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http://tinyurl.com/tc83bk3>
nypost.com
.. America is reverting back to the feudal age
.. In recent decades this country has begun to show
signs of growing feudalization. This trend has been most
pronounced in the economy, where income growth has
skewed dramatically towards the ultra-rich, creating a
ruling financial and now tech oligarchy ..
The fading prospects for the new generation are all too
obvious .. According to a recent study .. the millennials,
are in danger of becoming a "lost generation" in terms
of wealth accumulation. ..
The ultra-rich represent an emergent global aristocracy -
or rather, a new oligarchy. .. In the United States, the
richest 400 US citizens now have more wealth than 185
million of their fellow Americans combined. The shift
has been dramatic: The top 1 percent in America captured
just 4.9 percent of total US income growth from 1945 to
1973, but in the following two decades, the country's
richest classes gobbled up the majority of US income
growth. / Patterns of property ownership reflect the very
same trends that anchored both the medieval aristocratic
and ecclesiastical classes. ..
Such concentrations of wealth naturally seek to
concentrate power. .. Firms like Google, Facebook and
Microsoft control 80 to 90 percent of their key markets
and have served to further widen class divides not only
in the United States but around the world. ..
.. Today's tech elites are now entrenched monopolists.
Increasingly, these firms reflect the worst of American
capitalism - squashing competitors, using indentured
servants from abroad for upwards of 40 percent of their
Silicon Valley workforce, fixing wages and avoiding taxes
- while creating ever more social anomie and alienation.
The tech oligarchs are forging a post-democratic future,
where opportunity is restricted only to themselves and
their chosen few. ..
This emerging world is far removed from the democratic
capitalism .. Traditionally companies liked employees
with families. Not so much in the brave new tech world ..
As for the rest of the population, the prospects are even
bleaker. .. The evidence of massive inequality, pervasive
homelessness and social dysfunction fills the streets ..
.. A plutocratic elite of venture capitalists and company
founders sits above the still-affluent cadre of skilled
professionals - well paid, but living only ordinary
middle-class lives, given taxes and high prices. Below
them lies a vast population of gig workers .. And at the
very bottom lies an untouchable class of homeless, those
addicted to drugs and criminals. ..
High prices make it all but impossible for anyone except
the very affluent to own their homes. Workers in the gig
economy, much less the "untouchables," have little chance
to improve their lot but struggle to barely pay their rent
or are forced to sleep in their cars ..
This new feudal order rests on a new clerisy .. Made up
largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent,
this class has become increasingly hereditary ..
The new clerisy is crucially important to the new oligarchs,
who need allies in the government, media and academia to
maintain their supremacy. In many cases the tech elite now
control the clerisy's own industries. Consider the media,
with Jeff Bezos' takeover of The Washington Post, and the
entertainment industry, with the rise of Netflix, Apple and
Amazon in Hollywood. ..
.. The clerisy .. operate from an assumption of "moral
superiority" that justifies their right to rule.
They represent the apotheosis of .. an "emergent class of
capable men," who could take upon itself the task of
"controlling and restricting ... the non-functional masses."
This new elite .. would replace democracy with "a higher
organism," ..
A shared belief in meritocratic superiority binds the
oligarchs and the clerisy. .. boosters of the "progressive"
party line .. By 2018 .. some 97 percent of all journalist
political donations go to Democrats. .. Hollywood and its
imitators elsewhere now tilt heavily to the Left. ..
As the oligarchy and clerisy have waxed .. the fading
prospects for the new generation are now painfully obvious.
.. Many young people face a future as propertyless serfs ..
...
Нечастая рефлексия, где писатель разумно пытается связать
лефтизм-прогрессивизм с большими бизнесами (хотя следовало
бы дальше и лучше уточнять какими именно).
Большинство райтистских симпов любят ныть про социалистов-
коммунистов, не замечая очевидного того, что мощь лефтизма
в его связи с неким значительным экономическим интересом.