The Inexorable Logic of the Selfish Class

The Inexorable Logic of a Selfish Class …a few among them are so strict in punishing offenses, that if a slave is slow in bringing the hot water, they condemn him to suffer three hundred lashes; if he has intentionally killed a man…his master will merely cry out: "What should a worthless fellow do, notorious for wicked deeds? But if he dares do anything else like that hereafter, he shall be punished."

But the height of refinement…is that better for a stranger to kill any man's brother than to decline his invitation to dinner. For a senator thinks he is suffering the loss of a rich property if the man whom he has invited, after considerable weighing of pros and cons, invited once, fails to appear at his table." Ammianus Marcellinus: Valentinian, Valens, Gratianus Written ca 400 AD.

Think of people at the height of society who are grasping and corrupt, think of a society dominated by them, think of a government controlled by them. The prime example is the Roman Senators who presided over the fall of Rome (direct ancestors of the current Mafia), a selfish class who led the Roman Empire to ruin. An historian describing the period wrote "… fraud and greed are everywhere triumphant … the rich are growing richer and more powerful, while the poor are becoming poorer and more hopeless, and … the imperial government has lost all control of the vast machine."

There have been other selfish classes, some of them described by Jared Diamond in his book, Collapse, ruling classes that failed to make the choices needed to insure the survival of their societies, including those in Easter Island and Greenland. There seems to be something inherently self-destructive about all of them.

The contemporary political class in the US fits the same selfish class paradigm, only earlier in the process: today there are escalating cases of corporate corruption, suborned Congressmen, networks of scams set up by their friends, billions misappropriated in the Iraq war, crony contracts, and a political organization that appears dedicated to realizing the selfish class interests of the very rich--at the expense of everyone else. There are many parallels between the contemporary ruling class (which includes President Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress, but is not confined to them) and the one which was dominant during the last century of the Roman Empire.

In order to understand the effects of selfish class rule, and the likely effects of the dominance of our present rulers, it makes sense to examine the Roman Senatorial class: how they achieved dominance, how they kept it, and what were the consequences of their rule. There is a logic to how a selfish class operates, a logic which ultimately leads to the destruction of society.

Roman Senators were incredibly wealthy in the western Empire. In fact, there was a significant difference between their class in the western part of the Empire (Italy, Spain, Gaul, Illyricum and North Africa) and their counterparts in the eastern part centered on Constantinople (Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and Libya).

The Senators of the western empire (the Empire was split into two separately governed parts at the end of the fourth century) looked down upon their "impoverished" eastern colleagues, who participated in, but did not dominate the government in Constantinople. In the west, Senators had fortunes generating incomes with a contemporary worth of between ten and twenty million dollars a year; in other words they were the equivalents of our billionaires. Their wealth came largely from huge landholdings, but of course they were few in number, and dominated their regions. In the east, each city might have had ten or more moderately wealthy families contending for power, but their wealth was considerably less than the western Senators, and they were not politically dominant.

It is significant that the eastern part of the empire continued to function for almost a thousand years after Rome fell in 476. It is also more than a coincidence that it was the part of the empire that had been conquered, not the direct descendants of the conquerors.

Now look at our contemporary condition. The agenda of the Bush administration for its second term was heavily skewed towards the interests of the wealthiest elements of society, what I would call the selfish class. In 2005, Congress passed both program cuts and tax cuts. The program cuts included significant reductions in funding for: Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start and student loans, all programs aiding those at the bottom of the income scale. The cuts were needed, various Congressional spokesmen explained, in order to justify the tax cuts: cuts in taxes on capital gains and dividends, disproportionately favoring the wealthy, and cuts in the Alternative Minimum Tax so that fewer of the upper middle class would have to pay it.

Even after the program cuts, the government was running record deficits, largely caused by the tax cuts and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is apparent, from statements "conservative" spokesmen like Grover Norquist have made, that the budget deficits are intentional: their purpose being to force shrinkage in the size of government.

Both the administration and the Republican Congressional leadership, true to the interests of the selfish class, also wanted to eliminate the estate tax, and to partially privatize Social Security, but they were blocked by the unpopularity of both proposals. They did succeed, however, in changing the bankruptcy law (they called it a "reform"), so that it will be harder for the average citizen to file for bankruptcy, and easier for credit card companies to collect their loans. The Congress also passed a tort "reform" that will make it harder for the average citizen to sue large corporations for damages.

Abolition of the estate tax would have created a protected, increasingly wealthy class, a selfish class like the Senators of fifth century Rome, and would cost the US treasury trillions of dollars (which would have to be recouped from people with lower incomes).

Privatization of Social Security would have destabilized the most effective income security program the US has ever had, significantly increased government debt, while enabling Wall Street investors to make at least hundreds of billions in profits from the "private accounts."

