After the Magna Carta
in 1215 the lords gained more autonomy, but autonomy among plutocrats should
not be mistaken for autonomy "of the people". In the industrial era feudal serfs became wage serfs, and
just as some feudal serfs at some times and in some places enjoyed quite
beneficent treatment by their rulers, so wage serfs at times (such as the three
decades after WWII in America) shared in a general prosperity.
In recent centuries
the sword's role in taking land and extracting wealth has been supplemented by
finance: the creation and allocation of credit money first by bond merchants
and later by the more formal institution of "banking." Money can peacefully "buy" most
anything in this world, including human beings and all their skills and talents
and energies and attributes, so by possessing the power to create financial
credit out of thin air and thereby issue a nation's and the world's "money",
the big international bankers are able to achieve with finance what had
previously required military force.
"Economic hitmen"
entrap nations in unpayable debt that is owed in a foreign currency, a currency
that the indebted nation is not allowed to create but must "earn" by selling
real things and receiving payment in that foreign currency. The hitmens' sales rhetoric is that
export earnings from the newly financed investments will provide the foreign
currency funds to repay the loans.
The "loans' {which are actually loans of "credit money" that banks do
not "have" but actually "create" on their balance sheets as a new bank deposit
in the borrower's bank account offset by a new debt balance in the borrower's
loan account: banks "create" the money that they lend}, are secured by
"collateral". Collateral is real
things of real value, which the borrower pledges to forfeit to the banker if he
fails to repay his loan.
Collateral is real mines and national utilities and buildings and infrastructure,
built up by the nation's collective efforts over decades or centuries.
So when the borrowers
default on the loan payments, the bankers and their collaborators come in and
assume ownership of the real resources of the nation. Or as we see today in places like Greece, the government is
pressured to sell the nation's islands and ports and national infrastructure to
get money to pay its debts, but the only people who have money are the
plutocrats, who buy the national treasures for nickels on the dollar. In this way finance is able to convert
its power to create money into its power to gain ownership of real resources,
real wealth.
Mills believed that 20th
century corporatization consolidated America's rich into a true
"class", self-aware of their own elite position and of their common
interests in extracting the productive wealth of the nation (and now the
"globalized" world) as their private profits. There is no need for an explicit "conspiracy", because all members
of the elite class self-consciously share the same interests, and their
corporate lawyers and managers vigorously prosecute those interests in the
financial, economic and political spheres, the spheres of power. Mills' analysis is in the
"sociological" tradition of Thorstein Veblen ("The Theory of the
Leisure Class", 1899), whose work Mills acknowledges as seminal but limited in
its scope and applicability.
In 1922 Richard
Franklin Pettigrew, long term US businessman and Senator, published, "Triumphant
Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 -- 1920", which is the
period during which Pettigrew was intimately involved in the business and
government of America. He
describes how the "robber barons" flat out appropriated vast tracts
of the American land mass and its resources, and had their paid Congressman
(especially Mark Hanna, whom Mills also names) weasel the government to
actually pay for construction of the railroads and the steel mills, etc. that
the 'industrialists' owned as their private property.
Their great wealth of
land and natural resources was simply "taken" from the public domain and
legalistically transferred into their private domain. And their great wealth of industrial infrastructure, such as
railroads and steel mills, was paid for out of public funds by the complicit
government. Perhaps not all great fortunes
were stolen in these ways, but this form of wealth acquisition defined the era.
This was "The
Gilded Age" that Twain and Dudley lampooned in their 1873 book of that
title. Though Balzac is attributed
authorship of, "behind every great fortune, there is a crime", nobody
on the internet can actually find a written record of his saying it. But it is nevertheless true. America's great fortunes were weaseled
and finagled and stolen by financial and political manipulation and collusion,
not "earned" by "rugged individual" economic production and
not "accumulated" by personal thrift.
Pettigrew insists repeatedly, from 50 years of first hand experience
with these men, that "capital is stolen labor, and its only function is to
steal more labor". Mills
concurs, observing that,
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