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THE ONE-PERCENT’S DOCTRINE FOR THE REST OF US
I think we're looking at something closer to the top 0.1% now, rather than the top 1%, but nevertheless, Mark Ames takes a deep, dark, disturbing look at economics. (And no, that chart below is not AAPL.) ~ Ilene
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THE ONE-PERCENT’S DOCTRINE FOR THE REST OF US: WE ARE NOT HUMAN BEINGS, BUT LIVESTOCK WHOSE MEAT THEY EXTRACT AS “RENT”
By Mark Ames
This article was first published in ConsortiumNews.com
A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across this unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War.
This graph tells the real story behind the South’s secession: the value of the South’s “slave stock”—the property of the ruling class — soared as secession approached, reaching an almost 90-degree angle in those final years before Harper’s Ferry. The South’s ruling class seceded to protect their riches, period:
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From afar, if you didn’t know that human “slave stock” was the asset being charted, you could easily mistake this graph, and its parabolic trajectory, for one of the many destructive asset bubbles this country has suffered right up through our own time.
Up close, this graph drips greed, mass murder and shame — it strips away the historical revisionism that falsely ascribed the South’s “cause” to an almost selfless, tragically romantic attachment to “tradition” and “culture”; it gives lie to the myth that slave owners kept their slaves to the detriment of their own bottom line.
Like the worst wars and the worst of history’s villains, the Confederacy’s one percenters seceded and fought in order to continue profiting from their most valuable investment properties — their human slave stock.
The graph comes from a grim working paper, “Capitalists Without Capital”, written in the late 1980s by a UC Berkeley economist, Richard Sutch, and a UC Riverside historian, Robert Ransom.
As they showed, slavery produced huge profits for southerners who invested in slave capital — to the detriment of all other portfolio investments, as the value of slaves soared in the mid-19th century. By that time, by far the largest cotton-growing states’ wealth was in slave stock, not in real estate or other investments.
The slave trade was outlawed in 1808; but the slave population quadrupled from 1 million in 1800 to 4 million in 1860 — encouraged by slaveowners who “bred” their human stock, thereby multiplying their profits as the value of each slave rose.
Slavery is often portrayed by revisionist historians as somehow antithetical to market capitalism; in reality, slavery was a winning portfolio investment, the very incarnation of just how evil “free-market” capitalism can be. As the authors write:
“If slaves … were an investment included in the asset portfolio of the planter/entrepreneur, they helped satisfy the owner’s demand for wealth. But unlike most other forms of capital, which depreciate with time, the stock of slaves appreciated. Thus, the growth of the slave population continuously increased the stock of wealth.”
What makes this graph so disturbing for us in 2012 is what it suggests about today’s “1 percent” — and how they view the rest of us. It gives form to the brutal crackdown on the Occupy protests — and suggests darker things to come as we try to free ourselves from their vision of civilization, and our place in it.
Contrast that with this McKinsey report put out a few years ago by the director of the consulting group’s New York office. Titled “The New Metrics of Corporate Performance: Profit Per Employee”, the report argues that the best performing firms in our increasingly financialized era are those companies that have learned to squeeze ever-larger profits out of each employee — and not by the more traditional “return on investment” metric.
The McKinsey report looked at the world’s 30 largest companies between 1995 and 2005, and found that their return on human capital more than doubled, from an average of $35,000 profit per employee to $83,000, leading to this rather frank and nauseating conclusion:
“If a company’s capital intensity doesn’t increase, profit per employee is a pretty good proxy for the return on intangibles. The hallmark of financial performance in today’s digital age is an expanded ability to earn ‘rents’ from intangibles. Profit per employee is one measure of those rents. If a company boosts its profit per employee without increasing its capital intensity, management will increase its rents.”
Extracting rent from “employees” as a business strategy: This is supposed to be the language of feudalism, not modern advanced capitalism — and yet this is the cutting edge in 21st century capitalist thinking, unashamed and unvarnished:
“One way to improve a company’s profit per employee is simply to shed low-profit employees. But if they generate profit greater than the cost of the capital used to support their work, shedding them actually reduces the creation of wealth.”
