How the Selfish Class
Marginalizes everyone else

Letter from Senator Sidonius, a man of the selfish class:

"…things seem to be always happening which a man of my order…can neither mention without unpleasantness, nor pass over without neglect of duty….The bearer of this is an obscure and humble person, so harmless, insignificant and helpless that he seems to invite his own discomfiture; his grievance is that the Bretons are secretly enticing his slaves away…I think the unfortunate man may be able to make good his charge, if indeed a stranger from the country, unarmed, abject and impecunious to boot, has ever a chance of a fair and kindly hearing….(Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius: Letter to Riothamus, King of the Bretons, c.470)

If this "humble person" owns slaves, who are the ordinary people? Obviously, to a member of the selfish class like Sidonius, they don't count at all. In fact, to a Senator of the highest order, soon to become the Bishop of Clermont, his range of attention only extends to the people found at the bottom of his own social order.

Anyone below a landlord in rank has no rights, and is not worthy of mention. It is also likely that the "slaves" Sidonius mentions in this letter were not slaves at all: they were probably coloni, that is, serfs; they were legally "free," but governed by their landlord as if they were slaves (classified as servae terra, slaves of the land). Most workers on fifth century estates were coloni, not slaves, but their status was little better than the slaves who had worked on villas in the earlier classical period. In another of Sidonius' letters he mentions "my own servants" constructing a sweat lodge for him, but beyond their function, they are of no interest. A close reading of his voluminous letters will find rarely a mention of them by name, but the names listed of his social equals are legion.

We do not have serfs in the 21st Century, not yet, but we do increasingly have wage slaves, and with the new bankruptcy law we could begin to have debt "peonage" that will render people's positions little better than serfs. All we need is a major recession, perhaps caused by foreign creditors refusing to lend us enough money (the US borrows more than half of the world's foreign debt every year), and millions of people living paycheck to paycheck with mounting debt will become debt-slaves.

How did the Roman people lose most of their rights, and will it happen here?

When the Empire was expanding, the few benefited and the many lost ground--does that sound familiar? The beneficiaries were the wealthy few, and the lucky who became wealthy, because they were able to take advantage of the immense influx of treasures and slaves won by conquest. Some of those who went out as soldiers also benefited.

On the other hand, the peasants and artisans were unable to compete in the markets against slave labor in large plantations (the Romans called them villas), and in many manufactories; the abundance of slaves were the result of thousands of captives being brought back in military campaigns; they were the most lucrative spoil of all, since you didn't have to transport them in wagons, and they worked for a lifetime. Over time the yeomen peasants lost what limited political power they had to begin with, and many ended up on the dole in the nearby cities, thereby weakening any potential power of the urban proletariat as well.

Why did common people lose power, even the limited power they had? Ask yourself: what did they have to contribute? What inherent power did they have? They could mass as an unruly rabble when they were upset, but they were unarmed. They were economically, as well as politically disfranchised by Empire, which meant they became surplus persons. Anything they could do was done more cheaply by the innumerable slaves carried off in wars of conquest. When Octavian named himself Augustus, and became Emperor for life, he took to himself the only office supposedly representing the people's interests, that of the Tribune, because with its power he could veto any legislation by the already emasculated Senate.

A comparable political transformation in our era may take a little longer and will be covered elsewhere , but a similar economic process appears to be happening today: the huge profits of a global "empire" are accruing to a very tiny portion of the world population, those who control global organizations, or the global selfish class.

Jobs are not being taken by slaves--except in extreme instances, like the captive Chinese workers on the Marianas islands--but outsourcing and off-shoring are rendering more and more American workers "redundant," like the Roman plebs, who were reduced to living on the dole. Globalization is forcing those still lucky to have a job to accept more and more "give-backs," cuts in healthcare insurance and higher contributions to it, and raises if at all, that do not keep up with inflation: in other words a reduction in the standard of living they can afford. This process shows up in income and wealth statistics--growing indebtedness at the lower end of the income scale, while the very wealthy are getting richer at a rising pace that leaves even the merely wealthy far behind.

