And Injustice for All (Except Those at the Top)
The 1% isn't even pretending anymore. It's smash and grab time.
Here is what I presciently wrote in my book Transforming Economy: From Corrupted Capitalism to Connected Community a full decade ago: (I updated this later in a five-part series of articles I wrote for Charles Smith at the alternative economics blog, OfTwoMinds, the links are here Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5):
So we have a lawless system. What does this mean for citizens and investors? In the near term it means that the fundamentals will not apply. Anything that maintains or augments elite wealth and increases elite options will be supported, and anything that consumes or converts common people's wealth and labor and restricts their choices will be pursued.
Anything that reinforces accountability, rational response, or cause and effect will be actively suppressed. Forget reversion to the mean. One only has to observe where the respective value/wealth of each party resides and where it gets channeled to know what the market will do and where policy will go. When the stock market should crash, it won't... until some time frame far longer than even the most generous fundamentals would dictate...
When did it happen that the super-economically and politically powerful no longer felt it necessary to maintain a fig-leaf of pretend democracy, meritocracy, and “justice for all”? Mix equal parts globalized multinational corporate monopolies, captured government, media, and academia, and manipulated crises (Covid-19, Ukraine War, Climate Change, etc.) and you have a game plan to leverage people to abandon their sovereignty to the world empire plans of a so-called “elite” that is nothing of the sort.
What has followed is a hostile takeover of the world’s policy mechanisms to automatically stovepipe power and money into fewer and fewer hands. What megalomaniac could resist that? It’s plug and play (or plug and pay, as it turns out). The New Emperors saw within interlinked communication, interconnected governance, and international trade an opportunity that would have made Pinky’s pal The Brain envious… (Pinky: “Brain, what are you thinking? Brain: What I always think: How do I take over the world?!)
Where can we see this smash-and-grab taking place, and how might we resist, providing our own empowered competitor from the grass-roots up?
“Too big to fail, too big to jail.” The world’s biggest banks bankrupt the world economy in 2008 with their fraud and leveraging, and get rewarded with even larger monopolies (called “consolidations”)and bailouts by taxpayers. Reminds me of the Bob Dylan line, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king.” A new spin on failing upward and letting the consequences roll downward.
“Qualified immunity” for police to protect them from any accountability, and “reasonable intent” for public health officials to protect them from lawsuits from vaccine mandates, elected representatives who are given “exemptions” for insider trading, vaccine manufacturers who fraudulently select and portray data and get “blanket immunity” for their dangerous junk. How is any of this allowed to occur? Lady Justice is peeking through her blindfold and putting her thumb on the scale. The separation of haves and have-nots is reaching a whole new class of obscene.
The notion that you have to prove “intent” in fraud for rich and politically powerful people. The standard should be “Would a reasonable moral person have known better than to do that clearly questionable act?” Otherwise (as research confirms), you just get sociopaths and psychopaths in, especially financial, leadership positions. Financial CEO’s just have a “fiduciary responsibility” to maximize wealth (for themselves and their stock options), with built-to-fail derivatives and risks in which the profits are privatized and the losses are dumped in the public lap. Now if you or I are caught speeding, do we get to claim we never intended this, and simply get a warning? Do prosecutors have to come up with texts saying, “I am speeding my ass off and I am loving it”?
No consequence for government contractors like KBR and Halliburton (especially military) rack up cost overruns, “cost-plus” accounting (guaranteed profits that reward waste), low-balling estimates, charging out the wazoo for “unexpected” snags, and even killing soldiers with substandard wiring, or toxic pollutants, or a host of other harmful assaults on bodily integrity. When is the last time that you or I got to given an estimate for our work, charge three times as much, injured the people we were serving, and have the government backstop and cover for us, instead of fining us for lying, anti-competitive, and endangering practices,
Why is it that big box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco were “essential businesses” during Covid while small businesses delivering the same products were told to shutter their doors? Why is it that Obamacare handed mandates to citizens to patronize drug and “health care” monopolies without any price controls on either? Why did Pfizer get awarded 100 billion for their dangerous, ineffective so-called “vaccines”.