As with slave stock in a Southern investor’s portfolio, the McKinsey report argues that as a corporation learns to successfully extract rent from its employees, the more employees it extracts rent from, the greater its aggregate profits.
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The new metrics: How much “rent” can be extracted from employees, not investments
To compare “the 99 percent” to African slaves would be crude; but the mindset of “the 1 percent” then, as now, is eerily consistent. They view the rest of us not as human beings with rights, but as livestock whose meat is “rent” to be extracted.
This is the language of plutocratic capitalism, a brutal system totally incompatible with democracy and antithetical to republican government and civilization. It is the language of misery, and misery is what “the 1 percent” is promising “the 99 percent” for years to come, in ever-greater doses.
Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
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Fantastic Read!
Thanks! I see i got junked twice with that post but wait until you hear (read) the rest....stay tuned.
Everybody thinks the US was the one with the most slavery, but it was Brazil by far, something like 5X the number of slaves that were shipped to the US
I think Germany during WWII suspassed Brazil
Based on?
think again. it would have been bolshevik USSR
Sorry, I don't buy into revisionist history especially one written by NAZIs. The Soviet Union economic policy did not revolve around Lebensraum.
I don't even think the communist chinese killed and enslave as man as the bolsheviks. They spared the last chinese emperor Pu Yi where as the bolshies executed, raped, tortured, imprisioned and looted an entire nation. History is written by the victors. Troll!
Tell that to the slaved and massacred Balts, White Russians, Ukrainians. Lebensraum? Try everything east of the Ural Mountains.
No doubt, the commies/marxists win the coveted Sacrificing People for Their Own Good Booby Prize.
Stumbled across an interesting factoid the other day...Engels sent Marx cut up pound notes to support him and the Marx family while living in England.
Even back then Engels knew he couldn't trust Marx with unlimited funds, no honor among thieves & murderers apparently ;-)
ahh, but did Marx ride around on a high horse with a bridle fashioned from human skin like ol' Sharp Knife? As long as we're giving prizes to actual thieves and murderers, that is. Speaking of which: exactly how many 'whelps' did Marx personally flush out their dens again?
Marx was just a messenger. And contrary to your constant assertions, unwavering even in the bright light of repeated factual repudiation, Stalin was no Marxist.
Judging by your strict adherence to your deliberately obtuse misconceptions, I think you and your ilk may have watched "The Spy who came in from the Cold" a few too many times; to the point where you carry on with the same malfeasant agenda promoted by that particular piece of statist propaganda.
The endgame of Marx was not a totalitarian state. It was much more akin, and therefore just as unrealistic, to the fantastical utopia that you envision.
But I've been on ZH long enough to know that you already know this. And by now you must know that I know that you know this. Yet you persist in disseminating such sophmoric misinformation; I wonder why?
Yes, they basically enslaved the biggest nation on earth and had death purges to keep the population terrified and compliant.
Serial Killer Bob killed 25 people for fun. Serial Killer Jim killed 5 people for fun. Which one do you invite over for dinner?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/vice-president-cheney-has-heart-t...
Liked this comment:
"To all our veterans and in particular those at Veterans Administration hospitals thank you for your service. To our Vietnam era vets hopefully you are receiving top notch care, including the latest in transplant technology."
Not reading too many fan comments. Lots about "pig" hearts and "war criminal" though.
F Cheney and they wasted a perfectly good heart on a defective human.
...more
"What is Dick Cheney going to do with a heart?"
dick chain-e's heart has been attacking him for decades, finally gave up. . .
and these...
I wonder if he tried to eat it before surgery.........
I presume W. is still waiting for his brain donor...
and these...
Keep him around for his war crimes trials.
They had to use a smokers heart so that it would be black enough for the body not to reject.
And to think, they could have given that heart to a human being.
"Capitalists without Capital" alternate download without having to go through jstor
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/56m1k703.pdf
"Without the force of law, kinder, gentler, 99% southern, non-slave-owning, folks would not have been under legal threat to help slave owners."