On the one hand, average credit card debt in this country keeps on rising (the 2001 figure was $7,500, up from $3,000 in 1990, and the delinquency rate had risen to about 5%) . A growing source of credit in subsequent years, however, is revalued home mortgages, people pocketing the difference between the original price of their home and the new, higher price they then can spend: the cash/credit given them in lieu of the difference. This can only last while the housing boom continues, and will also cut into the last resource many will have for retirement later on. As a result of the escalating debt of all kinds, the average American family owed approximately 100% of their yearly income in 2002. Indications are that indebtedness has escalated further in the last three years.

On the other hand, the very wealthy, the selfish class, keep on piling on wealth. While we have working poor who are homeless, because they can't afford rents in the bloated housing market, new houses are being built at a rapid rate, and they keep on getting larger and more expensive. The average price for a home rose to $254,000 in Oct. 2004, which puts it out of reach of most middle income buyers.

On the other hand, the richest one percent in the US held over a third of all wealth in 2001, and the bottom 90% owned only 28.5%, and actually these figures understate how much the wealthy control, since they had lost considerable wealth in the stock market collapse that year; they have now more than regained it.

The top ten percent actually owned almost 72% of all wealth even after losing much in a recent recession, and the very rich owned almost half of that. The top 0.1% has gained the largest share of wealth since 1980. Accounting for only 145,000 people in the US with incomes above $1.6 million per year, this group that David Cay Johnston calls "the hyper-rich," have seen their average incomes increase by two and a half times since 1980--the beginning of conservative (selfish class) pre-eminence--and their share of national income has almost doubled to 7.4%. The share of the bottom 90% has gone down.

How has this happened, and what does it mean for the position of "the rest of us?" In The Rich , I pointed out that the rules of society have shifted to the advantage of the wealthy, especially since Reagan's accession to the presidency, and have continued to tilt further in their favor with the ascendancy of radical conservatives. The rules that are particularly important have to do with tax policy (for example, tax cuts on dividends and interest amount to $23 billion in 2005, but three-quarters of that amount goes to those with incomes over $200,000; this is revenue that represents slashed programs or higher tax rates for everyone else). Virtually every aspect of modern society as it has changed in the last generation, however, has conspired to increase the wealth and power of the very wealthy, and to diminish that of everyone else.

Let's look again at what happened in Fifth Century Rome to gain further perspective on what may be in store for us. When the Empire was reorganized under Diocletian in the fourth century, legal distinctions were created between the honorable classes (honesti) and the humble classes (humili). The honorable classes were protected from most kinds of punishment, but, in addition, if they were landlords or employers, they were set over the humili as their absolute rulers. The Senatorial landlord was judge and jury to his humiliores; they could be punished by him with any penalty he saw fit, including death, and it was up to the landlord to decide if any of his coloni should be sent into the army if the state established a conscription. Further, humili who fled their lord could be hunted down just the way escaped slaves had been, even though, legally, they were still free. The legal justification for this treatment was that they owed the lord their labor, which shows how the selfish class had manipulated the law to conform to its own interests.

Even if a state official, like a procurator, sentenced someone, there were major differences in treatment accorded the two legal classes: humili convicted of forgery would be sent to the public mines for life--essentially a death sentence--while honesti convicted of the same crime would only be banished. If condemned to death, humili were subject to torture, and to the most excruciating of deaths (like being torn apart by wild beasts), while honesti were executed by the relatively humane method of beheading.

We haven't reached the point, yet, where there are different legal classes, but the inequitable treatment of minorities in the US justice system has led many African-Americans and Hispanics to call it the "Just us" system. It is also true that the more money you have the less likely that you will end up in the clutches of the system, but that has always been true, the selfish classes have always had legal advantages, even before they gained dominance.

With the proliferation of illegal aliens, however, we have more and more people who are seen as belonging to a different legal class. The 2005 Congress passed the Real ID Act, in attempt to make it harder for "illegals" to get drivers licenses, the basic ID card for most transactions. If that law is upheld, it will create a new legally defined underclass--those without ID's.

But it is not just the poor and aliens who are affected by the dominance of the selfish class. Why is the middle class shrinking, why are the income gaps growing so huge, why are wages barely keeping up with inflation in the so-called "jobless recovery" of 2001-5?

