The Decline and Fall of Obama

I am increasingly unhappy with President Obama, who received my vote in 2008.  And that is probably an understatement, since I haven't been pleased with his actions since he began appointing his Cabinet and staff in Nov/Dec of 2008, before he was even sworn into office.  Anyone who has been reading this blog since then knows what I'm talking about.

Who's not to like?  Let me list the names (sorry if I mispell the names but I'm not looking each one up!).  For starters, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Peter Orzag, Laura Tyson, Ben Bernanke, and Rahm Emmanuel.  Obama's economic team was a swat team from Wall Street, if you ask me, ready to shoot down any real economic reforms measure.  This administration has been every bit as subservient to Big Finance as any Republicans ever were.  Instead of reform, we got the status quo of the last 30 years.  Which means that we're going to continue the patterns of the last 30 years, and that means further (and worse) economic disaster down the road.

And then we had the ramping up of the Afghanistan War, in all its inglorious ugliness.  Make no mistake, this is Obama's war.  He could have scaled down and gone counterterrorism, but instead he put the pedal to the metal and went counterinsurgency and nation-building.  And so we've invested untold billions of increasingly worthless American dollars, destroyed thousands of lives, families, and communities  on all sides, and FOR WHAT?!  To prove that our Democratic President is not a wimp?  To kill a few hundred Al Qaeda?  To try and determine the destiny of the Afghani people by 'defeating' the Taliban?  To keep our military-industrial complex in business?  For God's sake, what is worth all this treasure? 

And now we (along with our European partners) are invading Libya.  To protect the Libyan people?  Please, don't make me laugh!  These governments couldn't care less about the Libyan people.  Really, I mean that.  What they obviously care about is that nice pool of oil there in Libya, plus Ghaddafi's unwillingness to play along with the Anglo-American big boys and the threat he poses to the petro and dollar system as a result.

I think there is a real chance that Obama will be defeated in 2012, given that the economy is going nowhere fast.  Furthermore, many people who thought who was a true reformer have now been thoroughly disillusioned (like me), and they're either going to not participate, or they will look for another candidate to support.  That doesn't mean that things are going to go any better, of course.  Our path toward national (and maybe global) decline is pretty well set and will be hard to change.  There's going to be a lot of thrashing about in the coming years by the mortally wounded American shark, and it ain't going to be pretty.

Thoughts on Panetta and Petraeus

I don't know about you, but I find Obama's appointments of Leon Panetta as Defense Secretary and Gen. David Petraeus as CIA Director to be both odd and objectionable.

First, what is this with the 'you can do anything' nature of the Panetta appointment?  Congressman, Clinton's White House Chief of Staff, CIA Director and now Defense Secretary under Obama.  I mean, c'mon!  Isn't there something to be said for having had some prior experience in these agencies?  Panetta is 73, for god's sake.  Oh, but he was an Army Lieutenant for two years in the 60's (probably a JAG)!  Whooooooo!!! 

How much clout can such a person have in the huge bureaucracy liked the Pentagon?  Frankly, I doubt very little.  They will know that he doesn't have a true grasp of the place (which must take years to develop), and so they'll defer to him on a superficial basis, but in terms of any real and wise change, how will that happen?  Unlikely.  At least Robert Gates was seen as a true professional.

And as for Petraeus at CIA...what the heck?  Why place a fairly controversial Army general and Special Forces expert at the head of a civilian agency that is supposed to (primarily) collect intelligence?  The trend toward the 'militarization' of the CIA is very bad.  It will only increase the tendency to use the agency for covert operations overseas, rather than objective intelligence gathering.  And frankly, you can't run a civilian bureaucracy like the CIA as you would run a military organization, without distorting and corrupting its original mission.  Anyway, putting Petraeus at CIA kills two birds with one stone for Obama:  he keeps a certified warrior/killer busy doing what he loves, and he also keeps Petraeus from running for President at least until Obama is done.

