photo Dipak Chattri Pexels

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Elites in our Societies are Ruthless, Spoiled & Deranged

by Philip Hall

When we see the heads of Europe and European Union act like apologists for Israeli genocide egging us on to World War Three and Mark Rutte sucking up to Donald Trump sarcastically calling Trump ‘Daddy’ and Bezos going on joyrides into space on a penis shaped rocket while his employees break their backs working for a minimum wage while, under surveillance, they are not allowed enough toilet breaks, and when we hear about the ultra-elite elite buying superyachts while billions live beneath the poverty line, using every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes, making money off war and partying with Epstein and P. Diddy, then we know the grown ups are not in charge.

My grandson doesn’t ask for much. My sons and daughters don’t ask for much. I don’t ask for much. I just want the grown-ups to be in charge – not this piratical band of murderers, thieves, rapists, slavers, and exploiters. And what happens, after a while, to pirates, murderers, rapists, slavers and exploiters? We catch them by the short and curlies and lead them to Madame Guillotine.

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When we are young, we look up to our parents. The hope is that our parents are governed by love. That they are responsible, moral and hardworking. They would never be unjust, unkind, prejudiced, or unreasonable, would they? They would never dump rubbish carelessly onto the street, or harm an animal, or speak cruelly to others, or act with bias. When we are children we want our parents to be good examples; to care about alleviating poverty and be charitable, to solve real problems that matter. We need them to make things work properly and to be cheerful not embittered and mean.

When needed, as children, we want our parents to be deeply serious as they ponder what has to be done, but we don’t want them to be self-important and pompous. They should laugh and be able to mix socially with anyone without being awkward, to be able to host generously and accept invitations with grace. As children we would like our parents and their adult friends to be curious about the world and eager to explore it. They have, we hope, useful roles to play in society. They are workers, teachers, scientists, nurses, doctors, care workers, cleaners, cooks, data analysts and programmers, shopkeepers, drivers, lawyers and administrators, not predatory Goldman Sachs spivs.

Our parents should be realists (we think), but also stand up bravely against injustice when necessary, confronting persecution – even when it is at great personal cost. And if, as children, we see them lose their temper, then we know they had a reason; they were exhausted, frustrated, worried about money, under pressure, or facing some kind of serious problem and quickly recovered countenance.

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To every child, these are the grown-ups they hope for – adults as a source of wisdom and reassurance. When we see society functioning well with highly intelligent people making difficult decisions alongside experts, and working to produce good results, keeping the complex society around us going and improving it, as children we felt secure and so want to be useful too. Children with these kinds of parents grow up to be the people who build and maintain bridges, cure diseases, implement and interpret law, design and run trains and planes, people who produce and distribute food and made it safe, who manage hospitals, schools, universities and factories responsibly, who administer tax fairly and who work for the public good and who do so also to feed and nurture their families. These are the adults we want to grow up to be in charge. These are the adults we need to be in charge.

But increasingly, society is being orphaned by the psycho-infirmities of the powerful who seem to suffer from Antisocial Personality Disorder; from a lack of empathy, who exploit others, disregard laws and social norms, who have no remorse, and are deceitful. Our governing class hoards wealth for itself. It uses and discards people like tissue paper. Instead of diplomacy, it prefers war, tolerating horrifying injustices for the sake of realpolitik and expediency. It is so selfish that it treats housing as an investment, denying young people affordable homes. It is so evil that it exploits public-private partnerships to siphon money from government budgets and reduce the provision of necessary public services. It is so dastardly that it employs people on starvation wages through zero-hour contracts with no benefits or security, forgetting these workers must still live and feed their families. Every action of this mad ruling class reeks of misanthropy, of hatred for the rest of us. This is a very bad grandpa and granny. A very bad father and mother. In fact, they are so evil that they are willing to sacrifice the entire planet on the pyre of their selfishness.

Let’s organise people’s tribunals to try oligarchs in absentia, let’s establish mutual aid banks to bypass the City of London and Wall Street

Billionaires live in a parallel universe due to yes-men, private islands and sycophantic servants, hangers on and media. Chris Hedges describes the Billionaire’s Psychosis where extreme wealth mirrors sociopathic traits like lack of guilt, grandiosity and exploitation. Psychologist Paul Babiak’s studies of corporate psychopathy reveal how the system rewards ruthlessness, noting that climbing to billionaire status often requires pathological behaviour – but the system protects them. We see this in Amazon’s worker exploitation where employees urinate in bottles while Amazon engages in union-busting. Similarly, BlackRock’s housing market manipulation earns Larry Fink the title of “philanthropist.” Corporate chiefs give instructions to lobby for war, block poverty alleviation, and many of them behave with impunity in Epstein-like exploitation while living in grotesque luxury as millions suffer. This is sociopathy.