What is happening is comparable to the loss sustained by yeomen farmers with the expansion of the Roman Empire. Global organizations benefit from American foreign policy, but workers, even professional workers, lose, because they are pitted against people with comparable skills who can be paid miniscule wages (at least by American standards), since they live in India, China, Russia, or South Africa. A global corporation can hire or contract for labor or goods anywhere in the world. An American journalist, for example, discovered that his brain-scan in Ohio was being read by someone in Bangalore, India!

Thomas L. Friedman argues that "the world is flat," meaning that all workers will have to compete on a global scale. Friedman doesn't point this out, but the only people who benefit from such a structure, ultimately, are those who own and control global corporations, the global selfish class.

According to the conservative argument, our economy should be creating more jobs, since a "business-friendly" government is in control of the presidency and the Congress and most of the courts. Furthermore, controls over business are being slashed, now that environmental regulations are being "softened." But what has happened? Instead, since 2001 we've had the most anemic job creation the US has experienced in a recovery, and wages have hardly budged, although corporations, especially those which have "low labor costs," have enjoyed high profits, i.e. the selfish class has benefited. Why?

Because of the global market, corporations are exporting manufacturing and service jobs, which puts workers on the defensive. Wages don't rise even if worker "productivity" does rise. Employers don't hire new workers when there is an increase in demand for the product or service, they just demand more from the ones still working for them. Employees, cowed by the fear that their jobs could be exported, will just do what they are told. Scared, hard-working employees, or "out-sourced" employees, it makes no difference to employers, members of the selfish class.

Another reason for the sluggish job growth is the rising cost of health care. Health care has increased the cost of hiring new workers, and the auto companies have transferred a lot of their production across the border to Canada, because of Canadian single payer health care, which lowers auto company costs. Another reason for slow job growth is a new "flexibility" won by employers from Bush's "reform" of work rules, which allows employers to require workers to work overtime, or on weekends and simply adjust their working hours rather than pay them extra.

All of these reasons for slow or non-existent job growth may also be a result of union weakness. Unions haven't been this weak since the 1920's. If they were stronger they would have resisted most of the changes pushed through by the selfish class. Then corporations would have had to hire more workers.

Corporations can and do put workers into competition with workers anywhere in the world now, because of free trade policies, the protection of the World Trade Organization and technology. There is not only "outsourcing" of production, there is also "offshoring" of service jobs that people used to think would be safe: programming jobs, telemarketing jobs, back office jobs, design jobs. Whole departments are being moved to places like India (a local IBM programming section, for example). The effect of all this is to put American workers, who used to earn over $10 an hour, into direct competition with equally skilled workers in some place like Bangalore, India who might consider themselves lucky to earn $10 a day.

It's true that American workers shouldn't buy ATV's and snowmobiles, computers and entertainment systems, clothes and groceries with credit card debt, or mortgage debt, but they do. Many use debt because their jobs don't earn the money they require to live a middle class lifestyle. Yet it's a lifestyle they've been taught to expect by the media, itself owned and controlled by the selfish class.

Could debtor's prison be next? Consumer debt is increasing because people's wages are lagging behind prices, because jobs are scarce, because…

In fact the whole world economy appears to be dependent on American consumer credit purchases. Without American consumption, world demand would wither--as it did in Fifth Century Rome. American debt floats the world economy.

But now, with the new bankruptcy law, a central "reform" of the selfish class, debtors will not be able to write off their debts, unless they liquidate their assets: like selling their homes. They will be forced into working off their debts over long periods. Once this happens, however, the whole edifice built on consumer credit will begin to crumble. Then only demand for goods and services based on people's earnings will remain--consumption could collapse!

This is part of the inexorable logic of the selfish class. If the wealthy make it harder and harder for others to survive, eventually the hen laying the golden eggs, i.e. mass American consumption, will collapse. This happened in the Roman Empire, and it could happen again. Consumption is only maintained now while it floats on American consumer debt, but as people's wages stagnate, as debt has to be repaid, that consumption will stop growing, may even go into free fall--and then where will the wealthy make their profits? In China, in India? But China and India are massively dependent on selling goods and services to… American consumers. This is why the rule of the selfish class is ultimately self-defeating.

