The power elite.

[MadHound]

There exists in this world a small but powerful group of people who determine the course of events the world over. This group is international in scope, yet invisible in their machinations. They disregard matters of sovereignty and even simple humanity in their pursuit of wealth and power. I'm not referring to groups such as the Bildenbergers, the CFR, Freemasons and the like, but rather an actual group. Churchill referred to them as the "High Cabal". R. Buckminster Fuller wrote about them, stating that they are "vastly ambitious individual who have become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. Always their victories are in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures are always the invisibleones behind the visible sovereign powers."

This small but powerful group of individuals have been around for centuries. We see their work in the introduction of institutional racism in this country in the wake of the Bacon rebellion, and more recently in the work of what has been come to be called the military industrial complex. They keep the rest of society divided and at war amongst ourselves with the use of racism, politics, and other social breaking points. They conduct wars for their own benefit, and their philosophy derives from the teachings of Malthus, Hegel, and the brutal logic of Social Darwinism.

Rarely are individual of this group in the headlines, moving behind the scenes, the men who are in the background of the presidential group photo. Averell Harriman, former Secretary of Commerce under Truman, is probably the most public of these figures in modern history. Presidents and prime ministers are but puppets in their hand, which is why we are so often disappointed when the actions of our presidents rarely live up to the promises they made as candidates.

These power elite take us into war, thrust us into economic chaos, and guide the affairs of this and other countries from behind the scenes. The only president in modern history who has openly referred to them was Eisenhower with his famous speech about the dangers of the military industrial complex, though he only referred to them as he was leaving office, being unable to withstand their pressure while in office.

So the question becomes what can we do to restrain them, to control their excesses, and wrest power from the few and put it in the hands of the many. Traditional democracy has been subverted to their will, as we see all too often in this country. So what is the answer? A French style, world-wide revolution? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that if we don't find the answer, our country, our world, is doomed to be mercilessly squeezed by this small group, until they have extracted every last bit of wealth, power, and personal comfort from the rest of us.

[Octafish]

1. Steve Kangas, the Liberal Resurgent, wrote about The Elite.

Thank you for your oustanding post, MadHound. Every word, pure gold.

For those interested in the subject, what the late Steve Kangas wrote, before his "suicide" in a bathroom outside Richard Mellon Scaife's office:

The Origins of the Overclass

Regarding Harriman, a leading Liberal light and no traitor to his class:

Know your BFEE: Hitler’s Bankers Shaped Vietnam War

Thank you for not averting your eyes from the monstrous, MadHound. Bravery and brains are what the nation needs a lot more of.

[MadHound]

2. Thank you for your kind words,

But still, I'm looking for some sort of solution here. What can we do to throw off the vile influence of this small, but ultimately powerful group of people?

I've thought on this question for a good deal of my adult life and still haven't come up with answer. I feel that, in the face of onrushing events, it is even more crucial than ever to find such an answer.

[Octafish]

7. Spread the Truth.

The truth is what these so-and-sos fear. They know the game is rigged, and they've gotten away with murder. So, they can't stand the thought of being found out.

Certainly it takes time and a concentrated, organized effort. And the truth may not get to enough DUers -- or enough people in the general public or in authority -- but it does spread. Eventually it reaches people in authority with integrity. They can, and do, make a difference.

That's why I welcome Agent Mike and all the FBICIADIANSAandalltherestofthem who monitor who says what to whom. I don't care about being labeled a "subversive" as long as they find out the truth about who gives them their marching orders.

Unlike guns, which can only kill a person, the truth kills evil.

[reformist2]

9. Campaign finance reform. It's the sine qua non of all reforms.

When it comes to our elections, we have to take money out of the equation as much as possible.

[MadHound]

11. Ideally we should go to publicly financed elections,

That would go a long way to limiting the influence of wealth and the power it engenders. But we run up against the practical problem of how to implement that. In order for such a measure to be effective, it would have to be in the form of an amendment to the Constitution, and I simply don't see such a measure garnering the legislative support it would need to pass.

