How the Selfish Class Gains Power and Wealth

How the Selfish Class Gains Power and Wealth

Indict me now by the laws against intrigue, degrade me from the Senate for keeping patient eyes on the promotion to which, after all, birth gives me claim, since my own sire and my wife's, my grandsire and his sire too before him were urban and praetorian prefects, or held high rank in court and army. If it comes to that, consider our friend Gaudentius, who but now of tribune's rank, towers in the dignity of the Vicariate above the un-enterprising sloth of our good citizens…. Sidonius, Letter III, Book 1, AD 467

….To win your dignities you did not parade your mother's income, or the largess of your ancestors, your wife's jewels, or your paternal inheritance…In place of this, it was your obvious sincerity, your proven zeal, your admitted social charm which won you favor in the imperial household. Sidonius, Letter IV, Book I to Gaudentius, AD 467

Senators like Sidonius, and his friend Gaudentius, gained wealth through inheritance, and power through wealth and charm, in other words through personal connections and the resources necessary to play the part of their class. The whole senatorial class, as we will see in the chapter on education, was taught how to be witty, appear learned and how to present themselves to those with greater powers to give. There are a number of instances in which Sidonius recounts gaining Imperial favor through his poetic rhetoric, and also at least one incident in which he foils an accusation against him through witty repartee with the reigning Emperor. Senators also paid for their offices, which required that they have the resources to do so and also to meet the obligation to spend large amounts of money ("the largess of your ancestors") on public entertainments celebrating their appointments.

The Senators were so wealthy that there was little they could do to squander their wealth; there was also little they could do beyond enjoying it, getting even wealthier by the year, and holding public office. Of course public office also gave them the means and the information necessary to gain even more wealth and to avoid paying most taxes. There was one tax, specifically levied on the senatorial class, which they did not avoid, since it confirmed their class status, but it was insignificant. Public office also gave them the means to take advantage of any government spending when possible. In fact it was the best investment they could make.

Are our contemporary would-be "Senators" at all similar?

In the United States we have a founding myth of the "self-made" man, but social mobility is actually declining rapidly, especially at the highest levels of our society. The top one percent of income earners, and even more, the top one-tenth of one percent of income earners are gaining wealth at a rapid rate, while the bottom 90% of Americans are losing wealth in relative terms. The creation of a senatorial class, that is a wealthy class based on inheritance, connections and the power that goes with it, is progressing rapidly.

Does the existence of a dominant selfish class increase society's wealth? Free market apologists would have you think so, but if you look at the example of the Senators in the Fifth Century, the answer would have to be a resounding "No!"

The Senators couldn't help but be wealthy by the accidents of their births. Unless they were intentionally improvident they couldn’t help but become wealthier, and yet their wealth did subtract from the wealth of society as a whole. How did this work? Wasn't it true that if you did business with a Senator that you would gain wealth and that you in turn would create additional wealth when you did business with others? Wouldn't it also be true that since Senators had large amounts of wealth, their wealth would create little (or large) industries to service them? Didn't that add to total wealth? So goes economic doctrine, but it didn't work that way in the Fifth Century, and it probably doesn't work that way now.

First of all, Senators invested in three things almost exclusively: land, gold and slaves or serfs. Senators surrounded themselves with gold. Their doorplates were solid gold, their coffered ceilings were lined with gold, they adorned themselves and their women--and servants--with gold, decorated their carriages with it, and even sometimes the shield bosses of their guards. Their income was reckoned in gold: 250,000 gold solidi a year, which came to several thousand pounds of gold.

They displayed so much gold because they didn't spend very much of it. This was because their vast land holdings, estates in Gaul, in Spain, in Italy, in North Africa, sometimes even as far afield as Egypt, Syria or Greece, were largely self-sufficient. Certainly, the Senators who owned the most diverse holdings needed to import little, either, since their different estates would produce almost anything they needed. They also, typically, owned townhouses in Rome, and in Ravenna where the Imperial government lodged itself for much of the fifth century.

The reason why they owned so much property, slaves and gold was that there was no estate tax, there were few expropriations after Diocletian, and Senators as a class failed to reproduce themselves. This is almost surely why so many of the most powerful Senators had two and three townhouses in Rome. At the same time, they were at the center of power, which is one of the reasons why their wealth generally increased, even while the society as a whole grew poorer.