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And so, we are all orphaned. The grown-ups are no longer in charge. Instead, we are ruled by the mad, bad, and eccentric great uncles and aunts – the financiers in New York, the arms dealers, the mining and petroleum giants. We are controlled by the goons they install as “presidents” and Prime Ministers after the charade of Potemkin style elections bankrolled by billionaires. Get rid of the PR and law firms the ultra wealthy hire to whitewash their stinking reputations, get rid of the think tanks they employ to scheme and plot for them.

the insane uncles and aunts who hoard all the wealth for themselves and who profit from war

The scale of social harm and destruction is staggering. Global military spending reached $2.24 trillion in 2023 according to SIPRI, with the U.S. accounting for 39% – more than the next 10 countries combined. Over 4.5 million people have died in recent wars according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, while 750 U.S. military bases are sited in more than 80 countries. Meanwhile the top 1% owns 45.8% of global wealth as reported by Credit Suisse, while $600 billion is lost annually to tax havens according to UNCTAD. In Global South supply chains, garment workers earn just $3-$6 per day reports ASEAN Labor Rights Monitor, while foreign capital buys 20-40% of luxury real estate according to South China Morning Post investigations, pricing out locals. In Africa, 60% of urban dwellers live in slums due to land grabs reports the African Union, while Zambia and Sri Lanka were forced to privatise infrastructure after IMF loans according to BRICS Policy Center.

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The corporate architects of this system include BlackRock controlling $10 trillion in assets and dominating global capital flows, Vanguard Group with $8 trillion in assets influencing Big Tech and Pharma, and arms dealers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies fueling conflicts. Tech giants like Amazon exploit workers while taking CIA contracts, Google engages in mass surveillance through Project Maven, and Meta harvests data for manipulation. Oil empires like ExxonMobil and Shell continue ecological crimes in Nigeria and Ecuador while lobbying against climate action. Financial giants like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs engineer debt crises, all protected by a system where corporate lobbying spends $3.5 billion annually to buy laws according to OpenSecrets, while 90% of U.S. media is controlled by just six corporations.

Our governing class hoards wealth for itself. It uses and discards people like tissue paper.

Tear the curtain aside to reveal the stunted, fearful and nasty wizards behind the curtain of power with their mainstream media megaphones. Let’s give democracy a try. 750,000 adults have joined Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultan’s Party. Let’s get Our Party elected come what may! The corporate capitalist machine must be defunded and the media and internet megaphones, AI poison and weaponry snatched away from them.

To dismantle this system requires breaking their financial power through wealth caps, abolishing tax havens, and transitioning to worker ownership models. We must end the political control of these abusive, infantile-disordered elites by banning corporate lobbying and dark money through full transparency laws, jailing corrupt politicians and abolishing the corporate capture of NGOs and the charity sector. Housing justice requires expropriating empty homes for the homeless, implementing rent controls and landlord licensing, while climate justice demands nationalising oil companies and holding CEOs liable for global warming.

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In the UK Your Party should nationalise arms manufacturers and other key industries, and protect free speech. Roll back encroachments on civil liberties. We can also build opposition through unionisation with funds for activism within the law. Let’s organise people’s tribunals to try oligarchs in absentia, let’s establish mutual aid banks to bypass the City of London and Wall Street and when we are in power use that power to re engineer our society so that it works for all of us including my son and daughters and my grandchild.

We need to get rid of these selfish, maladjusted, infantile, socially awkward, sociopaths – the insane uncles and aunts who hoard all the wealth for themselves and who profit from war. We need to vote in Corbyn and Sultana and put the real adults back in charge.

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Bibliography

American Psychiatric Association. *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)*. 2013.

ASEAN Labor Rights Monitor. Garment Worker Wages in Global Supply Chains. 2023.

African Union. Urban Slums and Land Grabs in Africa. 2022.

BRICS Policy Center. IMF Loan Conditionalties and Privatization. 2021.

China Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Report on U.S. Military Bases Abroad. 2022.

Credit Suisse. Global Wealth Report. 2023.

Freeland, Chrystia. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Penguin, 2012.

Hedges, Chris. America: The Farewell Tour. Simon & Schuster, 2018.

OpenSecrets. Corporate Lobbying Expenditures. 2023.

Real Estate. 2022.UNCTAD. Tax Havens and Global Financial Losses. 2023.

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Phil Hall was born into an ANC family in South Africa. The family was forced into exile in 1963 after his mother was imprisoned and his father banned. They relocated to East Africa, where his parents continued their activism and journalism. In 1975, after a period living in India, they journeyed overland back to the UK, eventually settling in Brighton.

Phil pursued a broad education, studying Russian, Spanish, politics, economics, literature, linguistics, and English grammar and phonology. His path led him to live and study in Spain, the USSR (in Ukraine), and later in Mexico, where he married and started a family. Over the next decade, Phil and his partner balanced activism with work before relocating to the UK—a move initially intended to be permanent.

However, professional opportunities took him to Saudi Arabia and then the UAE, where he spent ten years before returning to the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in Britain, he founded Ars Notoria Magazine and, alongside fellow humane socialist Paul Halas, launched AN Editions, a small venture dedicated to publishing thoughtful, progressive and exciting new books.