There’s nothing new about it.  And it’s not a meritocracy.

In the “Economist” magazine of January 20, 2011 was an interesting article, “Inequality – The rich and rest.”

What was most fascinating was how carefully the article tiptoed around the issue of wealth generated on Wall Street, that top one percent whose wealth has grown so fast and so great that they in fact now rule.  The magazine went so far as to call them a “new meritocracy.”

Really?  A new meritocracy?  Does anyone else hear the bitter laughter?

In what way do they merit?  Aside from sitting on the lines of production and commerce in order to skim a huge percent for themselves?

In every age of man has been a type of person unable or unwilling to produce and exchange and whose proper name is parasite.  They can always be determined by their lack of exchange for the income they extract.

Currently, having destroyed our housing market and our home values with their outrageous speculation–and thus having killed that victim from which to feed, the Wall Street parasites have added the commodities market to their menus.  For years these markets operated to maintain even prices and even flows of commodities.  Bush allowed the speculators in.  Obama continues to allow them.  For each gallon of fuel and for each loaf of bread, the parasites have now added their tax.  Not a tax for value.  Just a tax to keep themselves rich.

Laughably, many parasites still call themselves “investors.”  Anyone can look up the word.  It has to do with the building of the future.  This most commonly does not apply to Wall Street.  That avenue is dominated by speculators who don’t give a damn about tomorrow but only in getting their cut from inflating stock prices or betting against those prices as they fall.  Worse, the parasites have injected themselves with stock options into the board rooms of almost all major companies, infecting them with the same attitude, causing our companies to destroy themselves in endless, churning foolishness in order to give the speculators an excuse for betting one way or the other.

The results of the parasites feeding are the fevers and comas of our economies.  Being parasites, they cause illness.  They always bleed the maximum from body in which they are lodged.  It is the amount of blood in their swollen abdomens by which the parasites judge their value.  And it is this sort of justification that we hear when the parasites of Wall Street are crowing over the tens and hundreds of millions in yearly pay.  They are not measuring their value by what they’ve produced and exchanged.  Rather, they measure the quantity of blood sucked, the comparative size of their gullets, and pretend among themselves that is a measure of actual worth and not merely thieves bragging over their cut of the take.

They consider themselves clever because they are careful to ally themselves with the government–they buy some guarantee that their brand of thievery is “legal.”  There is nothing new here–it was the practice used by the pharaohs, the senators in Rome, the protection-racket thugs who became Europe’s aristocracy, and used also by warlords, pirates, slave owners, and so on right up to the Soviet commissars.  Our particular parasites practice the same shopworn tactics:  Don’t produce a product.  Take a cut from everyone else.  Use the government for protection and as an enforcer.  Become the government whenever possible.

There is so little new in what they do that it is incredibly humorous to hear these “capitalists” grumble and moan about socialists and communists.  What they really are saying is that they don’t like the competition from the other parasites.

The Wall Street parasite’s frenzied gorging, infecting the rest of the world with their fever, gave us the crash in 1929, which gave us Nazi Germany and World War II.  Today, we can see governments falling all over the world.  Years of Wall Street causing economic turbulence, capped now by hungry children and jobs lost due to Wall Street inflating prices for commodities, are setting the stage for World War III.  The root cause of that war will be the immeasurable and insatiable greed of those “The Economist” calls the “new meritocracy.”

Meritocracy?  What they merit is a seat on the same cart used for Louis and Marie.  What they deserve is the temporary use of a basket for the display of their heads.

Here is a little law, noted by me for them (and you):  Whenever the gap between the poor and the rich grows to the extreme, you will find political manipulation at the core.  Not skill, not merit, but corruption, bribery and influence.

Value given for value received is the basis for all viable economies.  Those at “The Economist” should know this best of all, unless of course, their name is simply cover.  Certainly the role the magazine serves with this article is less obvious.  Parasites always work to prolong their feeding.  The aristocrats of Europe employed skilled artists and architects to portray themselves as godly and surround themselves with trappings beyond those due mortal men.  This was artful public relations designed to impress the public, to keep the peasants cowed, to keep up the lie that the aristocrats deserved what they stole.  At “The Economist,” with this article, they serve the same role.  They prostitute themselves to the parasites, working to portray the useless in the most flattering light.

Sadly for all of us, “The Economist” may help the parasites succeed long enough for this cycle of history to end in another disaster.

In time, the magazine’s true part in this fiasco will be remembered–nor will they escape.  The parasites who flee will not remember the magazine’s editors or writers, and the parasites will not make room on their lifeboats for mere hangers-on.  As the edge of disaster sweeps forward, those at “The Economist” will stand on the shore with the rest of us, will stand there with all of our children, while those the magazine fawned over and lied for sail away.

And that is all the justice there will be.  Unless . . .

Unless we take our government back.  The politicians and the criminals on Wall Street still fear us.  If they didn’t, we wouldn’t still have elections.  That would be the first inconvenience they cast aside.

They should fear us.  Regardless of the type of political structure–republic, democracy, monarchy, empire, whatever–the government forever and always depends upon the consent of the governed.  As governments go insane, they gain that consent through more and more destructive methods on down through lies, coercion and brutality.  But even then, to rule requires the consent of the governed.

Don’t think so?  Just summon up the ghosts of Louis and Marie Antoinette.  Don’t have that skill?  No problem.  Spend just a few minutes with the history of the French Revolution.

Those who pervert our government have read those books, and they still fear us.

As they should.