When the wealthy hold onto gold, that wealth goes out of circulation: it subtracts from the money available to the rest of society. Common people never saw a gold coin, and rarely even saw a debased silver one. In fact the gold held by the Senators meant that the government had to continually debase its currency, because the value of currency was based on the amount of precious metal within each coin. Most silver coins of this period were only thinly coated with the metal, and turned black or dull brown after much use. Gold coins were rarely used except by the elite. The result was that much currency was nearly worthless, and even the government resorted to widespread barter, as in its collection of taxes and distribution of the proceeds to the army and the bureaucracy.

When the wealthy also own large tracts of land, and when land is the main source of wealth, as it was in the fifth century, they are also subtracting from the wealth available to society as a whole. This is because significant portions of the large holdings went unused; managers were unable or uninterested in producing more from them, because they had little incentive to do so.

The third kind of investment Senators made was in people, as in serfs and slaves, but neither had much incentive to produce more because of their servile status, so again the Senator's contribution was a net loss to society.

To illustrate what might have happened if Senatorial wealth had not depressed the economy: if free yeomen farmers worked on their own land, they would have been many times as productive. Dramatic increases in productivity have been demonstrated over and over again when land reform has given farmers their own land to work ; much of the vacant land could have been farmed by them. Further, if the Senators' gold had been taxed away from them, and if the government had spent it wisely (a condition that probably could not have been met, given the high level of corruption in the Imperial government, a result of its autocratic form), that gold would have energized markets, since it would have been spent as wages for more military and for road and harbor reconstruction, for example. The combination of a revived infrastructure and greater security, with more money in circulation, could have revived the Imperial economy.

But of course the modern selfish class gains their wealth through a broader array of sources. Didn't Bill Gates create the wealth of Microsoft; didn't the Waltons create the wealth of Walmart? They didn't subtract wealth from others, did they? The answers to these questions are at very least ambiguous.

Wealth in the modern era tends to accumulate, just as it did in the Fifth Century, but it is based on more than land and gold; it is based on concentration, on control of organizational corporate structures more than it is based on manufacturing, on controlling corporations that have global reach. Did Gates create the software industry and therefore his own huge holdings (somewhere between $50 and $100 billion, depending on the market)? Computer mavens would argue that he took advantage of IBM's monopoly (since lost) and ripped off operating systems and applications programs from other computer designers. In other words, his fortune is in large part due to monopoly power--again reducing the amount of wealth in the economy by hiking prices for goods and thereby restricting supply.

Walton founded Walmart, creating the largest retail company in the world, but it is a company that depends on selling goods from China and other low-wage countries, thereby driving out better paid competition. It also depends on paying its retail workers the lowest wages possible, breaking up all attempts at union organizing, and even counseling its employees on how to apply for Medicaid, because its own health insurance program is unaffordable for nearly half of them. This means that taxpayers subsidize Walmart's low wages. Walmart does provide lower-cost consumer goods than would otherwise be available, but it drives out other retail stores, drives down the prevailing wage, and contributes to the rising cost of public services like Medicaid. It is no accident that there are three Waltons who are among the wealthiest people on the planet, but they got there at the expense of every one of us; they are prime examplars of the selfish class.

A good case can be made that the wealth accumulated by the Waltons really diminishes the wealth of everyone else, since it comes from exploiting both US workers and the Chinese and other foreign workers, and destroying local environments thereby reducing the amount of wealth available to all those people. Do Walmart's lower prices compensate for that loss? Considering the billions held by the Walton family alone, that doesn't seem likely. Further, Walmart is now seen as the new corporate model to be emulated, while General Motors, which paid decent wages and benefits to a highly unionized workforce, is perceived as a corporate dinosaur.

But how did we get here? How did this conservative offensive get so far? Again, how the Roman Senatorial class gained its wealth and power is instructive.

Up until Diocletian (284-305) the Senatorial aristocracy, or many of its members, were participants in the scramble for the Imperial purple. They had actually lost most power when Julius Caesar became Dictator, and for a long period of the Empire after Octavian named himself Augustus. At that point, too, the common people lost what little power they had held under the Republic, but the Senators had been reduced to a rubber-stamp and audience for the Emperors. Until Diocletian, the Emperor had almost unlimited power. All decisions, ultimately, had to be made by him personally, even if he was insane or incompetent. The only remedy, if he was completely out of his mind, like Caligula, was for the troops to overthrow him and raise a replacement "to the purple."

Once succession struggles became endemic, however, members of the Senate became active participants as they had been before Julius Caesar. During the chaotic third century, many Senators lost everything when they ended up on the losing side. Since this happened over and over again, there was much circulation of the elite. After Diocletian put an end to the civil wars and chaos of the third century, he banned Senators from careers in the military, the direct route to power. At the time this was probably seen as a political defeat for the whole Senatorial class, but Diocletian also created a bureaucratic state; it was to control most government functions from that time onward.