Tort reform protects large corporations; in fact it grants them something close to impunity, since the limits to damage awards would make even the successful lawsuit merely the routine cost of doing business.

The spate of criminal cases against corporations from Enron to World.com to Martha Stewart, the growing numbers of cases against lobbyists and Congressmen, the scandals concerning "lost" billions in Iraq, and corporations found to have spent hundreds of millions in bribes world-wide, all these events look more and more like the Roman selfish class, the Senators close to the end of the Empire. Emperor Majorian, one of the last Emperors, and probably the last Roman Emperor who really attempted to rule in the interest of the people, complained about how the Senators avoided paying taxes (although they had a near monopoly of the wealth); he complained publicly about how they used the state for their own corrupt purposes, and even for diverting tax payments into their own pockets.

The dominance of a selfish class , however, goes far beyond government budgets or Congressional programs. Consider: in the US the pay differential between the average corporate CEO and the average worker in his firm has grown to somewhere between 425 to 500 to one, while CEO's in countries like Germany and Japan are paid, on average, no more than 11 or 12 times as much as their workers. Even in Venezuela, a Third World country, the pay differential is more like 50 to one.

Not only is CEO pay in the US way out of line with the rest of the world, there is also very little protest against it. A note: the surge in CEO pay (from less than 100 to 1 to over 500 to one) actually took place in the 1990's, most of it during the Clinton administration, which goes to show that while the selfish class may be more faithfully represented by the Republicans, such as those in the Bush administration, it did very well when Democrats were in control as well.

A case can be made that the leadership of most of the different institutions in our society act in support of a selfish class, or acquiesce in its dominance (like many of the opposition Democrats), even though the "conservative" Republican leadership articulates selfish class interests most clearly.

The two American political parties play different roles in the current system. The Republican Party, especially as it was reconstituted by Gingrich and Delay after their successful takeover of Congress in 1994, has become not only a faithful representative of the selfish class, but an efficient machine, (through actions like its program to Republicanize the big lobbying firms: "the K-Street Project") to carry out corporate wishes almost without modification. This is why Congress now is ruled as a one-party institution in which lobbyists or corporate representatives sit in on drafting legislation, and on policy creation (like Vice President Cheney's notorious energy policy meeting in 2001, the participants of which have still not been revealed). It is why Congress conference committees meeting to reconcile bills from the House and Senate routinely ban Democratic participation, and almost as routinely add provisions, without votes, for the benefit of favored constituents. It is why people like the now convicted lobbyist, Abramoff, had access at the highest levels even at the White House.

In a way you could even say that Republican corruption, as demonstrated in the Abramoff and Delay cases, is highly principled. It is compatible with their governing vision: to make government directly responsive to the selfish class and its interests, which are also their interests. Many members of Congress and high-level administration officials are multi-millionaires.

The Democrats are not pure, either. Some, like Senator Baucus from Montana, and Senator Landrieu from Louisiana, are primarily representatives of their states' major industries: mining and oil respectively; that's how they get elected. Senator Lieberman of Connecticut has been a faithful representative of the defense industry, which is heavily represented in his state. However, the Democratic Party is not consciously and ideologically committed to the interests of the selfish class; the Republican Party is. But Democrats are not consciously committed to any interest; some are true populists, some espouse vaguely social democratic ideas, but few see the selfish class for what it is, although the nakedness of the Republican program may have opened the eyes of more of them, even some members of the Democratic Leadership Council, like Al Gore.

Further, as the political system has become more and more impenetrable to anyone without their own money, Democrats have been recruited for office because, as multi-millionaires or billionaires, they can use their own money to win elections. But a Democratic multi-millionaire is still a multi-millionaire; his interests are much more in synch with the selfish class than with the single mother working at Walmart.

In addition, most Democratic officeholders owe their elections to campaign money raised by corporations, or political action committees representing their interests. There are exceptions to this: union money, the money raised by grassroots organizing, money collected by progressive groups with environmental or civil rights concerns, but compared to corporate money the amounts raised do not compare. If you cannot raise enough money to be visible, then your election campaign will sink without a trace. The system of campaign finance virtually ensures that the vast majority of officeholders of both parties will represent the interests of the selfish class, or at least won't go against them. This will continue to be true until or unless private campaign funding is at least neutralized by the voluntary public financing of elections. (It has to be voluntary to pass muster in the Supreme Court).

When a selfish class rules, it moves to monopolize wealth, which is precisely what almost all the Republican policies discussed above would help to accomplish. Also, with the tax cuts and tort reform, representatives of the selfish class are attempting to establish a most important safeguard: preventing anyone else from gaining access to "their" wealth.

