Tag: plutocracy

I’ve seen all these open letters lately, to the President, Michael Moore, you name it, and I wondered what it be like to get an open letter.  It must be something to read a newspaper or a blog and see an open letter addressed to you for all to see.  Since it’s highly unlikely someone will post an open letter to me in any media outlet, I thought I’d do it myself.  Can’t really stop me now can ya, cuz if you’re reading this, I already did.

Dude,

I know you’ve been depressed lately.  It’s not hard to see for chrissakes.  Moping around all day like you have forever to live.  Well, you don’t.  You’re getting old brother and you better stop and smell the roses before there are no more to smell.

I know it’s hard to go on with all this shit going on.  Wars, homelessness and poverty, unemployment, the world going crazy.  You’ve seen clearly how the two major parties differ only in approach, with the same overall agenda to maintain the plutarchy.  Remember when you learned about a plutarchy?  Shit, you had to look that up didn’t ya?  When you found that term, first you looked up oligarchy:

“An oligarchy is a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royal, wealth, intellectual, family, military, or religious hegemony.”

Whoa! That was an eye opener.  It certainly seemed to fit with exactly what this country has become, even though you now know it has always been that way.  

Then you looked up plutocracy:

“Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth.”

Well ya, that’s true, but maybe oligarchy is better.  Then you came upon the combo term:  plutarchy.

“The combination of both plutocracy and oligarchy is called plutarchy.”

Plutarcy!  That was it and you knew it.  Money controls shit, but so does religion and the military industrial complex.  And that New World Order thing with the stuff about thirteen families and the Illuminati.  The family part!  It’s out there bro, but you know you can’t push it away.  You aint built that way man.  Truth is truth and that’s what you’re all about aint it?

So you decided on plutarcy and then became depressed.  Like it was all too much to overcome.  Fuck that.  Just because the lemmings are flowing over the cliff, doesn’t mean there aren’t many more like you.  Non lemmings.  You know there are and you just need to keep focused on them.  Fuck the lemmings.  And just because of your realization that the plutarchocrats just may be too powerful to overcome, fuck that too.  You’re better than that.  Lemmings are lemmings for a reason.  Because they have no power.  They follow.  You aren’t a follower.  You’re a big, mean motherfucker.  They’re useless and no factor in the overall battle.  They aren’t your battle, the plutarchocrats are the target.    

So I encourage you to stay in the game my brother.  You have much to contribute and you know the truth.  That’s the key.  You know the truth.  It doesn’t matter if you get your facts fucked up now and then, or if you have doubts because of what others may say.  Trust your instincts!  Keep learning and fighting the good fight.  I’m here if you need me.

Keep on truckin man.

The current economic troubles in the US can be explained as a simple case of policy inversion. Because our government is a plutocracy, controlled by the wealthy, its response to economic distress is to provide aid disproportionately to those who need it least. What we are witnessing is a zero-sum struggle between the 1 million people who run America and everyone else. Bankers, realtors, lawyers, lobbyists, and corporate executives are using the Federal Treasury to maintain their incomes, and this is being done at the expense of the vast majority of the American public.

An elaborate propaganda campaign has been created to persuade the people that the world will explode if the earnings of the plutocrats diminish. But the continuation of this reverse-Robin Hood policy is far more dangerous than cutting Federal subsidies to the wealthy. It is the American citizenry that provides the economic base that supports the affluent elites. By sinking the population under unsustainable debt to win a few more quarters of big bonuses and golden parachutes, the plutocrats are risking the total collapse of the US economy.

The correct course for US fiscal policy is for the government to stop being the lender of last resort and instead to become the EMPLOYER of last resort. Only by restoring a secure income stream to the working class and middle class can America’s prosperity be rebuilt. It is objected that government employment programs are wasteful. But just how efficient have our private employment markets been? How efficient has Wall Street been? How efficient has General Motors been? How efficient was Enron?

