In theory a corporatist system can still produce value and provide services for the citizenry, albeit at the price of expensive rents extracted by parasite in business and government. A gangster can still provide a real service.
But as we look at the America of today, at a bloated finance sector incapable of adding
any value, of producing anything other than distortions, bubbles, collapses, and of doing anything throughout other than looting; when we look at a health care system which only becomes more expensive while providing less service, and expels ever more people from any access to care short of the emergency room; at an agricultural system which provides an ever less nutritious, more toxic diet, and which is rapidly losing even its virtue of inexpensiveness as prices steadily climb, and all this as it becomes economically impossible for anyone other than a handful of industrial rackets to engage in farming, and only through the most fossil fuel intensive, soil depleting, and environmentally destructive monoculture farming methods; when we see how every public service degrades, every amenity is canceled, every space enclosed, privatization and expropriation becoming the order of the day; when we see thieves and thugs closing in from every direction while barbed wire fences are going up along every horizon, and the horizons closing in; at this point we have nothing left of “government” in any real sense of the term, let alone democracy, but just
kleptocracy.
Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from Greek klepto (theft) and kratos (rule), is a term applied to a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. Political corruption is closely tied to the internal workings of a Kleptocracy. Not an “official” form of government (cf democracy, republic, monarchy, theocracy) the term is a pejorative used to describe governments perceived to be highly corrupt.
Kleptocracies are often dictatorships or some other form of autocratic and nepotist government, or lapsed democracies that have transformed into oligarchies. A kleptocratic ruler typically treats his country’s treasury as though it were his own personal bank account.
Lapsed democracies that have transformed into oligarchies. Let’s see.
The effects of a kleptocratic regime or government on a nation are typically adverse in regards to the faring of the state’s economy, political affairs and civil rights. Kleptocracy in government often vitiates prospects of foreign investment and drastically weakens the domestic market and cross-border trade. As the kleptocracy normally embezzles money from its citizens by misusing funds derived from tax payments, or money laundering schemes, a kleptocratically structured political system tends to degrade nearly everyone’s quality of life.
Adverse to the economy: The crash and bailout leading by design toward the next crash.
Adverse to political affairs: Practically no variation, two corporatist parties, corporate media, the acceptable political discourse and policy runs from rightist (i.e. “liberal”, by MSM standards) to hard right (“conservative” or even “centrist”/”moderate”).
Adverse to civil rights: The assault on civil liberties; erosion of
legal standing and
other hurdles against access to the law; the attack on net neutrality (and the whole public space which is growing in the blogosphere); and all the ways in which rights and liberties have been monetized so that they exist in theory only, not in reality, except for the rich.
Degrades nearly everyone’s quality of life: All services are being degraded or abolished: infrastructure (a $2.6 trillion maintenance backlog to keep things like bridge collapse from happening), roads, public transportation, public health, public parks,
public legal services, libraries, education, renewable energy, environmental protection, policing (the focus is on drug war privateering, SWAT-type militarization, the prison-industrial complex, all primarily profit-seeking, to the detriment of the real safety of the citizenry; general surveillance and ratcheting up terror through media scares, “contempt of cop” brutality, creeping Taser totalitarianism, growing resignation to Nazi tactics).
In addition, the money that kleptocrats steal is often taken from funds that were earmarked for public amenities, such as the building of hospitals, schools, roads, parks and the like – which has further adverse effects on the quality of life of the citizens living under a kleptocracy. The quasi-oligarchy that results from a kleptocratic elite also subverts democracy (or any other political format the state is ostensibly under).
They seldom have to directly steal this, since the money is usually “legally” voted onto the loot conveyor. Health care funding is systematically funneled to the insurance and Big Drug rackets, student lending money to the banks. Whatever’s left over after the systematic theft is stolen as earmarks.
The Republicans are the aggressive ideologues of kleptocracy, while the Democrats are either de facto gangsters or enablers of Republican stealing. It’s not that the Dems are any less consciously malevolent than the Reps, they’re just more cowardly and scatterbrained about it.
And then there’s
the personal factor, which these days is more and more likely to support the criminal status quo.
I quote this at length because I think it captures the larger situation exactly. It identifies the ridgelines. And in doing so, it clearly reveals why Obama is, at bottom, a conservative, notwithstanding some cultural inclinations to the contrary. When all is said and done, he wants to change things as little as possible, his desire for change is driven by a perceived necessity to avoid disaster, and the priorities and parameters of change are dictated by doing as much as possible for those representing existing power, and doing as little as possible for everyone else. This is what classic Burkean conservatives believe in, along with the ideal of unifying the polity, and marginalizing all divisive forces.
Divisive forces, for those not clued in, means you and me, pardners. Every bit as much as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. For a classic conservative like Obama, it really makes no difference whatsoever if the divisive forces are right or rational. All that matters is that they resist going along. And because of Obama’s essential conservatism, it’s you and I who are the problem in Obama’s eyes. Not Baucus, Nelson, Lieberman & the like. You and I. We are the problem.
