The following article, a bit longer than usual, is purely my own theoretical construct. It may or may not bear any resemblance to your “reality.” I come from a gulag mentality after a total of some 25+yrs in jails and prisons across the planet; to me, they’re all simply a pack of criminals…
From Mohamad Bouazizi in Tunisia, thru North Africa and the Arab Spring, the democracy movement is spreading to Europe and the Americas.
(Click image to enlarge...)
As the insatiable greed for wealth and privilege of the 1% plunges the world deeper into Depression, their drive for total socio-political power in their own name has never been greater.
This is necessary for the survival of all criminal conspiracies. To stand down would bring their entire house of cards crashing around them.
Without political control and access to the public treasury, unbridaled capitalism is no more than a Ponzi scheme. If Bernie Madoff had the same inside political game as, say, Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, he wouldn’t be in prison. Like them, he’d have been able to soak the public (“bailout”) and continue the scheme.
Back in the 1930s while vampire capitalists were considering the plight of their felonious enterprise, they latched on to the economics of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), whom they used to give themselves a cloak of systemic respectability.
(Vulture capitalism is a misnomer. Vultures clean up decaying matter; vampires are constructs that prey upon the living. Yes, Virginia, they’re real…)
In reality, it’s a polyglot of systems employed by the criminal elite to provide a lawful cover for themselves.
They’re perfectly at home operating within ANY socio-economic system that affords them such cover…from pseudo-democracy, to state-capitalist dictatorships, to fascism.
None of this, by the way, is to be confused with “free enterprise.” There’s nothing free about a system of rip, rape and rob…whether by individual sociopaths or corporate ones.
Keynes’s idea was to acknowledge the inevitability of “recessions and depressions” as a natural state of private enterprise profiteering, and how to manage it.
Keynes noted how the world was soon thrown into an economic abyss after the competitive depredations of the Great War (WW-I) between the major corporate states.
In fact, the whole reason behind the first world war was the competition over markets, cheap labor and raw resources between the corporate-colonial empires.
This also objectively diverted the world’s major working classes from any threat of rebellion. The Bolshevik example (1917) was not lost on the corporate rulers and their political footmen.
At the height of World War-II, the major corporatists had their respective states sponsor the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
When Mexico nationalized their oil, they dispossessed a group of Texan financial barons of $400 million. These parasites ran to Washington to complain.
FDR offered the Mexicans an $800 million “aid” package (privately explaining that the “free” money was to be divided between them and the Texan oil barons…$400 million each). Worked like a charm.
Win-win for all, except of course for US consumers and taxpayers. But that’s the way the kleptocratic system works.
By 1944, the corporations fully perceived the need for post-war measures to guarantee their system (and payments).
Thus was born the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which went into post-war operation, 1945. All neatly financed by public treasuries.
Think: Loan sharks and protection rackets. What more could corporate profiteers ask for?
As generally true with all criminal conspiracies, these vampiric leeches are always attracted to greater profits. Thus appeared another consigliere, a “voodoo economist” named Milton Friedman (1912-2006).
Friedman’s contribution was that Keynes’s idea of “appeasing” the inevitable recessions and depressions of bloated capital theft was unnecessary altogether. After all, high-end capitalism is the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss.
Friedman figured that if the victims were so stupid to go along with the pyramidal protection racket that the superior elite had devised, well, quite frankly, fuck ‘em. Take it all!
This also rides on the conservative foundation to the “just-world fallacy,” necessary to avoid cognitive dissonance created by the corporate-criminal culture.
They no doubt pined for the simpler days of Crusades and Conquistadors when they could chalk up all their theft, murder and meyhem to the White Man’s Burden and God.
Once GE, Friedman & Co. got their FBI informant/actor front-man Ronald Reagan (1981) into the White House, the rest was political child’s play. The new capital consigliere, Friedman, helped guide all of Reagan’s economic policy steps.
By 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO), made up of the corporate consiglieres of some 188 nations, had assumed power over GATT and led the corporate world’s capital schemes. Criminal Economics 101.
The WTO “ministerial conference” in Seattle in 1999 (corporate executives in the guise of “state” representatives) even attempted to form state-free status complete with their own diplomatic passports. They deem themselves to be exempt of all national laws, including environmental regulations.
In the meantime, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gave corporations the power to move industry and jobs out of the US into cheap labor markets and exempt themselves of tax controls.
By the bust of 2008, the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism was wholly in place. Impoverishment of the Homeland is simply corporatist strategy to soften up US workers into a “third world” wage-friendly reality.
So, where was I? Oh yeah, the democracy movement.
Applied mass action, democracy, mob-rule, revolution–however you wish to characterize it–has been the ONLY means historically of effectively changing such embedded social conditions.
For the first time since our previous fin de siècle we see the development of a mass movement espousing the issue of capitalism itself (“1% vs. 99%”). This is significant…where else can it go but into the question of corporatism as a viable system at all? (And don’t the corps know this!)
SYRIZA: Greek Left Radical Coalition...
We now see coming out of Europe–Spain, France, Greece, etc.–mass electoral and street opposition to the euphemistic “austerity” measures classically designed by the ruling elite to make the masses pay.
Syriza, the left coalition formation in Greece that won a plurality in their recent election–who will be voting again on June 14th for the whole enchilada (or moussaka, as the case may be)–recently posted a series of its demands, apparently their official program.
While there are a total of 40 items on that list, I’ll only note a few here…
These include: Raise the tax to 75% for all incomes over $600,000 and tax financial transactions and luxury goods; Nationalize all banks, utility services, health care and all private hospitals; Abolish military aid to Israel [and Colombia]; and Close all foreign military bases.
Small wonder that the Greeks are pariahs to the corporate establishment. Without enforcers, how are the “capitalists” gonna collect their booty?
I guess we’re gonna find out soon enough…
Dr. Publico