When the Roman state was in extremis, when the German palace guard (Palatini) demanded higher pay and the Emperor was unable to pay them in 476, even individual Senators could have paid them off (they were wealthy enough), but the Senate chose instead to side with the German mercenaries to overthrow the Emperor; he was replaced by a German general, who named himself "King of Italy." Historians sometimes date the beginning of the "Dark Ages" from 476, because the chaos that followed destroyed what was left of the classical Roman way of life, including the high literary tradition of the educated classes. One cleric wrote about a generation after: "…we think no one nowadays can boast much learning. Here the fury of the barbarians burns daily, now flaring up, now dying down. Our whole life is taken up in cares, and all our efforts go to beating back the war-bands that surround us."

The reason that the Empire could not pay the palatini was that it had been driven into bankruptcy by the rapacity and non-cooperation of the Senatorial class. The Senators avoided almost all taxes on their huge estates, and protected others from paying taxes as well, but people were protected at a price, not out of altruism; those protected became serfs on the Senators' lands, and their meager properties were added to the Senator's estate. This was truly a selfish class. Over the previous hundred years the Senators had aggrandized tremendous wealth, while they starved the state, putting into practice American "conservative" Grover Norquist's prescription to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Since Grover Norquist chairs the Wednesday Meeting of the Leave Us Alone Coalition, a meeting to which Bush's White House and Vice President Dick Cheney send representatives weekly, along with representatives of the Republican Congressional leadership, it is not too extreme to say that his philosophy of government is highly influential. The failure of FEMA to adequately cope with the New Orleans disaster in the wake of Katrina (and the Corps of Engineers failure to rebuild the levees), was an object lesson in what happens when governments are dismantled, when the idea that governments shouldn't provide services becomes dominant.

But the reach of the selfish class goes far beyond government. The Senators didn't just starve the state; they starved everyone else, as well. Senators surrounded themselves with gold: solid gold doorplates, gold coffered ceilings, heavy gold jewelry and gold shield bosses; carriages, horses and even their slaves were decorated with the stuff. Since gold was the basis for the currency, their hoarding of it impoverished everyone else. The common man never saw a gold coin, and rarely saw a debased silver (plated) one. The state couldn't maintain the roads, or dredge the silted ports, because its revenue base had shrunk so far. As a result, trade dwindled to a trickle. And, of course, the state couldn't defend its territory, either, but the military dissolution took longer, in part because that is the last sector of government that the selfish class will cut; the military will also protect their property--and make them money.

Today, it's not too extreme to say that the selfish class has nearly completed its takeover of American society. Even though CEO's go to jail for corporate misdeeds, they are still celebrated as the leaders of society--who heads TV shows to select their assistants, after all: Martha Stewart and Donald Trump, not government leaders, nor union leaders. Even if Republicans didn't dominate most branches of government, what we see when we compare society in the 1940's, 50's or 60's with society today represents revolutionary change.

It is a revolution that may have begun with Barry Goldwater's quixotic run for the White House, but it is much broader than the merely political, or economic, and much of it happened away from public notice, such as the creation of global corporations more powerful than governments. In order to succeed, the (radical) revolution has to be nearly total; it has to encompass culture, ideology, academic theory, religion, education, entertainment, criminal justice, methods of governance and war; it is even spilling over into realms like science.

A total revolution. One of the reasons why we aren't aware of it is because it has taken over peacefully, and the revolutionaries say and may even believe that the changes are minimal, or that we are simply, properly, turning the clock back to a simpler, better time. The revolutionaries call themselves "conservatives" after all. The better time they seem to idealize is not just prior to the 60's (which established Medicare and Civil Rights), or just prior to the New Deal (when we got Social Security and welfare), but all the way back to the beginning of the 20th Century, before Teddy Roosevelt instituted antitrust action, and before Woodrow Wilson passed the income tax. That was a time when the wealthy could hold on to their wealth. It was also an overtly imperialist era. In fact, it was very like the early Roman Empire.

However, things happened in the 20th Century which made our current condition much more like late (decadent) Roman times, developments like the US hegemony after World War II, and then exporting our industrial base and becoming the largest debtor in the world.

What made Rome decadent in the fifth century? There are many explanations, such as the lead poisoning in the water (carried by lead pipes), and the chaos of the preceding centuries (civil war for almost one hundred years prior to Diocletian in 284), but the political-social-economic system established by Diocletian and Constantine also (unintentionally) established the dominance of the Senatorial class, the selfish class.

It was a ruling class at the apex of society that modeled rapacity and self interest above all else. Citizens expressed the morality of the selfish class when in 410 they chanted "pretiam impone carne humanae!" in the Colloseum, meaning, "Set a price on human flesh!" Because they were hungry, they wanted to slaughter slaves for meat. They were hungry because the Roman Senate had capitulated to Alaric's Visigoths, and the grain ships from Africa had refused to dock.