Ironically, the Senatorial class was the best connected and the best educated, so naturally it took over the top of the bureaucracy as its own. It was more in control of government than it had been when the Emperor was absolute ruler. As a class, it was also no longer competing for succession to the diadem, so mobility into the elite slowed drastically in the fourth and fifth centuries. Senatorial families inherited from other Senatorial families and their fortunes accumulated. Civilian and military concerns were separated completely by the middle of the Fourth Century: Senators were not allowed to go into military service, or even to bear arms. Their powers as praetorian prefects, vicarii and other civilian officials did not include power over the military. Nevertheless, one of the major responsibilities of civilian bureaucrats was to see that the military was adequately supplied. They had to administer the tax system, theoretically overseen by the fisc or treasury. In the latter part of the fourth and into the fifth century Senators increasingly confined themselves to public offices closer to home than Ravenna, such as serving as governors of provinces where they held large properties.

Despite their retreat from public office, socially the Senators continued to be the dominant class. Almost all of the documents of the era reflect the styles, biases and interests of the Senators. They enjoyed the greatest esteem and deference in Roman society; they were like a combination of Hollywood star and CEO of a large corporation today. They also had legal privileges that common people did not, since they were honesti with titles like illustres, clarissimus and spectabilis setting them apart from the common herd. Even if they committed crimes they were not executed in the horrible ways reserved for common citizens, the humili; if they were condemned to death, they still had one privilege--to be beheaded, rather than tortured. The worst punishment, to them, was to lose their class, to be reduced to a humiliore and to be jailed "not now first degraded to plebian rank, but restored to it as his own."

Like influential people today (Corporate CEO's, heads of large banks, scions of wealthy families), members of the most important Senatorial families could meet with the highest officials whenever necessary, and could easily overawe them--they were old family, cultivated, prestigious, and had an aura about them that even the most powerful official might defer to. More importantly, everyone knew who they were, and that they were untouchable unless they dabbled in palace intrigue. Think of someone like Donald Trump, today, or David Rockefeller yesterday, the kind of person who could travel to Washington for a day, and meet with department heads, Senators and Congressmen just because of who they are.

Another source of wealth, or rather a reason why it tended to accumulate in larger and larger fortunes, was the Senators' practice of tax avoidance. The elite were notorious for avoiding taxes not only for themselves, but on behalf of all their dependents, as the quote by Emperor Majorian demonstrates: "This is the method of powerful persons, whose agents in the provinces disregard the payment of taxes, while ... they arrogantly keep to their estates." That meant that their large estates were effectively removed from the tax rolls. Tax avoidance allowed Senators to keep all their accumulated wealth--except for any they might choose to "invest" in a public office and the games it would entail. As pointed out in The Logic of a Selfish Class, , their investment in office was a highly lucrative enterprise. Some of them may have used high office to collect "taxes" for their own profit, but most didn't need to go to such corrupt extremes; they could use the position for their own interests, without being so blatant. Office gave them an inside track on government contracts--supplying the military, for example--on land deals, and dealing with legal problems. Just like the Bechtels and Halliburtons of today.

Their tax avoidance had other consequences, too. Since they protected their dependents from paying taxes (letting the share-cropper survive and earning more for the landlord), many independent peasants appealed to the large landowner for protection, when they faced ruin if they paid their taxes. The peasants' difficulties had become extreme in the fourth and fifth centuries, such as in having their seed corn and breeding stock seized for taxes, so that, facing starvation, they would have no alternative to selling their daughter into slavery, or appealing for help from the nearby large landowner. Since the landowner had available land to work, this often seemed a better choice. But to throw himself on the mercy of the landlord meant that the peasant or municipal gentleman was giving up an independent existence and an honorable social class. The small landowner would give up being a honestiore, and become a humiliore, literally one of the humble, serving classes. In fact, to work on the landlord's land they became serfs, or servae terrae, slaves of the land, whether they were peasants beforehand, or even decurions, that is people from the urban middle class.

The decurions were a special case. They had some land, and some wealth, as respectable members of local municipalities, but they were often assigned the thankless task of collecting local taxes. The task was an onerous one because so much of the property was becoming exempt (in fact, if not legally). As a consequence of the shrinking tax base the rate of taxation became heavier and heavier on those unprotected by the Senators, and if the decurion/tax collector could not meet the quota set by the fisc then he (and his family) had to make up the difference out of his own pocket. So, decurions, too, sought refuge on the Senators' estates, despite the prospect of losing their social status. It was either that, or they could escape to the hills to become bandits.

