We are in a world-wide war between the plutocrats and the networked people

Why are we seeing people's demonstrations taking on plutocratic governments from Tunisia to Madison, Wisconsin? Jon Taplin offers his explanation. It is quite compelling.

On October 14, 2008 I gave a speech at USC called "America 3.0 and The Interregnum". In it I argued that we were entering a global phase of extreme turbulence in which the bottom-up forces of a networked world battled the top-down hierarchies of centralized power. As the Italian philosopher Gramsci had noted,"The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms." Although this upheaval was accelerated by the global financial crisis that I had been warning of since December of 2007, it was not caused by the crisis. It was rather a symptom of a technological revolution initiated with U.S. Defense department funding as early as 1958. We came to call this the Internet.

I am not a techno-utopian who believes that the mere existence of a globally networked culture will allow "the new to be born". In fact, as John Palfrey points out, dying regimes will do their best to use Internet surveillance to hold on to power.

The leaders of many states, like China, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan, have proven able to use the Internet to restrict online discussion and to put people into jail for what they do using the network. We should resist the urge to cheer the triumph of pro-Western democracy fueled by widespread Internet access and usage. The contest for control of the Internet is only just beginning.


What I do believe is that the sources of leadership innovation and change in the next decade will be the bottom-up networked culture, rather than centralized hierarchies dictating how people should organize their polities. This is why the events in Wisconsin are as important as the events in Tripoli. As the historian Joseph Ellis wrote, "The main story line of American History, cast Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the lead roles of a dramatic contest between the forces of Democracy and the forces of Aristocracy (plutocracy)." The Punk'd phone call between Governor Scott Walker and what he perceived to be his aristocratic patron, David Koch, revealed the truth of Ellis's maxim. Like Hamilton, who he so admires, Koch is only interested in restoring the primacy of the plutocracy. His assault on the forces of democracy has three phases. First, by funding the Citizens United court case successfully, he freed the forces of the plutocracy to completely dominate political speech. Second, as Paymaster to governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich he is directly attacking the rights of workers to form unions and collectively bargain. By breaking the unions he eliminates the one institutional source of political money that might counter the plutocrats lock on campaign finance.

The final phase of Koch's plutocratic assault on democracy will come in the years to follow if he is successful in Wisconsin. We will return to an age of radical deregulation.

The plutocrats are primarily the people with great amounts of money together with their hirelings in government and in large corporations. As the Wall Street Banks (who make their money both by investing the funds of the plutocrats and by exploiting the people who are not wealthy and who do not understand financial exploitation methods like usury) know very well, they get their money by making financial deals, not by creating jobs that make life better for average workers. David Koch is one of many, and almost all of them in America are working to attack the American middle class and destroy it.

The Great Recession is the direct result of their efforts to free banks from government regulation so that banks would be free to create money without any limitation. (This is where the money supply comes from, not from the government.) The financial collapse is the direct result of that freeing up of banks and the growth of the shadow banking system outside of all regulation. Banks cannot be allowed to operate except under tight regulation and great transparency if we want a stable economy. Similarly, the plutocrats cannot be allowed to free themselves from taxation to support the government because it is the existence of government that creates their wealth and protects their privilege of using that wealth.

Madison Wisconsin is America's entry into the battle of the middle class around the world to take and keep control of their world.

The ultra-wealthy plutocrats have declared war on America

The Citizen's United Supreme Court Decision has unleashed a storm of money into American politics as the ultra-wealthy plutocrats try to destroy or take control of American government. They cannot accept that there is another political power in this nation that rivals their own. Some of the individuals involved were named in an earlier post here. Frank Rich at the New York Times has provided additional detail to flesh out this story.

...local chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker. Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

However much these corporate contributors may share the Tea Party minions’ antipathy toward President Obama, their economic interests hardly overlap. The rank and file Tea Partiers say they oppose government spending and deficits. The billionaires have no problem with federal spending as long as the pork is corporate pork. They, like most Republican leaders in 2008, supported the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout. They also don’t mind deficits as long as they get their outsize cut of the red ink — $3.8 trillion worth if all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

But while these billionaires’ selfish interests are in conflict with the Tea Party’s agenda, they are in complete sync with the G.O.P.’s Washington leadership. The Republicans’ new “Pledge to America” promises the $3.8 trillion addition to the deficit and says nothing about serious budget cuts or governmental reforms that might remotely offset it. Surfing the Beltway talk shows last Sunday, you couldn’t find one without a G.O.P. politician adamantly refusing to specify a single program he might cut at, say, the Department of Education (Pell grants?) or the National Institutes of Health (cancer research?). And that’s just the small change. Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else.

The tea partiers are masquerading as a grass roots movement, but in fact they are an astroturf stalking host for the wealthy conservatives who are still angry that during the Great Depression FDR kept them from grabbing the power which they feel entitled to. The Great Recession is their next chance. They have been buidling for this opportunity since the hapless Jimmy Carter let Ronald Reagan grab the American Presidency in 1980.