Comments by "Jeremy Barlow" (@jeremybarlow2291) on "Big Think" channel.

IronskullGM 37 of the 56 founders of this country were lawyers. 55 of the 56 owned slaves. Every single one of them was rich. Hancock was the wealthiest man in the Americas BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. George Washington was the wealthiest man in America after the revolution. The only people they allowed to vote were men with property. They didn’t get to vote for the Senate or the President. They have never allowed anyone to vote for judges. Literally this government was designed for elitists, by elitists. Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily make someone an elitist. It allows them to understand complexity. Perspective makes someone an elitist. Wealth and seeking control makes someone an elitist. Ralph Nader is an educated man. He lives in the house his parents who owned a small grocery store that they started left him. The million dollars he won in a lawsuit for defamation against GM was all donated to a not-for profit. No one who has ever met the man would call him an elitist. Educated and intelligent yes, but not an elitist. He isn’t part of the ruling class. He is part of the working class, from the petit bourgeois certainly, but not from the ruling capitalist class. Despite an Ivy League education few would call George W. Bush intelligent, but he comes from old money on both sides of his family. He is from the ruling capitalist class. His mother was a relative of President Pierce. His father’s father was a business partners of the son of the owner of the Union Pacific railroad. Despite a false humility he is the definition of an elitist because he went to schools for rulers and he has a family fortune which he will pass on to his children. He owned an MLB team for Christ sake. Most people would call Jack Kennedy an elitist too for the same reason - he came from a wealthly capitalist family and went to the private schools that train rulers. Elitism is about wealth and the perspective of a ruling class. Knowledge doesn’t create an elite -wealth and privileges that come with that wealth make someone elite.
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Janice from Accounting i agree, if you haven’t read at least 2000 non-fiction books on psychology, philosophy, history, politics, economics, business, hard science, the art of storytelling, and read or watch at least 10,000 plays, books, and movies that are works of fictional storytelling you are not prepared to have an intelligent discussion on the subjects people need to understand to begin to hope to figure out anything resembling a solution to the problems we face today. You need a peak inside that many other considered minds on the non-fiction side to begin to grasp what is going on and have the collective knowledge to start formulating a theory about how things could work better and why we are at where we are at. You explained an important part of where we are at fairly succinctly, but I agree. It takes a mind exposed to a lot of other solid thinkers ideas to begin to talk intelligently about what is going on in anything resembling short hand. It probably takes someone with at least 2 decades of explaining complicated things simply to distill the ideas we need to fix the problems we face in a manner that most people can grasp. There aren’t enough of those people around right now.
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dharma6529 hey dumbass he is blaming “elites” that is BOTH PARTIES, because they are both to blame. Who drafted NAFTA? George H. W. Bush. Who got NAFTA ratified? Bill Clinton with a Democratic Congress. Who enacted the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. Well the primary author of the law and its champion in Congress was Texas Republican Senator Phill Gramm. That is why it was called the Gramm-Leach-Blilley Act as well. Who signed it into law, Bill Clinton a Democrat. Who gave the banks a bailout when exactly what North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan said would happen because of that bill which he opposed happened 8 years later? George W. Bush signed TARP into law. It was a bill authored by his Secretary of the Treasury and passed by a Democratic House and Senate with bipartisan support. Both parties are bought by the exact same people. Clinton had Goldman Sachs executives in his White House. Bush has Goldman Sachs executives in his White House. Obama had Goldman Sachs executives in his White House. Trump has Goldman Sachs executives in his White House. It doesn’t matter which fake corporate spokesperson from which team you put in the White House they are all owned by the exact same people and Trump is owned more than most because he OWES billions of dollars in commercial real estate development debts that can be called in at any time by creditors. He is on the shortest leash of anyone to ever hold the office and he has some people snowed into believing he is independent. He isn’t and neither was Obama or Clinton or Bush. The same people run all of them and I’ll give you a hint. They are a family of European bankers who own the Federal Reserve Bank which is about as Federal as Federal Express. Until you stop playing the left versus right paradigm and start playing the worker’s should own every penny of value that they create -because as Lincoln said -labor is superior to capital because until labor exists, no capital can be created as capital is the fruit of labor, until you start saying that workers should own where they work and control the way where they work operates by a majority consensus of the workers, you are playing the game that the wage slave master wants you to play. You are the obedient Uncle Tom house negro they want everyone to be. You sure as shit ain’t an American rebel.
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