Lakhota
Diamond Member
By George Monbiot
A potent myth is being used to justify economic capture by a parasitic class.
We could call it Romnesia: the ability of the very rich to forget the context in which they made their money. To forget their education, inheritance, family networks, contacts and introductions. To forget the workers whose labour enriched them. To forget the infrastructure and security, the educated workforce, the contracts, subsidies and bail-outs the government provided.
Scarcely a Republican speech fails to reprise the Richard Hunter narrative, and almost all these rags-to-riches tales turn out to be bunkum. Everything that Ann and I have, Mitt Romney claims, we earned the old-fashioned way(5). Old-fashioned like Blackbeard perhaps. Two searing exposures in Rolling Stone magazine document the leveraged buyouts which destroyed viable companies, value and jobs(6), and the costly federal bail-out which saved Romneys political skin(7).
Romney personifies economic parasitism. The financial sector has become a job-destroying, home-breaking, life-crushing machine, which impoverishes other people to enrich itself. The tighter its grip on politics, the more its representatives must tell the opposite story: of life-affirming enterprise, innovation and investment, of brave entrepreneurs making their fortunes out of nothing but grit and wit.
There is an obvious flip-side to this story. Anyone can make it I did without help translates as I refuse to pay taxes to help other people, as they can help themselves. Whether or not they inherited an iron ore mine from daddy.
In the article in which she urged the poor to emulate her, Gina Rinehart also proposed that the minimum wage should be reduced. Who needs fair pay if anyone can become a millionaire?
In 2010, the richest 1% in the United States captured an astonishing 93% of that years gain in incomes(8). In the same year, corporate chief executives made, on average, 243 times as much as the median worker (in 1965 the ratio was ten times lower, namely 24:1)(9,10). Between 1970 and 2010 the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, rose in the United States from 0.35 to 0.44: an astonishing leap(11).
As for social mobility, of the rich countries listed by the OECD, the three in which mens earnings are most likely to resemble their fathers are, in this order, the UK, Italy and the US(12). If you are born poor or born rich in these nations, you are likely to stay that way. It is no coincidence that these three countries all promote themselves as lands of unparalleled opportunity.
Equal opportunity, self-creation, heroic individualism: these are the myths that predatory capitalism requires for its political survival. Romnesia permits the ultra-rich both to deny the role of other people in the creation of their own wealth and to deny help to those less fortunate than themselves. A century ago, entrepreneurs sought to pass themselves off as parasites: they adopted the style and manner of the titled, rentier class. Today the parasites claim to be entrepreneurs.
More: Romnesia: The Ability of the Very Rich to Forget the Context in Which They Made Their Money | Alternet