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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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The blacks murdered every white women, child, and man on the island. Genocide. Then, being negroes, descended into barbarism, primitive poverty, and savagery.
I laughed when they asked me at the check out line if I wanted to donate $1 to Haiiti after the earthquake.
The blacks murdered every white women, child, and man on the island. Genocide.
________________________________________________
That is classical US citizenism. Expansion of the base to dilute responsibility.
Negroes in Haiti aimed at killing french people. Many testimonies showing french weaseling their way out by claiming they were English, Dutsch etc...
I have to agree with AnAnonymous here. Even just a quick perusal of the history of Haiti should be enough to convince a rational person. The murders mentioned by the poster to whom AnAnonymous was responding were in response to horrific atrocities of the French when they tried to reimpose slavery in 1802 after abolishing it in 1794.
While I will criticize AnAnonymous when I think he (or she) is being ridiculous, I will also point out where I think he is correct. His theory of US citizenism is overly broad, lacks refinement, and is frequently misapplied. Nevertheless, in this case, its application is correct.
A good example of US citizenism is the depiction of Mujahideen in Afghanistan. In 1983, US president Ronald Reagan said:
This was when the foreign occupiers were the Soviet army. Now, when the foreign occupiers are NATO and the US army, the same people are now labeled terrorists.
By definition, the slaves rebelling in Haiti, first to obtain their liberty and then to keep it, were freedom fighters. To call them anything else is, indeed, a display of the hypocricy which AnAnonymous refers to as US citizenism.
AssMouth:
William Luther Pierce...
Neo-Nazi/ameriKlan ideologue, hatched September 11 1933; rotted out July 23 2002.
He turned to extremist politics in the mid-1960s, linking up with George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party and National Socialist White People's party, before Rockwell's murder in 1967. Pierce remained a leader of this movement before forming his Alliance group in 1974.
Pierce inspired hate crimes, including a wave of violent robberies and murders during the 1980s carried out by the Order, another white supremacist group, and the machine-gun murder of the Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg in Denver in 1984. Pierce demurred when asked about his influence. He was undoubtedly the movement's theoretician - proposing the expulsion of all blacks and Jews from America.
Pierce revelled in violence, as his writings show. After the Day of the Rope, his hero comes across a hanged figure in Los Angeles wearing a placard saying: "I defiled my race."
Pierce wrote: "Above the placard leered the horribly bloated, purplish face of a young woman, her eyes wide open and bulging, her mouth agape." He added that "many thousands" of women were hanged around the city because they had married or lived with blacks, Jews or "other non-white males".
A struggle for dominance of the extreme right in America did not follow Pierce's death, as nobody seems likely to match his canny opportunism and powers of organisation.
Some hero Ya'll gots thar!
Get a grip man!
BTW-George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party was another staged divide and conquer promotion brought to us by the U.S. government. Rockwell who was splashed prominently on the cover CIA run Time magazine (and other propaganda rags) was a Fed! The Symbionese Liberation Army gig starring Patty Hearst is now declassified… staged by the Feds. Racist former talk show host Hal Turner prosecuted for threatening violence against a federal Judge… you guessed it- a fed with high national security status.
Links?
Pierce was a Visionary, years ahead of his time. His writings and recorded speeches inspire all True Patriots: to Race, Nation, and Civilization. His Time has now come: Whites are being drowned in a Jew-orchestrated Rising Tide of group-entitled Color. All financed, however, by trillions in ZOGDebt. And that debt will be theirs - and your - downfall.
Uh yea as western and northern europe and northern africa drown in islam.
Super sharp as usual, just keep posting it! that alone will make your deluded fantasies come true.
Aslam Alekem
I remember when some of his sheep, I mean acolytes, were a bit dismayed when his latest mail order bride acquisition turned out to be asian haha
Junk mail.
comp, the guy had multiple mail order brides, including an asian one. Hell, you can probably track down the video of her. Apparently he was such an Aryan hero, no Swan Maiden wanted to get anywhere near him
Have a tantrum if it makes you feel better though haha
Or maybe it was the other way around? Maybe he didn't want to get stuck with a liberal white whore
The Asians are very much on equal footing with Caucasians and in many ways ahead,
I would even preffer an Asian woman to an European as they tend not to trash them selves so much and are a lot more loyal and traditinal
Im not a fan of any totalitarian ideology, but Rockwell nailed it with his Fable of the Ducks and Hens.
Elwood: "Illinois Nazis."
Jake: "I hate Illinois Nazis."
People and cultures have to develop before they can become part of an advanced culture. You need intellectuals and a sense of organization. Ideals that a slave would not possess involuntarily.
