This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
The ultra-wealthy hover above the realities of the world around them like extraterrestrial aliens. Their material reality physically separates them from the rest of society with gated communities and private jets but paradoxically, their very wealth also severs them psychologically, unable to understand the reality of the 99%.
Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is professor and author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More, Rob Larson.
Larson begins by bringing attention to basic data points that nakedly reflect the state of the world and particularly the U.S. when it comes to wealth inequality. “[The] richest 1% owned 35% of all US wealth and that’s cash, that’s real estate, that’s all kinds of investment portfolio assets… the bottom 50% of all US households, very similar to the bottom half in most regions of the world, you’re looking at about 1.5% of the national wealth is owned by that half of the population,” he explains.
This gross wealth imbalance produces a number of problems within a society, including the wealthy’s overreaching influence into policymaking. Tax breaks, deregulation and other neoliberal doctrines have defined the last few decades of American politics, and that imbalance means “that’s more cash chasing the same number of assets, and it just tends to have the effect of hideously inflating every asset market, making housing out of reach for so many people, making the market absurdly overpriced,” Larson spells out.
Hedges and Larson go on to describe the evolution of elites and the psychology behind handling obscene wealth, from personal relationships to the way they dress. Both agree, however, that it is possible to continue the fight against this inequality through labor organizing and local community building.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable.
The public face of the oligarchic class bears little resemblance to the private face. I, like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the embrace of the upper crust when young. I was shipped off as a scholarship student at the age of 10 to an exclusive New England boarding school. I had classmates whose fathers — fathers they rarely saw — arrived at the school in their limousines accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so the press could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of good fathers. I spent time in the homes of the ultra-rich and powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants. When the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there are always lawyers, publicists and political personages to protect them — George W. Bush’s life, along with Donald Trump’s, is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. The rich have a snobbish disdain for the poor — despite well-publicized acts of philanthropy — and the middle class. These lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances that have to be endured, at times placated and always controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. But it exposed me to their insatiable selfishness and hedonism. I learned, as a boy, who were my enemies.
The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work on behalf of corporations and the rich. Compliant politicians, clueless entertainers and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which holds up the rich as leaders to emulate and assures us that through diligence and hard work we can join them, keep us from seeing the truth.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.” Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology — in this case free market capitalism and globalization — that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Joining me to discuss the pathology of our billionaire class of rulers is Rob Larson, a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College and author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More.
So you begin the book with a description, actually it reminded me of a passage in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens at beginning of the book where he describes pre-revolutionary France and the insane amounts of money amassed by the aristocratic and oligarchic elite, where it takes six people to serve this rich person their cup of hot chocolate.
You kind of do the same thing in the beginning of your book just by talking about the insane squandering of wealth. And of course, you juxtapose that to the working poor and a shrinking middle class. But let’s just begin with the figures because you lay it out. This has been since you argue correctly, of course, since the Gilded Age, the age of the robber barons, the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. But before we get into the lifestyle of those who are in “Richistan”, was that a New Yorker writer who coined that term, explain where we are just in terms of data.
Rob Larson
Yeah, for sure, Chris. So there’s a number of ways to chop up the wealth of a society. And you do see a lot of random statistics on social media feeds and stuff. So it’s good to actually start with your feet really on the ground. And most of the data that I cite in the book along these lines is from the World Inequality Database, a large international economist consortium on wealth and income inequality.
It includes relative rock star economists like Thomas Piketty and others and the data that they have is pretty stunning. I really recommend that people take a look at their website. They have a lot of country-specific data and stuff. That’s very interesting and a lot of visualization but the very shortest version I like to cut to the chase and look at just the concentration of the wealth.
We can go with income and chop it up at all kinds of levels but just at that most basic level of resolution if we stick with the richest 1% of US households by wealth, just using that as the classic marker. We find the last year we have data for is 2022. And that richest 1% owned 35% of all US wealth and that’s cash, that’s real estate, that’s all kinds of investment portfolio assets, which is pretty serious.
So again, that’s the 1% with 35% of all wealth. And if we look at for example, the middle 40%, sort of the middle class or professional class, we find that that middle 40% of households has not quite 28% of wealth. So definitely not a full share for them. And then the bottom half, the bottom 50% of all US households, very similar to the bottom half in most regions of the world, you’re looking at about 1.5% of the national wealth is owned by that half of the population.
And of course, you know, we should say many of the poor and working class households that that encompasses do own some wealth, they’ll own middle class American things like a car or perhaps some equity in their homes. But of course, when we look at wealth, we have to subtract debt from your assets. It’s net wealth, of course, is what we really care about. So very typically, that bottom half region by region will have 1%, 2%, or negative a few percent if their debts outnumber their assets.
So that’s kind of the simplest picture. It’s very similar worldwide. Globally, that richest 1% of households owns 40% of all wealth. Pretty similar numbers there. And there’s a lot more we can add to that, but that’s sort of the broad outline.
Chris Hedges
Well, you talk about this global ruling oligarchy as being transnational. One of the points you make in your book is that they all collect passports from various countries. But yes, there is a supranational quality now to the billionaire class. Explain how that works.
