The Democrats got crushed. Again. They're being buried by billionaire money even as they desperately grab for some of the money themselves. Its looking bad for the middle class as their concerns are being drowned by the billionaire bucks. Its looking bad for American democracy as people are wondering why should they vote if their votes are just going to be ignored. Finally, its looking bad for the planet as billionaires use their power to enhance their short term profit while their actions doom future humanity to misery and yes, death. Its not murder if you are a Koch brother! Yep, there's plenty to get depressed about. The power of evil is overwhelming. The billionaires crush decency under a pile of filthy lucre. What can possibly stop them.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that we are not as weak as we think we are. The billionaires empire is not real. It his held together by imaginary ideas. The billionaires power is just a concept. We are prisoners of bad ideas. We are prisoners of our own minds.
When I went to law school, we were terrorized by a contracts professor nicknamed Cal. Another nickname for Cal was the Terminator, as in terminating your dreams of becoming a lawyer by flunking Contracts. To add insult to injury, he loved to humiliate you when he called on you. I will never forget the day he called on me and my brain just shut down in terror. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I hated and feared Cal. Most of us did. We would snigger behind his back and say that what did HE know, he never stepped into a courtroom! We would hold him in scorn for his very short professorial work hours and his well known propensity to overindulge in certain liquid refreshments, not to mention sexism that would not be tolerated today. Effing Cal!
It was only later, when I got out in the "real world" when I discovered that Cal was a genius. And it was just under my nose.
You see, when I first stepped into Contracts class, I wondered what the fuss would be about. Just read what it the contract and enforce what it said. Easy! But this was Cal, and he kept saying the same thing over and over "A CONTRACT IS JUST A CONCEPT!'. Over and over. But I was to dense (or too petrified) to understand what this meant.
The very first case illustrated this. It was from England in the middle ages. It was a very simple case. A nobleman promised a commoner to pay all the expenses to let the commoner to attend Oxford. Just when the commoner is ready to go, the nobleman reneges on the deal and refuses to pay. The commoner sues. Open and shut case right?
Make the nobleman pay. He promised! All of our feelings or fairness and morality are with the commoner.
Not so fast. The court sided with the nobleman.
Why? The court decided that the contract lacked "consideration". What is consideration? Ask ten different law professors and you will get 10 different answers. In layman terms, it means that each party to a contract has to get something from it. Mutuality of obligation. Quid pro quo. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. The court ruled that since the commoner got everything from the agreement and the nobleman got nothing, there was no consideration, therefore no contract, therefore the nobleman did not have to pay.
Of course, the vast majority of us law students missed the forest for the trees. Instead of railing against the unfairness, indeed the absurdity of the court decision, we desperately tried to figure out what "consideration" was. Cal would ask various students, like random gunfire, what "consideration" was and he would destroy all their answers. Because there were no right answers. Because "consideration" was just a concept. Like the contract itself. By calling a contract "just a concept" he was saying "hey kiddos, its all bullshit!!" After all, it seems obvious that the court wanted just to help the powerful nobleman by pulling the concept of "consideration" out of the blue. But most of us law students were not ready for such cynicism. We wanted the keys to the magic kingdom of LAW. I was so desperate to put by hands on "consideration" that I ignored Cal's decree. Big mistake.
People often talk about the "sanctity of contracts". Baloney. Contract law is just the study of how we let certain people weasel out of their promises. So we lawyers create concepts to trump the concept of a valid contract. Concepts like "no offer", "no acceptance", "misrepresentation" ,"no consideration" and on and on and on. Cal warned us! Most of us didn't listen.
It gets worse. A contract is a concept that relies on the fiction that both parties have the same freedom and power to enter freely into an agreement. Real life tell us this is false. The concept of "contract law" has proved elastic enough to favor the interests of the powerful at the expense of the masses. The powerful get to strangle the masses with the fine print But here's the rub. These concepts only have power if we allow them to as, concepts are nothing but creations of the mind, and minds can be changed.
That brings us to another of our favorite powerful concepts, the corporation. A corporation is simply the idea that investors, in pursuit of a certain project, can only lose the amount of their investment. That's it. Its called limited liability, and its one hell of an idea if you want people to invest in a risky project, even a project for the common good. But we lost the idea that a corporation is just a concept. We can limit a corporation to a certain time period. We did it before. We can limit the things a corporation can do. We did it before. We can regulate it. We can tax it. We can KILL it if we want. A corporation is a person? Really? Did you really THINK about this? Corporate personhood is just a concept, and an insane one at that. It only exists because it helps powerful people. It exists only because of inertia. It only exists because we lack the imagination and the courage to imagine something better. You can sneer at this and say this is just obvious. But if that is so, why are we letting the Koch Brothers and their ilk destroy our Earth?