So, tax avoidance added to Senatorial wealth in the sense that they kept "their own money," as George Bush might say, but tax avoidance also drew a ready labor force to them, since the estate owner offered the refugees protection from paying taxes, as well. The new coloni often brought additional land with them, too, especially if they were former decurions of the middle class, thereby increasing the Senator's holdings. This was a common occurrence. The appropriateness of labeling the Senators the selfish class, is borne out by the fact that their offer of protection also required their clients to become serfs.

The effect on the Empire was disastrous because the selfish class withdrew more and more land and resources from the government's revenue base, despite the fact that barbarian incursions were continually getting worse, and more threatening. In other words, the tax base was shrinking, but the government's needs were growing--just to defend its territories. The effect upon the Senators, however, was the opposite: their landholdings grew and the number of people under their control grew as well.

In the next chapter we will examine what this meant for the rights of the common people.

How is the contemporary selfish class following this model? So far, although the wealthy tend to be born to privilege, their vast accumulations of wealth do not come from inheritance, but from taking advantage of their connections; they don't start with nothing, but they accumulate much more. Bill Gates used his mother's entrée into IBM (she had a high level position in the company) to gain his first DOS contract, and its exclusivity was the basis for his company becoming a software monopoly. George W. Bush is also a good example of how the selfish class promotes its own. His family was wealthy, had gained its riches from investment in the military-security-industrial complex over several generations, but George started in business by investing the remainder of the education trust fund he had inherited and funds he gathered through his personal and family contacts. He founded Arbusto Energy, an oil and gas exploration company in 1977, with a number of investors including his mother, a drugstore magnate, Lew Lehrman, who later ran for governor of New York, and a member of the Saudi Bin Laden family, close to the Bush family (ironic that?). Arbusto (shrub in Spanish) lost money. It was bailed out with a million dollar stake (the company was worth less than $400,000 at the time) put up by a family friend (Philip Uzielli), then merged in 1984 with Spectrum 7, another oil exploration company, and George became CEO. Spectrum lost another one and a half million dollars in 1985 and was bought out by Harken Oil and Gas for $2.2 million, with George coming along as a member of the board of directors. Other investors included a Palestinian, Ghaith R. Pheraon, who was later involved with the huge BCCI international banking scandal (Bank of International Credit and Commerce) which was found to be involved in money laundering, support of terrorism, arms trafficking and which somehow could not account for at least $13 billion of its depositors' money.

Harken, in turn lost money, even when George's father was President of the US. It landed an unlikely contract to drill for oil offshore of Bahrain, although it had never before drilled offshore, or operated outside the US. Meanwhile, George, using his clout as the son of a US president, assembled investors (close friends of his father's) to buy the Texas Rangers from a friend, borrowed half a million to finance his share, and then sold $848,000 worth of shares in Harken a week before the oil company announced a $23 million loss. He beat a charge of insider trading because he had sold out, at least so he claimed, to pay off a loan he had incurred in the Texas Ranger deal. In all these business ventures, in other words, George W did not become wealthy through great business acumen; he was continually being bailed out by family and friends and the influence they could bring to bear, but he did become wealthy, while others lost their shirts.

With the Texas Rangers deal we come to the intersection of sports, money and politics. Bush's role as general managing partner of the Rangers, his role in media relations and in securing a new ballpark for the Rangers gave him a positive public image throughout Texas, so much so that he was able to parley his role (and his family name) into a winning campaign for governor of Texas.

Meanwhile, George's father, George H.W. Bush, the former President, is a major partner in the Carlyle Group, a private investment corporation worth at least $13.5 billion, and one that has profited heavily from the war on terror that his son, the President, now leads. It has been remarked that if the estate tax is abolished, George W. will be a major beneficiary, because of the escalating value of his father's Carlyle Group shares.

