We have seen the wealthiest one percent of our nation's population double their percentage of the nation's total wealth in the last thirty years, while most American's disposable income has been shrinking as healthcare and housing costs have gone through the roof. This concentration of wealth is due--as it always has been in America--to war profiteering:in this case the Cold War and War on Terror. Enough is Enough.

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How Much Is Enough?

By Richard Girard

â??The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.â?

Marcel Proust (1871â??1922), French novelist. Remembrance of Things Past, volume 11, â??The Sweet Cheat Gone,â? chapter 1 (1925; tr. by Scott Monkrieff, 1930).

â??Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.â?

Thomas Carlyle (1795â??1881), Scottish essayist, historian. Past and Present, book. 3, chapter 10 (1843).

â??That's all I can stands, 'cuz I can't stands no more!â?â??Popeye the Sailor-man; innumerable short animated cartoons and comic strips since 1929.

To whom does the world belong?

Does it belong to the rich, to those who canâ??under the laws of property or by their ability to coerceâ??lay claim to the world's largest pieces? Or does it belong to humanity as a whole, now and in the future, a gift held in trust for us all?

What is the value of a clear mountain stream, lush grasslands, forests that act as pillars for the heavens, the song of a meadowlark in the early morning sun, the sight of a fox running through the brush, or salmon swimming up the Columbia River to spawn? How about a sunset over the front range of Colorado, or a starlit night at the foot of Long's Peak?

To quote the television commercial: Priceless.

Our ownership of landâ??and the mineral and water rights that comes with itâ??has been part of the argument over wealth and the fairness of its distribution that has existed since the rise of civilization.

For many years, land was the only recognized basis for true wealth. Gold, silver, and all of the other things which we sometimes think of as wealth in our modern era were, prior to the rise of mercantilism in Europe in the Sixteenth Century (which happened to coincide with the arrival of the Spanish Treasure Fleets from the New World), a commodity of exchange for trade between nations and merchants in both classical and feudal Europe, but not wealth itself. This was the reason that the Jews were not permitted to own land in most Western European nations until after the rise of mercantilism.

With the arrival of the Spanish treasure galleons, all of this changed.

Suddenly, nations were able to raise and maintain much larger armies, often times by renting out parts of their armies as mercenaries to wealthier (those with larger supplies of bullion) nations. The Swiss, the Scots, the Hessians: all of them became famous for the mercenaries they provided to the warring nations of Europe during the wars of the Protestant Reformation (1525-1648), Louis XIV (1660-1715), and the First British Empire (1721-1783). Spain, Holland, Austria, France, The Papal States, Venice, Sweden, and Great Britain made use of these and other mercenaries at various points in those 258 years.

This time period also saw the rise of the great banking houses, the first national banks, including the Bank of England, and a number of speculative ventures, some successful (the British East India Company, Lloyd's of London), and some not (The Great South Sea Bubble).

The essence of mercantilism is â??accumulating bullion, establishing colonies and a merchant marine, and developing industry and mining to attain a favorable balance of trade,â? (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition copyright1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company). Ownership of land was still important, as exemplified by the fact that the founders of most of the American colonies were wealthy nobles or landowners in Great Britain, but it was no longer the sole determining factor. This was the economic model, more than a modern industrial society that Adam Smith was writing of in The Wealth of Nations.

Even as Smith was writing his magnum opus, the death of mercantilism was already approaching on feet of iron. The Industrial Revolution, fostered by men like James Watt and Richard Arkwright, would change the world in a manner not seen since the discovery of iron. England was uniquely situated economically to take advantage of industrialization, the pound sterling being the standard upon which all other specie was judged.

The other half of the rise of our modern economic dragon came about at the time of the French Revolution in 1789. A broad wave of nationalism was felt for the first time in Europe, and its repercussions are still being felt to this day. The hiring of the mercenary was replaced by the levee en masse, the drafting of a nation's manpower for total war. This fact (together with Napoleon's genius) permitted France to dominate Europe on land for twenty years: subjugating Austria, Prussia, and Spain (for a while); incorporating Holland, Italy and western Germany into the French Empire; neutralizing Russia and the Ottomans; leaving Great Britain to face Napoleon essentially alone, behind the moat of the English Channel, from 1807 to 1811.