A similar kind of sentiment was expressed in the US when the Abu Ghraib photos were first released: "I do not give a damn about the way terrorists are treated in prison. Hang them by their testicles, by their thumbs…" said one AOL post. Note that the Bush administration also refused to admit responsibility for the scandal, and Vice President Cheney tried every way he could to stop or nullify McCain's amendment to a defense appropriation in which torture was outlawed.

In the end Cheney did not prevail, but it is too early to say whether the McCain amendment will make a major difference; President Bush publicly maintained an exception in his signing statement; he based it on his expansive powers as Commander in Chief.

In any case, Romans had gotten this way from living at the heart of an Empire that dominated the known world, but with the exception of the very wealthy, most Romans, especially in the West, benefited from Empire little if at all.

In fact, the majority of free citizens suffered long-term economic losses even before the Empire began its long decline. Only a small upper class and a smaller number of the newly wealthy shared in the immense treasure won by Empire. The wealthy did build public monuments with the proceeds of some of their plunder, but most of their riches went into three kinds of investment: land, slaves and gold. The abundance of slaves from conquests (and the low prices for them that resulted) drove out peasant farmers throughout Italy, leaving land open for purchase by large landowners. The dispossessed peasants swelled the proletariat of the cities, and later, when the cities began to decline, their descendants jumped at the occasional chance to become share-cropping serfs on the large estates; it was better than starving.

The Senatorial (selfish class) takeover was paradoxical, however. It didn't happen until the Empire was in real trouble (much worse than 9/11). When depression and chaos became endemic in the late third century, the solution offered by Diocletian, and the Emperors following him in the fourth century, was government coercion: fixed prices, caste assignment of essential jobs and unlimited bureaucratic autocracy.

Ironically, the Senators were excluded from the military at this time, which was seen as a major political blow, because, without a military base, they could not compete for the Imperial succession. But, because they were well-educated and well-connected, they were the logical leaders of the new large bureaucracy; they actually gained more day to day power with Diocletian's reforms, and also greater protection from expropriation, because they were no longer in danger of ending up on the wrong side of a succession struggle. The effect was that they became wealthier and more powerful.

While taxing Senatorial wealth would have boosted the economy at this or any later time, and would have increased Imperial security, the aristocratic selfish class was able to evade almost all taxes since it ran the bureaucracy. Holding on to and increasing their wealth, Senators ensured an ever diminishing market, everyone else's impoverishment, and their tighter and tighter hold on both wealth and power. That's how the Roman selfish class established itself, and how it made the crucial choices that led inevitably to the Empire's collapse.

As I indicated in the title to this chapter, there is an inexorable logic to how a selfish class operates, and it is a logical system that ultimately can lead to society's destruction.

First, the selfish class must be able to persuade everyone that its rule is legitimate and that its dominance is justified. For the Roman Senatorial class this was relatively easy: 800 years of history, in which the aristocracy was either in power or close to it, and the last one hundred years in which stability was created after a century of chaos by the bureaucratic government that dominated it.

The contemporary selfish class does not have history to support its claims to legitimacy. After all, the era it looks back to with the greatest nostalgia was not only the "gilded age," but also the era of "robber barons." So it must persuade through its near monopoly of the media, entertainment, education, culture and through its development of a supportive ideology: free market economics, and, yes, free market religion. I will examine these in later sections, but suffice it to say, that instead of "honorable" birth (the honestiores), the contemporary selfish class speaks of "freedom," "free" markets, "opportunity" and "family values."

It is critical that the ruling selfish class is able to insulate itself from society as a whole. In the cases Jared Diamond explores, the elites lived substantially different lives from the common people and were able to protect themselves from the disastrous choices they made (or made by not making) long after those choices had affected the common people. An example from the fifth century: travel for most people was dangerous; the roads were beset with bandits and the lone traveler could easily be killed, or robbed, captured and sold into slavery, but Senators traveled with armed retinues or on government business with official escorts. For them, travel was much less risky. The reason travel was dangerous was that the government was unable to rid the countryside of bandits, or enable the trade which would employ the desperate, because wealthy Senators avoided taxes and did not contribute to maintenance of the roads, or to a public security force.

We have a contemporary example: the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, when the poor were unable to evacuate, while the better off loaded up their SUV's and relocated to hotels on higher ground. The overwhelming poverty of Katrina refugees was a shock to TV viewers, and yet they represented a substantial portion of the population, a part we rarely see. And the scope of the disaster was not the hurricane per se, but the Federal Government's failure to allocate sufficient funds to repair the levees, or to enforce the environmental safeguards needed to preserve the wetlands and barrier islands; they had previously served as buffers from storm surges.

