and not harmonious democratic or economic rationality, that erased the past and enabled society begin anew with a clean state.

The reduction of inequality that took place between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. A great wave of enthusiasm swept over Europe in the period 1945-1975. People felt that inequality and class society had been relegated to the past.

One major lesson is clear: it was the wars of the twentieth century that wiped away and transformed the structure of inequality. Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, inequalities in wealth that had supposedly disappeared are close to regaining or even surpassing their historical highs. The new global economy has brought immense inequities. Can we imagine a twenty-first century in which capitalism will be transcended in a more peaceful and more lasting way, or must we simply await the next crisis or the next war?

The Witches’ Hammer – The Lucifer Effect

The Malleus Maleficarum Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

The bible of the Inquisition, the Malleus Maleficarum, or “The Witches’ Hammer” was required reading for the Inquisition judges. It begins with a conundrum to be solved: How can evil continue to exist in a world governed by an all-good, all-powerful God? To reduce the spread of evil in Catholic countries, the proposed solution was to find and eliminate witches. What was required was a means to identify witches, get them to confess to heresy, and then destroy them.

Making witches the despised dispositional category provided a ready solution to the problem of societal evil by simply destroying as many agents of evil as could be identified, tortured, and boiled in oil or burned at the stake.

Given that the Church and its State alliances were run by men, it is no wonder that women were more likely than men to be labeled as witches. The suspects were usually marginalized or threatening in some way: widowed, poor, ugly, deformed, or in some cases considered too proud and powerful. The terrible paradox of the Inquisition is that the ardent and often sincere desire to combat evil generated evil on a greater scale than the world had ever seen before. It ushered in the use by State and Church of torture devices and tactics that were the ultimate perversion of perfection.

Escher Circle Limit IV

United States’ Tax Haven Structure

Tax Haven Series

Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson, 2011, Excerpts

Along with Britain and Europe, the United States anchors the third big offshore pole. At the federal level, on the top tier, the United States dangles a range of special tax exemptions, secrecy provisions, and laws designed to attract foreign money in true offshore style. U.S. banks may, for instance, legally accept proceeds from a range of crime - such as handling stolen property – as long as the crimes are committed overseas. Special arrangements are made with banks to make sure they do not reveal the identities of foreigners parking their money in the United States.

The next tier involves individual U.S. states. Florida’s banks have a long history of harboring mob money, often in complex partnerships with the nearby British Caribbean havens. Other U.S. states like Wyoming, Delaware, and Nevada have specialists in offering low-cost and very strong forms of almost unregulated corporate secrecy, which has attracted illicit money, and even terrorist money, from around the globe.

The third U.S. offshore rung is the U.S. Virgin Islands, a minor haven used by Bank of America, Boeing, FedEx, and Wachovia, among others. The Marshall Islands provides the anything goes, unregulated flag, among many others, the Deepwater Horizon, the BP-operated rig that caused environmental chaos off the U.S Gulf Coast in 2010.

The biggest tax haven in the U.S. zone of influence is Panama. The country is filled with dishonest lawyers, dishonest bankers, dishonest company formation agents and dishonest companies. The Free Trade Zone is the black hole through which Panama has become one of the filthiest money laundering sinks in the world.

The U.S. government and many others have allowed tax havens to proliferate because the elites who use them are the world’s most powerful lobbyists. Nearly every multinational corporation uses tax havens, and their largest users – by far – are on Wall Street.

Elite Centralization - Political, Economic, and Military

Power Elite Series

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

The political order has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure.

The economy has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions. The trend within the corporate world is toward larger financial units tied into intricate management networks. Today the great American corporations seem more like states within states than simply private businesses. The economy of America has been largely incorporated.

The military order has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain.

In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced; within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up. Religious, educational, and family institutions are increasingly shaped by the big three.

Jekyll Island

Elite Moneyed Life

Power Elite Series

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

Whenever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected. A million dollars, it is said, covers a multitude of sins. It is not only that men want money; it is that their very standards are pecuniary. In a society in which the money-maker has had no serious rival for repute and honor, the word ‘practical’ comes to mean useful for private gain, and ‘common sense,’ sense to get ahead financially. The pursuit of the moneyed life is the commanding value, in relation to which the influence of other values has declined, so men easily become morally ruthless in the pursuit of easy money and fast estate-building.

The very rich in America have been culturally among the very poor; the only kinds of experience for which they have been models are the material ones of money-getting and money-keeping. Material success is their sole basis of authority. The elite of wealth and power do not feel in need of any ideology. Perhaps nothing is of more importance to the conservative mood than the rhetorical victory and the intellectual and political collapse of American liberalism.

The higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite; its general acceptance is an essential feature of the mass society. The absence of any firm moral order of belief makes men in the mass all the more open to the manipulation and distraction of the world of the celebrities. A great deal of American corruption is simply a part of the old effort to get rich and then to become richer.