With the coming of the industrial revolution, land in and of itself became less important in the assessment of individual wealth. A property's capital improvements increasingly determined the land's value.

Even today, farm and grazing lands have a finite capacity of production. You can only graze so many herd animals of a specific type per acre, or raise so many bushels of corn or any other crop. The Industrial Revolution did increase agriculture's numbers, especially with innovations like McCormick's mechanical reaper, Whitney's cotton gin, and Smith's barbed wire. But land is still a finite resource, and overworking a particular piece of landâ??either by grazing or plantingâ??can ruin its productive value for years.

When manufacturing was done entirely by hand, the number of items that could be produced by a shop was limited by the speed and dexterity of the human workers. The arrival of machines to do the work of humans changed all that.

A steam or water powered loom could weave more cloth in a day than a dozen human workers; automatic spinning jennies spun vast spools of yarn to keep up with the demand; sewing machines permitted the rapid stitching of a seam with a precision that few seamstresses could match. Precision lathes and drills permitted the creation and production of mechanical devicesâ??including gunsâ??with interchangeable parts, easing supply and repair concerns.

Most importantly for manufacturing, the machinery in the same building could be replaced and upgraded, over and over again, to increase production capacity, without changing the size of the building.

So it came to pass that wealth was redefined by the term capital. This term included not only land and money, but many forms of financial instruments (stocks, bonds, etc.), and all of the non-human business assets including machinery.

Ah, what a brave new world, to have such creatures in it.

The new economic system was not without problems. Although the beginning of the Industrial Revolution heralded an end to the institution of slavery in the European dominated nations, it also was the beginning of the exploitation of the proletariat in place of the slaves by the capitalist elite. These industrial magnates' social, political and economic practices more closely mirrored those of the feudal lords of the Middle Ages, than the human centered, democratic ones propounded by Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Madison, and Paine. In the subconscious of too many of the new lords of capital, the chattel slave had been replaced by the wage slave.

While capitalism may, in its own way, have been a very moral system, as Karl Marx pointed out in his chapter on â??Human Requirements and the Division of Labor,â? in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, (see Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p.144, 1966); it is not a fair or humane one. The capitalist, â??By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standardâ??general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs,â? Marx wrote, â??...therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract needâ??be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activityâ??seems to him [the capitalist] a luxury"This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave "The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you saveâ??the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devourâ??your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.â?

What Marx is essentially saying is that pure, laissez faire capitalism, or what I call antisocial capitalism, only works for a community of monks, who have taken a vow of poverty, and are expecting their reward in the afterlife.

Under such a system, human beings can only survive in the long term if they become mindless, unquestioning automatons. (Kind of makes you wonder if the war on drugs was ever supposed to work?)

Marx was not the first to question the inhumanity of antisocial capitalism: Charles Fourier, the Count de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson all questioned aspects of this dehumanizing system before Marx did. To quote Jefferson, â??How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper objectâ??the happiness of manâ??to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests." (Letter to Ellen W. Coolidge, 1825; The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume18, page 341; 1904.)

Such a system, exploiting human beings for profit, is contrary to the ideals of most of the architects of our nation and its Constitution. This is because it devalues the common man in general, and his labor in particular, and signals the establishment of an aristocracy based on capital.

Abraham Lincoln was one of the first to directly point out the intrinsic value of labor in relation to capitalism. â??Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital;â? President Lincoln stated in his annual message to Congress on 3 December 1861, â??Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.â?

The â??Gilded Age,â? as Mark Twain so aptly named the period immediately following the Civil War, saw the real beginning of this era of extreme exploitation in America. This was initially powered by profiteering on the public dime during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Identical exploitation of workers had been experienced and written of earlier in Great Britain by authors such as Charles Dickens, as well as by European philosophers and radicals including Blanc, Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx, Engels, and Lassalle.