In the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, consumption, except by the wealthy, was at depression levels--probably one of the reasons for the chaos leading up to Diocletian. Wealth was too concentrated, i.e. there were too few people in the selfish class to sustain the economy, and no new imperial spoil was flooding into the Empire, since there were no more conquests, only warfare to defend the Empire's over-expansion. Despite the lack of new wealth, there was still the expectation of an imperial lifestyle, which had been created in the heady years of the Empire.

There is a parallel with the US experience in the post World War II years compared to the present: after the war until the mid-1970's American workers could realistically expect to earn more each year, even if they kept the same jobs, even if they were not promoted. Overall, American prosperity may still be driven by global profits, but it is not enjoyed by the majority of Americans, who now experience falling wages (in purchasing power) from year to year, and cannot realistically expect to earn more next year unless they do get a promotion, or a better job.

Meanwhile, the top tiers of the income mountain, the upper echelon of the selfish class, keep on gaining greater and greater shares of the wealth. If we were to place everyone on an altitude corresponding to their wealth, the great bulk of the people in the US would be within a few hundred feet of sea level. However there are some Americans (like Walmart's Waltons) who would be higher than Mount Everest. While many people struggle to pay rent of $800, say, for minimal apartments of under 1000 square feet, others build houses of 7,000 square feet, have country homes in addition to their city condos, perhaps own ski chalets in Vail, and beachfront retreats in Malibu or Miami Beach. The differences in the way people live is perhaps not quite as stark as that between Senator Sidonius and the people he refers to as "slaves," people who lived in one-room hovels, but what is important is the trend; until the 1980's the way people lived in the US appeared to be on a converging path. Now those paths are diverging at a much faster rate.

Why is this happening? Mainstream economists don't seem to have a clue, but to the economists at the Economic Policy Institute the reasons are fairly clear. Disentangling the technicalities, the reasons come down to political decisions on trade policy, health care policy, wage policy, tax policy and the relative weakness of unions, the only institution potentially capable of defending workers. Congress, faithfully representing the selfish class has kept down the minimum wage since the 1970's; it has raised it only after long lags, while inflation continues to erode its value. Other low-wage workers' wages therefore lag as well, since they tend to follow the minimum.

Meanwhile the Congress and the President, the same representatives of the selfish class, have insisted on making taxes more and more regressive; health care costs make it more expensive for employers to hire workers, despite stagnant wages (we spend more on health care than any other country in the world, and we still leave over 40 million people uninsured), and trade policies have exported millions of jobs as corporations compete to cut labor costs by relocating or outsourcing.

Further, cuts in domestic government programs reduce the competitiveness of American workers, a typical instance of the selfish class's short-term thinking. Bill Gates has explained, for example, that Microsoft has set up software research centers in China and India, because of the greater availability of engineering graduates in those countries compared to the US.

So, there we have pretty substantial reasons why wages aren't rising, and why jobs aren't being created, even though corporations are earning tremendous profits. All of these are the results of political decisions made by government, made by people who supposedly represent "the people," except that they don't; they represent the selfish class.

Since these results come from political decisions, they are not inevitable. They are political decisions made by the selfish class as it consolidates its power both here and abroad. Economic inequality has increased dramatically because of these policies, and all you need to do is ask who benefits from these trends to see why they are happening.

If the wealthy gain a larger proportion of total wealth, that increases not only their purchasing power, but their overall power in a society. As others lose proportionately, they become more vulnerable, and therefore more easily manipulated and controlled, which increases the power and wealth of the wealthy in a self-reinforcing cycle. Proponents of the selfish class will give many reasons why this is the best policy, why their wealth should be inviolate. They have enlisted many people, in religion, in economics, in politics and even in the arts to reinforce these trends. After all, the selfish class has more and more money to pay people to hype their interests and to promote the values and styles that celebrate and magnify their merits.

Why does a society accept changes in which most people clearly lose? In the early fourth century, Diocletian bound workers to their factories and had them branded to prevent them from running off; he bound bakers' sons to become bakers, and bound grain-shippers liable for the shipments of grain sent to the cities. When the sons of grain-shippers began to desert their fathers' businesses because of this regulation, the Emperor bound the sons to follow in their fathers' footsteps. Roman society became a caste society from Diocletian on. Why did Romans submit to this? Why did they allow themselves, supposedly free, to be treated as slaves?