Another example could be drawn from Vice President Dick Cheney, who became CEO of Halliburton, a defense-related company, after he served as congressman, then as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. Cheney resigned from Halliburton when he became Vice President, but he is now estimated to be worth between $30-100 million, mostly from his tenure with Halliburton, even though corporate insiders say his leadership there nearly drove the company into bankruptcy. No more: it has profited tremendously from the war in Iraq, gaining no-bid contracts of $7 billion and $5 billion in the last several years, despite continued charges of over-billing and fraud.

bAnother example of how politics and business intertwine to the advantage of the participants in the selfish class is the recent business deal of Tom Delay, former Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, who has been accused many times of fundraising improprieties. After the Energy Bill of 2005 was closed to all amendments, when negotiations in conference between the House and Senate had been completed, it was discovered that a provision had been secretly added to fund subsidies worth $1.5 billion to oil companies. Most of the funding is to be managed by a consortium of oil companies headquartered in Delay's district, including Halliburton.

According to the provision, they will be paid $100 million simply to administer the fund, and members of the consortium will be eligible for the subsidies, in other words, they can grant the subsidies to themselves. Despite the protest of the Democrat's House Deputy Leader, the provision was included in the final bill and passed without much media attention. In other words, the US legislature is in the business of handing out money to its favorites, lots of money, and what's surprising is that hardly anyone even complained about it.

How do you get rich and join the selfish class? Become active in the Republican Party, make lots of connections with people like Tom Delay, and control a large corporation, preferably in oil, or in military services and military construction.

Of course, the selfish class needs protection from all those nasty bureaucrats who might want to regulate them, who might insist that unfettered competition needs to be protected, and that people and the environment should be protected as well. What a silly idea! But see here. In an unregulated market, when a large and a small corporation face each other in competition, it usually doesn't matter if the small corporation is more innovative, or more efficiently run. The larger corporation can prevail simply because of its superior capital. The movement to deregulate may initially have been promoted by Democrats like President Carter to increase economic efficiency, but after two decades of experience with it, it is now clear: deregulation has two main targets: one of those is small business, the other is labor. The environment, of course, is also a loser.

And what is one of the major thrusts of the radical conservatives: to reduce or eliminate regulations on business. There are many ways to do this. The FCC under Chairman Michael Powell was quite forthright in championing the reduction of barriers to concentration in the media industry, while the Anti-trust division of the Justice Department has become a pale imitation of its former self. Under Bush, Anti-trust worked out a settlement with Microsoft, rather than dismantling it, or demanding that it provide information to enable competition in the software industry. Controlling Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies has been left to the Europeans, who demand that it provide open source code. If the Antitrust Division had been controlled by the conservatives earlier, it is likely that AT&T would still own all the Baby Bell phone companies. Now here is an example of what would have been a major reduction in future wealth caused by lack of regulation; think of the tremendous expansion of business in telecommunications once AT&T was divested of its phone companies!

Deregulation also can be pursued by indirection, by suppressing scientific studies that argue in favor of regulation, as the EPA did with research on the effects of mercury, therefore writing less stringent pollution control rules, or by Bush appointing regulatory administrators who had been advocates of deregulation for the industries being regulated.

"Tort reform" is another tool in the radicals' toolkit: it protects corporations from citizen accountability. If class action lawsuits are limited or eliminated, and if damages are capped at a few hundred thousand dollars, then corporations that no longer have to fear regulators, won't have to worry about liability suits from citizens, either. Fines of $250,000 or $500,000 are no more than slaps on an insensitive wrist to a multi-billion dollar corporation. They can simply be absorbed, even budgeted for, as a necessary, if minor, cost of doing business. But that's the point. Congressional passage of the "reform" was viewed as a huge payoff to corporate interests in return for their political support.

The conservative re-making of the courts has a similar intent, especially the appointments of Justices like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who subscribe to libertarian ideas similar to Justices Thomas and Scalia. If all property is protected from government by the legal philosophy that any "taking" must be compensated, then virtually all environmental, labor, and commercial regulation will prove unworkable.

All the legal and government apparatus for limiting the power of corporations to exploit the rest of us is being rapidly dismantled by advocates of the selfish class. But the government's apparatus for popular repression is being strengthened: witness the Bush administration's insistence that the detainees in Guantànamo and elsewhere should not be subject to court review, and that the President has the wartime power (in a "war" that they have declared could last for a generation) to declare anyone, even a citizen, an "illegal enemy combatant," who is denied virtually any legal rights. The administration also insists that there should be no limits on the means it uses to extract information from detainees, most recently pressuring Congress to prevent it from enacting limits on its rights to torture them, and then issuing a signing statement to the McCain-Feingold law, that outlaws such practices; the signing statement largely nullifies the law, at least as far as the President is concerned.