Rob Larson
Yeah, it is interesting. I recently did a small article on this specific subject for Current Affairs, looking at the ways that these people are able to move around the world so effortlessly, certainly compared to the middle class and obviously compared to the very poorest people in the world who migrate extralegally. So I feel like the passports thing actually is a good indicator. If you look at wealthy households, it’s all kinds of assets.
You own your home or your multiple homes outright and you have plenty of cash and so on. But then we get into the more exotic wealthy assets and I often say some of the real family jewels of the wealthiest households are vaults full of passports and visa and residency documents for different countries in the world. Of course in most developed countries it’s possible to apply for a residency that can lead to a permanent visa or a green card if you get an employment sponsor.
But what’s been happening more recently is a lot of countries, especially those that have an urgent balance of payments issue to correct, are making it much easier for wealthy people to just buy citizenship, sometimes starting with residency or just outright handing out passports to wealthy individuals who make qualifying property investments.
And if you’ll put a couple hundred thousand dollars into a firm in Spain or Greece or Ireland or Portugal or some other countries, and certainly in many third world countries as well, they’ll put you on a path to gaining residency, including that incredibly valuable EU passport that is very sought after in the world. So that’s a major thing.
But of course, even if we get just past that specifically naked issue of selling citizenship to the rich, most countries, wherever you’re traveling, wherever you’re trying to live, large amounts of money, and just having staff, you having someone who can keep up with all the requirements and all the paperwork and watch those deadlines as they come. That’s exactly the kind of thing that a struggling poor person who’s head of household with a bunch of kids isn’t able to do. So to me, that international aspect of the ruling class, it is the aspect that bothers the right wing the most.
And when they talk about globalists, even if they don’t specifically say Jewish globalist, you know it’s in there. But it’s often this sort of feature. These people are seen by the right to be rootless and they have no nationality. And of course, that’s bad because nationality is how we get most of our right-wing identity. But you don’t have to be an arch-conservative to see the downsides of a ruling class that’s so much more mobile than the rest of us.
Chris Hedges
Well, of course, when they parked their money overseas, we saw that with the Panama Papers to avoid taxation.
Rob Larson
Yeah, most extensively, absolutely.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about Richistan. What it’s like, I know, I was there, it’s disgusting. You spent the first part of the book describing life in Richistan where they really have no contact at all with the rest of us. If they ever deal with a member of the working class, it’s somebody who works for them, whether it’s their gardener, their chauffeur, their nanny.
And of course, as you point out in the book, if these people are not completely obsequious, they very swiftly don’t have a job. This creates a very distorted view of the world and understanding of the world because no matter how, again, this is from your book, anything they say that’s ridiculous or stupid just gets validated. I mean, we’re watching Elon Musk as kind of the poster child for this at the moment.
Rob Larson
Truly.
Chris Hedges
So, but talk about Richestan, life in Richestan because it is another world. They don’t fly on commercial jets. They travel around the world in mega yachts. But I’ll let you, I mean you do a pretty good job of painting that world that I had to endure as a boarding school student.
Rob Larson
Yeah, thanks Chris. I can do that. You know, just brace yourself as you revisit some of these atrocities. Yeah, the first thing I always just tell people and tell my students is just to start with the simplest aspect. If you are one of these really wealthy people, just start with the simple things like you own your home outright. It’s just your property. You know, you’re a wealthy person. You’re not a debtor who borrows money to do purchases or to get a home or mortgage like I have.
You’re being a debtor in that scenario. If you’re wealthy, you’re a creditor. You have investments. You put money into the system. Other people borrow it to your profit so they can have a mortgage or a car loan or whatever. So just that basic security, I feel, is something that’s already so foreign to a lot of conventional working and middle class people that I think it’s a good place to start.
Obviously, though, beyond owning that primary residence, of course, these people have multiple residences and many are just seasonal; you merely summer there or winter in this place in the Caribbean. And it means that most of the year those properties are completely empty with no one around or perhaps some staff.
Chris Hedges
Let me just interrupt because I was just in Belgrave Square in London a few days ago and walking around at night and all of these, these are where the luxury apartments are, almost all of them were dark because no one inhabits them.
Rob Larson
Indeed and like many ruling class sort of level neighborhoods are like that if you walk through Midtown Manhattan and look at those very fancy, very tall, very ugly new billionaire catering skyscrapers I mean you see some lights, few lights. Yeah, those people are in their other homes or their Russian or Arab or European or other investors and it’s just purely a property to be flipped or to store some of your equity. It will never be inhabited until you sell it
Amazing stuff. So that’s a good place to start. The properties themselves, of course, though, do get fairly crazy. I like to mention just a few examples. Obviously, there’s a good deal in the book. One of the largest states down in Los Angeles County, one of these ones that’s large enough to have a name and be a storied mansion. This is a recounting from the Wall Street Journal, I should mention through their very valuable Friday mansion supplement that they include in the physical paper, doesn’t go online just for subscribers.
But they mentioned, for example, this large mansion that has 40 rooms or 60 if you include the servants quarters and the walk-in [inaudible] and wine vaults in the basement. So it’s a completely different sort of physical landscape. So that’s the first thing to consider. And that’s very real, of course, and the effect that has on people’s daily life is obviously large.