Language can be revealing here: before Diocletian the Emperor was addressed as the "heaven-born Augustus," and with many other superlatives, as well, but never as master. But from Diocletian on, the Emperor was addressed as "Master" (dominus) or "Lord," the same title used by a slave when speaking to his owner. It was also the same title used by a serf when addressing his landlord, modeling subservience down the line, reinforcing the stranglehold of the selfish class over society.

Here is why people submitted: fear. Before Diocletian, the Empire had gone through a devastating period of instability in the previous century: usurpers kept on popping up like mushrooms. For decades there were three and four usurping emperors fighting for control in different parts of the Empire. Diocletian put a stop to the civil wars, and also attempted, through price controls, to put a stop to the long inflationary depression only partly caused by the chaos. The controls over the people were his (and his successors') solution to preventing chaos from erupting again. People submitted because they were scared; they were scared that if they didn't submit--and this included the powerful Senatorial class--the chaos would resume. Fear of chaos is a powerful tool that has been used by selfish classes and their representatives for millennia.

According to some commentaries on the 2004 election, President Bush and the Republicans in Congress won because of fear, because Republicans were trusted with Bush's proclaimed War on Terror and Democrats were not (if Bush really won, but that is a separate issue).

The Patriot Act was pushed through Congress in the wake of the destruction of the twin World Trade Towers, passed overwhelmingly although most Congressmen hadn't even read its text. Fear is also why there have been so few and ineffectual protests to the creation of the new legal status "illegal enemy combatant," even when not only Afghans and Arabs, but even several American citizens have been branded with that label. By labeling them as such, the government has denied them legal representation, denied them the right to know the charges against them, and denied them the right to defend against these (unknown) charges. Even the growing scandals in American-run military prisons (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram and many others) have only prompted government denials, energized the few who were against the war in Iraq to begin with, and disgusted the many.

Was the dominance of the selfish class in the Fifth Century based on fear? Senators in the fourth century were afraid of sticking their necks out against Diocletian, because he offered much desired civil peace, but what looked like a political defeat for the senatorial class actually became a political victory.

Senators were prohibited from military positions, and therefore could not realistically compete as successors to the Emperors, since they did not control the military. The field (mobile, elite) army usually named the emperors, after all. But the new bureaucratized state came under the control of the Senators, the selfish class.

In the post-Diocletian dispensation, Senators were also no longer in danger of being on the wrong side of a succession conflict, so they were unlikely to face the kind of mass expropriations that had taken place before. At the same time their power grew under the new government.

After Diocletian it was the bureaucracy that governed, not the Emperor. It governed in the interest of the selfish class, i.e. the Senators. But fear was a major support of the state: agentes in rebus, as I mentioned in another context , spied on everyone and could destroy anyone, executions were designed to be terrifying, but the force of the state tended to fall on those who could not defend themselves. Senators and their relatives either ran the bureaucracy, or knew those who did. As a selfish class, they stuck together.

The regime was not all based on fear, however. Senators even before Diocletian were owed tremendous deference, and both history and religion increased their authority. But such class deference was foreign to American political culture until recently.

Why do our contemporaries accept such things as the dramatic increase in CEO pay, when their own pay stagnates? Why can Congress get away with not raising the minimum wage, when its value has eroded because of inflation? Why has our government negotiated international treaties that lower the barriers to trade and capital flows around the world? Why has it neglected to safeguard workers' rights or environmental standards? Why have taxes been "reformed" several times since 1980, in each case favoring the wealthy over both the middle class and the poor? All of these changes have favored the selfish class, and most of them precede 9/11.

There was no overriding fear to drive this trend before 2001. Since 9/11 the addition of fear has accelerated the marginalization of everyone except the very wealthy and well-connected, but the process has been developing since at least 1980, when Reagan won power, probably since 1968.

There has been a cultural shift, partly spontaneous, but also created with political intent. The owners of capital have mounted a culture war and it has been blindingly successful. The culture war began as a reaction to the excesses of the sixties, and as a reaction to the Great Society, when Lyndon Johnson made the fatal mistake of attempting to transform society at the same time that we were fighting the Viet Cong halfway around the world; we couldn't do both; we ended up doing neither.

