Posted on 05/09/2019 10:41:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
Recent news is riddled with proof that America's soi-disant elites are the most venal, self-absorbed, sybaritic and utterly tone-deaf group since the French nobility of the 18th century. And the comparison is not idly made.
We start with the Met Gala, for which movie stars, musicians, athletes and fashionistas paid upwards of $35,000 a ticket ($200,000 to $300,000 per table) to show up and show off in the most outrageous (and outrageously expensive) clothing and costumes imaginable. It is meaningless, over-the-top indulgence, par excellence.
Perhaps because I was already peeved by the photos of the Met Gala's vulgar display that were plastered all over the Twitterverse, I found myself further annoyed by promoted commercials in my Twitter feed pitching Coco Crush jewelry from Chanel, and "T" bracelets and other wearable trinkets from Tiffany & Co.
Coco Crush is a line of gold rings and bracelets imprinted with the signature Chanel "quilted" pattern; some are encrusted with diamonds. The ads and taglines promote buying more, more, more, and the beautiful and talented actress Keira Knightley smolders into the camera as she deftly places ring after ring on her lovely slender fingers and fondles the cluster of bracelets on her wrist.
The cheapest piece of jewelry in the collection is $2,400, and prices run up to $55,000.
Hey, kids. Collect 'em all!
The ads Tiffany & Co. is running on Twitter show model Carolyn Murphy gazing seductively and playing peek-a-boo from behind her own collection of expensive baubles. Kendall Jenner, one of the many omnipresent Jenner and Kardashian offspring, also makes an appearance, presumably to show the appeal of jewelry that runs from $250 to $49,000 to the younger crowd.
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes; she will have chaos wherever she goes.
All this wretched excess would be just mildly amusing if not for the fact that these are the same people who shake their gilded fingers at middle-class Americans and say, "No more cars for you! No more airplanes! No more straws! No more grocery bags! No more meat!"
Let them eat cake.
Early last month, the online publication Quartz published a brief profile of writer and social critic Anand Giridharadas to promote his new book, "Winners Take All." In the book -- and the profile -- Giridharadas questions the conventional wisdom that business leaders are truly interested in "doing well by doing good," suggesting that their true motivation is "more sinister." According to the article's author, Ephrat Livni, "Giridharadas discovered ... that there are strict limits to the kind of solutions that powerful 'change makers' will entertain. They don't want to pay higher wages or taxes or make better products or sell only what's really needed." They just want to be adored by the public for their charity and generosity.
Giridharadas' concerns would make some sense if he were to acknowledge their limits. He spent the better part of two years palling around the world with some of the world's wealthiest billionaires (Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers, Marc Benioff). But in the cynical conclusions he draws about business and capitalism, he implicates all business owners.
Giridharadas makes the same mistake that so many of our elites do: equating all "business" with the biggest businesses in the world. He utterly overlooks the fact that there are 28 million firms in the U.S., that nearly 80 percent of them are sole proprietorships, that the vast majority of companies that (SET ITAL) have (END ITAL) employees have fewer than 20. The idea that all entrepreneurs are like Mark Zuckerberg, or that all CEOs are like Jeff Bezos, or that all companies are like Goldman Sachs or Twitter, is the kind of inexcusable ignorance that the upper echelons of our society get away with every single day.
This kind of ignorance -- and the arrogance that almost inevitably accompanies it -- is becoming a dangerous threat to the American middle class.
And they know it.
When a "thought leader" like Giridharadas calls for rethinking the entire capitalist system because of what Amazon or Facebook or Lehman Brothers have done, the uber-wealthy will nod and tweet their approval, safe in the knowledge that the flames they fan won't consume them but will consume the millions of small businesses unfairly condemned whose resources will not be enough to withstand -- or lobby against -- the "progressive" solutions proposed thereafter.
The political elites are just as bad.
Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris announced this week that if elected, she would push to repeal the tax cuts enacted by Congress under President Trump -- despite the benefits to the middle class.
