I’ve spent the last 10 years doing almost nothing but studying politics and the super-rich. I’m very fortunate in that I don’t have to work. I make my money as a writer and am able to devote my time to whatever I want. What I wanted, and had wanted for years, was to figure out who pulls the fucking strings around here.
I wish I had remained ignorant. I began to use the mafia model to understand American and, indeed, global politics about 4 years ago. It best describes the situation in a way average people can relate to. Turns out, there’s a reason for this. Humans just like to organize into clans. It’s a sociological phenomenon. You can even see it in play in the leftosphere with little crowds and their various email lists.
This phenomenon goes all the way to the top. Globally you have hundreds of “crowds”, some of which intersect, acting like so many crime families. These “interests” assert power in various ways, sometime legally (it’s easy to remain legal when you write the laws – ask Bernie Madoff), and sometimes as illegally as any mobster operation.
It’s hard to visualize the organizational structure of such an array of interests. In many ways, it’s not very organized at all. This is what I always try to convey to people who want to see everything in a conspiratorial framework – it is far more complex, dynamic, and evolving.
Maybe there is some superpowerful Illuminatti out there. But I haven’t seen it. But there are big fish. And that crowd is the most dangerous. They are the bankers, arms manufacturers, oil barons. These are the untouchables. They control (not as one) corporations, private armies and intelligence agencies. They form the revolving door community of the big think tanks, government positions in Treasury, State, and the Senate, and they rarely ever get taken down.
The story of geopolitics is really the story of these big fish, working together on occasion, at war with each other on other occasions. It’s all very nasty business, but that’s the game if you want to be a billionaire.
These different interests rarely ever completely align but for a couple of exceptions: they almost all want to globalize the planet so they can conduct inter.., no, transnational commerce unimpeded, and they don’t give a shit about democracy or any other people empowerment ideas that can ruin their good thing.
Some really do want to form a world government of sorts, but it’s not the one the conspiracy theorists are always babbling about. Others prefer a wild west type of world and they try to sow instability so they can exploit it. These two groups, loosely defined, have been battling it out for decades. Guess who’s winning?
The stable world crowd once dominated and saw themselves as stewards of the meek. They didn’t mind socialism much and saw keeping the masses happy and complacent as the way to secure their dominance – soft power. Then in the 60s, the wild westers started to make a stand. Armed with shitloads of Texas oil money, they went after the Eastern establishment and helped shape the latter half of the 20th Century into something far more monstrous than the Rockefeller brother even conceived. And that’s saying something.
Then there was also just an element of unpredictability. Poachers and financial wizards moved on Wall Street and helped wild westify it without any ideological motive. They just seized the opportunity. And by the 80s it was pretty much anything goes.
As for how all this speaks for our democracy, people power, and the prospects of a young, wet behind the ears president, I don’t have a lot of hope. Just google “business roundtable”. Scroll down the list of thousands of hits, scanning quickly all the different chapters, front organizations, groups and subgroups in different states, cities and countries. This is just a fraction of the “Interests” network. Then think of ours.
The Business Roundtable is a lobby set up in the late 60s to take on the so-called liberal agenda. It’s main organization comprises the CEOs of the biggest corporations in the world. It’s sub-chapters, for lack of a better word, are in the thousands. They coordinate with the Chamber of Commerce and all their thousands of organization, the National Association of Manufacturers, and countless other business lobbies and thinktanks. It is a multi-billion dollar army with and army of PR firms to manipulate public perceptions.
Of course, they need to spend all that money because their agenda is wholly unpopular with the public.
There is really only one organization on the planet that can even remotely take on such an omnipresent organization as the corporate lobby – the US federal government with the support of the American people.
And that will inevitably fail too unless a critical mass obtains and we remove the central instrument of control these interests have over our government – money.
We can try all we want to “elect better Dems” or any otgher strategy we can think of, but none will work until we remove completely the influence of money over our political system. It’s that simple.
All this bullshit about netroots donors and small contributions are that – bullshit.
We can’t afford our government and we don’t have the organizational structure to do it even if we could. It’s a pipe dream. A constitutional amendment banning ever giving a politician or a candidate a single penny is the only way – followed by the construction of a public financing regime and serious media reform that forces media corporations to allow us to conduct our democracy for free on OUR airwaves.
And as long as those media corporations are the primary source of information among the American people, there will never be a critical mass. If religion is the opiate of the masses, television is a coma.
This is it. Our only chance. I give us about 3 in 100 odds of success.
42 comments
Skip to comment form
We have to be ready and waiting for the next big shock, and fracking take advantage of it.
That means having quick answers that will let some “very important people” that are in a bind because of the shock, out of their bind, while also advancing our interests.
That’s what the corporations do, all the time. And as long as there are rich and powerful corporations taking opportunistic advantage of crises, there is no need for a Ring of Illuminati, because that in itself lays the groundwork for more crises. Just need the unfettered private governments – everything else in the corporate Shock Treatment approach follows from that, because the world is too complex a place for any Ring of Illuminati to be required in order to generate shocks.
The shocks, they happen. The corporate opportunism, that’s built in to the structure of unfettered commercial corporations. And before that, the steady, relentless onslaught on the fetters that keep corporations from acting that way – that also built into the structure of unfettered commercial corporations.
Since its a mob, we know where its weak point will be – when self-interests diverge. Like any feudal system, it is vulnerable to goal conflict among the powers that be.
We do have a handful of other advantages. One is that the corporate elite pays for economic theory that rationalizes that the corporate elite by rights ought to be obscenely wealthy. But if economic theory is going to successfully rationalize that, then the same economic theory must avoid being a scientific theory for very important parts of the economy. So we have the opportunity to better understand economic crises than the corporations do.
