Double Dip Recession

Have you ever looked at the crowns, orbs, sceptres and jewel encrusted clothing of the "great and the good"?

Ha, ha. Since when were the monarchs of the past not the champions of bling?

The social elite, the high and the mighty, the snobs in their ivory towers, espying the masses below, have always looked on in disdain at the common people.

They said they were brash, they said they were brazen, and they said they wore bling. But it was through jealousy and the realisation that their time was up - that the masses were on the rise, they were grabbing the prize and nothing could stop them; the bars had been removed from their prison thanks to capitalism.

And in private, the same old machinations continue.

Those people were puppets of the real elite. The real elite are not on TV screens, they operate behind the curtains and pull the strings of the people on the TV screens.

The capitalist class invests money in order to create goods that help humanity, and sometimes they lose their money due to the risks that they take. In the hope of earning more money, they employ millions of people who all work and learn and grow in the enterprise of making these goods. The wheels of commerce turn and the mass of people earn and teh capitalist who invested in it stands to gain. It is a great system that has brought wealth and innovation and the people who advocate zero growth and even negative growth want to put a spanner in the works.

Yes, some people become too powerful and too greedy, but that is why we must have transparency of ownership and open regulation to prevent anybody cornering the market and preventing free competition.

New Labour's 'light touch regulation' is not adequate for the task; it let the fat cats off the hook.

The only difference Philip Green has made to the elite is to allow it to be more brazen - to remove any sense of embarrassment at spending a fortune on showing off how wonderful you think you are and to widen the number of ways in which it is culturally acceptable to show off. I don't think that is a colossal improvement, it just makes the behaviour of the elite more publicly nauseating.

Perhaps Mr Green might pay his taxes in this country if we promise to elect him into power.

Ooh, yes. And I'll bet Philip Green's children go to an ordinary school.

Victorian industrialists didn't tend to come from the top public schools - some even rose through the ranks from poor backgrounds, so I think you are wrong if you think shopkeepers' children and barrow boys never made it good. There are plenty of examples through history of just that. And once they made it to the top, they joined the elite, or were knocked back down again. Nobody ever tried to beat them, only to join them.

Heaving?? heavily obv

The new elite are where they are precisely because of the revolution and the adoption of capitalism, this can be agreed. History shows us that the most revolutionary class is what Schumpter refered to as intellectuals and what Marx refers to as the petit bourgeois, educated, disaffected class.

The elite that you refer to claig when you start to include uber wealthy bankers and oil barons, are the capitalist class. Capitalism relies heaving on three things, money lending/banking, ownership of the means of production and control through whatever means of the worlds natural resources. The people that you refer to have control of these things. In addition they have control of the media, education and governments through the accumaltion of sovereign debt.

The capitalist class of which Mr Green is a member what ever his background is constantly renewing itself, it will make some people very rich and as it does so they take up the ranks of elites who exploit all natural resources, all peoples and all means of production. Do you think Rhodes was elite through birth, why do you think he set up various little cliques with Rockefella and Schiff money? because he bought into that class, just as JP morgan did, one through natural resources and the other through banking and who owned the mines, oil wells and the banking system?

In fact I have now convinced myself that if Philip Green stood for Prime Minister, he would get my vote, and I hope yours too, over someone like Tony Blair.

Philip Green speaks like a cockney, not like Tony Blair's mockney.
He probably went to schools where we now go, not Fettes where the rich and well-to-do go.

He is not the real elite. He is one of us done good and we need more like him.
He didn't go to Fettes, which is possibly why some snobs don't like him.

Philip Green is one of the elite, attempting to pull the ladder up after him and behave as the elite always do - ensuring regulation remains in his and his future progeny's favour now he has got to where he is. If he knows how we feel, then none of us are very nice.

Why do you think he votes Tory?

Centuries ago, the children of market workers and shop keepers and barrow boys and scrap metal workers could never have amassed hundred million pound fortunes because there was no growth, only stagnation and stags roaming on the gentry's huge estates. Now, it has all changed, and ordinary people can share in the wealth of the elite and these parvenus can be even richer than the nobles. The real elite want to turn the clock back and set the people bacl with their zero growth and negative growth.