1860 Census data shows 35% of southern families owned slaves.
This is a lie, it shows nothing of the sort. Complete and utter bullshit. You lifted this number from some halfassed source and are clearly too lazy to research yourself, it certainly didnt come from the 1860 census. If so, I challenge you to provide the section and page you got this figure from. I think it was from lolomgipulledthisfrommyass.com
As you are apparently unable to look into things and do math on your own, it is fortunate that I have researched this topic myself and can provide the real data. Yours is nonsense.
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1860.html
Starting on page 592 of the "Population of the United States in 1860" section, you can see the white populations of each state.
Starting on page 230 of the "Agriculture of the United states in 1860" section you can see the number of slave holders per state.
Free blacks, mulattos, and Indians all owned slaves but for purposes of argument lets assume all slaveholders were white. The real numbers by state are (rounded to nearest .1%)-
Alabama- 526,271 population 33,730 slaveholders 6.4%
Arkansas- 324,143 population 11,481 slaveholders 3.6%
Delaware- 90,589 population 587 slaveholders .6%
Florida- 77,747 population 5152 slaveholders 6.6%
Georgia- 591,559 population 41,084 slaveholders 6.9%
Kentucky- 919,484 population 38,645 slaveholders 4.2%
Louisiana- 357,456 population 22,033 slaveholders 6.2%
Maryland- 515,918 population 13,783 slaveholders 2.7%
Mississippi- 353,899 population 30,943 slaveholders 8.7%
Missouri- 1,063,489 population 24,320 slaveholders 2.3%
North Carolina- 629,942 population 31,658 slaveholders 5%
South Carolina- 291,300 population 26,701 slaveholders 9.2%
Tennessee- 826,722 population 36,844 slaveholders 4.5%
Texas- 420,891 population 21,878 slaveholders 5.2%
Virginia- 1,047,299 population 52,128 slaveholders 5%
DC- 60,763 population 1229 slaveholders 2%
Alabama- 526,271 population 33,730 slaveholders 6.4%
Arkansas- 324,143 population 11,481 slaveholders 3.6%
Delaware- 90,589 population 587 slaveholders .6%
Florida- 77,747 population 5152 slaveholders 6.6%
__________________________________________
Debunks the one pc story.
Strongly.
To this one, one should remember that slavery was institution and as such, it created activity and jobs graviting around.
The number of people living off slavery was by then greater.
You seem awfully emotional. Are you a weekend reenactor or something? haha
Go back and read what I said. Note the word families. Not individual slaveholders. As the entire family would have benefited from the slave's labor, it's perhaps fair to classify it that way.
so, total population roughly 7,625,200
number of slaves roughly 392,200
you following?
so, divide that and you get about 19,
Southern families were large...do I really need to do the rest? Are you feeling foolish yet?
And your claim on the number of families that owned slaves comes from where in that census?
Edit: had to step away before I could respond fully.
No place at all- you pulled seasonally adjusted, rehypothecated numbers from your posterior based on hazy, unsubstantiated and uprovable assumptions to back up your beliefs. Do you work for the BLS or something? Your train of thought is silly.
No Im not a reenactor, just a guy with an interest in history and little patience for made up bullshit. I gave hard facts, you made something up- and Im emotional?
I concede, the census does not state what I said it did. Operating from memory, I conflated earlier time periods and botched the number. I was responding to someone who, from what I could tell, was saying that 99% of the south was not involved with slavery. Fact is, that is much more bullshit than what I typed. I typed 35% for 1860 when it was more like 25% (of families). I think the general point still stands, but I erred and for that I eternally apologize to one and all.
Instead of arguing further, I will try to illustrate my point here with a less politically charged and more current theoretical example, the slavery issue tends to create problems due to its nature.
