We are fast approaching a Marie Antonette moment in the US largely because the rich and poor live in entirely different worlds with entirely different realities.

Indeed, our milieu is marked by the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests and their billionaire owners. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything–life in America keeps getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.

Imagine the tyranny.

What’s ironic is that the allocation of resources towards policing is so drastically skewed towards controlling the plebs while virtually nothing is allocated towards punishing elite crime.

Matt Stoller calls it white-collar policing and blue-collar policing in a new article analyzing ICE’s murderous rampage. In Why ICE Polices in Minnesota, and Not the Corporate Board Room, Stoller writes–“Law enforcement budgets show we defunded those who police corporate America, while ramping up coercion on working people.”

Of course there has always existed a bifurcated rule of law in the US, where the rich are to be constrained simply by tort law while the poor require the full measure of criminal law to keep them in check, In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”

And while capitalism in the US has always been unfair, the disparity hasn’t been this obvious since the first Gilded Age where the Robber Barrons wielded the Pinkerton’s and other para-militaries to intimidate, infiltrate, and break up labor unions. The 1892 Homestead Strike saw 300 armed agents hired by Henry Clay Frick (for Carnegie) fight strikers, resulting in deaths. The Pinkertons served as a crucial and often violent, tool for industrial capitalists during the rise of the American labor movement, enabling the maintenance of low wages and dangerous working conditions. 

Under our current system the easiest way to become a billionaire, the new Robber Barrons, is to exploit workers, monopolize your industry, plunder resources from the global south, push all the externalities onto society, capture government with legal bribery via campaign donations, collaborate with the CIA and Mossad, and propagandize Americans into thinking all of this is normal.

Recently deceased Marxist scholar, Michael Parenti, well described the absurdity of our system–“The free market mythology argues that the most ruthless, selfish, opportunistic, greedy, calculating plunderers, applying the most heartless measures in cold blooded pursuit of corporate interests and wealth accumulation, will produce the best results for all of us through something called the invisible hand.”

The problem we face is that the oligarchs have captured and repurposed the state. Certain features of the fascist state have long been in place. The unity of the state and major economic structures is an obvious case. One has not been able to tell for many years where the federal government ends and the most powerful American companies begin. Remember that Benito Mussolini stated that “fascism should more properly be called ‘corporatism’ because it is the merger of the state and corporate power.”

The oligarchs appear to believe that they are untouchable and I believe that the actions of ICE are a test run for how they believe they can govern, where they don’t require consent as long as they have overwhelming force and terror.

The question is what are we going to do about it?