The news media have collaborated in limiting the sources of information available to the public, especially in keeping them corporate and government-friendly. It is no secret that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has become a pliable arm of the government, and that other big media conglomerates have largely followed Fox News' lead, because they see not only political benefits in doing so--greater access to power and information about government--but corporate economic benefits, as well, such as government complaisance as they conglomerate and merge even further, and gain control of larger and larger swathes of the information business. An example of this, after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled greater concentration of ownership of media outlets is Clear Channel Communications, which has swept up over 1200 radio stations across the nation. But even the relaxed limits of the act are not expansive enough for Rupert Murdoch, who has used his influence and access to gain permission to buy more TV stations, radio stations and newspapers, even if he needs special exceptions from the Act to do so.

However, if that's all the selfish class had done to insure its dominance, then competing institutions, especially labor, would have been able to put up more resistance. However, workers, and the unions that represent them, have been severely weakened by another part of the process: the internationalization of business, and the creation of a corporate-controlled international trading and monetary system.

Cutting tariffs and other trade barriers began as a liberal program; conservatives, until the 1980's, were largely protectionist, a holdover from earlier periods when American business had developed behind trade barriers before it could compete on world markets. However, in the 1990's, both Presidents George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton promoted NAFTA, the "free" trade treaty that created a free trade zone in all of North America. Clinton, in a gesture towards his labor union and environmental constituencies, included some side agreements (subsequently proven unenforceable) to subject NAFTA partners to fair labor and environmental laws. In addition, Clinton and the Republicans both supported the founding of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

Do you remember H. Ross Perot campaigning for president in 1991 and claiming that NAFTA would create a giant "sucking sound" of jobs disappearing from the US in their scramble into Mexico?

Even Perot didn't anticipate what would happen: not only were millions of jobs lost, but wage rates in Mexico went down; American and Canadian wages haven't been buoyed by NAFTA, either. Where did all those high-tech jobs go, the ones predicted by NAFTA proponents? To India, to China, to the Philippines, the result of new corporate-friendly trading rules set by the WTO? One thing is certain: the international labor environment has depressed wages and prices during the "jobless" recovery, because employers would much rather invest in contracted production abroad, where labor costs are lower and environmental regulations are laughable.

So, the effect of the developing international trading system has been to increase the power of corporate employers over their employees many-fold; it is so easy for a factory to pull up stakes and relocate to Mexico; in fact the US tax code even subsidizes such moves. This is really why labor unions have lost so much political power, and also so many of their members; their industries have been dismantled and sent abroad, or the corporations can threaten to do so if the workers don't capitulate to employer demands.

This kind of corporate "free trade" extended by the US to countries like China or Indonesia, or India has even more negative effects on US workers--and on Mexican workers as well. In fact, there are indications that Mexico is losing some of its new factory jobs to China, because Chinese workers can work for even lower wages than Mexican maquiladora workers. That may be another reason why Mexican wages haven't risen, and why US wages are held down.

A small sidelight: a conservative Republican Senator, Frank Murkowski, was outraged by the virtual slave labor conditions found on the Marianas, a US territory, and sponsored a bill (passed unanimously by the Senate) that would have imposed mainland labor laws on the territory. The bill was killed by Tom Delay, Republican Majority Leader in the House, who said of the appalling labor conditions, that they were "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island." His associate, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff spent several million dollars in that effort. Talk about a selfish class!

The winners of the "free" trade wars are the corporations and their owners, the selfish class. The process has paralleled the movement of peasants and decurions into the estates of the Senatorial class, that is corporations have reconstituted their production, have relocated much of their business, to sites all over the world, sites that are beyond the reach of whatever regulation the US can still enforce within its own territories.

Just like the selfish class in Rome, Corporations have also discovered ways to protect their profits from US taxes (by keeping them out of the US, by "realizing profit" in low tax countries through internal pricing mechanisms and much more), much as Senators protected their estates from the tax collector. In the process, they are destroying more and more of the manufacturing capacity of the US, much as the Senators destroyed Italy's peasant agriculture back in the expansive phase of the Roman Empire, when they imported so many slaves that free workers had to abandon the land for the cities and the dole.

Of course, just as the Roman legions tromped over the known world to make the world profitable for their selfish class, the aristocracy, so, today, US troops are stationed all over the globe and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, to make the world profitable for the multinational corporations (especially those closely associated with the US administration) and, of course, their owners, the contemporary selfish class. And just as the effect of the Roman Empire was to disfranchise and impoverish most of its people, while enriching the selfish class, so the contemporary US empire is working to the advantage of the few who are well-connected, and to the detriment of everyone else.

