|
Money is Speech
By Wilson J. Moses
10
August 2011
“What is money, anyway,” asks my
nephew.
“Money is Speech.” answers the Supreme Court of the
United States in
Buckley v. Valeo.
Whoever controls
words controls thoughts. Whoever controls symbols—and
words are sometimes although not always symbols—has
tremendous influence over thoughts. Whoever controls
communication controls the thoughts of those who are
most arrogantly and stupidly convinced of their
intellectual independence and free will.
Money is a complex
instrument, but it is among other things a means of
communication. For the clever and the very wealthy, it
is a means of storing wealth. For the foolish and the
very poor it is merely a medium of exchange. For those
who have enough, it is a means of communication.
In
Buckley v. Valeo,
the Supreme Court ruled that money is speech. This
decision has been grotesquely fortified by the ruling,
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,
No. 08-205.
Whatever you or I
want to think or to believe, regardless of whatever my
friends in the blogosphere maintain, the Supreme Court
has ruled, just as Adam Smith predicted they would. The
interests of the masters are served by the laws because
the masters make the laws. Or as Adam Smith says in
words that timelessly describe conspiracies of the
master class, “the law, besides, authorizes, or at least
does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits
those of the workmen.
But matters are even
more sinister than that. As
Jack Vance argues in his
satirical and brutal novel
The Languages of Pao,
the thinking of people is controlled, with varying
degrees of success, by the master class. Whoever
controls vocabulary and syntax controls thought. Mao and
Stalin and Freud’s nephew,
Eddie Bernays understood
this, as did the
War propaganda office of
Woodrow
Wilson. Unfortunately there are many people walking
around with prestigious degrees who don’t understand
this.
It is not enough to
get a masters degree in German, Chinese, or Hebrew. That
doesn’t necessarily mean you understand how language
works. One needs to understand the extent to which
language controls perceptions of reality. This is the
classic, but contested theory of the so-called
Sapir-Whorf theorists. There is a great deal of
discussion of this controversial theory, which should be
discussed thoroughly, but not accepted dogmatically.
Rupert Murdoch
understands this, and so does
Michele Bachmann. But
there are lots of otherwise smart people who don’t
understand this.
The
Koch
Brothers certainly understand that money is speech,
whether they understand semiotics, I cannot say. But
what does it matter?
Eddie Bernays is working for them, and
Sapir-Whorf offers food for thought as to why the Koch
Brothers and Rupert Murdoch invest so much money in the
control of language and syntax.
The people who are
currently
rioting in Britain are expressing discontent,
but if they are capable of articulating the sources of
this discontent, the press is not reporting it. The
media portray them as inarticulate.
The 1% of the
population who constitute the master classes are easier
to organize and more aware of their interests. All of
this discussion of the powers of the
Fed, the volatility
of the market, the behavior of the Obama administration
are of relatively little importance when one reflects on
the fact that it is the masters who control the
government and make the laws.
Adam Smith noted this
with sorrow, contrary to popular mythology, although he
recognized that from his premise only a dismal
prediction concerning the rights of workers could
follow.
Robert Malthus
proposed means of redistributing wealth, and his ideas
were adopted a century later by John Maynard Keynes, but
Keynes has few defenders today. Certainly the Obama
administration is not willing to consider putting money
directly into the hands of workers. They endorse the
Friedman-Greenspan-Bernanke method of creating large
sums of money and putting it in the hands of the upper
classes, i.e., the big banks.
It is sufficient,
unfortunately, to proclaim by fiat that Keynes has been
discredited, and the misguided working people
unfortunately contribute to Keynes defamation,
preferring the bromides of Hayek, von Mises, Friedman,
Rand, Bastiat, and all the other intellectual brigands
who conspire to reduce them to a state of poverty, ill
health, and ignorance.
I receive emails from
honors graduates of Michigan and Penn State, who earn
less than $20,000, and are burdened with debt, but
continue to believe that unleashing the free market will
solve all their problems. The master class preaches the
free market, but sneer at the idea of a free market.
They understand the necessity of controlling the market,
and they make the laws in order to serve their ends.
The masters control the law, and they
control the language. This, alas, is how it always has
been. This, regrettably, is how it always will be.