The landslide election of LBJ, and his attempt to do too much all at the same time probably inspired the conservative revival, first, very tentatively, under Nixon, and then more strongly under Reagan and after. Consider Nixon's winning election coalition: a coalition of the un-young, the un-poor, the un-minorities, and the un-North: all the people who had been on the losing side during the New Deal/Great Society--with the exception of the South, which had been alienated from the Democrats' coalition by the Civil Rights movement even earlier.

The very dominance of LBJ and Great Society policies created the reaction that led the selfish class to invest in alternative ideas, think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Foundation to oppose the Brookings Institution and the liberal foundations. (Ever noticed how the "liberal" foundations do good works, while the conservative ones have put their money into conservative political ideas?)

Not only did the Mellons, Scaifes, Coors and others pour a lot of money into these start-ups, but they were founded with specifically political goals. These were not to be foundations that launched private programs, such as the anti-poverty programs and development programs of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, or the educational programs of the Gates Foundation. These were foundations established to develop, articulate and sell conservative/reactionary ideas, ideas to counter "liberal" bias in the media and academe. Research was goal-oriented. It should result in political statements supportive of the selfish class, likewise programs, the creation of policy experts and finally, campaigns to help the corporations and the wealthy take back the power they felt they had lost during the New Deal and the Great Society. They set themselves to undo the Progressive era reforms of the early 20th Century, as well.

They generated ideas such as the novel one that a government regulation was a "taking" of private property and had to be compensated, but also they revived and expanded old ideas such as "free trade," which became the "Washington consensus." Consequently they demanded the privatization of services such as drinking water in South Africa, and opening up nations to private (and foreign) investment. All these ideas promoted the interests of capital, and of the selfish class that owned most of it.

The most extreme case of promoting the Washington Consensus was the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq declaring all Iraq's public corporations and services open not only to privatization, but to foreign ownership.

This was also the time when wealthy donors funded direct mail geniuses like Grover Norquist, the Religious Majority and other conservative Christian groups to begin operations. In addition, consider how many billions the corporations annually spend on PR and image advertising. Because of their increasingly global reach, corporations were becoming much larger, and much more powerful. Their donations, through PAC's, to political candidates became many times more than the amounts unions were able to give. Think of the relative strengths, then of workers, on the one hand and the selfish class on the other.

In the same period, unions stagnated, became bureaucratized, complacent and inflexible. They were unable to keep up with changes in the work-force, and were unsuccessful in crossing national borders. They were also successfully attacked and their power limited after investigations uncovered corruption in some of their leaders.

If you read The Grapes of Wrath, or look at the WPA murals in Post Offices that date back to the 1930's, or hear a recording of FDR, or even of JFK, you realize that what you have glimpsed is not just our past, but a different political culture. Values have changed. In some respects we have definitely made progress. Mississippi may actually put an old man into prison for a civil rights murder committed over 40 years ago. Some black people, some Hispanics are near the highest pinnacles of power, although racism and ethnic discrimination still exist. But many of those changes for the better are cosmetic, while the increasing control of the selfish class is anything but.

In some ways, the plight of inner-city minorities is worse than it has ever been. Why? Because, now they are blamed for their own misfortunes; they can no longer blame their problems on legal discrimination and segregation. If they are still poor and handicapped by crime-ridden neighborhoods, the conservative consensus is growing that it's because they're lazy and dishonest, certainly not because whites still discriminate against them! Middle class white people don't discriminate against Condi Rice, after all!

To see how we have really changed, consider some of the heroes of the '30's and '40's. "Workers" were our heroes, producing us out of the Depression. "Rosy the Riveter" embodied women workers on the assembly line during World War II; they were celebrated along with soldiers, because they produced the "means to do the job." Unions were strong and getting stronger. Solidarity was not an outworn slogan. Joe Hill, the martyred union leader, was celebrated in song. Men in top hats were "fat cats," derided, disliked, certainly not emulated. At the same time, the income tax was highly progressive. As late as the Eisenhower years, the top brackets paid over 70% of income over $100,000 (maybe the equivalent of half a million in income today).

These "anti-business" times and policies, by the way, did not drive the US to stagnation; it was a period of tremendous growth and investment that continued into the heady 1960's.