Empire, of course, has always been known as an opportunity for profit. In the good old days of the Roman Empire's expansion, both officers and men came back from campaigns with piles of loot, including slaves. It was this wealth, and the graft that succeeded it in the corrupt government of the provinces, that flooded into Rome, making it the wealthiest city in the world at that time. By the Fifth Century the Empire was in retreat and only occasionally offered new troves of loot, such as when Radagaisus, a Gothic leader, was defeated in his massive invasion of Italy at the beginning of the fifth century; his people were captured and sold into slavery and there were so many of them that the price of a slave went down precipitously. Nevertheless, the wealth already accumulated by Senatorial families had come from conquest, but most of it many years, even many generations before.

Now in Iraq the tales of corruption and of huge amounts of cash simply vanishing have become legion. Not only are there corporations like Custer Battles and Black Water Security that seem to be peculiarly free with public money, but there are the larger corporations, like Halliburton and the oil companies, that have benefited from the Coalition Provisional Authority's privatization of Iraq's public sector corporations. Even more egregious, however, was the shipment of $5 billion of frozen Iraqi funds, in cash, to the CPA to distribute to its political allies and cronies. A Fed official commented in an email on June 11, 2003: “Just when you think you’ve seen it all... the CPA is ordering $2,401,600,000 in currency to be shipped out on Friday, June 18.” C5A cargo planes airlifted the cash in shrink-wrapped pallet loads. Much of it is now unaccounted for.

So, we've covered how the Roman aristocracy, the selfish class, gained dominance in the fourth century, but how did the corporations and the radical conservatives, who speak for the contemporary selfish class interests manage to do so in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?

In the case of the United States, the takeover of the selfish class began almost as a conspiracy, in reaction to the overreaching of the Johnson presidency in the late 1960's. This was when liberals attempted to remake society, through regulation, through institutions like the Office of Economic Opportunity, EPA and OSHA, through civil rights legislation, and through funding generally characterized as "the war on poverty," while at the same time ramping up the war in Vietnam. The economic effects were disastrous enough (triggering inflation and then "stagflation") to create a backlash harnessed first by Nixon and then by Reagan, but probably more important was the effect on the conservative movement: think tanks founded, direct mail organizations created, religious reactionaries mobilized as political allies.

I said "almost a conspiracy," because the conservative movement was not the creation of a few people conspiring to take power, but more like the consensus of a class, the selfish class, those who own capital or control large corporations. It's as if the descendants of the people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" had finally found a program, a mythos, an economics and a politics that would oust his successors from power and erase his (and LBJ's) legacy.

The takeover of the selfish class ranges far beyond the political and even the economic. Ask yourself: why do Americans acquiesce in the most unequal pay differentials on the planet, an average of 425 to one between CEO's and workers in 2003 (it may be much higher now, since CEO earnings have continued to escalate), when differentials in other wealthy countries were nearer 10 or 12 to one? Why do we agree to cut taxes on the wealthiest and institute other taxes which hurt the poorest and the middle class? Why is it that the sweetheart deals with firms like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group do not become huge corruption scandals? What about the nearly complete lack of accounting that has accompanied the Iraq occupation? Why can the administration shrug off scandals like Abu Ghraib and Guantànamo, and pillory its critics like Senator Durbin for "disrespecting" the troops? How did "liberal" become a dirty word?

Some of the answers are more readily dealt with in separate sections: on media and entertainment, on education, on ideology and religion, on crime, on the developing autocracy. In all of these sectors there have been major changes within the last several decades, and in nearly all of them the intrusive hand of corporate money has been crucial. In other words, they have been strongly influenced, if not taken over, by large corporations or their owners. At the same time there has been the aggressive development and promotion of ideas and policies favorable to corporations, the wealthy, and their allies, religious fundamentalists.

There is, however, a major political component. How did Republicans not only become the dominant party, but become to be perceived as the party speaking for the white middle class, despite policies which favor the selfish class, the very wealthy and the large corporations? Even in liberal, or "blue" states, there are Republican governors, even a Republican mayor of most liberal New York! Republicans have been able to project populism, while advocating the opposite. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan have both been successful exemplars of this skill, as have Republican governors like Pataki and Schwartznegger. The primary exemplar of conservative populism was Ronald Reagan, another film star, who successfully played the role of just plain Aw Shucks folks.

Republicans have also successfully taken over what I call "the politics of diversion." For several centuries, white aristocrats in the South were able to maintain power (even as they changed political labels) by scaring white have-nots that blacks would take over unless whites were united against them. While blacks have now gained legal civil rights, there are still ways to keep them marginalized, and still ways to use their numbers as rallying points, but now diversionary politics has been expanded.