Want to stop Exxon-Mobil? Want to stop Goldman Sachs The Vampire Squid? Want to stop your favorite sibling unit? Simple. Tell them they no longer have limited liability. Tell their stockholders that each and every one will be liable for ALL the damage they cause. (of course money is just a concept too. See below.) That destruction of the planet shit will end right quick. Of course , the apologists of corporate power will say that their way is the only way. Or they will say there are only two ways; if you are not a capitalist you must be a communist. Baloney. There is a third way. There is a fourth way. There are a million ways. There are as many ways as the human imagination can dream. The corporation is just a concept. We are prisoners of our cowardice and lack of imagination. We are prisoners of our own minds.
You might say to yourself "You're dreaming! They have too much money!" But money is just a concept too. Say you walk into your neighborhood's best pizza joint. The owner cooks you a delicious concoction with everything on it. You hand him a tiny, crumpled piece of green paper with the number 20 on it. You leave with the pizza. The owner gets the piece of paper. A space alien from a barter society would find this transaction ludicrous. This type of thing has become so routine that we don't see the incredible leap of faith it takes. The ONLY reason the pizza guy takes a twenty for his labor is his FAITH that he can exchange it for something he wants in the future. That's it. If the pizza guy and the rest of society loses this faith, the 20 dollar bill becomes toilet paper, only less absorbent. There is no way out of the fact that money is just a concept. By the way,
please don't tell me money backed by gold would solve this dilemma. Sure, gold and diamonds are real. The idea that they are worth many conceptual units such as dollars is just a concept. Good luck trying to trade your gold for food during the apocalypse. So why are the Koch brothers "rich' while the overwhelming majority of us are "not rich' or even "poor"? Its not even the fact that they have huge piles of green paper. The are "wealthy" because somewhere in cyberspace they have a very big number next to their name, while the overwhelming majority of us have a much smaller number next to ours. ( If you want to accuse me of envy, so be it.)
This can explain a lot of the paranoid behavior of the superrich. A lot of us say "Why are they grasping for more, more when they have so much! Can't they relax and enjoy it?" No they can't. Much like a person who cleans portajohnnies for a living is an expert on shit, these guys are experts on money. It defies reason to believe that these mostly very intelligent people don't recognize the precarious conceptual position of their wealth and power. Woe to them if the rabble ever found this out! It would be over for them. Indeed, one of the reasons they stay in power is that the average person does not understand money by their very lack of it. To a poor person, the suffering caused by the lack of this concept called money is very real. Money just a concept? No, it was the thing that enabled him to feed his kids for the first time in three days. To him money is not a concept. Money is magic.
And the Koch Brothers want to keep it that way. Why do you think they have jumped in politics with such force?They don't need more money. They need to take it from the masses. Why do you think they are so obsessed with the minimum wage? Shipping jobs overseas? Downsizing? Crushing unions? Lowering Taxes? Yes, they want to lower taxes to increase their own wealth. But that is a secondary reason. They want to lower taxes to destroy the very idea of the common good. To destroy the government's ability to bring about the common good. To keep the rabble poor. To keep them thinking desperately rather than conceptually. Poor people usually do not challenge the power structure. They are too busy surviving. It is only when a person gains the time to think does she gain the luxury to think conceptually. The superrich can't let that happen. They cannot let people know the precarious reality of their position. They cannot let Toto pull the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. The rabble must be impoverished. The rabble must be filled with fear. The rabble must not THINK.
That last paragraph was painful to write. This next one is even worse, for I am a follower of Jesus Christ and a man of peace. Ultimate power does not flow from the concept of money, even if can buy a lot of politicians and a lot of 30 second attack ads. Ultimate power in this sinful world resides in the control of violence. When control of violence is in the hands of a benevolent government, this is a good thing. It keeps us peaceful and secure. But our government, as it gets controlled by the superrich, it gets more violent.. Policemen who look like Robocop routinely crack the skulls of people who dare question the Billionaire Empire. The strategy of the superrich is to keep the masses impoverished and fearful. But the terrible truth is that ultimate control of violence rests with the masses. The American Revolution. The French Revolution. The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain. Ultimate power does not reside with the plutocrats. It rests with us. This article is NOT a call for violence. It is a call to unleash our peaceful power by realizing that the enemy is not as powerful as we think. It is a call to realize that the only thing enslaving us is our own bad ideas. We have the power to stop the plutocrats by releasing ourselves from our chains. Is it scary? yes. Change always involves risk. We can unleash strange new forces when we leave our comfort zone. But change we must.
Yes, the power of the plutocrats is illusory. The damage they cause to the planet and the souls on it is very real. There is no excuse for us not to act.
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