It is unimaginable how people can think that a race that would be otherwise(where it not for White colonialism) still in the Stone Age is somehow equal to European Caucasians,
racial equality is to biology as communism is to economy, it fails flat on it's face with the worst possible consequences where ever is it set into practice
Nigeria independantly entered the iron age around 1200BC, BEFORE just about anywhere else. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_age#Africa_timeline
Take your lies elsewhere.
LOL Egyptians where the bearers of the Iron Age in Africa, it spread from Egypt to the South, so you simply validate my point if not for others the blacks would be in the Stone Age
Does the peak of civilization mean that the most 'civilized' get to control the lesser?
Or is the peak of civilization to live in harmony with the world around you?
The white Europeans have hardly treated the earths non-white populous with what can be described as civility. In fact, they have killed maimed and raped more than any other race since the beginning of mankind.
Now, tell me about civilization again?
I am going to tell you about civilization - it's a metaphor for whatever culture you are capable and choose to have, it has nothing to do with good or evil White man killing and enslaving other non-white people is no more evil than a lion killing a zebra, we got handed the better cards(totaly random) it's no shame nor evil to Play to Win. Evolution choose the White Man as the winner, we won the Lottery, sure if you wanna throw it all away go ahead but don't expect me to jump into the fire following your lead(sic.)
"it's a metaphor for whatever culture you are capable and choose to have, it has nothing to do with good or evil White man killing and enslaving other non-white people is no more evil than a lion killing a zebra, we got handed the better cards(totaly random) it's no shame nor evil to Play to Win."
Incorrect.
civ·i·lized (sv-lzd)
adj.1. Having a highly developed society and culture. 2. Showing evidence of moral and intellectual advancement; humane, ethical, and reasonable: terrorist acts that shocked the civilized world. 3. Marked by refinement in taste and manners; cultured; polished. To Reiterate. 2. Showing evidence of moral and intellectual advancement; humane, ethical, and reasonable
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/civilized
Now, ill ask once more. Why don't you tell me about civilization?
People obviously want to dress them selves in Righteousness so they invent fancy terms to describe their animalistic instincts, civilization as you describe it is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig
Notice - every single term in your definition of the so called civilization is completely Abstract and Relative and there is no objective way of verifying what constitutes civilization it's all in the eye of the beholder
"Showing evidence of moral and intellectual advancement; humane, ethical, and reasonable" - show me 1 African nation fitting this description ?!?!, not to be called a racist many White nations would fail flat on this too
Nice, just ASSERT it all away.
So now you are claiming that Nigeria was such an awesome and great power that the Egyptians were FORCED to trade away their greatest technology to them within a hundreds years?
Come off it, shithead.
Just read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The winner of the culture wars is essentially based on luck of the draw: Europeans got dealt the best cards in thousands of circumstances.
Ultimately "who wins" comes down to how much of your day you need to spend finding food. Farming, animal husbandry, irrigation systems, easy access to ore, caloric value of native vegetation -- all are based on random global distributions of resources, species and enviornmental factors which are grossly unequal.
Yes you are correct, Evolution does not choose winners based on skin colour the process is totally random, however results are anything but random. I am not talking about how we got where we(random process) are I am talking about here and now(the results) and the way forward(don't fuck with Mother Nature), black-skinned man is clearly a backward branch of evolution and should go the way of the Neanderthal, whether we help him on his way or not should be the question not if we join him
Mean like in the middle east, Islam has basically run everyone out and although discovered oil somehow watched the former eastern bloc, parts of central america and southeast asia blow by them in the human race.
Oh that's not what you meant, you really meant I HATE JEWS, KILL THEM ALL!
Must practice stupid imbecile in the mirror to get to be so good at it.
Aslam Alekem Backwardation Moronification.
Funny that Israel is the only country on Earth where religious and/or racial background makes you automatically a citizen and where the Only State sanctioned marriage can be between an two jews(try getting a jewish woman to marry an African in Israel), talk about racial bias
Google this "can a jew marry a non jew in israel" and you'll know all about racial equality when it comes to jews
“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause”
eric hoffer
My nation ?! - I have None, i consider my self an Sovereign Man
My religion ?! - I am an Atheist
My 'holy cause' ?! - Look 1 point up
My race ?! - If you wanna generalize than yes, but some white nations differ from each other like whites from blacks
Eric Hoffer: LBJ's pet "working class" intellectual.
No, that was Earl Butz.
Rich mans war. Poor mans fight.
In his Inaugural Address Lincoln plainly stated that the war would be one of Northern aggression, collection of taxes being the reason for hostilities:
In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
And. This is the democracy called America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk4W_ImF_bE&sns=em
Could have been russia or venezuela or china... But sadly it's America...
Good thing he is Honest Abe because it is so believable that the north needed the south's tax revenues to the point of going to war.
At the time Federal revenues were raised almost exclusively through tariffs. A majority of the ports at which tariffs were collected were in the south. Facts is facts.