But I really do think the deeper insight into that wealthy psychology is exactly what you mentioned Chris and your relationship with the people around you. And we can talk about what this does to your friends, but just purely focusing on the households here. Of course, if you’re rich, you interact with the working class whose paychecks you sign as you said, like that is the crucial thing. You don’t interact with just some independent blue collar person.
You interact with people who’ve been brought into your estate by your home or family manager who pays your bills and brings contractors out to do different kinds of work. And obviously this includes all the maintenance and work that it takes to keep these very fancy properties on their feet. But I also would say it’s that personal staff though that really shows you the issue. And we mentioned, yes, the great book Richistan, which is very enjoyable, a nice outline of the mid 2000s ruling class before the 2008 crisis.
So without even the shame that they kind of maybe remember from that episode. This is the journalist Frank Rich and he said, and this is quoting his description here, because I think it’s pretty memorable, of some students who are in a home staff training academy. So being instructed in school on how to be what they used to call a butler, but that’s now seen to be stuffy. So you go with household staff, which sounds more neutral or corporate, which people prefer.
And Rich mentions this about the training these people receive. He says, most of all, the students learn never to judge their employers, whom they call principals. So if a principal wants to feed her shih tzu braised beef tenderloin steaks every night, the butler should serve it up with a smile. If the principal is in Palm Beach and wants to send his jet to New York to pick up a bottle of Chateau Latour from a Southampton cellar, the butler makes it happen, no questions asked.
And obviously this is fairly gross and disgusting and wasteful on the face of it, but what I like to think of is just what does this do to your ability to relate to other people? I mean, most of the people you encounter during your day, at least around your home are staff and they’re obliged to be nice to you and kiss your ass all the time and never criticize you as they specifically are trained not to do. What effect would we expect that to have on people?
And of course the effect is to make you an imperious, condescending jerk to everyone you deal with. And I always say, the real way to see the power of this is to watch what happens when these characters are occasionally actually criticized. And to me, the definitive version of that in our lifetimes was the 2020 presidential debates where Elizabeth Warren, whatever one may think of her history of candidacies, really tore into Michael Bloomberg publicly during their debate and I think she could have gone a lot further, but she was very disparaging to his face.
And I invite people just to pull up the video of that and just look at Bloomberg’s face in that moment. He looks like he’s seeing aliens arrive on the earth. He’s so dumbstruck. It is the face of a man who’s never been criticized to his face for 20 years. So I think that kind of shows you what happens to the relationships when you’re deep in Richistan like that.
Chris Hedges
Well, you also, there was a leak or something of tweets, was it to Elon Musk or somebody in the book, where they, all the people around him were basically just slobbering all over whatever silly idea you had or something.
Rob Larson
Absolutely. God, that was, I remember that. That was painful just to read the amount of groveling sycophancy that this brings out of people. And I think that’s a big part of it too, especially because now we’re often looking at people who, I mean, some are, but some of these people are not like directly being paid by Musk or his various firms. They’re like his nominal friends, some somewhat rich other acquaintances and so on.
And it’s just nonstop wall to wall ass kissing and the dynamic you see is people competing to kiss the powerful person’s ass the most. Like that’s the dynamic that drives the group is like who’s doing the most butt kissing. It’s a very competitive environment in that way. But I just tell my students like think what would happen to your brain if that’s how your friends related to you. If everyone just tells you how great and brilliant and heroic you are.
And anyone who criticizes you is just jealous, you would lose touch with reality. You think you’re fantastic and you would act the way that Michael Bloomberg or Elon Musk do act, which is, I am the second coming of Christ. You’re so lucky to be speaking to me and have me ruling your life. Because it just destroys your ability to understand reality.
If you’re a middle or working class person, you get corrected by society. Your friends tell you like, yeah, you should rethink that, guy. You’re embarrassing yourself. It’s the kind of thing a normal person can say to one another that you would think twice about saying to someone of this stature.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I mean, from personal experience, it destroys the capacity for empathy. You know, that’s what withers and dies.
Rob Larson
God, that’s a good way of putting it. I should have put that in the book.
Chris Hedges
And the other thing is that they’re not really friends because a lot of the people who suck up to these sycophants, who suck up to these rich people, despise them. And there’s a moment in your book where you talk about the paranoia of the ultra rich because on some level, they recognize it. That people just want a piece of them or a piece of their money or a piece of their power, but don’t really like them.
I mean, they’re very lonely. I know, having gone to school with the super rich, they’re very lonely and unhappy people. And you also make that point in the book. I think it’s anybody who earns above $50,000 a year, I can’t remember the figure. But once you start earning mega sums, it doesn’t make you happy.
Rob Larson
Indeed, but it does completely warp the economy and put insane demonic power in your hands. But it is amazing, you dig into this. I mean, these characters, their lives are filled with, I mean, just wall to wall pleasure. People who help them, do everything for them, provide them with the very finest things that are in the world. And then you gradually learn these people are kind of miserable. Like, what is this even all for if you’re not even enjoying your ruling class lifestyle, which we’re ruining the planet to bring to you?
