Where Do You Fit In?

Why is everybody always picking on the elite these days? The American upper-crust has been taking it on the chin so long they don’t even know who they are anymore. There’s an identity crisis going on in polite society. What can the man on the street be thinking when he calls out his betters? There ought to be a law. There probably will be. Congress can be counted on to act when all the right people are suffering. Haters spewing out the E-word need to start watching their backs. John Kennedy said: “Forgive your enemies but remember their names.” The in the crowd is keen on the second half of that advice.

Just what, exactly, do the swells want for America anyway? Joe Six-Pack might be more understanding if they’d come right out and say. It’s never easy squaring visionary actions with enlightened words. The latest pose is standing up for minorities against a violent, oppressive constabulary. A privileged, not to be confused with elite, white lynch mob supposedly thirsts for minority blood. The boys in blue are, according to one conspiracy theory, merely obliging. So whose paw prints are on the paper trail that transformed the American policeman’s image from Joe Friday into Sledge Hammer?

Views on World War I that would get you fired from a university or tossed out of CFR headquarters onto 68^th Street only 20 years ago are suddenly in academic vogue. It is finally safe to tell a truth that was taboo in smug society for 9 decades. Elite bankers dragged us into the fight and lucre was as much a motive as slavery had been 56 years before. Don’t mistake this for light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just the academic statute of limitations kicking in. The big bang-up theory of bombing democracy into existence will go on as long as there is profit in it.

Without US entry into the Great War Hitler’s rise would have been very unlikely. If the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had not been reversed several generations of East Europeans might have been spared Stalinism. Meanwhile, the most committed faction of war advocates were Wall Street financiers who’d lent the allies billions. American industry enjoyed its best boom to that point selling war supplies. Thousands of men entered the “elite” of government and media through opportunities that emerged from the war.

Both Dulles brothers were in the Versailles entourage. The fortunes they amassed between the wars were plucked from webs spun out of the Versailles-St. Germain-Trianon-Lausanne-Sevres pacts. Many of their fees were generated by finding ways around the strictures on German re-armament decreed by the Paris Peace conference they attended. 20 years after the Nazis took Berlin the siblings held more sway than any other unelected family in the United States.

What do the elite want? Two infamous suicides, often attributed as cold war casualties, might offer a clue.

In 1962 Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham was a welcome guest throughout American high society. His image made the cover of Time Magazine in 1956. The president accepted his phone calls and kept his company. He held final say-so over opinions and reports offered by one of America’s most influential dailies. But the golden boy had been losing it for years and was soon on the outs with all the really cool people in Washington. The former editor of The Harvard Law Review knew he would never fly so high again. Still, he had four children less than 20 and was rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams. A selfish obsession with celebrity prevailed over the needs of loved ones when Graham shot himself in 1963.

Frank Wisner’s story wasn’t too different. He was OSS point man in southeast Europe in WWII and went on to direct covert operations in the early years of the CIA. Born rich into a Mississippi banking and lumber fortune he never had to worry about money. But Wisner began a long, windy crack-up around 1950. Many authors attribute his demise to American failure to shore up Hungary against the Soviet invasion in 1956. By this theory, his conscience got the best of him. Funny that the thousands of innocents and comrades in arms lost in scores of other half-baked schemes never cost him much rack time. Any honest examination of the man leaves little wiggle room. Wisner blew his brains out in 1965 pining for a lost cloak and dagger chair at the beautiful people’s table.

The right to make life altering decisions for the human hordes without getting their nod is what makes some people tick. They’ve been known to take their own lives rather than give up a place in the sun. In this kind of scenario, how much can you really count?

The one’s bitching about the white middle class and its sense of “entitlement” feel every bit as entitled as any Hapsburg, Bourbon or Tudor a few hundred years ago. If you don’t believe me just listen to James Traub as he tells his fellow caste men: “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses.” Brexit, the Bloomingdale heir finds, is an example of taking the pretense of democracy too far. Blue blooded conniving is the only thing that stands between the undeserving “citizen” and pitchfork politics. Traub bears a striking resemblance to Montgomery Burns. His sequel, Release the hounds, is due any day now.