Lots of people have it in for Sir Philip Green. Yes he is brash and probably didn't go to elite schools and elite universities, but he is one of us. He came from where we came from, he knows how we feel, he knows his roots are like ours. He is not against our prosperity, because he earned his prosperity the hard way, just like us, and it wasn't handed it to him on a silver platter. He was one of us and in his heart still is one of us.

Yes, we need regulation and transparency and the sovereign parliament of the people should control the regulators and ensure transparency.

What was so fascinating about teh donors to the Tory Party issue was how many of these rich 700 million pound people were ordinary people. They were people whose fathers were from Smithfields or Bilingsgate markets and who went on to create huge fortunes. There was also teh scarp metal mogul from Essex. They are far richer than teh aristocrats with a few paltry millions, and they didn't go to elite schools and elite universities. And of course some of teh papers sneered at teh "barrow boys'" faux pas in bragging when being secretly filmes. But what it showed and what no paper mentioned was that social mobility was possible in this country through free enterprise and capitalism. These people are not saints but they believe in growth, prosperity and capitalism. They are not the real elite who wish for zero growth and even negative growth. These people came from where we come from, went to schools that we go to.

That's a really good point Rabbit, capitalism necessitates greater regulation just as it does welfare. It also creates the need for a militarised state, this is all washed over though because most people are not prepared to see it esp if it means questioning their individual predisposition towards accumulation(greed).

And who is likely to control the regulators? Those with the most power, who will therefore ensure things are regulated so as to suit their own interests.

And capitalism also requires regulation and regulators, or it becomes a free for all and descends back into little tribes warmongering against each other for a bigger share of the next tribe's little plot of land.

niceguy2 - I disagree with your statement: "Surely in a free society we are free to do what we want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Am I harming anyone here? I think not." On the basis that I think the incredibly high levels of executive pay in many large companies and banks ARE harming us.

Wasabi - as for currency fluctuations, etc - who is saying employees are asking for rights to have a say in futures and options? Do you mean to imply that this is the real business of any business and any other decisions made within it are irrelevant? That the businesses might as well not exist and be replaced by a lot of people playing about with hedging their bets? I'm sorry, but having worked with people who make decisions on market fluctuations, etc, I don't think they are worth many millions. They really aren't that clever, they are just in an environment where there is an awful lot of money swilling around.

And as for an elite wanting a smaller population so that they can protect their grouse moors.... it's not just an elite that would rather they had a bit more space about them. I think you'll find all sorts of people from all sorts of levels of society would rather they had a bit more space and greater resources to themselves and fewer people whose behaviours and habits they did not like around them. The difference is, those who historically have been the most aggressive (by warmongering and being rewarded for it by the powers that be, or through getting involved in industries that were considered socially unacceptable - eg money lending, which used to have a status somewhere similar to that of prostitution - and then using the wealth created to wield power over others and join the ranks of those rewarded for warmongering by funding warmongering...) are those who get to decide who should and shouldn't get the resources and who should be starved out. They aren't an evil minority - they are what most people seem to become when they get enough power to decide on the lives of others. And capitalism allows inbalances in power every bit as much as any other system we have tried - in fact, it encourages it.

Yes claig education is the answer but not the type of education that actively prevents freedom of thought. It is not just children that need education. The working classes need to become a class of itself and for itself. Somehow people need to reclaim who they are, what they are and become masters of their own destiny, people need to become political not just vote. Voting in a system that is mired with money,wealth and private interests, is not a democratic system at all.

I don't think you can. I think that education is the answer, so that people wake up and don't vote for policies that are against growth and their interests, so that they are not conned by spin.

How do you propose to undermine the power of these elites, how will you wrestle their wealth and power from them?

Communism has become a dirty word hasn't it, no one is prepared to stand up in defence of it. I have one response to that "Stalin & Lenin" It isn't socialism that is wrong, it was the fact that the revolution came about from a vanguard of intellectual elites who proceeded to create a whole new class system. Marx must have turned in his grave!

I disagree, because that will lead to communism - a dictatorship of people who say they are on the side of teh proletariat, but who imprisoned them behind walls, incarcerated them for thought crimes and killed millions - a system believes that the end justifies the means - a system that is really just a proxy for the same elite that pull the puppet's string and once again control the masses and limit their growth.

What the elite don't like is freedom, growth and capitalism. So we should vote for that.