Source:
WilsonMoses Blog
posted 8
September 2011
* *
* * *
The pride of man
makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so
much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his
inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of
the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally
prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. The
planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expense of
slave cultivation. The raising of corn, it seems, in the
present times, cannot. In the English colonies, of which
the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of
the work is done by freemen. The late resolution of the
Quakers in Pennsylvania, to set at liberty all their
negro slaves, may satisfy us that their number cannot be
very great. Had they made any considerable part of their
property, such a resolution could never have been agreed
to. In our sugar colonies, on the contrary, the whole
work is done by slaves, and in our tobacco colonies a
very great part of it. The profits of a sugar plantation
in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much
greater than those of any other cultivation that is
known either in Europe or America; and the profits of a
tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar,
are superior to those of corn, as has already been
observed. Both can afford the expense of slave
cultivation but sugar can afford it still better than
tobacco. The number of negroes, accordingly, is much
greater, in proportion to that of whites, in our sugar
than in our tobacco colonies.—Adam
Smith,
The Wealth of Nations, p. 315
* *
* * *
Masters Combine to Lower Wages
What are the common
wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract
usually made between those two parties, whose interests
are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as
much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The
former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the
latter in order to lower, the wages of labour. It is
not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two
parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the
advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a
compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in
number, can combine much more easily: and the law,
besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit,
their combinations, while it prohibits those of the
workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining
to lower the price of work, but many against combining
to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold
out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master
manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a
single workman, could generally live a year or two upon
the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many
workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a
month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the
long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master
as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so
immediate.
We rarely hear, it
has been said, of the combinations of masters, though
frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines,
upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as
ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are
always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant
and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of
labour above their actual rate. To violate this
combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a
sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and
equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination,
because it is the usual, and, one may say, the natural
state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters,
too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to
sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are
always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy
till the moment of execution; and when the workmen
yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though
severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other
people. Such combinations, however, are frequently
resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the
workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of
this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise tile
price of their labour. Their usual pretences are,
sometimes the high price of provisions, sometimes the
great profit which their masters make by their work. But
whether their combinations be offensive or defensive,
they are always abundantly heard of.—Adam
Smith,
The Wealth of Nations, pp. 60-61
* *
* * *
Capitalism and the Ideal State:
Marcus Garvey / Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism
/ Economic Emancipation of Africa
Chomsky refutes
"libertarian" "anarcho"—capitalism /
Chomsky on Capitalism & Anarchism
Free
enterprise and the economics of slavery /
The Zong
Massacre—29 November 1781
The
Responsibility of the Artist (Maritain) /
RSA Animate—Crises of Capitalism
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
|
Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of
Abolition
By
Seymour Drescher
In this
classic analysis and refutation of Eric
Williams's 1944 thesis [Capitalism
and Slavery], Seymour Drescher
argues that Britain's abolition of the slave
trade in 1807 resulted not from the
diminishing value of slavery for Great
Britain but instead from the British
public's mobilization against the slave
trade, which forced London to commit what
Drescher terms "econocide." This action, he
argues, was detrimental to Britain's
economic interests at a time when British
slavery was actually at the height of its
potential.
Originally published in 1977, Drescher's
work was instrumental in undermining the
economic determinist interpretation of
abolitionism that had dominated historical
discourse for decades following World War
II. For this second edition, which includes
a foreword by David Brion Davis, Drescher
has written a new preface, reflecting on the
historiography of the British slave trade
since this book's original publication. |
 |
* *
* * *
 |
From the Ashes of the Old
American Labor and America's Future
(2000)
By
Stanley Aronowitz
Aronowitz presents a compelling case for the
idea that "unions, if they are to thrive,
must overcome the complacency of the last
fifty years and expand labor's influence
throughout politics and culture. But first
labor must overcome its image as the
representative of a narrow segment of the
working population...."
In
intellectually strong but clear-spoken
language, Aronowitz urges labor once again
to define itself in sharp opposition to the
ideology of corporate capitalism. He might
attract some controversy with his suggestion
that doing so requires a distancing of the
unions from the Democratic Party (which, he
reminds the reader, has drifted increasingly
to the right under Bill Clinton, whose
"reform" of welfare not only took money from
the unemployed but may also keep wages down
for the working poor). Might, that is, if
labor had a strong enough voice for its
dissent to be heard. —Amazon.com
|
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 5 May 2012
|