And of course, sometimes I think people hear this and the tendency is to say, so we should really pity them. Like, no, you could still be mad, but just these are actions that they took that didn’t even redound to their own happiness. But you’re right. It’s common enough that it’s apparently becoming clinically recognized in the book. You know, I cite a professional therapist who mainly caters to very high end income clients in New York, if I recall.
And she mentions, yeah, one of the most common things that we encounter in sessions is people, clients who are very wealthy and saying, do I really have any friends? All these people, I mean, maybe I grew up when they were my friends or I came to know them, but now that I’m so rich and not just rich, if I’m super powerful or just a celebrity, it just makes friendship… you can’t put confidence in it. And it starts to look more and more transactional.
Like I really got to be close to this guy, maybe he’ll have a few glasses of wine and feel like buying me a house or something, keep that nose brown. You can see how that just leads you to, yeah, you don’t even feel like you have the relationships you should have with friends, which is one of the most important things you can have in life. It’s such a twisted picture.
Chris Hedges
Well, of course, because the more deformed you become, the more odious you become. And part of the problem is among the rich themselves. It’s how do they define friendship? They define friendship as what’s in it for me. The moment a quote unquote friend gets in trouble, they go for the door. It’s a very perverted way to define friendship.
That’s something that I experienced knowing a lot of these people. But let’s talk about the… Just one other point. Remember, as you also point out in the book, it’s not that these people, most of them, became rich. Most of them grew up rich. And having gone to school with the sons of the ultra-rich, their family life was a horror show. They almost never saw their parents.
They were superfluous. Of course, that’s one of the reasons they were packed off to boarding school and then turned around and sent off to summer camp. So they were already traumatized. There’s a book called The Trauma of the Privileged Child or something by a British psychologist, which talks about English boarding schools. But we can’t negate the fact that they were reared in this particular environment where there was very little nurturing or love. So it’s not just that their obscene wealth deforms their life, it’s that they grew up as a child like this.
Rob Larson
Yeah, it’s like a bonsai tree that was made to look ugly and be mean to people. Yeah, you grow up in this warped environment, you know, like a potato growing in stony fields and you come up with a weird, not quite correct or normal shape. Makes sense. And, you know, again, like it is amazing to see how it extends to your own kids. But, you know, I got a two year old nephew myself.
My God, he’s such a sweet little kid, but he’s a little terrorist. It’s so much work taking care of kids. The first thing that even middle class people do when they get some money is hire some help with the kids. If anyone’s a parent out there will understand why it’s so much work. You love your kid, but just carry that forward. Once you have millions of dollars. Well, I can just offload all the childcare onto this person.
And this is why we have all these famous stories and you know, every piece of media about rich people always has a joke about this from Succession to Arrested Development about how the wealthy kids are closer to the domestic staff or their nanny or whomever they designated, than they are to their own parents who are jetting around the world, drinking champagne, having fun, not doing the hard work of changing their kids’ diapers or even the medium difficulty work of having serious conversations with them and just having them with you while they explore the world as kids.
It goes to show that when you have this kind of money, just that commercial ease can just intermediate itself between any relationship you have, even with your firstborn child. It’s amazing.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, this you just explained, Winston Churchill’s parents, and the only person he felt who really loved him was his nanny. And then when he finally went off to Sandhurst or wherever, they fired her with no pension. And Churchill, I think until she died, sent the nanny something, meager probably, every month. Let’s talk about the political and the social consequences because the billionaire class runs the country.
I mean, described the last election as between the corporatists and the oligarchs, the corporatists embracing the Democratic Party and Biden and Harris, and the oligarchs embracing Trump. Oligarchs want something different from corporatists in that oligarchs like chaos. They want to destroy the administrative state, to quote Steve Bannon, because they make their money by setting up toll booths in essence between commodities.
We just saw the CEO of UnitedHealth get assassinated. Who knows where that came from? And of course, it’s a horrible event. On the other hand, these for-profit healthcare companies, their job, to boil it down to its moral essence, is to hold six children hostage while parents frantically bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters, a form of terrorism, really.
So let’s talk a little bit about now that it’s the age of oligarchs, private equity firms, which are about destruction of capital for short-term profit. I mean, that’s why they’ve all coalesced around Trump deregulation, destruction of the Department of Education. Everything will become privatized because that’s how they… it’s in its purest form, rentier capitalism.
Let’s talk about how these individuals with this kind of power, given their psychological makeup, how they destroy the society. At the end of the book, you talk about socialism. We’re both socialists. I don’t know if you’re a Marxist. I’m not a Marxist. I’m kind of a Swedish socialist, but we’re socialists. But talk about the political and social consequences of being ruled by the billionaire class, which we are.
Rob Larson
We most certainly are, indeed, and that includes their corporate property. I saw in one of your previous videos how you described that ‘24 campaign of corporatists versus oligarchs. I think that’s thoughtful. That gets at a lot of the character of the ruling class configurations of both parties. I mean, obviously, both of them had billionaires, both candidacies, I mean, for the White House had billionaires backing them and plenty of support from the wealth of society.
But indeed, if you look at Trump, it’s more Wall Street, yes, exactly, private equity, capital destroying to reapportion some of it, sort of hedge fund and private equity background of people all the way up to that Treasury appointment that’s so important. It’s true. And if you look at Harris, it is more conventional, traditional Republican and Democrat corporate support.
