The Devilish Agenda of the Super Rich by Edwin Young

The Brilliant, Devilish, Duplicitous, Successful Agenda of the Super Rich
By Edwin L. Young, PhD

Do you suppose that those leaders at the top of the US's largest corporations, the ones who are the main contributors to McCain's campaign, are the least bit interested in issues such as same sex marriage, abortion rights, or the 'family values' and religiosity of our political leaders? They eagerly fund politicians like charlatan and hypocrite Representative Tom DeLay. The rich power elites are experts, or rather hire experts, at marketing and demographics and know what will influence the poorly educated majority and how to influence them. We never get to see the connection between what we hear on radio, read print media like tabloids and even WSJ, and see on major TV channels and the CEOs, moguls, magnates, tycoons, and robber-barons heading international corporations such as General Electric, Monsanto, General Dynamics, Dow Chemical, Lockheed, DuPont, Bank of America, Boeing, Newscorp, AT&T, Wal-Mart, Time-Warner, Johnson and Johnson, Humana, Merck, Martin-Marietta, Archer Daniels Midland, Caterpillar, Brown and Root, Halliburton, Exxon, IGA, the ex-Enron, and on and on.

In the early 1950s, William Randolph Hearst, Newspaper Magnate and instigator of foreign wars, heard about Billy Graham's popularity as a fundamentalist preacher in Tennessee. Upon hearing about the young Graham, Hearst is reliably reported to have told his editors to "push Graham". Hearst was way ahead of his time in understanding how powerful a tool the Christian fundamentalist movement, led by Bible thumping, Hell Fire and Brimstone, Ole Time Tent Revival, ultra conservative, circuit preachers, could be in swaying their uneducated followers to vote for conservative politicians.

In the late 19th century and most of the 20th century, at their tent revivals, these roving preachers routinely auctioned off plots of land in heaven while the collection plate was being passed. I know because I attended many of their weeklong, evening revival services. Most of these spellbinding, sanctimonious, hypocritical sociopaths were as, or even more, unscrupulous than Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry". Most of us are familiar with versions of them on the modern day religious scene. They are the mass audience, scalawag, ultra-right-wing protagonist preachers such as the scandalized and ousted Ted Haggard, Moral Majority’s leader and political right’s darling Jerry Falwell, convicted felon and famous televangelist Jim Bakker and his notorious wife Tammy Faye Bakker, and the list goes on.

Ever since radio reached the boondocks, radio talk show hosts in rural communities have been, and still are, selling autographed pictures of Jesus Christ to their backwoods followers. While they rave on about religion, they intermingle their primitive, ole time religion messages with ultra conservative values, ridicule city slickers, and tout intellectuals and liberals as Satan’s collaborators. Their myriad but more sophisticated radio DJ clones in metropolitan areas, like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and FOX TV’s Hannity, and O'Reilly have an even more compelling appeal to the uneducated urban masses. People devoutly listen, hour on hour, to their hate-filled harangues. We must take note of the fact that these peddlers of radical conservative political spin, character assassinations of democrats, and spewers of riveting trash talk for the gullible and small-minded are lavishly supported by the super rich.

Sociologists have long studied and recorded the remarkable similarity between the actual moral practices of the super rich and the miserably poor. The difference being that the public talk and the ‘espoused’ beliefs of the super rich is ‘moralistically conventional’. Yet, in spite of themselves, their public talk is correctly articulated, refined, and aristocratic. They leave the bawdy, crude language to ranting of their sycophant radio and TV lackeys. For the poor, on the other hand, there is not much of a public persona. There is seldom a need for one. For the super rich there is a gulf between their public personas and their private personalities. Few outsiders ever gain access to this odd phenomenon. Nevertheless, this rarefied world of the ultra opulent, with its inaccessibility and dichotomous existence, is the power driving American and world politics and economics.

This Mount Olympus apex of amorality, greed, and power, obsessed as it is with devouring the world, callously devoid of concern for the earth and the rest of humanity, has been setting, surreptitiously, invincibly, and inviolately, the course for America, and, now with globalization, the course for the whole world.

We now have a world with three Castes. We have the super rich Caste, the uneducated, ruthlessly exploited, and miserably poor Caste, and the Caste consisting of the dwindling, educated, but now nonetheless exploited, middle class that also includes on the fringe the modest number of intellectuals. Just as was the case with the Feudal States of old, the super rich Caste now governs everything, including monarchies and ‘elected’ governments of nations.

The first great challenge for the rest of us is to learn not to be taken in by the main media. Most of you are well aware of this challenge. The next great challenge for us is to find a way to educate those same uneducated masses as to how they are being duped and how they are being led, like sheep to the slaughter, into willingly allowing themselves to be exploited.