I can hear it now: "Carl, you don't know the first thing about the Pentagon or the CIA!"  You're right there.  These are just my common sense reactions, from a distance.  But I've come to learn that sometimes those are better than all the insider knowledge in the world.  When most everyone else in Washington, the media, and the country, was gung-ho about the Iraq invasion, I opposed it, based on little else but common sense and my natural anti-war orientation.  And, of course, I was right, according to today's conventional wisdom.  And when most experts seemed to think our economy was in great shape before 2008, I was for several years warning about a housing bubble and huge levels of debt which weren't sustainable.  And again, I was right (and I wish I weren't, actually). 

I'm not tooting my horn here (although a little 'I told you so' eases the blood pressure), just telling you that sometimes common sense and some distance gives you a better perspective than anything else.  C'mon, you can do it too!  Be skeptical, don't believe everything the media tells you, and certainly don't believe what the government tells you.  (The truth-tellers up there in Washington are very few and far between--and they're called 'whistle blowers'...or Ron Paul.)  THINK FOR YOURSELF.

The Execution of Osama

The big news that's happened since I last posted in March is the execution of Osama Bin Laden, in his 'compound' in Abbotabad, Pakistan, where he apparently had lived for a number of years.  President Obama sent in a team of Navy Seals to kill him, after having tracked him down over the better part of a year.  His body was taken and dumped into the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Pakistan.  The government says that there was a huge cache of information taken from his compound, in the form of hard drives, documents, etc.

My first reaction to this, which I posted on Facebook, was that Obama had just guaranteed his reelection.  On further thought, I now think that was an overreaction and that the political 'bounce' that Obama gets from this will wear off pretty quickly.  In fact, given the skit on Saturday Night Live two days ago, which I'll share below, I'd say that there is a certain level of cynicism developing about it already.

I'm Back

Okay, I'm back.  I took a long, two-month break from the blog, and in part, I was trying to do what I have done here on Facebook.  But I'm finding that difficult to do, so I'm back to my blog.  I'll be posting later today.

Losing Our Way

With the approaching 'paywall' for the NYT, another columnist is taking the opportunity to bail out.  Bob Herbert has been a fearless advocate for the average person in this country, speaking the truth when many others look away.  And he does it one last time in this final column.

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Libya: Another Military Intervention With An Uncertain Future

George Will opines in the Washington Post about the Administration's intervention in Libya:

Does practice make perfect? In today’s episode, America has intervened in a civil war in a tribal society, the dynamics of which America does not understand. And America is supporting one faction, the nature of which it does not know. “We are standing with the people of Libya,” says Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, evidently confident that “the” people are a harmonious unit. Many in the media call Moammar Gaddafi’s opponents “freedom fighters,” and perhaps they are, but no one calling them that really knows how the insurgents regard one another, or understand freedom, or if freedom, however understood, is their priority.

But, then, knowing is rarely required in the regime-change business. The Weekly Standard, a magazine for regime-change enthusiasts, serenely says: “The Libyan state is a one-man operation. Eliminate that man and the whole edifice may come tumbling down.” And then good things must sprout? The late Donald Westlake gave one of his comic novels the mordant title “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” People who do not find that darkly funny should not make foreign policy.

In Libya, mission creep began before the mission did. A no-fly zone would not accomplish what Barack Obama calls “a well-defined goal,” the “protection of civilians.” So the no-fly zone immediately became protection for aircraft conducting combat operations against Gaddafi’s ground forces.

America’s war aim is inseparable from — indeed, obviously is — destruction of that regime. So our purpose is to create a political vacuum, into which we hope — this is the “audacity of hope” as foreign policy — good things will spontaneously flow. But if Gaddafi cannot be beaten by the rebels, are we prepared to supply their military deficiencies? And if the decapitation of his regime produces what the removal of Saddam Hussein did — bloody chaos — what then are our responsibilities regarding the tribal vendettas we may have unleashed? How long are we prepared to police the partitioning of Libya?

Explaining his decision to wage war, Obama said Gaddafi has “lost the confidence of his own people and the legitimacy to lead.” Such meretricious boilerplate seems designed to anesthetize thought. When did Gaddafi lose his people’s confidence? When did he have legitimacy? American doctrine — check the Declaration of Independence — is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So there are always many illegitimate governments. When is it America’s duty to scrub away these blemishes on the planet? Is there a limiting principle of humanitarian interventionism? If so, would Obama take a stab at stating it?