But one thing I think is important just to connect that is just to mention something that goes back to the statistics behind this. Just one thing I always want to make sure people realize is that like the corporate world and all of its billion dollars of support for Harris’s failed campaign, this stuff is the property of this same ruling class just for people’s familiarity with this. The big research we have on it comes from the economist Ed Wolff. And his estimate was that the top 1% once again of households owned 40% of all US stocks, and the top 10% owned 84%, which is almost all of it.
So even if we are indeed looking at some oligarchs fighting against more corporate-backed fundamentally, all of this is the property and the domain of that rich ruling class, just to sort of add that aspect to it. But the consequences of getting ruled by them are pretty intense. Obviously, on the policy side, we’ve been looking at 40 years of neoliberalism and it’s meant doing nothing about climate change even as it has completely come to us now and we are just living in it, watching 40 years of re-redistribution of wealth and bringing us a long distance back to that Gilded Age level of wealth concentration.
We aren’t quite back there yet based on the data we have from that time. I’d say next year’s tax cut that everyone expects will probably get us most of the way there. So we’ll explore that. Big consequences of these things and not just that our middle and working class pay has stopped tracking productivity as we all know it stopped doing in the 70s, but also just like what that does to the economy. We have bubbles in so many markets now, you know, those unsustainable spikes and crashes in assets.
Most of our markets now are insanely overheated. The market, the stock market, is ludicrously overvalued by any conventional price to earnings ratio valuation. Our real estate prices are stratospheric in this country. Any asset, cryptocurrency, the whole financial sector, they’re hugely overvalued because so much of this wealth has gone back to these rich households.
You know, I tell my students when middle class people get an income increase, we spend it on our needs. I have a health problem. Junior needs braces. Susie needs a college fund. I’ve got a credit card to pay down. That’s what normal people do. If you’re wealthy, as we’ve said, you already own your property, you have the assets that you need. So wealthy people, when Reagan or Bush or Trump cut their taxes so much, most of that money just gets invested.
And that means that’s more cash chasing the same number of assets, and it just tends to have the effect of hideously inflating every asset market, making housing out of reach for so many people, making the market absurdly overpriced, if you’re concerned about that. The consequences are pretty rough from government policy all the way to its effect on the markets.
Chris Hedges
And how does it distort the political system? I mean, you argue in the book, which I agree with, that essentially these were the people who gave us Trump.
Rob Larson
Indeed. And I have a little piece coming out in In These Times in a week or two kind of looking at this in more detail. But fundamentally, this story has kind of hit the public how important money is. I mean, Trump runs his campaign saying he’s running against the power of money. And that was one of his big switchblades in the back of all of his Republican competitors in 2016 was saying, I donate money to these people and they pick up my calls.
You know, they always do. That spoke to people because it suggests a little of that Bernie Sanders populism, but with a bunch of Trump racism. So you can kind of have both. And that’s part of his successful coalition there. So these absolutely are the figures that brought us Trump. Again, you have like, it’s fundamentally a social democratic country, despite it all to this day, and candidates that succeed usually at least pretend to be catering toward that.
So Obama in 2008 talked all this progressive fight about codifying Roe and signing the Card Check Act to make union elections easier, all this stuff, and then backed off most of it, let Congress write the banks’ re-regulation, and used a right-wing Republican health care plan to become his signature bill. When people see that, they become cynical about left-wing approaches and kind of have abandoned the Democrats in part, I think, because of that switcheroo that they pull.
Then have figures like Clinton and Harris who refuse to even pretend, and then they’re the ones that go down in flames, sadly. So watching the political parties adapt to this, the Republicans are working very hard on their working-class cosplay, which is a long-standing ruling-class pastime, as I review in the book. Ever since we’ve had the wealthy, you know, today billionaires, back in the original Gilded Age it was just millionaires with inflation, you know? But ever since we’ve had that class distinction, these guys’ favorite thing is to dress up like they’re working class and amazing.
Chris Hedges
But you actually, you write about the difference in the way they used to dress in top hats and tails and how now figures like Bezos show up in t-shirts and jeans. I just want to throw out, by the way, that John D. Rockefeller III was my graduation speaker at boarding school. That’s, of course, who we were all, the Rockefellers went to my boarding school, that’s who we were all supposed to emulate. But I thought that was kind of an interesting point.
Just before we go on, explain that weird thing where the ruling class… it used to be that you immediately knew who the ruling class was by the way they dressed and by manners. And you write in the book that it takes time to learn manners. That’s true. And believe me, that was a heavy form of indoctrination within boarding school, these elite boarding schools, was manners. What were manners?
But I came to see it as more, we, or I was supposed to be a member of the club, but I ended up being a heretic. But the ruling class, the 1%, had elaborate manners because the people who did the dirty work for them, they didn’t have to do the dirty work.
The goons, the thugs, the bankers, they didn’t do the dirty work. Their hands were clean. And it was, I looked at it as a kind of subterfuge. But talk about that issue and talk about the issue of dress just because I found it kind of interesting.