Let us assume that County A in State X has a population of 250K people divided among 100K families. There are 25K cars in this county with a retail value of 50K or higher registered to 15K different drivers. Can we then say that 25% of families enjoy the benefits of a very high end vehicle? No, absolutely not. It is far more likely that these vehicles are concentrated in a small number of families with garages full of some very nice sets of wheels. There are probably some where everyone has several. Maybe 10K of those families at best have the resources to put into a vehicle with such a prohibitively high (for most) expense, probably alot less.
For what its worth, that census doesnt fully answer the question with any of its data regarding what percentage of families owned slaves, Ive spent a fair bit of time on it trying to answer that and it cannot be done for the simple reason that it doesnt tell what percentage of owners belonged to different families, the answer will remain forever lost. However, highly concentrated wealth in any society and any luxury good (and slaves were definitely a luxury good for the very wealthy) tend to be closely associated.
Did only 1% of southerners own slaves? Clearly not. By the same token, it wasnt a particularly large chunk of the population that could afford them, it wasnt like every other (or even third or fourth) house had its own negro.
Historian william cooper states that "in 1860, approximately 1.9 million whites, 1/3 of the white population, belonged to families that owned slaves". Now of course that could be parsed different ways...
These calculations jibe with what I said as well
http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html
That doesn't get around the problem of mulitple ownership within families.... But there are more localized stats that do say specifically how many families owned slaves. Some counties in Missouri, for instance, topped 40% even in 1860. If we go back in time some, it was certainly the case in some places that every other household had slaves (Louisville in 1820 for example).
Beyond all this, I think it is probably safe to say that many who didn't own slaves in the south certainly aspired to.
No doubt you do, and I can only assume that the reason for it is to provide an emotional cover to justify the power grab of ol' Honest Ape and his merry band of blue suited terrorists. Yankees love to do this to tell themselves what great people they are.
Well, you have what he fought for now and I hope you enjoy it. He laid the foundation for all-powerful central authority in the US and what we have currently is the logical extension and growth of his policies. Centralized power and planning uber alles rules the nation from coast to coast; in place of a system that enslaved a portion of the population we have one that is powerful enough to enslave everyone and force them to its will. A tremendous victory for equality no doubt.
Well, I don't know what many aspiring to, winds up meaning.
I say that because my eye fell to this...
"in 1860, approximately 1.9 million whites, 1/3 of the white population, belonged to families that owned slaves".
The inference is clear...that because Uncle Joe owned a slave or many slaves (doesn't matter) Nephew Bob and Niece Annie who lived in a completely different states altogether and worked their own land with their own families, derived some benefit from Uncle Joe's slaves.
So the premise is not true for obvious reasons.
And there were black slave owners as well. For instance, twenty eight percent of free blacks in New Orleans owned slaves themselves. Point being...one should be careful conveying statistics to tell a story, as usually they don't paint the complete picture, only a corner of it...just as New Orleans is a corner.
For those with an interest in this usually unremarked on aspect of life back then I would point them to Antoine Dubuclet, William Ellison and Justus Angel.
Slavery: privatized profits, socialized costs.
Why does this sound familiar?
What the ideological anti-government crowd always fails to consider is that the government is a grouping of individuals. If you outlaw government, strong and ruthless individuals will create something else like corporations, klans, tribes, etc to fill the void, and the leaders will be unelected. Government protected slave owners because slave owners were the government and financially supported the government. If there were no government to control/corrupt, they would have enforced slavery through brute unelected force. Human beings tend to corruption and greed. The Founders had a pretty good idea how to balance those tendencies while still providing order to chaos, even though our current version of it needs major overhaul. The libertarians and Ayn Rand followers have a simplistic, child-like idea of human interation and their model would fail miserably if put into practice. The proof? Thousands of years of human history wherein their model has NEVER worked.
You forget that the same force that outlawed the government in the first place must still exist in order to prevent others from "filling the vacuum".
You think governments just fold up shop because some idealists say so? If there is a method for getting rid of government, it will work against most or all forms of quasi-governments.
Also, you really need to cut the ad hominem shit out. The "child-like" ideas of the libertarians WERE IN FACT IMPLIMENTED in this country following Reconstruction, and led directly to the emergence of the middle class, and the elevation of the US from primative backwater to industrial superpower. The process started sooner in the North, which is why they won the war (superior industrial output).
