Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, there was a social phenomenon that fueled the money making machines of those 15000 families that you describe and it was the hordes of poor European immigrants that came to the USA by the millions. Hungry and cold, they would work for nickles and dimes during ten or more hours a day. Little brothers and sisters joined the family effort just the same. Everybody's labor was bought as cheap as those 15000 families could have it, and they made sure to keep it like that for as long as they could. Of course, as soon as the workers could get their noses out of the mud of extreme poverty they began making more demands for benefits in exchange for their sweat and years of working in terrible conditons. Shamefully, child labor laws had to be written, passed, and institutionalized to protect little kids from the unhealthy environment of industry. (I wonder how many senators of either party voted against this law) Worker unions had to be formed so that the workers had a way to protect themselves from the leonine way of their employers.

Nowadays, the same phenomenon continues, except that now the immigrants come from the south, but they are still hungry and cold. Unlike the Europeans, they have brown skin and eyes, but they also work for nickles and dimes and that makes them very desirable to have. The problem with many of these immigrants is that they actually work a lot and are able to move up the economic ladder within their own generation. Just like those immigrants of European origin.

The rest of us? well, as you say we are living from paycheck to paycheck. Why do we do it without creating problems? Why are we so polite with the descendants of those 15000 families and with the new rich ones? We are even convinced that it is good for us to have millions of jobs outsourced to other countries. I can think of several reasons for this to happen:

We have made idols of those people. Just like we have not been able to disregard royalty members. We still pay homage to them as if we were royal subdits still.

We are always being trained to admire new idols of sundry kinds through ridiculous TV shows.

Just like the Roman populace was controlled, we love to be controlled. Panem et circensis. Give us pizza and buffalo wings while we watch games on end...

Ah! and if anything goes wrong, blame the immigrants.

"there was a social phenomenon that fueled the money making machines of those 15000 families that you describe and it was the hordes of poor European immigrants that came to the USA by the millions."

AHAHAHAHAHA.

You are absolutely retarded and the Freyeditor is retarded for giving you a mark.

They made their money off of technology. Where do you think Bill Gates got 60 billion from?

You are completely retarded.

I realize you like to troll for liberals, San, but I am in a biting mood today.

I would say that Bill Gates made his 60 billion less because of his magic with "technology", and more because of a) lucky business moves, such as acquiring the rights to DOS in the early 80s, and b) agressively swallowing other technology companies with a predatory and monopolistic fervor that would have made even Rockefeller blush.

-jonas

Jonas--

Whenever I see San's name, I just skip over the posting. He is beyond contemptible.

--nbahn

Metropolitan Washington, D.C.

The problem with calling Bill "lucky" is that he reinvented himself several times as the market changed, and continued to make the right moves at various points (excluding seeing how big the internet was going to be).

It is not easy to go from being boss of a small company, to a midsized company, to a large company, to a very large company. The skill sets simply don't match very well and being good at one can make you bad at the other.

Bill combined technological magic with management magic with seeing where the market was going to go magic. Saying that someone had to be the best doesn't take away from Michael Jordan's successes, or make them less impressive.

abraxas said;

"We have made idols of those people. Just like we have not been able to disregard royalty members. We still pay homage to them as if we were royal subdits still.

We are always being trained to admire new idols of sundry kinds through ridiculous TV shows.

Just like the Roman populace was controlled, we love to be controlled. Panem et circensis. Give us pizza and buffalo wings while we watch games on end..."

Your right, we are trained. Starting with the government schools. Reinforced by the media & its 'popular culture'. Sam Clemens commented on it in some of his essays, though he never dreamed of how sophisticated it would become after the 1970's.

Well, San, if Abraxas is retarded, at least you'll finally have some company.

San:

"there was a social phenomenon that fueled the money making machines of those 15000 families that you describe and it was the hordes of poor European immigrants that came to the USA by the millions."

AHAHAHAHAHA.

You are absolutely retarded and the Freyeditor is retarded for giving you a mark.

They made their money off of technology. Where do you think Bill Gates got 60 billion from?

You are completely retarded.

The "15,000 families" referred to in the "History Lesson" article are the richest .01 percent of Americans as measured by the latest statistics. While this would include Bill Gates, it would also include heirs to some of the mega-fortunes made in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The comment by abraxas clearly refers only to the latter. It would have been better had abraxas inserted the words "some of" in the phrase "the money making machines of those 15000 families that you describe." But the context is clear -- abraxas in the sentence you quoted was referring to a factor that fueled the amassing of great personal fortunes in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Those fortunes were made largely in railroads, steel, and finance. It is difficult to describe any of them as particularly making "money off of technology." And since the first two industries did employ large numbers of relatively (indeed, sometimes shockingly) cheap immigrant labor, abraxas' point is far from retarded.

true abraxas, but not entirely pizza n buffalo wings...

the rest of sheeple are given endless "well meaning" "innocent", wide eyed

discussions about whether water boarding is truly "torture". Meanwhile

another class just keeps churning out their widgets! Nothing else really

matters to them as much!