Good Morning Friends,

I use the terms New Money and Old Money in two ways.

A) the traditional way: length of time wealth has existed in a family line

B) Individually: When I invoke someone like Warren Buffet or George Soros, I call them Old Money, in that they have been in the financial business a long time, have been two of the most successful at it of those who started out with them many decades ago, and they seem to be more personally serene in their wealth; in other words they seem to have been super rich long enough to seem as though they are comfortable with their fantastic god-like wealth - no matter what the economic circumstances they may have been born into.

This second level of wealth achieves transcendance - and therefore "Old Money" status, for our purposes - with its inclination and ability to achieve wildly disproportionate influence over the government.

This level of wealth uses the social power that accrues to it to influence government in four ways:

1. to get hugely anti-competitive, anti-capitalist in fact, subsidies, supports, tax breaks, tariffs against foreign goods, and the like; its ability to bully state governments by saying that if they don't get massive considerations they are leaving and taking every single one of those thousands of desperately needed jobs somewhere else more amenable, who will provide a more favorable business environment.

2. its ability to lobby the government for policies that specifically benefit itself, or defeat policies that would in the least way infringe upon their bottom line. Remember when Congress defeated a bill to make it easier for individuals to file for bankruptcy protection?

Take this "historic" healthcare legislation that President Obama seems poised to sign. It won't be single-payer, universal coverage. But one good thing is that, according to the rumors, insurance corporations will not be able to deny people coverage based on pre-existing conditions. But there are other rumors about a "mandate." People may be required by law to have health insurance.

But the state is not expanding coverage. The private corporations are getting tens of millions of new compulsory customers. In this way the private corporate apparatus will have embedded itself into the government, has become as inevitable and undefiable as the government itself. I will come back to this point.

3. its ability to position its "Old Wealth" capitalists as "wise old men" counselors to power (political).

Cast your minds back to the 2008 presidential campaign. I think it was just before the Iowa caucausus. Obama was under pressure to position himself as both a transformative agent of "change," a substantial, "serious" politician with "gravitas." Remember that word, 'gravitas?'

He made a speech somewhere and rattled off a list of luminaries that was advising him on policy during his campaign, the people "I associate myself with." Warren Buffet was one of the names on that list. Remember that Warren Buffet is one of the "Old Money" capitalist making nostalgic, and yes, reactionary, and vaguely sounding populist criticisms of "New Money" practices of 'derivatives' and so forth.

By getting on the "hope and change" team he was, by extension, able to be viewed, vaguely, over time, as such himself. So much so, it would seem, that a proven leftist like Ralph Nader can write a work of speculative fiction called "Only the Super Rich Can Save Us," in which Buffet, or some one like him, among many someones like him, is one of the heroes.

4. What are we to make of all of this privatization of government, everything from the military, intelligence functions, healthcare, of course, as well as education; I even heard there is/was a fully privatized town in Florida somewhere [I heard Naomi Klein mention this in a video clip on the Internet, as she was discussing her book, NoLogo]; and what about this "revolving door" of Washington we hear so much about? That is when government officials work government and with the connections they acquire they go into the corporate world. Then they go back into government again. Then they go back into private business......

As we make this analysis, here, and more broadly concerning the relationship of the ruling class to capitalism, let us keep in mind one of the main ideas of Existentialism, which has dominated this blog: Man is the desire to become God.

If we keep this in mind, I think it will help us resolve seeming contradictions in the behavior of the ruling capitalist class with respect to the practice of capitalism.

Here's the analysis: the corporate world - despite Grover Norquist's famous assertion that the goal of the right wing is to make government so small that it could be drowned in a bath tub - far from wanting to shrink government, far from just wanting to benefit from patronage, want to replace and become the government.

This is so of practicing members of the capitalist ruling class, as opposed to the purely ideological or theoretical, we might say, members of it in the media, think tanks, and the like.

However much we may think and know that government is under the thumb of moneyed interests, by their lights, they have a long, long, long way to go before they, corporations, become the government. If and when they finally achieve this, they will, at long last, be free of capitalism, which they do not believe in.

Old Money has, in a sense, transcended capitalism. New Money, as rich and powerful as they are, are still capitalist - which is why Old Money has historically found them distasteful.

I'll pick this up later.

wingedcentaur