Will argues convincingly against the irrationalities of liberal and neo-conservative interventionism (and he's been doing this for some time now, as the 'dean' of American conservatives, beginning with calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan a couple years ago).

As one who tends to think we're overextended militarily around the world (and spending WAY too much money on our military-industrial complex), I tend to agree with him on this.

No Courage In His Convictions

Tom Friedman of the NYT, after describing the pain and folly we're courting if we don't get our act together as a nation, complains about our President in what I feel is an accurate description and criticism:

President Obama has the right convictions on all these issues, but he has not shown the courage of his convictions. The Republicans have just gone nuts.

If you listen to Obama, he eloquently describes our energy, climate and fiscal predicaments: how we have to end our addiction to oil and cut spending and raise revenues in an intelligent way that also invests in the future and doesn’t just slash and burn. But then the president won’t lead. When pressed on energy, he will say that he just doesn’t have the Republican votes for a serious clean energy policy. But the president has never gotten in the G.O.P.’s face on this issue. He has not put his own energy plan on the table and then gone out to the country and tried to sell it.

It is what a lot of Obama supporters find frustrating about him: They voted for Obama to change the polls not read the polls.

On fiscal policy, the president has put forth a decent opening budget bid and has opted for the same inside game of letting Congress take the lead in forging a compromise with the G.O.P. that would bring spending under control and raise revenues. That inside game worked for the president in producing health care reform and the stimulus, but in those cases he had a Democratic majority to push through decent legislation. I fear this time he will not have the votes for the kind of serious, sensible, Simpson-Bowles-like budget cuts and tax increases we need — without his leading and enlisting the public in a much more aggressive way.

Solution No. 1: Living Within Our Means As A Nation

In my last post, I listed ten things that we Americans will come to regret in the fairly near future.  I also said that I would try and list some possible solutions to our serious national dilemma.  So here goes.  (If you want to see the solution in one sentence immediately, scroll down to the sentence in bold.)

We have been on this 'road to perdition' as a nation for about 40 years now, with the trend lines that I sketched out in the last post pretty well in place (plus others that I didn't mention, like the eclipse of the labor movement, or the rise of the 'junk food/fast food' industry and the resulting health problems like obesity and diabetes in youth).  But most people didn't see it happening, though a few did.  (I began to see it about 10-12 years ago.)  And our leaders have almost totally failed us, again with a few rare exceptions. 

One of those exceptions (who has gotten credit for other good things but not for this) was President Jimmy Carter.  In the late 70s, he saw the energy/oil crunch coming and pushed this country toward energy conservation and renewable energy.  But sacrifice of any kind was not in our game plan, so when the Reagan Administration took over, with its new 'conservative' view of things, it totally reversed Carter's efforts at energy reform.  So we went back to our old profligate ways in that realm, that have basically continued to this day.  And, it's sad to say, most Americans remain in denial, though I think there is clearly a growing sense that something is seriously wrong.  You see this in the rise of national pessimism about our future as a nation, especially since the beginning of the Great Recession in the fall of 2008.

The question is: is there a point where we as a nation will reach the point of no return?  Where the damage that has been done within our nation by bad habits, corruption, selfishness, and blindness has gone too far?  I liken it to a patient who has had a heart attack and is lying in ICU.  Will he die because the damage is so great, or is there a chance he'll recover and go on living.

To be honest, I don't pretend to know the answer to that question, because no one really does and we won't know until one or the other takes place.  So all we can do is look for possible and realistic solutions, and then hope and pray for the best.

The problems are so big that it's hard to know where to start.  And to make matters worse, there is no consensus politically on these solutions.  In fact, the political system is so paralyzed right now that common sense solutions to any of the problems I mentioned are unlikely to be approved.  It needs to be said that President Obama has tried to nudge things in the right direction in several ways: by supporting new plug-in hybrid vehicles, like the Volt, in order to reduce petroleum dependence in our car fleet, and by the construction of a high-speed rail system.  But in my opinion, they are 'too little, too late'.

And frankly, most of the problems remain 'below the radar' of the American public, who tend to be preoccupied with various American 'spectacles' and celebrity hijinks, brewed and served up by our corporate mass media  And when they do get interested in politics, they are diverted from the real problems by ideological demagogues, which look in all the wrong directions for answers.

