Shysterocracy

on The-reign-of-Boehner-begins-today.....

with.........

EzraPoundSpeaking--


(warning: Pound's radio speeches--broadcast in Mussolini's Italy in 30s and 40s-- are not for the timid, tame or overly PC...)

""Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness about the existence of justice, starts rootin’ round, starts trying to delimit the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work yesterday by the folk who are still livin’, 3) work by the departed. And ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in on a professorial conference of several hundred persons, and not three of ’em had any glimmer of this simple tripartite division.

ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won’t think up and use to get a monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin’. And the shyster is pizin’. He is the sworn blasphemer, false swearin’ and cheatin’ FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will eliminate him from your system.

That’s what non-shyster Europe is drivin’ at. The shyster got hold of Russia. He sweat the hide off of labor, he built the Stalin canal, and I advise all readers of the N.Y. Herald to GET the official reports of the treatment of human MATERIAL, carloads of “human material” dumped into the making of the Stalin canal."""


One kind of shyster succeeds another: shyster penetrates ANY organization, church or state for the sake of livin’ on the Purchasing Power that DON’t come from labor. Shyster joins EVERY new movement so as to be there when it gets big and to be at the exploitin’ position. Gangster shysters, medieval orders of chivalry rose to combat the gangster, to combat universal brutality and injustice in range of the individual knight. Or the body of chivalry rose to an idea. With these two forces, i.e., gangsterism AND chivalry, the feudal system developed. As law it was a RESPONSIBLE system. The DUTIES of the overlord were enormous. They required DISTRIBUTION of wealth. Naturally this annoyed greedy overlords, and weak overlords, and the shyster entered the system. Ready to sweat out taxes, to sweat the hide off of labor, and to collect money interest. In fact the shyster is always a rent collector. And the worm ate into the fruit. Reniou, provençal word meanin’ interest on lent money. Gangster barons kept and lent all right whenever they could so wangle it. Greed, violence, nothing new about vices. When the two had rotted the world long enough, there came an explosion. The difference between OUR American Revolution and the French was enormous. OURS rose with the perception that dead men do not EAT. That is, with a perception that there is a just limit to the rights of work done by men [who] have ceased to breath. Jefferson said it: the earth belongs to the living. As He did not say: the earth belongs to idiots. But on the other hand, he did not clearly assert that the management of the earth requires the intelligence of men who are prepared, and FITTED to govern. An assault on mortal man, an assault on the exaggerated privileges accorded to the whims and greeds of the dead was NEEDED. It came.

Naturally the Revolution was betrayed. BUT it lasted sixty years. Or rather the government set up on that basis lasted 60 years. Count it longer dependin’ on when you count the start of our revolution as from 1776 or 1750? Or 60? The French revolution flopped in a hurry. The Napoleonic dream was not merely a dream of conquest. To witness the CODE, code Napoleon, Napoleon’s law code. Desire for justice, Mediterranean sense of justice. But a lot of good sense got lost. The guilds, the anti-trade or ganizations, with their grades of apprenticage, got chucked into the discard. They were NOT 100% innocent. Against the feudal greed, trade greed developed. Nevertheless the guilds left a dream. Left THEIR code of sanity, code of sense, necessity of order and preparation.

There is now a new code in Italy. STUDY it. Is it better than Napoleon’s anti-feudal, anti-privilege demonstration? It is a matter of interest, something you ought to know You ought NOT to be in this war and that CODE is a proof of it. Proof of what you are fightin’, but that you DO NOT know you are fightin’. All the hopes of Ruskin and William Morris, work being done, work done by men still livin’, work done by the departed. includin’ in the latter two brackets ALL the masterwork, all the cathedrals in Romanesque style, and in Gothic. (The first lot the more satisfactory.) Henry Adams got to Chartres. Ought to have seen San Zeno, and Cathedral of Modena. All the best work of the great authors, all the best painting. All that has place and right, has its rights in corporate order.

And the shyster is out against it. Against all order, all beauty. Against all work? And you ought NOT to be on the side of the shyster."""