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proclaimed that Veterans Affairs "isn't broken" and, in the same week, announced that she doesn't care if immigrants are "undocumented." So, while our veterans suffer from untreated PTSD; commit suicide at a shocking rate; languish living in homeless shelters and under bridges; and die untreated on VA waiting lists, political elites throw open the doors to the poor from other countries to come get freebies here.
The "pay-to-play" college admissions scandal showed that the very wealthy can buy their way into college. And of course, the poor can get scholarships. But the middle class can do neither.
The "Medicare for All" and other comparable policies promoted by Democrats will be similarly unjust: They'll be pitched as paid for by taxes on "the very rich." But when there are not enough "rich" people to fund the boondoggle (and there never are), it will be the middle class -- again -- that will get crushed.
A revolution is brewing in this country. The middle class is tired of being America's beast of burden and whipping boy.
If the author is right we’re in a lot of trouble as the Hard Left typically emerges on top in such struggles.
I don’t think anyone outside of NYC, LA and SF gives a rat’s arse about the Met Gala or who attended or what they were wearing.
> the Hard Left typically emerges on top in such struggles <
You’re right about that. A moderate group usually first takes power. But they are quickly pushed aside by ruthless (and I mean ruthless) Leftists.
But there’s a rather unique twist in the American dynamic. The 2A.
The elite are moving from the Blue states to the red states
They will turn all the red states blue..
I have move three times as red states turned blue
Example Colorado
Yup. I think the ruling class is waaay too top heavy. Heads will roll when the serfs get p/o’d enough.
Repeal the tax cuts because only the rich and middle class benefit?
Not hardly.
The “poor” have it rich. With a $24,000 standard deduction at least $24,000 is TAX FREE. After that the rates are minuscule for a whole lot of dollars. They didn’t even lose the earned income tax credit did they?
The upper middle class got hammered in the Trump tax plan by comparison and as usual.
The gap to the very rich is HUGE but you can’t solve all problems by taxing their wealth away. They could do a better job with their wealth though. You can only buy so many baubles and crap without putting it to work.
The whole article is meaningless, talking about the obvious. Only the last paragraph is the meaty part. Then it abruptly ended.
Leaving readers with no clue on what she is going to foreseen.
Of course people know either a revolution or a SCW (take your pick) is coming, anybody paying the least bit of attention knows there simply is NO peaceful way going forward.
I really don’t need to spend 5 minutes reading how much a trinket or a ring costs. What a waste of time.
The elites are after the middle class because that’s where the real money is. It may not look that way when you’re wearing a Coco Crush bracelet and your cross-town counterparts are wearing paracord, but it’s a fact. It’s going to be a race between the middle class becoming a revolutionary class and being wiped out. At the moment it looks like a tossup.
Only because we let them.
The burden is placed on the middle class on purpose. You cannot impose communism when there is a vibrant middle class.
I hope so but I suspect not.
I hope so but I suspect not.
The only bastille gates the middle class is going to crash are the ones between their La-Z-Boy and the fridge.
When the cable/sat is down due to neglect, and the middle classer can’t watch foobaw on Sunday, and 3000% inflation has made it so he can’t afford a 6-pack, but never mind, because there aren’t any on the shelves in the now empty stores anyway, then, maybe they’ll rise up, take a peek out of the door and be blinded by that burning thing in the sky, but until then...
Until then, we’re all just being kept fattened up and comfortable enough that we hardly noticed the velvet shackles being fastened around our ankles. Until the velvet wears off, that is.
A new American Revolution could look a lot like the French Revolution complete with a reign of terror. Liberal elites could find themselves facing the gallows and politicians suffering the same fate as the Romanian dictator or Mussolini.
Nothing is going to happen - there will be no storming of the Bastille or Manhattan or Hollywood.
We are frogs already in the pot and the water is slowly becoming a little warmer every day.
In a few decades only a few old people will know what America was like before the filthy leftists destroyed it.
I see nothing wrong with these poodles strutting their stuff and pooping on the red carpet. If people give such trash that kind of money, they have every right to it.
The problem is the people who are so stupid and whose lives are so empty that they actually admire such undeserving vermin.
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