The money wasn't allocated because the Bush administration decided it needed the money to fight the war in Iraq; environmental laws weren't enforced and dredging and levees were built where they shouldn't have been, to serve the interests of the oil companies and developers. While the Republican administration was directly responsible for failing to repair the levees, Republicans and Democrats collaborated for decades in trashing the environment--both representing the interests of the local selfish class, oil companies and developers. Whoever was to blame, poor people suffered disproportionately.

Another example: the price of gasoline has fallen from its peak after Katrina, but it is still high, and will probably go higher again, perhaps higher still if we have reached "peak oil," which we may have. In any case, demand for oil will keep on escalating beyond available supply because of the rapid economic development of China and India and because oil reserves appear to be quite finite. Nevertheless, Republicans and "moderate" Democrats (and the United Auto Workers!) resist raising fuel efficiency standards, and the wealthy happily drive their huge SUV's and Hummers, which has contributed to the rising inefficiency of our collective transportation fleet, increasing the amount of oil we have to import.

But consider: while poor people may have to choose between freezing and eating in the winter (since heating costs have also risen dramatically), while the middle class are more and more hard-pressed to commute to their jobs, because of high fuel costs, the Hummer driver hardly worries about filling his tank; if he can afford the Hummer, then $50 to $100 per tankful isn't going to present much of a problem; he probably earns well over $100,000. Therefore, why should he worry about the price of oil, or about global warming, which at very least is exacerbated by our extravagant use of fuel?

You could call this "The Hummer Syndrome." The effect of it is demonstrated by Bush's refusal in July, 2005, to even consider a proposal at the G8 Summit in Scotland for vague mandatory controls of emissions to slow global warming, and by his administration's cuts in funding (from $36.5 million to $10.4 million) for repair and strengthening the levees in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina.

Unfortunately, the logic of the selfish class goes beyond self protection and blindness. The selfish class must also protect its sources of wealth ("Get government off our backs!") because it gains wealth created by others.

In fact, a good case can be made that Roman Senators actually diminished the amount of wealth available in society as a whole; they didn't increase it. They hoarded gold, which reduced the amount of money available to society; they accumulated vast estates, which were less efficient than small-holdings would have been; and they also depended upon un-free labor, both slaves and serfs, neither of whom could be as efficient as free labor. They greatly increased the number of serfs, through their rapacious manipulation of the tax system, a topic I will take up in Taxes. The contemporary selfish class probably diminishes the amount of wealth as well. Rising inequality (caused by tax and trade policies and by anti-worker and anti-union policies), does at least three things: it reduces the mass market for consumption; it increases the level of indebtedness (a problem that will eventually sink the US, and possibly the global economy) and it reduces the efficiency of workers, since too many people are unable to get adequate health care, education, training and so on.

Inequality can also increase economic instability, since luxury consumption and investment decisions are much more volatile than mass consumption; their collapse caused the Great Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, for example. I'm not even considering the costs to quality of life here, but inequality also probably hurts overall morale, especially if people expected conditions to get better, not worse. (Isn't progress part of the American ideal?). Poor morale will have an impact on overall productivity. Concentration of wealth may enable some kinds of investment not otherwise possible (the transistor is often cited, since it came out of AT& T's Bell labs), but huge, wealthy corporations are not where most innovation takes place.

In 2005 I asked an Exxon employee why Exxon didn't invest in alternative energies. He stated that Exxon was sitting on $700 billion in cash (this was before its record-breaking profits were announced at the end of the year), and that it would invest in alternative energies eventually, but only when a technology had been proven by start-up firms; then it would buy them up and control it. The point is: huge corporations do not really create wealth; they use their capital to control it, as Standard Oil did back in the late 19th Century, when it crushed its rivals and took over their oil transport innovations: tank cars and pipelines.

The contemporary selfish class gains its wealth from the large corporations they run and control, and also from those firms that are politically well connected, like Halliburton, The Carlyle Group, and Lockheed-Martin. As cases of graft and misappropriation of government and Iraqi government funds proliferate, it becomes clear that the wealth-holders with large interests in these firms--like Vice President Cheney and former President George H. W. Bush--are gaining wealth at the expense of…taxpayers! In other words, a few, the selfish class, are getting very wealthy, while the majority is being driven into debt.

For this reason, the selfish class must insure that its wealth is protected from others. How does it do this? In the Roman case, as I've indicated above, not only was the tax system tailored to selfish class interests, and manipulated by its office-holders, but Senators largely avoided paying taxes, with one exception, a small tax that established a Senator's status.

