Above: money doesn't make the world go 'round--but it does keep the system moving.Yeah, pretty sad when things in the real world happen like they would in a novel--you know when the people you trust betray you in a way you would never have expected? Let me get more specific.
Remember that thing called "government" that's supposed to protect your rights and help organize society in a way that allows humanity to have an easier, more enjoyable time?
How about corporations? Remember them? They're the groups of smaller businesses that team up to help better provide for the communities they exist in.
Well, that's the way both were originally supposed to work, anyway. Alas, they've supplanted those wonderful ideals with concerns only for themselves. Corporations have the same rights as we individuals and, while they can't vote, politicians make sure big businesses are more than equally represented in government.
Capitalism is dead and probably has been for years--it's only recently that we've discovered its body. See, Capitalism too, has been supplanted by the system of Corruptionism.
The basic idea is that our leaders (both political and corporate) tell us that they care about all humans, our rights, the environment and our morals, but all they really care about is taking from us and giving to themselves. We give our money to corporations in exchange for products and services we don't need (but are literally brainwashed to believe are necessary) and the corporations take that money and pay off politicians to make laws that make it easier for corporations to make even more money off of us.
Politicians are corrupt because they take money for favors. We are corrupt because our money comes from corporations that we then use for things we don't bother realizing we don't need. Corporations are corrupt because the people who run the corporations take money, ignore their own morals, and keep the corporate interests going.
Everyone is corrupt in this system.
Maybe the Corruptionist system (like most systems) can actually function to make life easier for us. However, take it to the extreme and we get what we have now.
Last month Matt Taibbi wrote an amazingly in-depth piece that you can find at RollingStone.com that covers the
bail-out, the AIG mess, corrupt politicians and most importantly how this whole thing has functioned as a non-violent coup meant to wrest control of government (and therefore us) from our elected leaders. Of course, I'd suggest that our elected officials haven't had any substantive power for years. Regardless, the reality seems to be that now they don't. Here's a bit from Taibbi's article:
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
That article has been sitting in a tab in Firefox since last month and is so incredibly long I still haven't finished reading the whole thing. It's a pretty good read, so far, though.
As much as I'd like to be wrong about this, the moral of the story seems to be that, ultimately, every ounce of stereotypical paranoia any of us have had about politicians and businessmen being liars has been accurate.
Politicians and businessmen are all lying--all the time. They may not even be aware of their own dishonesty, but the reality sure seems to be that eventually, any corporation and every politician will sacrifice what ever it/he/she needs to in order to make as much money as it/he/she can.
One good example of this is when
People Magazine put out their 911 Memorial Issue, just a few days after 911. They ran ads opposite pictures of the disaster.
My "favorite" was a picture of a man on his knees, mouth agape, seemingly staring across the gap between the page his picture was on and the page facing him which featured an ad for State Farm life insurance.I emailed the editor and complained. She replied with a bunch of rationalizations and apologized only for my offense. Members of an email list I was subscribed to at the time seemed nonplussed by my offense at
People Magazine's behavior.
"They have to make a living don't they?" said one person on the list.
Here we are 8 years later and things have only gotten worse. We're all just fodder for the machine of Corruptionism--we seem generally OK with that and so do our political leaders. So much so that, morals are put aside in favor of bringing in the cash so we can buy our iPods, pay our bills, and feed our kids. Our government takes our money (both directly through taxes and indirectly by having the Fed inject new cash into the system) and gives it to these corporations to keep them going and to quite literally reward them for their horrible behavior.
Just keep doing what you're doing, the government seems to be saying.
But "corruption" is the right word for it, isn't it?