[reformist2]

16. We could give free TV time to all candidates on the ballot.

No amendment required for that! I sincerely believe that given a modicum of exposure, truly good leaders can and will overcome the financial advantage of the elite.

[el_bryanto]

3. The Illuminati lives

If such a group exists than the only way to get rid of them is the collapse our entire society. To use an anology - if they exist they aren't simply termites in the wood of our house. They are the house.

Which is why given the choice to believe in this powerful a cabal or not, it's hard to convince people to believe in it. Because the implications are so staggering and far reaching.

Bryant

[MadHound]

4. I think that we can stop short of collapsing our entire society,

But it would take a mass concentrated action on a scale that we've not seen before. I think that MLK came the closest to achieving this with his fight against poverty. It was a battle plan designed to reach across the artificial barriers of race and class to unite us all against the true oppressors in this country.

[el_bryanto]

5. And he didn't succed and things haven't actually improved since he was

assassinated. Probably gotten worse. The system, if it exists, can handle an MLK. They just have to outlast him.

Bryant

[MadHound]

6. Yes, but can it handle two MLK's, a dozen MLK's?

Our only advantage is in numbers. The drawback with that advantage is that you have to get everybody playing on the same page. Once you solve that problem, then I think we might have a solution.

[el_bryanto]

8. And the Mice voted to bell the Cat

how many people are knowingly or unknowingly in cahoots with the power elite? How far does the corruption extend and how directly can they control their pawns? Are they running Obama? Or have they simply created a context in which only a Corportist like Obama can get elected?

It's one thing to say that Wealthy people like to make things nice for wealthy people and have the means to do so; impossible to disagree with that. But i take your tone to be a bit further than that.

Bryant

[MadHound]

10. What do you take my tone to be, specifically?

Do you think that I'm just peddling woo, or what?

[el_bryanto]

15. I think it's impossible to prove one way or another

But again it depends - how much direct power vs indirect power do the Power Elite have? If they are just a successful international lobbying effort than they are evil, but no worse than say Murdoch or Scaife (assuming they aren't part of the Power Elite). If they say "jump" and Presidents Obama and Bush would say "How High" than we are in burn the whole thing down territory. I do agree with what the poster said above - we need public financing of campaigns along with redistricting reform. But depending on how powerful this Power Elite is, that might be little more than a bandaid.

Bryant

[blindpig]

19. It simply involves abolishing capitalism.

In this society money is power, the source of money is control of the means of production. Take that away from them and their power is broken. Easier said than done, I know, but there really is no other alternative.
The sooner the better, survival in the near and long term demands it.

[starroute]

14. The Illuminati were a scare story cooked up by these same people

The actual Illuminati weren't a very appealing bunch -- in many ways they were the Scientologists of their day. But they scared the elite enough to provoke a hasty crack-down. And once the real Illuminati were out of the way, the fake ones became a useful bogey-man.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790's were provoked by an Illuminati scare. And in the early 20th century -- when the specter of communism was making the elite more nervous than they'd been since the defeat of Napoleon -- the Illuminati were dredged up again to become the center of a whole new set of conspiracy theories.

There are no Illuminati. There are only a bunch of people with too much money and power dicking the rest of us over.

[swilton]

12. There have always been three classes

in any society - the elites, the middle class and the lower class. The middle class is the revolutionary class and will eventually trade places with the upper class - the system perpetuates itself. The lower class is merely concerned about survival and results in being the conveyor of social relationships...This paraphrase is what I've picked up from George Orwell.


But this phenomenon of hierarchical societies, a feature of most civilizations, and definitely perpetuated by western civilizations through their focus on the military, the royalty and the church as core civilization foundations, no longer holds. Resources are becoming scarce. The world's elites are fighting to control those resources and everyone else who will be the pawns to extract the resources - in a form of neo-feudalism. We need to move beyond the lust for material goods and form our societies horizontally among relationships. This is what I understand to be post-materialism and is being experimented to some extent in European societies....

I think that ending corporate financing is one good start - I would also recommend starting with the abolishment of the Federal Reserve....admittedly our entire globalized economic system might collapse but we would essentially be burning the village in order to save it. We need to rebuild economic systems around local communities, local farms and produce.