Senators were also able to protect and increase their holdings through their control of high government offices; Senators bought offices for their sons so that each generation could maintain useful contacts with government officials even after they "retired" to their estates in early middle age. The offices themselves were a major source of wealth, a point that becomes abundantly clear in the large number of edicts in the Theodosian Code on "caducous" or ownerless land and on vagrant slaves, and how people may properly gain them from the state. Even included is a restriction that requests for gold (presumably to smooth the way) "shall be reserved for the highest dignitaries, even down to the assistant chief of office staff of Imperial secretaries."

How does the contemporary selfish class protect its wealth? The need for this explains why the Republican Congress is so determined to insure not only that taxes on capital and high incomes are cut, but that the tax cuts are made "permanent," so that never again will any but miniscule portions of the burgeoning resources of the wealthy be taken by government for collective or social purposes. This is also the reason for "reforms" like the new bankruptcy law and corporate tort law. It is also why leaders like Gingrich and Delay were bent on insuring the permanent dominance of "conservatives" within the Republican Party and on K Street (the site of most lobbying firms), as well as Bush's insistence on using recess appointments to place well-connected ideologues to positions of power in the administration even when Congress failed to go along.

Another self-protective strategy is dismantling or co-opting regulatory agencies, or, in the short term simply de-funding their enforcement arms. The same aims are present when governments, corporations and media attack unions. The assault on unions has been overwhelmingly successful; they are a pitiful remnant of what they were in their heyday in the 1940's. As such they can no longer effectively challenge corporate interests. What is most important, however, is to persuade everyone of the central ideas of the selfish class: "nothing can be done" about the poor; workers should fear that they will lose their jobs in order to spur them to work harder and avoid unions, and programs like the cradle to grave social care offered in EC countries are needless and grave inefficiencies that modern economies must do without. Fictions like Reagan's "Welfare Mary" have gone a long way to rationalize cut-backs in expenditures for any kind of welfare, and to make what remains so punitive that workers have to be willing to work harder, for less pay, no protection and no prospects. Yet Reagan made up Welfare Mary out of whole cloth!

In Rome and most other cities in the Empire, the poor were given increasingly generous distributions of food and services as long as the Empire was prosperous; the dole kept a superfluous population quiescent--the people who had been driven off the land, remember--and it also bought their political support. The dole was expanded beyond the simple "bread and circuses" to pork, wine, cooking oil, and other staples and such amenities as the public baths.

However, by the fifth century the dole was something governments often could not afford, or simply could not collect the resources to maintain. That was when the Church began to feed (some of) the poor, as an act of Charity. That was also when the dominant Christian dogma taught that people should not worry about this life; it was the next one that was important. This, too, protected the selfish class; there were no reasons for revolution, only for submission to the will of God.

Note that if an aggressive and effective government had collected the resources needed for maintaining the dole, they would have had to take them from the estates of the Senatorial classes; no one could do that, as edict after despairing edict of succeeding Emperors makes clear, because the officials and the selfish class were one and the same; they worked together for their own interests.

Similar processes are at work today. Anti-union lawyers control the National Labor Relations Board, bankers and bank economists run the Federal Reserve Board, proponents of privatization of public lands like Gail Norton run the Department of Interior, advocates of deregulation, like Michael Powell, regulate the airwaves from the FCC, and Mayor Giuliani forced TANF (welfare or workfare) recipients to work raking leaves and cleaning streets in New York City, preventing them from enrolling or continuing in higher education or training.

However, the city was forced by the courts to reverse its policy, and under Mayor Blumberg who succeeded Giuliani, it agreed to allow recipients to count education as "work-fare." The courts have been one of the few available avenues for opposition to the unfettered control of the selfish class. But the conservative movement has worked very hard to dominate the bench, as well. Bush's appointments of judicial "conservatives" Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts are simply part of that program.

The above examples illustrate two things about the logic of the selfish class. One is that resources to aid and maintain the poor, or even the middle class have to be starved because to fund them would require levies on those who don't need these programs: the wealthy selfish class. The logical extension of this is to withhold funding from infrastructure, unless it can profit the politically well-connected (like the Alaskan Congressman Don Young, as chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, providing $223 million to build a bridge to an Alaskan island inhabited by 50 people and a small airport), as opposed to appropriations to the politically disadvantaged, like the poor, black, largely Democratic inhabitants of New Orleans' 13th Ward, who were most damaged by the government's failure to adequately fund repair of the levees (a shortfall of $26.1 million from the same committee the previous year).

The result in the fifth century was that roads and harbors fell into disrepair and worse. The contemporary result has been poor maintenance of roads and bridges in older industrial states, and especially niggardly appropriations for maintaining, improving or building new mass transit systems. The contrast between our transportation system and those seen in Europe or Japan is striking. The same could be said for almost all our collective services: education, health care and cultural amenities like libraries and parks.

