Mitt Romney's Tax Returns And The 6th Century Zoroastrian Reformer Mazdak

Saturday, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, we wished the French people the best on their Fête Nationale, what we call Bastille Day, the 223rd anniversary of the French people beginning their struggle to throw of the oppressive yoke of plutocracy. Bastille Day is symbolic of this struggle all over the world-- and all through history. Oklahoman Woody Guthrie may never have joined the Communist Party, but he was-- to put it mildly-- sympathetic with their goals of injecting more equality into the socio-economic system of the U.S.

This weekend I was fascinated to see a survey from a formerly communist country that has adopted capitalism (and where plutocracy is flexing its nascent muscles), China. It doesn't seem like a remotely scientific survey but 78.32% of the respondents said they despise the rich and think the rich don't deserve their fortunes.

One netizen "Li Zhuanhao" said he does not hate the rich but only hates corrupted wealthy people who are heartless and will do anything to make a profit.

Another netizen "Jie Cuo" said 80% of the wealthiest Chinese make their fortunes through unfair means of competition...making the term of 'rich' synonymous with corrupted officials, the underworld, gangsters and the despicable."

Here in the United States, the first little tiny bubbles of the pot boiling over are starting to drift to the surface. Even a kiss-ass conservative journal like the Weekly Standard is starting to ask when will an ex-vulture capitalist and wheeler-dealer like Mitt Romney, should he ever become president, call out the banksters. "Where," they want to know, "is the Republican candidate’s outrage at some of those who might be considered his own friends and allies?"

Just because Obama attacks “fat cat” bankers in one of his egalitarian rants doesn’t mean that Romney should refuse to excoriate those bailed-out, over-bonused executives when their behavior warrants it. Ever since the days of Adam Smith, believers in the virtues of free markets have known that “people of the same trade seldom meet together... but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” It’s bad enough when these conspiracies aim to fix prices on, say, construction projects. But when the conspirators are bankers who label themselves “dudes” and “big boys,” and promise each other bottles of Bollinger for manipulating prices, and when the price they fix is the interest rate that the Wall Street Journal estimates governs $800 trillion of loans and derivatives worldwide, including almost one million U.S. home loans indexed to Libor carrying an unpaid principal balance of $275 billion, we have an assault on the heart of capitalism, not to mention a potential bonanza for class-action lawyers. The CEO of one multinational bank told the Economist, “This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” referring to that industry’s $200 billion claims payout.

A pillar of conservatism sounding like Jie Cuo and Li Zhuanhao? They're outraged about the Libor scandal... and they should be. It's another tip of the iceberg, exposing a rotten, fixed, corrupted system-- and how the plutocratic nature of capitalism is reaching the point where society will have no choice but to slap it down-- the way the French did 223 years ago. And plutocracy's candidate-- now exposed as nothing but a money-grubbing slimy felon-- is too scared of being hauled off to prison if he releases his tax returns. Bill Kristol thinks Romney can win if he debates Obama about capitalism!



This is a debate that's been raging, intermittently, for longer than anyone can remember. Right now I'm reading Tom Holland's elegant history of late antiquity, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. In the first chapter he introduces his readers to an historical figure few of us have ever heard of, Mazdak, a Zoroastrian religious activist preaching an early form of socialism, like around 500 AD (I checked; he's in wikipedia.) Holland introduces him in a way that must bring up today's Mitt Romney characters:

All the wealth of the Shahanshan in his many fabulous palaces, of the dynasts in their own strongholds, and of the mowbeds on their fine horses, all the splendour of the aristoracy's shimmering silks, their jewels and their groaning tables, all their dancing girls, their musicians and their performing monkeys, almost everything enjoyed by the rich, in short, had been wrung from the exertions of the poor.

...Men, they declared, were created equal. It followed, then, that all good things, from food to land to women, should be held in common. The privileges of the nobility, the pretensions of the priesthood: both had to be dissolved. Such were the demands of the self-proclaimed "Adherents of Justice": the world's first communist manifesto.

It ended badly for Mazdak and his followers. They took over the world for a brief moment... but ended planted upside down in a park, Mazdak himself a target for archery practice. Maybe if they had Internet in the 500's he would have been able to pull it off better.