This is certainly part of the Obama pathology. His personal ideology is clearly right-of-center, but even more deeply he wants to uphold the status quo no matter what it is. So no matter in what kind of society he existed, his main priority would be to say to everyone “don’t rock the boat”.
It’s our great misfortune that this innate conservative, this innate apologist for all entrenched crime, is in power at such a time of travail and such an impulse, such a mandate, for revolutionary change.
What has been the result in every similar historical situation in recent decades? In Chile, in Bolivia, through much of the rest of Latin America,
the same assault led to the betrayal and destruction, often violent, of democracy. In Poland, Solidarity sold out the people. In South Africa the Freedom Charter was trashed. Everywhere democratic political promises were the Big Lie front behind which the shock assault of massive gangsterism stood ready to attack.
And now in America the vicious government of George Bush, not even remotely a normal if extreme presidential adminstration but rather a cabal of gangsters, was just the prelude to this Big Lie. Obama and the Democratic party stood for “Change”? Emanuel said “never let a crisis go to waste”?
Oh yes, but not at all in the sense they lied into people. The exact opposite. These take their place among the classical totalitarian lies as meaning the exact opposite of what they claimed to mean. The change was an even more radical, more systematic corporatist assault, this time open, brazen, the spear point being the Too Big To Fail bailouts. Meanwhile, even more than under Bush, the Global War on Terror is officially enshrined as the permanent state of Bailout America’s foreign policy. It’s a war policy, now and forever, for as long as this government exists.
An
excellent piece by Adam Levitan is especially suggestive regarding how it’s not just trillions of our dollars but our democracy itself which has been stolen by the rackets.
Everything involved is political. Don’t let them fool you for a minute into thinking that any of this is dictated by economic “necessity”, that the bailouts are unfortunate but necessary, or the GWOT is unfortunate but necessary. These are chosen instruments of aggressive literal and socioeconomic warfare by the rackets and the rich upon democracy and the people of the world.
Where politics is hijacked by $24 trillion worth (and that’s just the bailout) of looting expeditions, there’s not much space left for democracy, as we see with the bogus bag of ”reforms” being touted.
As for the hijacking of foreign policy by money and militarization, perhaps we were too fast to say Obama did nothing to receive that Nobel. Certainly the Europeans needed him to be completely on board with the bailouts. That’s the only kind of “peace” TPTB all over the West care about nowadays.
And we were silly enough to wonder if the “peace” prize should be given to someone who has escalated a war which already looks permanent (and sounds so in his rhetoric).
That’s not where peace is at nowadays for the financial power structure. Remember what “Great Moderation” always meant under predatory globalization. Not what it sounds like.
The Orwellian Peace of the Great Moderation and the Global War on Terror. Change for Bailout America.
As the enemies of the Constitution often say, “the constitution is not a suicide pact”. They use this ideal to attack civil liberties, jobs, and freedom, to replace them with fear, poverty, and enslavement, all for the sake of gangsters led by the banks. The capture is complete.
And they are clearly organizing for physical violence. They already have the professional Nazi structure (the “SS” element) in place in the form of Blackwater and other mercenary structures. Now they’re organizing their Brownshirts in the form of the teabaggers.
They clearly intend a bloodbath, and yet everyone sleeps and even laughs. There’s zero will among the people to organize for their economic or even their physical existence. I just can’t get over the blindness.
I don’t know how to solve everything at once, but one policy plank is absolutely clear: Smash the Banks.
Too Big to Fail is Too Big to Exist. break them up. If I had the wherewithal I’d start a political movement founded on this one policy imperative. Just as all large-scale corporate and political crime now flows from the banks, so Smashing them is the solution from which every other solution would flow.
[Interviewer]: Are you saying the U.S. shouldn’t have done all those bailouts? What was the alternative?
NT: Blood, sweat and tears. A lot of the growth of the past few years was fake growth from debt. So swallow the losses, be dignified and move on. Suck it up.
There’s no other way out. For those who fear, suck it up. This is the only way to break through to the world free of fear, one of FDR’s great
Four Freedoms.
The complete capture and enclosure of our democracy, our government, our economy, our politics, our land, our hopes and dreams, our future as human beings, our very souls, is before our eyes.
Our big banks have demonstrated an unmatched ability to take over regulators and to convince politicians that a dangerous financial structure is good for America. These same people will almost certainly render ineffective whatever new regulations you put in place. More broadly, how can you run a well-functioning political system when a few large banks are so powerful?
The key insight at the heart of breaking up Standard Oil in 1911 was that it was too big to regulate. That breakup may have been good for competition; it was certainly good for democracy.
As Nicolas Trist – secretary to President Andrew Jackson – said about the incredibly powerful privately owned Second Bank of the United States, “Independently of its misdeeds, the mere power, — the bare existence of such a power, — is a thing irreconcilable with the nature and spirit of our institutions.” (Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, p.102)
Break up the banks.