What Obama needs to do now is throw out his economic team and commit to a populist agenda. We need to stop grinding the US people down to keep champagne flowing on Wall Street.  Corporate executives with myopic vision restricted to the next quarter are not going to rebuild America’s transportation network, energy infrastructure, and educational facilities. Our government needs to put people back to work making the things America NEEDS. Instead, it is piling on more debt so that we can continue to consume the garbage that makes unsustainable profits for corrupt corporations.

When the private sector fails to allocate resources properly, the government must step in. We have witnessed a massive failure of resource allocation in America, and attempts to persist in that misallocation are doomed. The wealth of the people should be spent on the welfare of the people, not on the aggrandizement of a predatory elite. This is the change that America needs, and it is the change that Obama has failed to deliver.

The uneasiness I have felt for months about the unraveling economy has come into clearer focus with the realization that America is entering a state of institutional anarchy. We are now in a situation where it is no longer clear who is in charge. The nominal supreme institution, the US Federal Government, is effectively being run by large private financial concerns. Superficially, the Obama administration may pretend to tell Goldman Sachs what to do, but on a practical basis, corporations like Goldman Sachs are directing the economic policy of the White House through a network of careerist influence that they don’t even bother to conceal.

We would not be in an anarchic state if the Government would simply capitulate, and put its economic affairs in the hands of the financial barons, but the fragmentary legal and political apparatus of our Federal system keeps making random and isolated challenges to the defacto authority of the financial oligarchs. It is like watching some great machine break down with a shower of sparks and short-circuiting, as misdirected energy continues to flow through a broken structure. Nationalization is off the table, not merely for political reasons, but because the Federal Government of the United States appears no longer to believe in its own competence. The financial corporations, having demonstrated incompetence, by contrast feel fully entitled to keep running the show.

Just who is in charge here? It’s not Obama. It’s not the bad boy plutocrats. Neither side is willing to take full responsibility. This is an anarchic state, and it will not be long before its pernicious consequences become more noticeable. Anarchy is worse than any system of government, and this awful realization is what will eventually drive us toward a resolution of the current crisis.

It has taken a few days, but a new great wall of Obama apologetics has been laboriously constructed at the great orange fortress of wishful thinking called DKos. Let us bask in the freedom of Democratic incorrectness that Docudharma provides to summarize the official apologetics. Here they are in Q&A form:

Q: Why did Obama appoint Summers and Geithner, men deeply implicated in the undermining of the financial system for years, to “clean up” this huge mess?

A: No progressive economist (e.g., Stiglitz or Krugman) could possibly have passed the guard dogs of the plutocracy in the US Senate. Dangerous Socialists like Nobel-prize-winning Princeton economist Krugman could never have been confirmed.

Q: Why is Obama allowing Geithner to shovel trillions in taxpayer money into the bottomless pit of Wall Street?

A: Geithner believes that an overpaid and rapacious elite can manage the US economy far better than colorless bureaucrats who are merely public servants. Thus, Geithner needs to give Wall Street’s predators another chance to gamble away the future financial resources of the republic. Obama hopes that Geithner may get lucky, but he can replace him with another plutocratic guardian if he “fails.”

Q: Why is the government not aggressively investigating the quality of the dubious “toxic” assets so as to have a sound basis for estimating the magnitude of the damage and properly guiding the recovery policy?

A: Obama believes that it is his highest duty to manage public perceptions for the greater good of America, and if that management task requires concealing the magnitude of underlying cause of the current financial disaster, then it is a patriotic act to conceal the truth. The less the public knows about the magnitude of the toxic bubble, the better.

Q: Why won’t Obama simply nationalize failed banks, fire the bad management, and rebuild the banking system in a manner that serves the public interest.

A: Presidents who attempt to discipline the plutocracy don’t finish their term in office. Obama’s job is to give the people hope by slightly reducing the scale of looting of public funds.

Q: How can the people maintain their confidence in Obama?

A: Every time Obama betrays the public trust and fails to honor his campaign pledges, the people will be reminded of how much worse a McCain administration would have been.

So there we have it. Obama, our national savior, is protecting the rich from the poor and the powerful from the weak, and all the while he is making us all feel better about having change we can believe in: the pocket change that is all most of us will own when this is over.