The problem is, its only an opportunity unless we actually do better understand economic crises than the corporations do. But many people succumb to intuitive false myths about the economy because functioning of some parts of the economy is intrinsically counter-intuitive.
Money itself is a big part of this. The system has to be set up to that money functions as if it has value in its own right. But of course, a money that actually does have intrinsic value is a tremendous source of economic instability. Now, for international money, its not always possible to do anything about this, but for the majority of effective domestic monetary systems from the evolution of the institution of money, money as a marker constantly tends to dominate money as an intrinsically valuable commodity.
In the US political system, we know one element of whatever shock treatment strategy we pursue during the next big economic shock – we need to primary establishment Democrats with progressives and populists who can raise a ruckus. Even if they don’t agree with us on all issues all the time, we need firebrands who’ll respond to threats from well moneyed interests by hitting back, and we need plenty of them, so picking them off one at a time won’t be enough.
…of the government would be a multi-centennial transformation, so despite the significant ideological support for campaign finance reform. The ‘system’ is designed to its very roots to make this kind of reform unlikely.
In our 230+ years slavery ended (not without considerable bloodshed), millions of middle and working class citizens were enfranchised, women finally got to vote too! The SCOTUS has alternately extended and rescinded civil rights to various classes. And sometimes the executive and/or legislative branches extend or rescind too.
But the original document favored a sort of benevolent aristocracy. That grew into a less benevolent industrial oligarchy. At the current time we’re all the way regressed to neo-feudalism. The SCOTUS is poised to declare corporations to be citizens MORE equal than the rest of us so as to enshrine that model well into the future. Until and unless the serfs revolt – get together and seize enough power to turn this around, that is what we must suffer. This is why the ol’ divide and conquer tactic is deployed against the people 24-7 while the Barons laugh all the way to their banks in the Caymans.
When they get the vaccine how long is it going to take before the emergency rooms are all full? Will that be sudden or in stages. I have no lethatlity projections on the vaccine let alone the chaos martial law is going to cause.
http://www.medicalvoices.org/e…
There’s really nothing to add.
Can we even find one Senator to even express support for this? Should we stop all other political activity to promote this? is there a fund? A place to discuss?
3 in 100? I don’t know. I don’t see any way out at this point. But I agree with your thinking. I’ve also tried to figure out this Illuminati stuff, the Bilderbergs, etc., but can’t quite get a handle on how they could make it work. Just an example, it would seem that every President would know about it. But what about Carter and Clinton? Could anyone carry themselves the way they do and be in on a new world order conspiracy? Seems hard to fathom.
is A) you get it and B) you’re a really good writer.
I have studied this for almost as long and am drawing exactly the same conclusions.
But I think you’re about one step ahead of me, which is actually pretty cool.
This Sibel Edmonds stuff is the biggest glimpse behind the curtain that I believe has come down the pike in my lifetime.
That’s why it’s being completely ignored. You’re not supposed to see this stuff. “Authorized Personnel Only” behind that door.
My brain may have whiplash, but it’s nice to see things laid out concisely.
Thanks for your service to humanity in the last 10 years, working to understand all this.
It’s really something to go on a huge research tear (project) like this, when it all clunks into place, isn’t it? Happened to me once, took 7 years. But that’s a topic for another day.
things. Doris, or GrannyD writes:
In September the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. will try again to decide if corporations are persons and, if so, would have all the rights of a person; and could send as much cash as they consider effective to candidates running for office. I HOPE THEY DECIDE AGAINST CHANGING OUR LAWS FORBIDDING CORPORATIONS FROM USING THEIR HUGE TREASURIES TO INFLUENCE THE OUTCOME OF ELECTIONS.
AMERICANS FOR CAMPAIGN REFORM HAVE TWO BILLS KNOWN AS THE FAIR ELECTIONS NOW ACT. „What has that to do with me?‰ you may ask. Sometime in the past ten years you sent me, GrannyD, your email, along with a donation or a get-well card, or signed a list and I am using your email to write to you because you said or inferred that you would help me when the time came and you could do so.
Now I am cashing in my chips! Would you be so kind as to make two telephone calls of singular importance for me? The numbers are: 1-877-851-6437 or 1-800-828-0498. Both are for the Capitol. The first call you would make, were you to accept my humble request, you would ask for the office of your Senator, and the second call you would ask for the office of your House Representative.
Leave a message for whom you called if he/she is NOT available. If he/she or a trusted employee answers, please use your own words saying something like this: „I would like the Senator (or Representative) to know that I do not believe that a Corporation is a person. I would like him/her to co-sponsor the Senate (or House) bill known as the Fair Elections Now Act, HR1826 for the House and SB752 for the Senate.‰
If either is already a co-sponsor, thank him/her for being one. If not say: “Please consider being a co-sponsor, for I am sure you would like to please me and many of your constituents.”
Yours sincerely,
Doris Grannyd Haddock
and brilliant essay
and incisive prescriptions.
thx!
Question: How do we start to move the FCC,
in the direction of re-claim our Public Airways?
Getting money out of government is not only impossible, it won’t stop corruption in the rest of society. The (very long term) answer is getting rid of money as a human motivator. It should be preserved as an economic measure, but the whole wealth-chasing pathology needs to be shut down.
The way to de-monetize human motivation is to replace money with esteem. The Internet makes this possible, because it can measure and communicate information about people with extraordinary precision and efficiency. The reason the open source software community is so extraordinarily efficient is that it operates in a market of esteem. You can’t steal esteem. You can’t forge esteem. You can’t cheat your way to esteem. It can only be honesty earned.
When money no longer distorts social behavior and unbalances our political priorities, mankind will have made an enormous evolutionary leap. To reach this brave new world, we will need A New Kind of Social Science (ANKOSS). My thinking and writing are aimed at this goal.