But abrupt social changes, especially the changes precipitated by the civil rights and feminist movements, led to reactions against change. Reaction was strengthened by the disaster of Vietnam, and an economy ravaged by inflation. It's probably no accident that the radical conservatives, the spearhead of the selfish class, won their first real victory with Reagan, at a time when the US was suffering double-digit inflation and an energy crisis.

In the Roman Empire, the Church was consciously established by Constantine (306-337) and later by Theodosius the Great (378-395) to provide unity and obedience to the Empire in chaotic times. Ambrose of Milan even asserted her primacy. He demanded penance of the Emperor Theodosius in part because the Emperor had tolerated pagan practices among his subjects. Theodosius was forced to mount the steps of the cathedral on his knees, and forced also to decree an end to the toleration of pagan rituals. Afterwards, the Emperor was also forced to accept the destruction of many pagan temples and statuary by zealous Christians led by rabid monks.

The religious extremism of the Nicene Church of the fifth century is echoed by the fundamentalist/evangelist Christians of the 21st. In both cases, religion plays an important role in reinforcing the power of the state, and the dominance of the selfish class, teaching intolerance of those who might oppose it, while supporting those in power--as long as they carry out "moral" policies.

Ambrose of Milan played a role a bit like Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) who intervened in the 2004 American election to insure that obedient bishops would exclude presidential candidate John Kerry from communion. The reason: because Kerry, although personally against abortion, had stated that he was against laws that would prohibit it.

The so-called "religious right" has provided a diversionary politics that has further marginalized the people, because among believers it is unimportant what a politician may advocate, if he is against abortion and gay marriage (and gun control!). Question: why did most whites, and some blacks, vote for George W. Bush in South Carolina? Because Kerry was "a baby killer." This gives the radical conservatives considerable camouflage for their campaign to remake the US (and the world) into a place that protects and expands the power of the selfish class.

Diversionary politics has played an important role in US history, but historically it was more racial or anti-foreign than it was religious. In the US South, poor whites, who were as poor as the slaves, were mobilized by the plantation aristocracy to keep blacks down before the Civil War. After it, poor whites were mobilized by the KKK and other white supremacy organizations to repress blacks, to keep them from demanding equality. But the poor whites were losers as well, in the poverty of the region and in their exclusion from the wealth and privileges enjoyed by the former aristocracy. They helped maintain a social system that preserved the economic backwardness of the region. It is no wonder that the religious politics of diversion works so well in the American South; it fits the historical pattern much better than does a politics of class, or of openness.

In the Fifth Century, the Church and the Imperial government provided most of the information current among the people, but there were no "news" organizations. Most people in the cities were diverted (literally) by public entertainments, the public baths and the dole. There still were the mimes (increasingly disapproved of by the Church as immoral), which occasionally provided some tongue-in-cheek criticism of the powers that be, but they were diminished in importance during the fifth century. Most people gained information informally, from their co-workers, families, and from their lords, the landlords and Senators and their hangers-on.

Twentieth Century America was quite different in that, of course, we had a proliferation of newspapers, radio news and TV news, none of which were controlled by government. Always American governments have tried to manipulate the news, but the independence of news institutions and First Amendment rights prevented that--up until recently.

"The Press" has undergone revolutionary changes since 1980. As corporations have gotten larger and more international, conservative administrations have allowed them to buy up TV, cable and radio networks as well as newspapers, publishers, movie companies and Internet companies. The number of major corporations controlling all these media outlets has dwindled from more than 50 to less than ten. You would be hard-pressed to argue that the major news outlets are still independent. The major networks are all owned by large "media" corporations, and despite the disclaimers their leaders issued when their corporations initially took them over, ownership has increasingly dictated not only the editorial content, but the slant and selection of news. There have even been documented cases in which, for example, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox and the NY Post, and many other media, dictated a news story, later proven wrong, that was run in his papers and on his network.

Even before the media takeover, however, a magazine like Time, ostensibly a newsweekly, used language like "union boss" and "corporate statesman" to flavor their news in the desired direction. With TV this coloration is both more profound and more subtle; corporate images have been portrayed in more and more positive lights, as "engines of growth" and as ecologically sensitive. Ads show wildlife and oil refineries co-existing happily, and spills of pollutants like MTBE may be reported, but corporate evasion of their responsibility for cleanup is underplayed. Meanwhile, the media love stories that showcase that "government is the problem." Nowhere but on union newsletters will you see stories about workers producing; people are no longer portrayed as being of much importance except in feel-good "human interest" stories. They have been reduced to being only "consumers" and "taxpayers."