The fact is that that model has worked EVERY time it has been tried. If you want to find where it has been tried, look to the history of every nation now considered to be "first world". Each and every one had a period of time similar to post-Reconstruction America where the government was quite small, with few or no regulations on business or trade, or even control over the borders, or even the concept of citizenship!
You continually conflate free systems with unfree ones, and IGNORE the successes of free ones.
Go become a rationalist before you come back with more dogma: http://lesswrong.com/
They were implemented during reconstruction? What a curious statement. Stealing peoples land to distribute it to political cronies and the lackeys of government, encouraging rampant lawlessness and banditry, and attempting to disenfranchise as much of the white South as possible while handing over government to illiterate former slaves is somehow small government?
That wasnt small government, it was anarchy.
You misread my comment. The system was minarcist AFTER reconstruction. Reconstruction had nothing to do with what came after. If Reconstruction was the process of setting up minarchism, I would have said that it started WITH Reconstruction.
And no, that wasn't anarchy. That was occupation by big government and arbitrary authority. Get your terms straight.
lol, speaking of 'dogma', I'm surprised you didn't choke on the mouthful of it you just regurgitated.
Bad News: You and yours have run out of continents and hemispheres to Manifest Doctrine Monroe Destiny.
Let's analyze your comment: baseless accusation, ad hominem, and collectivist garbage.
Try formulating an actual argument instead of acting like a brat.
Nothing more than mob dynamics usurping inalienable rights from the individual.
Proof? WAMU was in business for 140 years prior to 2008.
It predated almost every modern banking law as well most of the seven federal agencies that oversee US banks and the state regulators. WAMU held amongst the highest reserves of any financial institution ever.
They basically went tits up at the absolute pinnacle of their regulatory peak.
Were any of these regulators held accountable? Doesn't creating more of them just make all the ones that currently exist less accountable since they have more people to point the finger at when shit hits fan?
Is the solution more regulators, more laws making it even tougher for more people to enter the industry bolstering the position of the already existing banks? or is it just the opposite?
No model of government has ever worked because, no matter what the system, people will screw it up. All this nonsense about this race and that race is meaningless. The sociopaths of society will always find a way to corrupt and destroy any system devised by man at the expense of the moral majority. Race, religion, ethnicity and so forth are simply tools used by the sociopaths to divide and conquer th sheeple.
+102,324
Yeah.
Statism and coercion has been awesome.
The only thing that you'll really find in those "Thousands of years of human history" is the State killing men, women, and children, on a scale of barbarism that you can scarcely even begin to imagine.
If you're interested, check out Lysander Spooner's "No Treason". Especially part III. I dare you.
For everyone else; liberty, free markets, and peace.
The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: "Your money, or your life." And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector," and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to "protect" those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
So, we should put up with government's monopoly on violence, because if we didn't, some other group might rise up and act violently? What are you afraid such a group might do? Steal half of the population's wealth and use it to kill people? Kidnap people engaged in peaceful, voluntary transactions? Sexually assault those who dare to travel away from home? And I imagine people would just put up with this, without defending themselves?
Bingo.
Isn't it amazing how people will exhibit such a lack of deduction?
It's delusional.
Only those who have fed upon the free spending from debt have a problem.
Guido say.
"You can spend it today,
but you gotta pay."
http://overlordsofchaos.com/html/global_economic_meltdown__glob1.html
What date was the Pentagon ground breaking ceremony?
http://househistoryman.blogspot.com/2012/03/pentagon-washington-dc-pics-from-wwii.html
9-11-1942
9-11-2001
John 3:16
Curious how the most evil organisation humanity has ever seen is housed in a pentagon-shaped building called, "The Pentagon".
Sorry, I can't make 3:16, can we move it back to 5 ish?
John
I think that went straight over JW's head....
I am sorry that my view(s) dont entertain you.
Faith! You Must Have Faith!