Rob Larson
For sure. Yeah, it’s a favorite of mine personally. So yeah, what we were referring to before was what wealthy people would do for fun dress up parties. In those days, it was, you know, dressing up like hobos or something like that, or, know,
Chris Hedges
Well, or, well, this was an actual case you quoted among coal barons where they would, I mean, the cruelty of it, dressing up like hobos. I mean, they’re all billionaires and I think they were served in tin cups or something. And then you had another example of, I forget, was it Carnegie or somebody? It was like a Versailles party and 50 women came as Marie Antoinette or, yeah.
Rob Larson
God, yeah, I forgot about that one. Yes, that’s a really great one too. So this is like a long tradition and this goes all the way through today. Again, as you said, in the classic sort of Gilded Age era before the New Deal and labor movements made this sort of suspect to do that much outward display of wealth, as you said, these people would wear the most insane finery, like exaggerated beyond what European rich people would wear, which is already fairly dandy as it stands.
But these days, it seemed to be generally your very wealthy people like to be more discreet in terms of their affectation. I know Kate Wagner, the great creator of the McMansion Hell blog that some of your viewers will know. She wrote for The Nation about how annoying it is that wealthy people don’t even dress conspicuously different from us anymore. They’re just boring, yeah, when you see Bill Gates, it’s grandfatherly sweaters, when you see Elon Musk, it’s some hideous t-shirt that doesn’t fit his body. And it’s annoying.
However, if you keep up with this stuff, this was just, I think, two months ago or so, it was actually after the book came out, The Wall Street Journal, which, if you’re an economist, is kind of your house newspaper, but it’s definitely a great place to keep track of what the wealthier thinking and doing. It mentioned that today, very wealthy people to our middle class eyes, it looks like they’re just wearing normal clothes, boring pants, boring sweaters, loafers or whatever.
If you look at these brands, they’re stratospherically expensive, but they’re very low key, fine material or imported, expensively sourced items. So to most people, you look like maybe you’re just some executive or some retired grandparent or something like that, but you’re wearing an outfit that even though it is boring, Wagner is correct, the outfit may still cost a couple thousand dollars because all the items are so low key, very expensive.
So it seems like it’s more about, I would say it’s about refining the signal that’s being sent in the old days with top hats and opera glasses and so forth, it’s about being conspicuous in your consumption to everybody. Whereas now it’s more about signaling to other wealthy people or people adjacent to that he looks normal, but he’s wearing that very, very expensive shirt. You know, that’s a $400 tailored shirt.
It’s more subtle signaling now that doesn’t necessarily land to the middle class eye the way it does for the ruling class. So I think part of the legacy of the new deal is now the rich, as [American cultural historian and author] Paul Fussell put it, have been driven underground and exactly how their outward class affectations manifest.
Chris Hedges
Except for watches, which you point out.
Rob Larson
Yeah, watches and it’s usually the toys now that we see the consumption more than attire and it would definitely include the watches. My God, the money that people invest in their simple timepiece is incredible. But then you get to people’s yachts and cars and as you said, private jets. And now we’re done with the affecting a down to earth persona. And I think, too, we were talking about Thorstein Veblen before we started recording, the great Norwegian-American sociologist who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”.
And one of his points, which I liked so much that I think it’s included in the text as well, is exactly what you said. It’s not just that you have a life of leisure because of all your wealth, but you have so much wealth to show off, so much wealth to conspicuously consume that you’ll have staff who also do nothing. In the old days, that would be your senior butler or your hall boys and so on who generally aren’t doing anything but I can pay them just to stand there in case later I want a glass of tea or something.
So extending your conspicuous consumption leisure lifestyle to some of your staff, this is the way conspicuous consumption works. It’s not just look at my flashy sports car, it’s these weird layers and who’s signaling to whom.
Chris Hedges
Well, this is Veblen’s theory of the leisure class, which is an important book along with C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. They’re older books, but they certainly get the pathology of the ruling class. C. Wright Mills makes a point which kind of coalesces with my own experience among the super rich. And that is that the way they signal to each other is always subtle. If you’re not initiated into that club, you can’t read it.
It’s not just about brands, but it’s about which ski area in Switzerland you ski in. That’s a concrete example I’m using. One of my friends, his father, Scranton, was the governor of Pennsylvania, came from an oligarchic family. I remember visiting the mansion. It was the first time I ever saw an Olympic indoor pool in a house. And his father came back from work in a helicopter. I mean, so it is a world in and of itself.
I once had dinner in New York with a very wealthy friend of mine. He invited me to dinner and gave me the address. And I went to a building in Midtown and got on the elevator and took it to the top floor and it was oak panel doors. There was no sign. There was nothing. You would never know it’s there.
And it was a very exclusive dining residence. Al Sharpton, I want to add, was at the table next to us. There were no checks. Every waitress looked like she was a fashion model. You could smoke cigars. And it gets back to this world of Richistan. They don’t live in the world we live in. And yet when they have, they live in a non-reality environment, really. It’s kind of fantasy land.
And yet when you give them an oligarchic elite, this is just true throughout history, when you give them that kind of power, then they just start destroying everything around them because they have no ability to judge reality because they don’t live in reality.