The â??cureâ? proposed by these Europeans for the ills of antisocial capitalism was called socialism, or in its most extreme forms, communism and anarchism. The proponents of this cure were called reds, after the red in the French flag (or tricolor) the color of the Third Estate, or common people, in the French Revolution: a description they wore with pride.

Most American newspapers used the terms communism, socialism, and anarchism (together with their derivatives), interchangeably; often combining them indiscriminately with terms like worker's rights, strikes and strikers, unions, etc.. Anyone who showed sympathy for the rights of working men and women were called â??pinksâ? and â??pinkos,â? or â??fellow travelers.â? Far too many Americans accepted the lies and misrepresentations of these newspapers, who tried to conflate the ideas of the most extreme European radicals (Proudhon and Bakunin), with those of the more thoughtful and moderate thinkers (Marx and Engels).

One example of this is the statement that all Communists and Socialistsâ??including Karl Marx--wanted to get rid of all private property, and do away with marriage; since at that time the wife was considered to be essentially the husband's property.

This is simply not true.

Some of the more extreme proponents of change did make such radical proposals; Marx did not. He in fact thought that the private ownership of property on a small or medium scale (such as individual housing, a small business or farm) was a good thing. It was only where the large aggregations of capitalâ??finance, in the factories, the mines, the railways, etc.â??tended most strongly towards monopoly, market manipulation, and worker exploitation, that the workers needed to control production and distribution (see Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, (1966), footnote 23, p.33; this book also contains a translation of Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844). â??The Third Manuscript,â? particularly the sections on Private Property and Labor as well as Private Property and Communism, are worth reading, especially Marx's description of those wanting to think of women as property as â??crude Communism,â? p.129).

As Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels said (and I will paraphrase here), â??Tell a big enough lie often enough, and strongly enough, and soon most people will believe it is the truth.â? So, too many middle class and rural Americans believed the lies and half-truths of the American press, written by newspaper publishers for their corporate cronies. However, even this did not prevent a few homegrown radicals and groups from emerging.

Eugene Debs, who would run for President on the Socialist Party's ticket, may be the most famous, followed by his colleague, Reverend Norman Thomas. Joe Hill, Big Bill Heywood, and the many others who organized the western miners against the mine owners. Daniel DeLeon, who started the Socialist Workers Party, helped found the IWW with Debs and Heywood, and wrote of the compatibility of James Madison's and Karl Marx's thought. Henry George, America's answer to Karl Marx, who wanted a single tax system based on the surplus value of land. Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and the rest of the muckrakers, who made the public aware of many of the corporate and government scandals that pervaded American life: from the corruption in the cities, to the abuses of the monopolistic trusts, including Standard Oil.

Finally, notice was taken by the American people of the corruption, governmental and corporate, that was eating away at the fabric of America. The progressive era arrived, represented by the Presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Standard Oil and other monopolistic trusts were broken up using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the first regulation of industries at a nationwide level took place with the establishment of agencies such as the FDA and the FTC, the first income tax was imposed on the richest Americans, and U.S. Senators were directly elected by the people of their state for the first time.

Unfortunately, this first attempt to curb corporate power lasted only twenty years. The huge fortunes made in the First World War due to war profiteering (see Marine Major General Smedley Butler's 1935 pamphlet War is a Racket, for more on this phenomenon), permitted most of the progressive era reforms to be undone by the corporations and their Republican lackeys in the 1920's. Laissez faire capitalism once again became a cancer on the American economy, and the subsequent abuses of the American economy under this system led to the Crash of '29, and the Great Depression.

When Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1933, among his most important actions in his first two terms was to set up a bureaucracy to prevent abuses by corporations and the wealthy such as those that had led to the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression. The Security and Exchange Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board were among the entities created to curb corporate and plutocratic power. When the Second World War came, Senator Harry Truman and his oversight committee made certain that war profiteeringâ??for the first and only time in American historyâ??was punished.

The end of the Second World War also regrettably spelled the beginning of the end of the curtailment of the plutocratic/corporate power dynamic that had twice nearly destroyed America's constitutional republic by bringing into existence the worst nightmares of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln, while fulfilling many of the worst predictions of Karl Marx.