Why is it that President Biden “the most pro-union president ever” (according to him) is trying to ram through a ban on the rail strike and shoehorn an acceptance of a deal rejected by the workers? Why are congressional “progressives” voting for tens of billions of dollars for a Ukraine war in which diplomatic attempts are being thrown out the window?
Sanctioned pedophilia. Jeffrey Epstein proved one thing to us all before his (cough, cough) suicide: Even when it comes to the most grievous crimes against the most innocent, there will be protection NOT for children, but for perpetrators of child abuse if you are in the special top tier. Epstein’s plane “The Lolita Express” and his private island hosted the world’s most connected men, across all political lines, joined in impunity and predation. The most amazing discovery in this sordid affair was not even the Epstein was allowed to basically run free AFTER he was convicted, but that prosecutors (whose job it is to “flip” small fish to get at the top-level criminals) explicitly FORBADE any investigation or prosecution of any possible co-conspirators (or famous child molesters, apparently) past, present, and future as a condition of Epstein’s “plea bargain.” What?! Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s handler, was the only one charged and convicted for soliciting and distributing minors for sex to people who were mysteriously never named.
Note the general dynamic of all these examples. The self-chosen few at the self-appointed top have apparently moved from “divine right of kings” to “I am God.” This peculiar evolution of self-justification and self-adoration has these false “elites” believing not only that they are special and superior,, but that they ought to live by different rules and receive ridiculous perks (to compensate for the excessive burden of herding 8 billion sheep, I suppose).
Those rules and those perks are insulated from any direct democratic challenge, but they still need our ignorance, civic laziness, and our cooperation, in short, our agreement. Almost all forms of seduction into this corruption take the form of: “If you just work hard enough, and kiss up enough, YOU TOO can be part of this special club, living as famed kings in the court of public adulation and in the lap of luxury.”
First we need to confront that interior temptation to join this corruption. Corrupt luxury is NOT the good life. A good life is qualitatively healthy, not quantitatively corrupt. We must also address the two-tiered exterior, societal injustice as any other grave illness: Show it we mean business. The best ways to do this as shown in my articles referenced in the intro paragraph are unplug from and come after “Big Everything” for their audacious greed and price fixing:
So what can we do about all this when our politics, regulation and policies are all captured by those who are determined to exploit us and extract ever higher rents from our labor, our talents, and our assets? We go directly to the source of value, which is demand. The organic food movement and the Covid-19 virus are showing us how.
When organic foods spread from a fringe subculture in the early 1970s to a conscious and viable desire for suburban soccer moms in the 2000s, big corporations had to respond or lose out. They spooned us cheap, high-fructose-corn-syrup garbage for decades that decimated our health and clouded our minds.
We rebelled successfully by moving to organic foods and conscious eating. They had to follow. We did not necessarily need any regulation or government mandate to change behavior. They tried to buy off regulation by making pesticide / sugar-laden food "natural", but we did not buy it, and citizen-activist groups successfully kept the label "organic" from being watered down. Now, these corporations are trying to buy up family-owned organic businesses.
And “plug into” small everything:
Research shows that beyond a modicum of material wealth necessary to support basic living and a few extras, happiness is NOT increased with additional wealth. Beyond a basic minimum, material more IS NOT BETTER. This goes against a major commandment of consumerist culture. However, I propose, that MORE IS BETTER for non-material qualities like love, friendship, and, yes, COMMUNITY.
Community focus has a way of stimulating one's own direct, concrete, productive engagement with original, authentically-generated economy. Whether it is discussion forums (exchanging the fruits of ideas) or farmers markets (exchanging the fruits from our trees), we come to know ourselves in relation with real others with real cares, hopes, and dreams and not through a haze of identity politics.
So what are we waiting for?
https://www.organicconsumers.org/ worth joining, costs nothing for newsletters....not a high tech outfit, refreshingly what you would expect from ex hippies.