The Bush administration has maintained that its provision of security against terrorism has given it a mandate, but even here it looks increasingly like the incompetence and corruption of the selfish class of the fifth century. The Homelands Security Department has been criticized from both the right and the left of the political spectrum for the chaos of its administration and for the President's appointments of unqualified but politically well-connected friends and colleagues. At the same time that the president has insisted on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has skimped on security measures like tracking cargo coming through US ports, and providing support to the Border Patrol.

Given skimping on public services, even security, is it surprising that governments dominated by the selfish class will resort to extreme punishments to enforce their power? In a decree on harboring brigands, Emperors Theodosius I and Gratian warn "if an overseer or procurator should harbor a brigand without the knowledge of his master and neglect to deliver him to the judge, he will be consumed by the avenging flames." Death by fire, even by slow fire, was more and more preferred as punishment as crime and chaos escalated, and as the government was able to do less and less in response. Beheading was considered too humane for an overseer.

It is in this context that the contemporary return to the death penalty, its expansion to federal crimes, and the increasing severity of other sentences can be viewed; it is an expression of government desperation in the face of what many perceive as social chaos. It is seen as a cost-effective way to achieve social peace; it could also be seen as a way to economize; to put someone to death might be cheaper than maintaining him, even though with our complicated legal system it is usually more expensive. It also has a deterrent effect, even though it does not deter would-be murderers. Capital punishment raises the level of coercion acceptable in society, just as torture of prisoners and indefinite detention of "enemy combatants" could terrorize most people into passivity, if those practices are ruled acceptable by the courts.

The logic of a selfish class calls for higher levels of coercion at all levels of government, not just in the courts, because otherwise why would people submit to their own oppression? Autocratic rule is a natural result.

In Rome, the Emperor was considered divine, even after the Empire became officially Christian: he was God's Vice-regent on Earth. That doesn't necessarily mean that he was an effective ruler. Honorius (393-423) spent most of his time in his chicken coop in Ravenna caring for his prize roosters, one of whom he named Rome. When a messenger came to inform him that Rome had fallen (to Alaric), he was doubly alarmed: he thought the messenger meant his rooster! His successor and nephew, Valentinian III (425-455), concerned himself with a different kind of chicken--the prettiest wives of his courtiers. The absolute power of the Emperor had been established long before, but after Diocletian, executive power was largely administered by the officials beneath him, members of the selfish class; many of them were corrupt.

The tremendous expansion of presidential power under President Bush, illustrates how the logic of the selfish class can work even in a putatively democratic state. He claims he can spy on all of us through the NSA's mass communication interception Echelon program, can detain anyone indefinitely as an "enemy combatant," can authorize "cruel and inhuman treatment" and can disregard binding international treaties, because he is Commander in Chief in a time of war. How convenient that the president's declared "war on terror" could last a generation! By the time it is over, the US could become a thoroughgoing police state, terrorized by its own government.

I should point out the obvious: in a police state, or even with a state teasing at the edges of one, it is unlikely that the selfish class will skimp on the military. In fact, as long as those with power can make money on it, the military is sure to be the last sector to feel the pinch of revenue short-falls.

This was true in the Roman Empire, but by the fifth century even military expenditures were cut back. However, it was the military adventures of Empire that had accumulated the wealth of the wealthy class. Their inherited estates came from the wealth aggregated by the huge influx of captured goods and slaves carried off by Roman armies.

Yet even in the fifth century it is probable that Senators found ways to make money off the military: misappropriating goods destined for it, harboring deserters and turning them into serfs, or having them serve in their private armies, diverting profits from the arms factories in the Danube and Rhine valleys and lending money to military units. It was not, however, their main source of new wealth, that came from the refugees of all kinds seeking out their protection and from government influence and graft. The refugees were fleeing taxes, disasters or military upheavals such as Alaric's and Attila's rampages through Dalmatia, Gaul and Italy.

In the contemporary period, the selfish class is still accumulating wealth through military adventure, and I will explore this process in depth in the section on the military. In order to flourish, a selfish class needs to be able to accumulate wealth and power without interference, but preferably with government help. Think of both the Senators and the current rulers as not unlike the Mafia (a spiritual descendant of the aristocracy of southern Italy, after all).

This is because the wealth of the selfish class is not created by them, it is taken from others. How Halliburton's Brown and Root subsidiary has operated in Iraq is an example of this. It has subcontracted nearly all of its government contracts (cost-plus contracts) allowing, even encouraging, outrageous over-billing. It then simply tacks on its 1 to 4% surcharge to the bill (its cost-plus margin depends on the particular contract) and forwards it to the Defense Department. The reason for encouraging subcontractors to over-bill is that the contract gives the contractor a profit that is not a set amount, but is simply a percentage above cost, whatever the cost can be inflated to be: the higher the cost, the higher the profit.