Magazines and TV news follow the Rich and Famous, people like Donald Trump, or Paris Hilton; bestseller novels are about the wealthy, and retiring CEO's like Jack Welch (of GE, the largest media owner of all) sell their tell-all stories for huge advances. Reality TV pits shark-like wannabe's against each other to gain the patronage of a media-savvy CEO, while pretty young women compete for the favors of a fake millionaire. It is a very different culture from one in which there was the great success of the Grapes of Wrath.

In the Fifth Century, a colon would approach his lord on bended knee, or even prostrate himself, if he summoned up the nerve to approach him at all. He would be received in a hall that resembled the nave of a moderate-sized church. The Senator would typically be seated on a dais beneath a half-domed ceiling; the half-circular expanse would be decorated with mosaics celebrating the lord or his ancestors, and the peasant couldn't help but be awed, usually into incoherence. In the Indian Empire, even the pettiest of British civil servants would sit at large desks raised at least three steps above his Indian clerks and any Indian petitioners. I was struck by how the Imperial pattern had been reproduced in the succeeding Republic of India, and how foreign it seemed (in the late 60's) to an American like me, raised in a democratic culture.

Times change. More recently, CEO offices in the US have been satirized as huge expanses with tremendous gleaming desks and expansive views over the city (New York, LA, it doesn't matter). The style is different, but the intent is similar: to awe those ushered into the inner sanctum. Line workers would not be among those allowed into the august presence, although union representatives might be, but mostly the CEO would be dealing with his immediate subordinates in such a space. This is not a "democratic" style, but now it predominates; it reinforces deference for the selfish class.

Note the contrast between the way we look at corporations and corporate leaders today, and the way we see unions and union leaders. When investigators uncovered corruption in unions like the Teamsters and the Laborers, the unions were put into long periods of receivership and outside oversight, and all unions were perceived tainted with corruption and possible mob connections. The scandals at Enron, World.com, Tyco and other large corporations, and their accounting firms, involved many times the amount of money ever even thought of in the unions, involved many more people, and hurt millions by defrauding them of pension funds and investments. But the reaction against these corporations and their offenses, was mild by comparison, even though some CEO's ended up going to jail.

While rules for unions have been tightened, accounting rules for corporations have only been tinkered with, because corporations are owned or run by the selfish class.

In the Fifth Century, of course, officials were appointed by the Emperor, who was not elected, and neither were Senators (who inherited their positions), but we have democracy, don't we? So, there should be no danger of our going the way of the Fifth Century, after all. Whew!

We can just vote the rascals out.

It may not be as simple as that, since the election machinery has been largely taken over by the selfish class as well. The take over includes partisan secretaries of state who decide what votes will be "spoiled," and what precincts will be scanted voting machines so that many minority voters will be discouraged from voting, and which Republican-friendly voting machines will be adopted.

Others have gone into great length describing the statistical anamolies that only could have emerged from computer manipulation, probably by the voting machine companies, the butterfly ballots of 2000, the hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic and Native American votes "lost" or "spoiled" in 2004.

What all of these articles illustrate is a subtle and sophisticated takeover of the machinery of democratic elections by a part of the selfish class. The other changes, in values and perceptions detailed earlier, are what have made this possible. There are parallels to the death of the Republic in Rome in 31 BC, when Augustus became Emperor, while still maintaining the trappings of the Republic. However, the nature of Bush's support, and that of his agenda looks much more like the Fifth Century, when Senators and Emperor jointly ruled in the interest of the former, the selfish class.

What can be done?

Already there are glimmers that people are catching on,such as the growing realization (and the poll numbers to show it) that the major media are not giving us the whole story about the ongoing chaos in Iraq. Attempts to counter the right-wing chatter, such as the creation of Air America to provide liberal talk radio, will probably have less impact than likely disillusionment caused by the disconnect between propaganda and reality.

As the media provide more and more propaganda instead of information, the American people may finally become so disgusted that they will no longer act like the fearful peasants of the Fifth Century, but like the disenchanted Soviet citizens in the late 1980's. Then, wholesale change will become possible.