So, to repeat, solving the macro problems facing America in a reasonable and timely way is unlikely, to put it mildly.  But it is nevertheless worth listing some possible solutions that might work, if they could be put into place by some miraculously appearing political coalition of new founding fathers and mothers.

Let me begin then with the issue of debt.  Right up front, I will say that I agree with the general 'Tea Party' sentiment that we must start to 'live within our means' in all aspects of our national life, public and private (though it certainly didn't originate with the Tea Part, but goes back as an honored tradition of our country that we've forgotten).  All debt and deficit spending, again public and private, must come under scrutiny and be pared down drastically.  Conversely, savings and investment must increase.  This will require really difficult, indeed almost impossible, political decisions.

For 40 years now, we Americans (of the 'non-rich' class) have been living on debt, using borrowed money from both domestic and international creditors, to keep our standard of living from falling, as they otherwise would have done from the loss of jobs and wages, trade deficits, artificially low interest rates, etc.  Credit has been easy to get, with borrowed money available for almost any purchase (autos, houses, big screen TVs), and credit cards were pushed on us from every direction. 

Our international trade deficits have been increasing as we export less (and thus manufacture less) and import more of almost everything except maybe haircuts and pizzas.  Most people don't understand this aspect of our economic dilemma, and how it undercuts our economic strength and our strong currency.  And of course, to some extent, this has been aided and abetted by countries like China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia that have continued to loan us back those dollars they got from us, so that we could continue to import their goods (which in turns weakens our manufacturing) in what becomes a vicious cycle, undercutting our economic strength and hollowing out our industry.

Our governmental debt has exploded, first of all, because it has become dogma among conservatives that taxes must always be cut and never raised.  This is especially true for the wealthy, whose tax burden has gone down while their income and wealth has skyrocketed.  And now more recently, because of the Great Recession and the desire to stimulate the economy, along with the bank and corporate bailout, the national debt has risen to historically unprecedented levels.  The costs associated with Medicare and Medicaid continue to grow at an uncontrolled pace, threatening to overwhelm the rest of the budget.  Add to this the growing expenditures of our military and intelligence agencies, and you have a federal budget completely out of control.

The housing bubble of the last ten years has been devastating in terms of debt.  For years, American families used rising home equity to finance all kinds of expenditures, but the collapsing housing market led to falling housing values, underwater mortgages, foreclosures, and banks holding worthless housing securities.

How is it that we have allowed this to happen?  Those contrarian folks (from all political persuasions, by the way) who tried to point out the obvious were ridiculed until just a few years ago as weirdos and 'outside the mainstream'.  Most mainstream economists/Wall Street analysts seemed to feel that debt really wasn't a problem--we would just 'grow' our way out of it.  Our public leaders, even those claiming to be conservative, did nothing but add to the problem when they controlled the purse strings.  Vice-President Cheney, a conservative's conservative, once claimed that budget deficits really didn't matter, as he invaded Iraq, a war that had (and continues) to be paid for with borrowed money.

How blind we have been, as we have spent money like maniacs!  And how unprepared we are to make the political and economic decisions necessary to begin to get a handle on this problem.  Not only are we not prepared to pay our loans back, we can't even stop the deficit spending itself!  (The budget deficits alone, stretched out into the future, are in the 'trillions' of dollars a year.)

The only possible solution is cut back all areas of national spending drastically, while at the same time, raising taxes on those able to pay them.

In addition, we can raise the national income by decreasing imports while increasing exports, stop thinking we have to or can solve all the world's problems with our military machine, reform our health care system (or in other words, solve the other nine problems I identified in my last post, all of which worsen the national debt).

The only problem is that we're not even close to having the political will to institute this reform measures.  Indeed, I don't think we will be able to find the political will to solve this until we suffer a kind of financial and economic collapse (think 2008 x ?), which will be the equivalent of national bankruptcy.  Then we'll have to get our act together because we won't have any choice, but in the process, we may lose our democracy and whatever affluence that the middle class has left. 