The plutocrats first attack against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal protections for the average American against economic abuse by the wealthy was the passageâ??over now President Truman's vetoâ??of the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the protections provided by labor unions in the work place. This, together with the National Security Act the same year--which established the Defense Department, the CIA, and the permanent placement of the United States on a â??war footingâ?â??also began an ever escalating degree of war profiteering by â??defense contractors.â?

The profits from these defense contracts also led to an ever escalating number of corporate mergers, despite the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914, which had specifically toughened the Federal government's power against combinations (mergers) in restraint of trade. So many mergers took place in 1950 (219), that Congress passed the Celler-Kefauver Amendment to reinforce the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, in an effort to further prevent companies from buying stock in other companies.

It didn't work.

The number of corporate mergers continued to rise over the years: 844 in 1960; 2377 in 1966; 2975 in 1967; 4462 in 1968. And as the numbers of corporate mergers have gone up, corporate competition has gone down. For example, we have gone from roughly fifteen companies designing and building military aircraft in the United States in 1975, to three in 2005.

What exists now is not competition, but open collusion.

This is true over nearly all of America's corporate landscape. We have returned to the place we were in 1900 before the first governmental reforms and regulations to provide a check to the most rapacious excesses of the robber barons.

I asked at the beginning of this article â??To whom does the world belong?â? Eighty years ago Bertrand Russell gave the answer of the corporate plutocrats; the laissez faire, antisocial capitalists in an essay â??Freedom in Societyâ? (Sceptical Essays, 1928), â??Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.â? In other words, the world is theirs, they have the bills of sale to prove it, so be glad they do not call you the serfs that you are, you f***ing peasants.

My answer to them is this: you built your wealth on the backs of our labor; directly in your factories, mines, offices, stores and mills; indirectly by the billions you have made profiting from this nation's wars and the gigantic public giveaways from the right of ways of the transcontinental railways, to the interstate power grid, from long distance phone lines to the nation's hydroelectric dams, from the Intracoastal Waterway to the public airwaves, and from the interstate highway system to the Internet. You have been miserly in your sharing of this public largesse, denying your workers pay raises commiserate with your profits, as well as a fully functioning social safety netâ??including universal, comprehensive, affordable healthcareâ??that provides protection for the elderly, children, and those individuals who, whether temporarily or permanently, cannot support themselves. You have abused the commons of our nation: polluting our air, our water and our land, to rid yourself of the toxic and noxious substances that you produce as a byproduct of your myopic quest for ever greater wealth.

We have had enough!

You have not heeded the warning of President Kennedy in his Inaugural address almost fifty years ago, â??If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.â? You have sown the wind: do not be surprised when the whirlwind comes knocking on your door.

I do not support violent, illegal actions, only nonviolent, legal ones. The rich have proven over and over again throughout history and around the world that they do violence better than the common man: you can always find someone to take the King's shilling for a hot meal and a warm bed, even if it means they have to bayonet their brother.

We are at a crossroads in our nation's history, with a choice between selfish self-indulgence, and a return to fairness in our government, building on the protections started by our two Presidents named Roosevelt against the depredations of big business and the plutocrats. We need to establish campaign finance reform so that we no longer have the best politicians that money can buy, but rather, true public servants. We need to quit speaking of a minimum wage, and start speaking of a livable wage. We need to establish a system of comprehensive universal healthcare, and rebuild our social safety net so that people quit falling through the holes that have been created since 1980.

We can pay for this by ending the plundering of the Treasury by the Halliburtons, Bechtels, Lockheed-Martins, et al., in the name of a â??national defenseâ? that is in reality imperial reach. The â??war profiteeringâ? during the forty-five years of the Cold War would almost certainly pay off most of the National Debt before 2001.

We also need to force American corporations to bring back manufacturing jobs to this country. We need to do this not only for the sake of our economy, but for our national defense. We must be able to produce all of the components of the weapons in our military's inventory in this country, in case we are ever faced with a war with a major power like the People's Republic of China or Russia. We cannot be dependent on a computer microchip manufactured in Taiwan or South Korea if we are in a war.

This nation belongs to We the People, not the corporations. It is time for us to take it back.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'