There isn’t really any confusion about which “elite” watchtower sentries need to keep an eye on. We aren’t talking about people who sip sauterne with their foie gras here. Frasier Crane might not vote my way but, like me, he only gets one. It isn’t necessarily all government, academia, media or banking executives who are guilty. It’s those among them who would use the forces and influences of these institutions to impose radical changes on a population without its informed consent. This goes far beyond the realm of international relations.

The FBI brought a magic bag filled with newfangled “scientific” evidence into courtrooms over recent decades. It arrived without even the illusion of sleight of hand. The authority of their name brand was its only selling point. In thousands of cases, there wasn’t anything remotely scientific about it. Calling yourself an expert and making assertions is a major industry. Who’d risk a paycheck, prestige, full medical and a pension over an occasional innocent convicted? Hey if they weren’t guilty they wouldn’t be suspects, right? Besides how many things did these “innocents” do that they never got caught for? When you add up the extortion, libel, collusion, perjury, obstruction of justice, false arrests and framed suspects the FBI has been let off the hook more times than a legion of pedophile priests and Michael Jacksons. But they wear fancy suits and think they are better than you are. That’s good enough for the media, Capitol Hill, the last 22 presidents and just about anyone going by the honorific Federal “Justice.”

Meanwhile, in a proposal FBI brass would never oppose, big bank mouthpieces have advocated the elimination of currency for years. Bailouts, bail-ins, the mortgage crisis, LIBOR, Wells Fargo, BCCI, Baring, Deutsche Bank, Long Term Capital Management, Bear Stearns, Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Nugan Hand and rafts of other banking scandals, foreign and domestic, haven’t changed the tune. Guys like Traub know the teeming masses will never vote paper money out of existence. That’s why negotiations go on behind the scenes as transactional power is incrementally appropriated.

 Central banks, an unnamed spokesman for Bundesbank told Bloomberg’s Vernon Silver, “are above reproach.” In laymen’s terms that translate into “can do no wrong.” These are the humble folks imploring to be entrusted with every last farthing within anyone’s grasp. The sole concern, of course, is that physical money can fall into unscrupulous hands…like yours.

Etymologically “reproach” gets to us out of Latin origins from Old French. It means to bring near. Anyone or anything supposedly above it is arrogating a right not to be touched by forces the rest of us the answer to. The anonymous source quoted above used the phrase defending the US Federal Reserve’s unaccountability. They’re the custodians of over 1400 tons of Bundesbank gold. No German has been allowed to see it for at least 50 years. All 80 million of them are expected to take the Fed’s word that not an ounce is missing. These are the same people who find circulation of the $50 bill, the full cost of a not too pricey dinner in most urban environs, too much responsibility for the common man. The fact that they are confident enough to openly avow their intentions is damned disturbing. All they ask is absolute control of everything necessary to modern survival. It’s only armed, dangerous, racist, conspiratorial types who should feel threatened.

Our betters stay up nights worrying about people who are worried. Why can’t those outside the clique accept their fate? It’s a question Robinson, Traub et al ask in all seriousness. The battle against widespread paranoia compels the government to stay hot on the trail of everybody. Anyone returning the attention, like Snowden or Assange, can expect to be hounded to the corners of the Earth. Opposing new bosses in the mix, or worse advocating a reduction in the number of existing ones, has, in the tradition of FBI “science,” been branded a diagnosable disorder. It is conveniently acronymed ODD for oppositional defiant disorder.

Most of us reach a point where we question our individual impact on human existence. How long will we have to wait for the people obsessed with a need for underlings and a world of flunkies to be diagnosed?  There is no evidence to support the theory any of them proceed fueled by better motives than ordinary people. The state has proved humanity’s gravest threat for the last 5 centuries or so. If human well-being is the goal the microscope should be turned around. Acton said: “The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.” The unfit are bent on building a race of beings that they find fit to be governed.

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