I guess that would be my prediction for our economy in the next decade or two.  Sorry to be so pessimistic.  But then again, I prefer to see it as simply being realistic.

And really, in our heart of hearts, we've known this all along, because ancient Wisdom tells us that there is a serious price to be paid for being a prodigal son...er, nation.  Which, if you're not familiar with the story from the Gospel, means that we're going to be wallowing in the mud and eating pig's food for a while.

Ten Things We Will Live To Regret as Americans

Most of us have regrets about things we did or didn't do in our lives that have had bad consequences down the line.  Let's say we sniffed cocaine once and became an addict.  Or had an affair that destroyed our marriage.  Things that seemed so right at the time can seem so wrong in the rearview mirror.

Similarly, nations do things they live to regret.  For example, I'm sure that Germany really regrets allowing Hitler to rise to power in the early 1930s.  We (and the British) ended up bombing most of their cities to smithereens, and they lost many millions of soldiers and civilians in WWII.  Ditto Japan and Pearl Harbor.

So what are the things we may live to regret as Americans?  Here are my top ten choices, in no particular logical order, since they're all tied together in numerous ways.

We will live to regret

...allowing ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.  America was the leading oil producer in the world in the early part of the 20th Century.  However, by the 1960s American production was starting to decline.  But instead of beginning to encourage the conservation of our uses of oil through various means, we allowed oil imports to skyrocket, thus increasing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.  We now import over 60% of our oil, much of it to run our enormous national fleet of gas-guzzling SUVs, trucks, and automobiles.  This of course adds to our burgeoning trade deficit and has also led to our dubious interventions in the Middle Eat, with its creation of anti-American Islamist sentiment.

...allowing ourselves to become so dependent upon automobiles, with a parallel decline in accessible and convenient public transportation, as well as the increase in our housing 'sprawl', all of which is integrally connected.  To most Americans, of course, this is the way life is supposed to be in any industrialized society.  It is only when you go to Europe or Japan that you begin to understand how public transportation is supposed to work, and how proper city planning allows people to actually live without a car, if they choose (living in Manhatten is perhaps the one place in American where this also happens).  As oil prices rise, as they inevitably will with the demand for oil worldwide increasing and supply decreasing, Americans are going to be hardpressed to keep driving in the fashion to which they have become accustomed.  And then life is going to get a lot harder, with no easy solutions available.  You can't suddenly produce overnight an integrated system of public transportation or a national fleet of fuel efficient cars or houses within walking distance of life's necessities.

...allowing the radical decline of our manufacturing capacity.  Beginning in the 1960s, for a lot of reasons, American manufacturing began to decline and our imports of manufactured goods began to increase.  This decline has accelerated and gotten so bad that many cities and town in America are beginning to look like scenes from the Third World, while our ports line up with ships hauling automobiles, televisions, cellphones, appliances, furniture, and all manner of goods from Asia and Europe.  A country simply cannot be a military, political, or economic superpower for long without its own strong manufacturing sector.  That lesson is going to hit home very soon.

...allowing our debt at all levels of society to grow uncontrollably.  America has in the last three or four decades gone from the world's large creditor nation to the world's biggest debtor nation.  Much of the illusion of prosperity in that time came from borrowing and spending without concern for the future.  Unfortunately, the future has now arrived.  Much of this debt can be attributed to the loss of our manufacturing and the failure to conserve oil.  The radical decline in the value of our currency is the nearly inevitable result of this growth in debt.

...allowing the wealthy elite to contribute much less in taxes and thus underfunding vital government expenditures and driving up debt.  The political cliche of 'no new taxes' masks the willingness of the rich to let vital government services either expire or be leveraged through borrowing, building up what is clearly unsustainable debt.  Thus the rich will help in the creation of a basically bankrupt and decaying nation.  They of course will be free to 'move about' the world, with cash stashed away in bank accounts in a variety of very willing countries.

...allowing our military-industrial-intelligence complex to become so bloated and out of control.  I read an analysis recently that estimated that our spending on this complex will top a trillion dollars this year.  We spend more on war and preparation for war than all other nations combined.  This kind of spending--on bombs, planes, ships, and gun--is bleeding us dry as a nation economically.  It's why we can't afford to upgrade our bridges, roads, sewers and water lines.  It's why the Tea Party is going crazy about our deficit.  It's essentially why we invaded (and continue to occupy) two Middle Eastern countries, all on the line of credit extended to us by China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. 

