Smash and Grab Looting is the Class War America asked for

Smash and Grab Looting is the Class War America asked for

By

David Gottfried

All over America, self-righteous lovers of fire and brimstone have been very voluble about the Smash and Grab rioters who are showing us that going shopping isn’t like it used to be.  Now, instead of the store ripping off the consumer, the consumer is smashing the glass windows, smashing the display cases and running off with luxury goods.

And looting isn’t what it used to be.   Formerly, looters looted their own neighborhoods, and torched their own tenements, and seemed distinctly masochistic.  Now they are looting the shops of style and panache.   

Although these people are giving the rich a taste of their own medicine (The negation of the legacy of FDR and the GOP juggernaut back into the hopelessly romanticized, miserable 19th century), they are, after all, disobeying the law and, as such, we are told that they should be punished.

But hasn’t our nation told us, in no uncertain terms, that laws are made to be broken.

For example, it’s abundantly clear that most members of the United States Senate are up to their snotty noses in graft.   One:  The stock portfolios of Senators are the luckiest portfolios of any group of people in the nation as their asset levels rise as assuredly as yeast.   Two:  They do so much better than the general public because they know when a defense contractor will get a billion-dollar order from the government before you do. Three:  They are profiting because they possess inside information.  Four:  Trading on the basis of inside information has been illegal since the passage of the Securities Act of 1934.

Of course, almost all rich people trade on the basis of inside information and are, therefore, violating the law.   Ergo, they need the punishment of the Law.  From this light, the looters are just assisting law enforcement.  Since the cops don’t have the time to punish rich men who break the law, the looters are helping out as kindly  citizens should.

Then again, trading on inside information isn’t the worst of what they do.  Senators are whores who are bought very single day of the year. For example, shortly after 26 people, 20 of them young children,  were shot dead by a crazed killer in Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, the Senate voted overwhelmingly against a very modest gun control measure.  Why? In part, because filthy, whoring Senators knew that contributions from the NRA were more important than the life of a five- or six-year-old kid.  Also, Senators routinely vote against restrictions on feeding antibiotics to livestock [1] because they are essentially paid off by the chemical companies.  Of course, Senators are also paid off to look the other way when companies disseminate carcinogens, when financiers trade in credit default swaps and when companies performing dialysis use inferior means of sanitizing their equipment. [2] 

But back to smash and grab.  Consider the epicenter of this greatest of new fads: San Francisco.

The degeneration of the Left in San Francisco is something akin to Mother Mary becoming a kept whore, dressed up in garish silks and jewels which twinkle with irradiating wrath.   There once was a San Francisco which had a short-lived but earnest socialist uprising after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia.   There once was a San Francisco that took center stage in California’s socialist political revolution of the Depression, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign.   There once was a San Francisco which sparked student activism across the country.  There once was a San Francisco which led the nation in opposition to the War in Vietnam.  There once was a San Francisco that was the gayest metropolis in America and that heralded a gayness that was free, liberating and happy.

But the youthful gayness of San Francisco soon became the gayness of a dyspeptic antique queen who behaves like Mrs. Drysdale of “The Beverly Hillbillies.”   And as that queen got more and more wrinkled, she became increasingly grotesque, miserly and mean.   She studied the market, she married Silicon Valley which married technology to tyranny, and she is the apotheosis of the new social order, sterile and sadistic.        

And the supposedly loving liberals of San Francisco are the selfish sadists which have created a city which is now famous for the breadth and severity of its homelessness crisis.  Millionaires became richer and richer as their real estate skyrocketed in value and what once were nice but modest one family homes are now valued at one million dollars, and this unholy concentration of almost cancerous wealth has put school teachers, firemen and hard-working people on the streets.

Now I am sure not too many teachers and firemen are among the looters, but they would be well within their rights if they were.  Very simply, the castles of the preening, oppressive princes and potentates should not sparkle with such verve and elan.  The parapets of their mansions should not be permitted to scowl at the common people who walk by.   The towering steepled tops of their homes should no longer spike like swords in the sky.   They should fall to the ground, and a new Joshua should make the walls of Jericho come “tumbling down” once again.

Of course, my hostility to unmitigated privilege might seem a tad un-American as we have been taught to venerate and adore the rich and all things wealthy.   Of course, if we respect wealth and riches, we must have contempt and hatred for the looters.  

But I am here to tell you that people who make lots of money usually do not deserve the slightest scintilla of respect.  Of course, if a man is rich because he is a surgeon who successfully extracts severely inflamed and infected appendixes, he deserves his cadillacs and his swimming pools.   If a man is rich because he saves innocent men from the living hell that is jail, he deserves to live in resplendent, sparkling luxury.  But the overwhelming majority of rich men are rich because of methods and achievements that have no redeeming social value.

In a word, most people are rich because they took  a product worth twenty dollars and they convinced someone to pay 50 dollars for that piece of dreck.  That, dear reader, is the alpha and omega of capitalism.  It is nothing but theft achieved with etiquette, with good manners, with a handshake.  It is robbery lite.  It is felonious conduct married to the manners of Fairfield County, Connecticut. 

The smash and grab looters are, in a sense, morally superior:  They don’t pretend to be doing anything other than robbing you.   The capitalist slowly kills you as he promises that his product will alleviate your ailments.    Who, really, is more morally culpable:  A smash and grab looter or the makers of a product, known as “Mother’s Little Helper,” (And the inspiration for a great Rolling Stones song with the same name) which was touted as being able to put colicky infants to sleep and which contained opium and addicted thousands of infants.   Who is morally more grotesque:  The honest street criminal who doesn’t pretend to help you, or the makers of Johnson and Johnson’s baby powder which buried the ugly truth that their talcum powder was laced with asbestos.  Who should we send to jail first, the thug who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a thug or the Sachler family, which submitted fraudulent reports, to the FDA, that their opioids were somehow less addictive than other opioids and succeeded in addicting and killing thousands of Americans.             

Postscript:  I do not advocate or condone arson or violence, but…  

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[1] Some antibiotics make chickens and cattle grow fatter faster, but the excessive use of antibiotics strengthens bacteria which are resistant to antibiotics.  Consider this:  When penicillin was first used in this country, in Yale University Hospital in  New Haven in 1944, on a woman who had had a back ally abortion and a fever of 105 Fahrenheit, her symptoms almost completely resolved in a day. Antibiotics never work that beautifully anymore. 

[2] European dialysis patients have fewer infections and fewer deaths because in Europe companies performing dialysis are forced to invest in superior means of disinfecting their machines.  Because government bends over backwards to defend corporate power, 100,000 Americans die every year from infections contracted in the hospital.   
A few years ago, I had diarrhea after a colonoscopy, and my doctor put me on antibiotics, surmising that it had been caused by microbes from an insufficiently cleaned device use by Mount Sinai Hospital.