We are the 99%.
Well, you are anyway, for the most part. I, on the other hand, am stonkers with cash, positively rolling in it.
My father was the second son of the Baron Capel of Tewkesbury, although there were always rumors that there was something a little, shall we say, Edwardian about his genetics, particularly given that the old Baron had, ten years earlier, had both testicles shot off by Ayub Khan in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Let’s just say that Daddy could do an impression of George V that would fool the king’s mother. He served in the Navy during the Great War, doing very secret and nefarious things. He was a great man, and I loved him very much.
Anyway, Great Grandfather had made money in Jamaican tobacco, which his son then invested in ironworks, making even more money. My father invested his share in ammunition factories a few years before the war kicked off. When daddy died, he left everything to me (well, that which wasn’t swallowed up in death duties), and I immediately began to carefully invest it in Dior, cocaine and Krug, along with the odd share of Ford or Apple over the years.
Daddy, my mother and I lived in a big house, packed with more servants than anyone knew what to do with, usually retired sailors. It was like Downton Abbey except with worse dentistry and more rum, sodomy and tattoos.
Now, Daddy was a powerful and ruthless business man. His first lesson to me was that, in business and in love, both your enemies and friends were fair game, and if you could steal someone’s business or their wife or their damn chair from under them it was your honor-bound duty to do so.
However, he also said that you should always be kind and generous to to your servants, not least because, as he put it, you never knew when one of the bastards was going to dunk his syphilitic tackle in your breakfast martini. I suspect that Daddy’s reasons were slightly deeper than just the fear of someone’s dick in his drink. Daddy’s servants were always the happiest and fattest and best dressed in the neighborhood, and so our silver was always the shiniest, our sheets were so well starched you could do yourself an injury on them, and there were never any nasty surprises in the soup. He applied the same rule to the workers in his factories, and there were never strikes because everyone had more than enough to feed and clothe their family and at least one day off a month.
My father also told me that it was your duty to pay the full amount of tax on every dollar that you earned, because otherwise how was the government going to buy all those things it desperately needed, like bullets and iron and tobacco?
Daddy was not a good man. He may have been ruthless. He may, in fact, have been a nasty son-of-a-bitch who’d sell his mother’s ashes to a soap factory or push a business rival under a tram (only once though, and it really might have been an accident).
However, he always said that if the revolution came, he knew that he wouldn’t be one of the ones putting on a blindfold and lining up against a wall. He, unlike our captains of industry of today, knew who buttered his bread and washed his car and shaved his face every morning with four inches of sharpened steel and made his bullets and built the roads that his delivery trucks drove on.
He, unlike much of the 1% today, wasn’t a fucking idiot.
Let’s call this a Balloon Jobs Thread, as well as an Open Thread. I know Mr Levenson has already done one this week, but another can’t hurt.
Image: A Hunt Servant – Ben Marshall (1767-1835)
TenguPhule
Willing to execute GOP and Wall Street 40 hours a week, for $55,000 annual & health benefits.
JPL
Sarah a song just for you.. link
Maude
On the bus today was a woman with a small daughter. The woman has a job starting next week. The problem is that 3 day care centers have closed down due to the state of New Jersey not funding them anymore. She was crying because if she can’t find daycare, she can’t work.
Thank you Governor Christie. This is what cutting day care for women who are in Workforce New Jersey does. But I guess this woman or perhaps the little girl should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
ArchTeryx
It’s a repost, but…
Up in the hinterlands of northern Michigan (Midland, MI, near Dow Chemical’s flagship plant) myself, trying to figure out the sort of job a molecular virologist might have a chance at getting that isn’t a full time science job (those being rarer then teeth on a goose these days).
Also still working on my educational card game, with a publication deadline of (I hope) the end of the year. Right now, I’m looking for high school/middle school teachers to talk about the art with, to make sure it targets that demographic correctly. (Gameplay is nearly locked down, but I’m not sure what art draws the teenagers in these days).
Ecks
<3 <3 <3 Sarah <3 <3 <3
Samara Morgan
he’s wearing a foxhunting pinque.
was he one of the whipper-ins?
stickler
Sarah, your father was wise beyond words. This particular insight is the reason why I’d not much mind it if some of the OWS folks brought signs with slogans like “We came unarmed … this time!”
Let’s not forget that the Gilded Age led to the Progressive Era, partially because the ruling classes got pretty worried about the whole Paris Commune, poor-people-killing-the-rich thing.
If the rich aren’t worried about the poor rising up and building guillotines, they will steal everything.
Chris from Arlington, VA
@JPL:
Even if you don’t speak German, the German version is better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9whehyybLqU
Litlebritdifrnt2
I know this won’t help for peeps with under water houses that they cannot sell, but here in Eastern NC (particularly the Onslow County area) jobs are plentiful, there are boat loads of them. If you are single and mobile then there is no better place to move to right now. Onslow County is the fastest growing County in the entire US.
Robert Green
i just finished producing this website and the video and the photography (which was done by my wife) for Progressive Majority:
runforamerica.org
seems like a good plan for some of you–check out the site and RUN FOR FRICKING OFFICE. seriously.
site is semi-live but pretty much done.
pete
@Chris from Arlington, VA: Beat me to it
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Samara Morgan: Whipper-ins? Hmmm. Seems you have a backstory we haven’t plumbed yet. Not too many outside of the 1%ers would recognize that phrase.
(My sister-in-law, a 20%er, foxhunted for a time)
Which always reminds me of Oscar Wilde: “The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”
ABL
would that you would host a cocktail hour in your brain so i can see what goes on in there.
brilliant.
Jc
This is a magnificent post, and just some awesome writing.
delosgatos
I saw what you did there… :)
chrome agnomen
@TenguPhule:
willing to do that for a lot less. free market!!!
Nellie in NZ
Want to leave the States? Hydrogeologist needed in NZ, applications close at the end of October. Google GNS NZ jobs. Pass the info around. Great place to work.
Samara Morgan
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: oh im the certified spawn of one-percenters. And i still adore my family so eff off.
But this is my club now.
Less exclusive.
:)
Samara Morgan
i know Sarah’s shit is largely made up, but there is liekly a grain of truth in it at the core.
My great-great-great grandfather owned sweatshops where 10 year-olds worked 16 hour shifts.
Their “summer house” is in the gugenheim foundation and people take “tours” of it.
a monument to excess.
its both a mark of pride and a mark of shame at reunions.
Barry
@
“Up in the hinterlands of northern Michigan (Midland, MI, near Dow Chemical’s flagship plant) myself, trying to figure out the sort of job a molecular virologist might have a chance at getting that isn’t a full time science job (those being rarer then teeth on a goose these days).”
I assume that you’re checking out UM’s website?
There’s also a number of biotech thingamajiggers going on in Ann Arbor. I also know a guy working on epid-related research at State (Ph.D. student, but a starting contact, depending on what you’ve already got).
Mail me at this address – please put BALLOON JUICE in all caps in the subject, because this address leads to a folder which is mostly junk-mail.
Samara Morgan
@Barry: A2 is the nanotech capital of the world.
sign on to the two week revolution.
the manipulation of matter is the new frontier– a molecular virologist would be perfect.
T. Scheisskopf
From a pure writing standpoint, this is fucking brilliance.
from the point of a larger commentary: can we get this engraved on tablets? Granite will do just fine.
Paul in KY
@Litlebritdifrnt2: Nice beaches too in E. North Carolina!