...allowing our Banking and Finance sector to dominate the economy.   Bankers and the Wall Street crowd now give more to our politicians by way of contributions than any other industry.  Consequently, they have had their way over the last 20-30 years, most of which has been deleterious to our economy.  By most accounts, they bear great responsibility for the Great Recession of 2008 (along with the bought-off government regulators) and the ongoing destruction of our middle class.  They also have led the way for the dramatic redistribution of income and wealth upward, much of which has gone directly into their pockets.  Before the 2008 crash, over half of the Harvard University graduating classes were going straight to Wall Street.  Case closed.

...allowing our Corporations and Wealthy to Control our Political System.  Plutocratic control of the government at all levels by the power and wealthy elite was common from after the Civil War until the Great Depression, a period of some 65 years.  The only exception to this was the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who acted to help enact a progressive agenda.  But the Presidency of Theodore's cousin, FDR, led America into a period of greater social, political, and economic equality that lasted through the 1970s.  Since the rise of Reagan Conservatism, the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, to the point where by many measures, we have returned to a new Gilded Age, except that we are now a debt-ridden, largely urban population, without recourse to the farms which allowed us a measure of self-sufficiency in the pre-WWII era.  The rich retreat to their gated communities and schools, while everyone stares at the increasing decay and desolation around them.

...allowing our health care system to become such a bizarre hybrid of public and private, with the worst of both worlds.  We now have in America both the most expensive and the most inequitable health care system in history, one that is completely unsustainable for very much longer.  Costs are growing out of control, and more people every year are uncovered by insurance.  Recent legislation attempting to resolve these issues will not work, in my opinion.  The bullet remains to be bitten, which of course is to adopt some form of true national health insurance, like every other advanced industrial nation in the world.  Meanwhile, rising health care costs wreak havoc on our jobs and our checking accounts.

...allowing our prison system to grow to the point where it is larger than any other country's, except perhaps China.  What happens to prisoners in our system?  How much does it cost to imprison them?  How much misery and bondage do we inflict in this god-forsaken prison system?  What will happen when our multiple budget crises force us to release many of these prisoners back into society?

So what are the solutions, if any, to these revolting developments in American life?  I'll share my answers in another post, as soon as I can write it.

13th Century Sweden and 21st Century America

I'm reading in a history of Sweden this morning, and I ran across this passage, about a time back around 13th century when actions by the Swedish kings led to a decrease in social equality and the rise of an aristocracy.  I thought it sounded suspiciously familiar to what the Republicans and conservative Democrats have been trying to do for about 30 years now.

The development of a separate noble class was one of the most fateful changes of the Middle Ages. Distinctions of status had existed earlier, but they were vague. No differences between freeman were recognized before the law. In the course of the thirteenth century, however...the need arose to provide a mounted armed force on land. Individual knights appeared....The kings could not afford to outfit armies of knights, but they could encourage their officials and the greater landowners to equip themselves. Hence King Magnus Ladulas...issued a statute at Alsno in 1279 by which he gave exemption from taxation to men who would supply themselves with horses and armor....

Thus King Magnus got an army and also created a lay upper class, the fralse, distinguished by its tax-free privileges and its social status....From an egalitarian peasant society with distinctions only between slave and free, Sweden became, with this new institution of knights and fralse, a status society with sharp gradations between ranks.

As the lands of the newborn fralse became tax-free, the lands of the ordinary free farmers had to bear an increased load. As the privileged fralse discovered how advantageous it could be to own land with no responsibility other than maintenance of a few knights, they bought up additional farms and took them off the tax rolls, thus increasing further the burden on the small landholders. The state found it harder and harder to collect taxes....The fralse served as functionaries of the state. They enjoyed mobility, contacts with foreign countries, and educational opportunities for their children; they worse fine clothes and built fine houses.  (Sweden: The Nation's History by Franklin Scott, pp. 57-58)

Sounds a whole lot like our current American aristocracy/upper class, their low tax burden and privileged life.