Large portions of the population can be galvanized against their own interests, Republicans have learned, by pressing the social/religious issues: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, immigration and crime (the latter has a racial undertone). Fear, which was used by the selfish class in the Roman Empire, is an important component in all these issues: fear of out of control sexuality, fear of loss of control and fear of the other. You can keep people down if you scare them enough. The most important issue which is governed by fear, and has been successfully manipulated by the Republicans, is national security and terrorism, which worked for the Republicans in 2002 and 2004.

The Roman Senators, as the functionaries of the autocratic state put into place by Diocletian, were the beneficiaries of the widespread fear of chaos in the Empire, and of the barbarian incursions coming from without. People did what they were told, because when they didn't, things had fallen apart--at least that's what the selfish class persuaded everyone to believe.

Things aren't falling apart in the United States, yet, but if you are passively saturated by TV and talk radio you may think that they are. Is that an intention of the selfish class? Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine that one of the differences between the US and Canada, which has as many guns per capita, is the relative absence of fear in Canada and its pervasiveness in the US. And that was before 9/11. Since 9/11 the Republicans have learned to use terrorism to their advantage, as well. The shilling of fear may have much more to do with the way the media market works, than it does with any selfish class intent to condition people to keep their heads down. But whether there is a conspiracy or not, the omnipresence of fear does make diversionary politics that much more effective. Because of what we see on TV, we can have so many more things to be afraid of.

Therefore, we leave politics to the "big boys," and respond positively to people who talk tough, and reject those who sound reasonable, or who play it safe. As Clinton said of US politics, it is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. Unless, of course, events prove just how wrong those strong talkers prove to be.

Perhaps the peace movement will force the Bush administration to slowly disengage from Iraq. Perhaps the corporate profiteering that has marked our occupation there will be reversed, as well, but the dominance of the selfish class will hardly be shaken by such temporary detours. Think of what the elite have already accomplished. They now have laws and programs and a government in place in the US that will protect their interests, and even with the peace movement gaining in strength there is little political will among the "opposition" (whether political, such as the Democratic Party, or institutional, such as labor unions) to oppose them.

The timidity of the known political leaders opposing the radical conservatives is remarkable. Hillary Clinton, for example, has proposed sending more troops to Iraq. Senator Durbin, who spoke out about the torture of detainees, has apologized and lapsed into chastened silence. Senators Schumer and Kerry said they would ask "tough" questions of the President's Supreme Court nominees, but enough opposition leaders had signed onto a compromise in the Senate, that there were no effective filibusters, which might have blocked the radical conservative takeover of the Supreme Court.

The selfish class can be stopped, but only if people are awakened to the losses they have already sustained in addition to the losses of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan: losses of wages and secure jobs, losses of protection from large corporations, losses to the environment and what that will mean for the very future of the Earth, losses of civil protections from a domineering government and losses of democratic control.

Remember how Octavian/Augustus took over the people's office of Tribune? (He did so to gain veto power over the Senate, but the people didn't rise up, did they?) Something similar is happening now, which will be covered in another section. . If people can recognize that the current disposition of power and wealth is not inevitable, and that the overwhelming majority, both in the US and around the world, are being driven into the 21st century equivalent of the class of humiliores, then perhaps real political change can happen.

A modest (but potentially revolutionary) start would be to take money out of politics by public funding of campaigns, and free media access to the candidates of recognized political parties. The problem, of course, for even such a modest procedural reform, is that with the Supreme Court Buckley v Valeo ruling, there is no constitutional way to remove all private money from politics. And those in power are indebted to those with money. Further, the large media companies would use all the capital at their disposal to oppose any free access proposal, or would shunt it off to some kind of public access agreement modeled on the ones local cable companies have agreed to with states: setting up public access channels, which few people ever watch.

Probably, the only way to stop the selfish class, and the disasters that will surely follow their continued dominance, will be to mobilize people without relying on access to the media, without depending, in other words, on institutions already controlled by the selfish class. Probably that their mobilization would have to be nearly revolutionary in its appeal. A peace movement might provide the impetus for that, in the face of a disaster like Iraq, which is really much worse than Vietnam, because it was so willfully entered into, and because it has unleashed much greater danger to all of us than existed before the US takeover. The positive effect of the peace movement could be to finally persuade people that the security they thought they had purchased at great price, by supporting the selfish class, is no security at all.

Then perhaps they will begin to question the dominance of the selfish class, itself.