{"id":139200,"date":"2014-09-11T19:11:41","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T19:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=139200"},"modified":"2014-09-11T19:48:17","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T19:48:17","slug":"1-destroying-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/1-destroying-america\/","title":{"rendered":"How The 1% Are Destroying America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Fraser<\/em><\/p>\n

George Baer was a railroad and coal mining magnate at the turn of the twentieth century. Amid a violent and protracted strike that shut down much of the country\u2019s anthracite coal industry, Baer defied President Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s appeal to arbitrate the issues at stake, saying, \u201cThe rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for… not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.\u201d To the Anthracite Coal Commission investigating the uproar, Baer insisted, \u201cThese men don\u2019t suffer. Why hell, half of them don\u2019t even speak English.\u201d<\/p>\n

We might call that adopting the imperial position. Titans of industry and finance back then often assumed that they had the right to supersede the law and tutor the rest of America on how best to order its affairs. They liked to play God. It\u2019s a habit that\u2019s returned with a vengeance in our own time.<\/p>\n

The Koch brothers are only the most conspicuous among a whole tribe of \u201cself-made\u201d billionaires who imagine themselves architects or master builders of a revamped, rehabilitated America. The resurgence of what might be called dynastic or family capitalism, as opposed to the more impersonal managerial capitalism many of us grew up with, is changing the nation\u2019s political chemistry.<\/p>\n

Our own masters of the universe, like the \u201crobber barons\u201d of old, are inordinately impressed with their ascendancy to the summit of economic power. Add their personal triumphs to American culture\u2019s perennial love affair with business — President Calvin Coolidge, for instance, is remembered today only for proclaiming that \u201cthe business of America is business\u201d — and you have a formula for megalomania.<\/p>\n

Take\u00a0Jeff Greene<\/a>, otherwise known as the \u201cMeltdown Mogul.\u201d Back in 2010, he had the chutzpah to campaign in the Democratic primary for a Florida senate seat in a Miami neighborhood ravaged by the subprime mortgage debacle — precisely the arena in which he had grown fabulously rich. In the process, he rallied locals against Washington insiders and regaled them with stories of his life as a busboy at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Protected from the Florida sun by his Prada shades, he alluded to his wealth as evidence that, as a maestro of collateralized debt obligations, no one knew better than he how to run the economy he had helped to pulverize. He put an exclamation point on his campaign by flying off in his private jet only after securely strapping himself in with his gold-plated seat buckles.<\/p>\n

Olympian entrepreneurs like Greene regularly end up seeing themselves as tycoons-cum-savants. When they run for office, they do so as if they were trying to get elected to the board of directors of America, Inc. Some will brook no interference with their will. Property, lots of it, in a society given over to its worship, becomes a blank check: everything is permitted to those who have it.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Fraser George Baer was a railroad and coal mining magnate at the turn of the twentieth century. Amid a violent and protracted strike that shut down much of the country\u2019s anthracite coal industry, Baer defied President Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s appeal to arbitrate the issues at stake, saying, \u201cThe rights and interests of the laboring man […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":139201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,52,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-139200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-money","9":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}