Halliburton was led by Vice President Cheney before he took office, and he still receives over $140,000 a year from the company, and has a large number of stock options he can still cash in. The Iraq war as a whole is really about American corporations getting their fingers into the lucrative Iraqi pie, and not just about controlling the oil, although that is important, too; in fact, it's not just about corralling US money, but Iraqi money, as well.

The relation of defense contractors like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group to government illustrates the kind of partnership the selfish class prefers. Government must get off the backs of corporations, i.e. it must not regulate and must not take the side of the workers, but it must also be the venue for providing opportunities for quick profits, profits at others' expense. In the fifth century, there was an Emperor, Majorian (457-461), who attempted to legislate on behalf of the common people, and who tried to prevent the wealthy from steering all the wealth into their own hands. Majorian was completely frustrated, however, because Senators controlled all the levers of government; he was easily disposed of by General Ricimer after less than four years in office. Majorian's fate is a cautionary tale for populists today.

Logically, the system winds down as the selfish class gains a monopoly of power and wealth, because it must protect its wealth from collective uses, that is from government in the form of taxes. This means that over time (and history appears to be moving more rapidly than it did in the fourth and fifth centuries) the government faces a shrinking revenue base (our huge deficits), even if the economy is expanding (into fewer and fewer pockets).

In the case of Rome, it was unable to defend itself from the incursions of its erstwhile allies (foederati), so that Britain, North Africa and then parts of Gaul and all of Spain slipped out of the Empire's direct control, because the cheapest way to put an army into the field was to rent one--the foederati--but these "allies" then saw greater return in taking control of the parts of the Empire they occupied. Finally, Emperor Romulus Augustulus and his father, the Patrician Orestes, were unable to pay off the mixed German palatini that controlled central Italy militarily, and the Senate sided with the German general, Odoacer, who named himself King of Italy.

The Senators, in the true climax of a self-destructive selfish class, apparently felt that it was better to deal with a foreign king, and to suffer his soldiers to settle in Italy, than it was to alienate some of their huge wealth for a government purpose. Few of them survived the chaos that followed, but then Rome itself was reduced from a population of over a million to under 100,000 in the fifth and sixth centuries.

We have not gotten there yet, and instead of military disasters, we may face environmental crises for which the selfish class seems singularly ill-suited as our decision-makers: energy crises, global warming, global pollution…well there is a list of possibilities, certainly.

There is also, however, the very real possibility of a financial crisis to end all financial crises. How long will the Chinese continue to support our increasing debt? The US owes the rest of the world more than all the developing countries combined, and we continue to rack up more and more debt, record debts with almost every quarter. At some point "good faith" in the US dollar will be stretched beyond the breaking point.

Our financial problems have everything to do with the dominance of the selfish class, which is increasingly a global class. In the US it cuts taxes on its growing wealth, imports oil because it must drive Hummers (and pocket profits earned by the oil companies), and exports jobs, because the Indians and Chinese can work more cheaply.

The more jobs we export, of course, the more goods we have to import, including military supplies for our forces around the world. A New York Times columnist concluded: Americans make money selling houses to other Americans, who pay for it with money they borrow from the Chinese.

Will the average American soon become like the Roman plebeian, unable to find work because it is all done elsewhere, dependent on government largesse for survival? But no, we have abolished welfare, so Americans may soon become the new wage slaves in a dictatorial system, perhaps cooperating with the Chinese, who will own us--unless the whole economic edifice collapses, or environmental catastrophe overtakes us.

What can we do to prevent such a gloomy outcome?

Political change would help, but it will have to be more than simply voting in Democrats and voting out Republicans; it will have to be far-reaching. Furthermore any populist democrat attempting radical change will have to watch his back; the forces who gain advantage from the current system, the selfish class, will fight back as they did against Emperor Majorian. That is why political change will only be successful if it is accompanied by much broader change.

Media should be thrown open to competition and to low capital alternatives. Unions have to reform themselves and go international to become true counterweights to corporations. The kinds (and amounts) of energy we use has to change drastically; solar and wind would not require our current global military, would be less capital intensive, would require no imports and would reduce our impact on global warming. Our trade system would have to eliminate corporate dominance, admit worker interests, local self-sufficiency and environmental concerns. The legal status of institutions, especially corporations, has to be revamped to allow local controls and the adequate representation of worker and public interest.

Finally, we need a major change of perception. The US would be better off if it did not try to control the rest of the world (or act as the global cop for the dominant global class). If the US is to have any importance at all, it should be in leading the world by example.