[starroute]

13. One weakness is that it's a fairly small and inbred group

I tend to think of them as the present-day embodiment of the old medieval aristocracy, always hopping from one power base to another -- first land, then capital/manufacturing, now finance.

The continuity of this aristocratic class is particularly obvious in Europe, where it's easier to track the old families. In the US, the system is more fluid and more willing to admit newcomers, but the basic aristocratic structure is the same and consists of a relatively small number of individuals who all know each other, go the the same schools, belong to the same clubs, and often intermarry.

This is why left-wing conspiracy theories about the right tend to be roughly correct. These people don't even have to "conspire" most of the time -- it's just friends doing favors for friends. We only perceive it as conspiracies when it spills over into something so massively criminal that it has to be covered up.

It's also why right-wing conspiracy theories about the left -- like those Glenn Beck is pushing -- tend to be so nutty. They have to assume that a lot of people who never met each other, have very little in common, and have no real worldly power have all been plotting together behind the scenes in pursuit of some nefarious end.

But the small and tight-knit nature of the real elite is also their weakness -- and they know it. They're very afraid of transparency. A few years back, when I was looking into William Stamps Farish III, I found that his wife was from the DuPont family. But it was incredibly difficult to dig this out at the time -- and in the process I ran into one article about a DuPont family member who was trying to do genealogical research and was complaining that other family members would share their personal details even with him.

This is true in general. It's typically a lot easier to find historical, personal, and genealogical information on Joe Nobody from Northwest Nowhere than on the members of the great families. I have to conclude that they're deliberately covering their trails.

These family connections tend to be strongest in the South and in Texas by the way -- not surprisingly, since the South was originally settled by aristocrats and their indentured servants, where the North was settled by middle-class families. This is one reason the South has consistently been a conservative power base.

So the information is out there, even if it's fragmented and hidden. And simply putting the spotlight on them might not be enough to get them to scatter like cockroaches -- but it would certainly crimp their freedom of operation.

[starroute]

17. Another weakness is that radical movements really do terrify them

The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution scared the shit out of these people. The upheavals of the 60s also got them nervous -- you can read the Powell Memorandum and see that the whole right-wing echo machine we're struggling with today came out of their fear that the message of the 60s might become more widely accepted.

You can also tell a lot by looking at what governments our (heavily elite-dominated) foreign policy establishment has been particularly irrational about. Our refusal to recognize the Chinese government after the communists took over, along with the power of the China Lobby -- which did so much to elect Richard Nixon -- had to do with elite interests. Our continuing refusal to deal with Castro's Cuba does as well.

And you can tell a lot by their alliances. The elite was eager to embrace the fascists in the 20s and 30s, and when that got too embarrassing they had to back away very discretely. As late as the 1970s, there were still old fascists like delle Chiaie running around and dreaming of a Fourth Reich, and the elite was covertly supporting them.

By the early 80s, the old fascists were all dead or in custody, and there was a clear switch of elite associations over to the Saudis and other Gulf sheiks -- largely mediated by George H.W. Bush and Texas oil interests, where there were connections going back to the early 70s. Having fellow aristocrats with unlimited cash and no accountability has been a great advantage to them -- which suggests that the current Mideast upheavals must be making them nervous like nothing since the 1960s.

Much of this information is out there and has been for a while, but nobody that I know of has put it together and said, "These are the allies and enemies of the elite. These are the people setting up the connections. This is the agenda and this is where you can see its pernicious influence over what should more properly be our national agenda." If someone did that, I believe you could learn a lot.

[BeFree]

18. Agree 90%

One point is that the bushie lead cabal IS presently the public face.
Call it bushco, if you like.

First thing we do is get a vote count that can easily and always be verified.
Without a dead-on accurate counting of our votes, all else is futile.

We need more representatives. We need more representation.
We need more common sense based individuals representing us in the halls of power.

The limits placed upon us, and accepted by us as a whole, are the chains which keep us oppressed.
Each of us individually must throw off those chains.

[RedCloud]

20. And 12% of all the world's money is hoarded.

Sounds like they are putting the squeeze to the rest of us.