Rob Larson
Indeed, that absolutely is the case. I mean, there’s a lot to say about this, but every time I get onto this subject, I always think of, you may remember and some of your viewers may remember this, famous photo of I think then Senator or perhaps State Secretary Hillary Clinton, I think campaigning, and she’s in the home of like a working class person. And it’s just a famous photo of her standing in the entrance to a kitchen, like a working class person’s kitchen, and it’s not I mean, we’ve seen tiny apartments. It’s not tiny. It’s not dirty.
It has a couple of plants that have been watered and are draining in the sink basin. The look on her face is amazing. It’s the look of the face of someone who’s seeing a homeless person for the first time. I think it’s just a little telling moment that got captured. But what I talk about in the book is how one natural process of markets is to produce class segregation.
You can’t afford to live in this neighborhood. Maybe you’d like the dingy, dangerous or environmentally unhealthy neighborhood on the other side of town or sometimes literally on the other side of the tracks. I’m going to have a little discussion of that in the book about how that segregation works. I would just say if, as I did for this book, if you read marketing for wealthy households, you know, product pitches that aren’t towards some mass market of most people, but the very high end of markets, there is no word that they use more than “exclusive”.
It’s an exclusive venue with exclusive products and exclusive service. And it’s fascinating because in society, so many of us and so many institutions are striving for inclusion to include historically marginalized groups and identities, which I think is great. But the whole economy is built around catering to people who want exclusion. I want to exclude all you grubby peasants from my lovely private dining environment or my private resort or whatever it is.
And that exclusion, I mean, it’s class-based. I mean, today’s ruling class, as we’re saying, is fairly cosmopolitan. Of course, you still have your rich, prejudiced wasps and some really buttoned-up Hamptons country clubs, and so on. But these days, people who are elite pride themselves on being accepting and having friends from around the world of different types, as long as they’re people of means.
If you’re some poor person who cares what kind of person you are, you’re fit to scrub my floors for a small check. But that segregation is a really big piece of it and there are places in the world, especially large cities, where you can just visibly observe where the class segregation line is drawn. Sometimes it’s the wall of a gated community, sometimes it’s just one of those streets where you have high rises on one side and then what you could characterize as slums on the other side of the boulevard.
So fascinating stuff, but yes, the effect of all of it is to make these people just abjectly disconnected from people’s everyday experience.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about where we’re going. And Aristotle writes that when oligarchs seize control, the only two options are tyranny or revolution.
Rob Larson
Indeed, I would definitely go along with Aristotle’s wisdom there. And there’s a lot to say about it. Obviously, this last election was fairly demoralizing. A lot of avoidable things led to that from Biden insisting he could run again despite being a walking corpse. Therefore, we don’t have a primary so we’re stuck with Harris, who’s one of the weakest candidates to ever run for any office, certainly including the White House. So that’s been painful.
Chris Hedges
Well, wait, Rob, you think the Democratic Party is reformable?
Rob Larson
That’s a really good question.
Chris Hedges
I don’t.
Rob Larson
I feel like I would have said that in the 20s too though, and we did get a New Deal Great Society era, not because of anything within the party of course, but because of waves of sit-down strikes in the Depression by the CIO that terrorized the rich and their backers. You could make a pretty good case they’re unreformable by this time. I’m not a political scientist, so I think that’s tough.
Chris Hedges
Okay, Rob, the liberal class, and I wrote a book called Death of Liberal Class, the liberal class is a completely different animal in the wake of the Cold War. They’re not the traditional liberal class. They’re not the, you know, FDR oligarchic liberal. Those people don’t exist anymore. And part of the failure on the part of the capitalist ruling elite is that they destroyed the liberal class, which as Noam Chomsky points out, functioned as a safety valve.
It ameliorated the excesses of capitalism. And by destroying that liberal mechanism, we ended up where we are. I mean, in a functioning democracy that wasn’t ruled by corporate power, Bernie Sanders would have been the nominee without question because the power of a [Nancy] Pelosi or a Clinton or a [Chuck] Schumer is money.
It’s the fact that they are the conduit for oligarchy money and they anoint the candidates they want and they destroy the candidates that they don’t want. And I think Bernie would have crushed Trump. I think anybody advocating New Deal reforms would have buried Trump. I just throw that out. I mean, you can respond, but I don’t see the Democratic Party as reformable.
Rob Larson
Yeah, I would say they’re going wall to wall to stop Sanders does show. I would say that’s a strong argument for your case.
Chris Hedges
Well, but Rob, Lloyd Blankfein was very open about it. He said that if Sanders was the nominee, they would support Trump. You’d end up with a 1972 kind of situation when [George] McGovern won and the hierarchy, the donor and the class and the political establishment, within the Democratic Party all backed Nixon and destroyed McGovern. And Blankfein was very open about what would happen.
Rob Larson
Indeed. I think the writing was on the wall before he even outwardly, absolutely explicitly said it. And that is a Blankfein. Like he really is Well, of course we’ll do this evil thing to stop health insurance for poor people. My God. It absolutely, of course, is the case that Sanders would have walked over Trump. I mean, this is why figures like Clinton and Biden, despite being ludicrously weak political figures and unpopular and poor campaigners, they were still chosen to be the party nominees. weren’t people who could beat Trump.
They were people who could beat Sanders. The big concern is to block out social democracy and the independence that would give some workers and the tax burden it would impose on the rich, even though they’re unlikely to notice much of it. It absolutely is the case. And I would say if 2016 and really especially 2020 showed us anything, it absolutely is that the ruling class would absolutely prefer a liberal norm breaking authoritarian to some awful social democrat.
Chris Hedges
Yeah. Well, I just want to throw out, I mean, certainly from your political standpoint and mine, Sanders was hardly a flaming radical. He was kind of an RFK kind of liberal. We’re not talking about Rosa Luxemburg here.
Rob Larson
Absolutely. And as a lot of my left-wing friends said at the time, Bernie is the compromise. Like, that’s already significantly more to the right than we want. He’s basically European social democrat, give or take. And in America, that’s just a stunning departure from the norm. And suddenly he’s scooping up all this support from across political groups that are thought to be antagonized with our weird, castrated identity and economic bracket-based horse race sort of political landscape.
To your main point though, I think that comment on liberalism is exactly right. And what I tend to think of on that subject was, I won’t be able to remember the quote, it was something that again Chomsky often liked to bring up from the old anarchist socialist, Rudolf Rocker, who said words to the effect of that the promise of liberalism and the liberal revolutions was broken on the rocks of capitalism.
I think that that’s pretty accurate. The ruling class likes liberalism and pluralism and a participatory process right up to the point that it inconveniences that base of wealth that the donor class stands on and that controls everything in the Democratic Party. So reformable or not…
Chris Hedges
Well, liberals throughout history have proven that point. It was [Friedrich] Ebert and the Socialists in Germany who organized the Freikorps to crush the revolutionary movements. Let’s just finish briefly, because you end the book with this. You define yourself as a socialist, I define myself as a socialist. Okay, let’s quote Lenin, who Chomsky describes as a counter-revolutionary. You know, what must be done?
Rob Larson
Well, in my view, obviously, it centers on economic issues as it would. But to me, the political situation in the United States is such a perennial disaster because of the structures that prevent us from having a labor-based or a socialist political party. You get stuck with various levels of right-wing conservative capitalist parties.
So to me right now, I feel like the best actions we can be taking going forward immediately is through other avenues and not to say we should turn our back on national level politics, but I would say right now the real promise is in the resurgence in the labor movement and gradually in socialist political representation too.
And I wouldn’t call it a labor comeback yet, but it’s at least a renaissance. We’ve several hundred organized Starbucks stores. Most of them are still waiting on contracts or I think several of them are now in negotiations, but I mean, that’s something no one would have anticipated just five or six years ago.
We have at least that one organized Staten Island Amazon warehouse, the JFK8 facility, which has some amazing people there. Modest but real UAW organizing victories in the South, impressive negotiations and contracts being brought in by some of the other major national locals. And of course, we’re facing this new ugly administration.
But having that organizing happening, I think, is just about the healthiest thing that could happen in the United States. Our labor density is still beaten down into the single digits nationally, but it was lower than that in 1910. And then we had the huge CIO resurgence, and that took a lot of sacrifice and real work from people. And it’s a different country now. It’s a century later. It’s a lot richer. It’s a lot lazier. There’s a lot of social platforms that make it easy to talk about stuff and never do anything. That’s popular.
But to me, working through this labor movement is the way to, I think, immediately move forward. And I’m very lucky to be part of my.. I’m in the AFT [American Federation of Teachers] and I’m our county labor council rep. And I would just say this to people, especially these days, people are feeling very bummed out, you know, bad vibes after this last election, understandably.
And I would say the cure for bad vibes is to be in some actual group that you actually physically meet in person and talk to and do some action with, even if this is just a small Gaza demonstration you do on the street or a little union affinity group, or you’re hoping in time to get an organization into your workplace, just meeting with people and actually engaging, you will be amazed what that does for your serotonin levels and for the furtherance of moving a socialist project forward.
Like it comes from being social. And I think especially after COVID, we have more people who are as they sometimes say, anti-social socialists. But I think a great cure for that goes through the same road that the movement needs, which is us actually getting together and trying to organize in a real way to get some labor strength in this country and to get some national, some nationwide left-wing political representation.
Sanders is the obvious figure here, but I think we should appreciate, despite it being such a modest achievement, just having any socialist congressional representatives, and at the state level as well, which people never pay attention to, but it’s so important. We do have that, and it was incredibly very frustrating this fall watching us lose a couple of congressional socialists of color, and losing their primaries after insane money is spent to stop them.
And it’s especially annoying that the defeat didn’t come from the traditional socialist archenemy, which is the chamber of commerce, it came from the ethnic cleansing lobby, which is very frustrating. And that is, of course, American socialist history.
Chris Hedges
Well, you’re right. All the points you make about shutting down your screens and creating collectives, I mean, that’s what’s going to sustain us. You’re exactly right. But let’s never forget that the Israel, the Zionist lobby, is completely fused with the war industry. And this is, of course, the great failing of Bernie Sanders in that he’s just, you know, out of political caution, refuses to take on the war industry, which consumes 50% of discretionary spending and is, as the socialist Karl Liebknecht said of the German military, the enemy from within.
But thanks so much. This is for your book, Mastering the Universe. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Photos
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