Article

2020-10-14 -Land of the Free

[CharlesHughSmith] Social and economic decay is so glacial that only those few who remember an earlier set-point are equipped to even notice the decline. That's the position we find ourselves in today.

There has always been corruption here, but exactly how much waxes and wanes depending on all sorts of things including what part of the country you’re in at the moment. New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, and Las Vegas, for instance, carry their reputation for corruption with pride, thinking it gives them an aura of edginess and sophistication that sets them apart from more straightforward communities.

Many Americans will discount the systemic corruption that characterizes the American way of life because they've known nothing but systemic corruption. They've habituated to it because they have no memory of a time when looting wasn't legalized and maximizing self-enrichment by any means available wasn't the unwritten law of the land.

If you don't yet see America as little more than an intertwined collection of skims, scams, frauds, embezzlements, lies, gaming-the-system, obfuscation of risk and exploitation of the masses by insiders, please read How Corruption is Becoming America's Operating System. (nakedcapitalism.com, via Cheryl A.)

Continued from Page 4

Here on oftwominds.com, you might want to read No Wrongdoing Here, Just 6,300 Corporate Fines and Settlements. (May 2015)

When JP Morgan Chase engaged in fraud and was fined a wrist-slap $1 billion, nobody went to prison because nobody ever goes to prison for corporate fraud and criminal collusion: JPMorgan to pay almost $1 billion fine to resolve U.S. investigation into trading practices.

Simply put, corruption is cost-free in America because most of it is legal. And whatever is still illegal is never applied to the elites and insiders, except (as per Communist regime corruption) for a rare show trial where an example is made of an egregious fall-guy (think Bernie Madoff: whistleblowers' repeated attempts to expose the fraud to regulators were blown off for years. It was only when Madoff ripped off wealthy and powerful insiders did he go down.)

There are three primary sources for the complete systemic corruption of America. One is the transition from civic responsibility for the social contract and the national interest to winner-take-most legalized looting.

This transition is visible in the history of empires in the final stage of collapse. The assumption underlying the social order slides from a shared duty to the nation and fellow citizens to an obsession with evading civic duties: military service, taxes, and following the rules are all avoided by insiders and elites, and this moral/social rot then corrupts the entire social order as elites and insiders lean ever more heavily on the remaining productive class to pay the taxes and provide the military muscle to defend their wealth.

That corruption is now everywhere in America is obvious to all but those adamantly blinded by denial. The JP Morgans pay fines as a cost of doing corrupt business, while "public servants" game the system to maximize their pensions with a variety of tricks: colluding to boost the overtime of the retiring insider; finding a quack physican to sign off on a fake "heart murmur" so the insider pays no taxes on their "disability" check, and so on in an endless parade of lies, scams, skims and insider tricks.

The excuse is always the same: everybody does it. This is of course the collapse not just of the social contract but of morality in general: anything goes and winners take most. Insiders look the other way lest their own skims and scams be contested, and elites and insiders view those who aren't skimming and scamming as chumps to be pitied.

The second dynamic is that financialization has completely corrupted the American economy, and that corruption has now spread to the political and social orders. Once the financial sector conquered the real economy, it began siphoning 95% of the economy's wealth to the top .01% and their toadies, lackeys, apologists, enforcers and technocrats.

As they hollowed out the real economy, distorted incentives and made moral hazard the guiding principle of the American way of life, the recipients of financialization's domination gained the wealth to buy political power from the pathetically corruptible political class.

The corruption that we call financialization corrupted democracy and undermined the social contract by eviscerating the value of labor and creating a pay-to-play political order that's a mockery of democracy.

The third factor is the decay of America's institutions into fronts for personal gain. While Higher Education insiders are masters of self-serving PR, the truth is they're not concerned about their debt-serf "customers" (students) learning the essential skills needed in the tumultuous decades ahead--they're worried that the revenues needed to pay their enormous salaries and benefits might dry up.

"Education" is nothing but a front for the corruption of self-enrichment by the elites and insiders at the top.

The same is true of "healthcare." The concern of insiders isn't the declining health of America's populace, it's the decline in revenues as fewer "customers" come in for the financial scalping of emergency care.

"Healthcare" is nothing but a front for the corruption of self-enrichment by the elites and insiders at the top.

Thanks to the Federal Reserve's endless free money for financiers and endless federal borrow-and-blow deficits, the unstated belief is since there's endless "money", my petty frauds and skims won't even dent the feeding trough--there's always another trillion or three to skim and scam, and there will never be any limit to the feeding trough.

There is no limit until the system implodes. Then the collapse becomes limitless.

Ironic, isn't it? The oh-so convenient belief that America's wealth and power are eternal and godlike in their glory fosters the crass corruption that has weakened America to the point of no return: systemic fragility and brittleness.

American Exceptionalism has been turned on its head: America is now as perniciously corrupt as any developing-world nation we smugly felt so superior to, and with extremes of wealth and income inequality that surpass even the most rapacious kleptocracies. This destabilizing "exceptionalism" is now the defining characteristic of the American economy, society and political order.

Systemic corruption and the implosion of the social contract have consequences: It's called collapse, baby, and the rot is now too deep to reverse.

Posted by 746 2020-10-14 02:55|| || Front Page|| [15 views ] Top

#1 I'll wait for P2K's reply.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-10-14 03:57|| 2020-10-14 03:57|| Front Page Top

#2 because most of it is legal.

Let's try defining corruption then, that might be a good place to start.

Posted by AlanC 2020-10-14 07:37|| 2020-10-14 07:37|| Front Page Top

#3 It's why socialism can't work in most of the world. The founders understood man was a corrupt fallen creature and that power had to be disbursed, even with its inefficiencies, rather than consolidated, and centralization for the bare minimum necessary functions that government has a reason to exist.

The husks chant about Scandinavian socialism never closely look at the environment it exists within. While they don't practice it as they once did, Lutheranism is still prevalent in the culture, particularly when it comes to corruption. There is no forgiveness of sins. There is no one standing between you and judgement. Notice as they move further away from this tenet, the more the problems start popping up and biting them in the rear these days.

I did a tour in Korea. The place was leveled by 1953 with the war. It's small, about the size of Kansas. It has no real major natural resources and very limited land for agriculture. Yet Mexico which hadn't suffered the devastation that Korea had, with an abundance of natural resources, vast agricultural lands and four times the population can't seem to get its act together. On GDP listings, South Korea ranks 10 and Mexico 16. That's the price the people pay for corruption. It's cultural. They both have corruption, but one far less so overall than the other.

If there is one major overhaul that a society can do to improve itself and truly progress, it has to become far more intolerant of corruption than most anything else. Corruption, the more you tolerate, the more you get.

Posted by Procopius2k 2020-10-14 07:47|| 2020-10-14 07:47|| Front Page Top

#4 Oligarchs and corruption ?

Wiki - Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth during the era of Russian privatization in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

American oligarchs are oligarchs who accumulated wealth following WWII, the Cold War and........

Posted by Besoeker 2020-10-14 07:56|| 2020-10-14 07:56|| Front Page Top

#5 That's the price the people pay for corruption.

Yes, it's a tax.

Posted by M. Murcek 2020-10-14 09:41|| 2020-10-14 09:41|| Front Page Top

#6 Rent-seeking is the name given to income that offers less in return to the purchaser, but has to be spent because it's legally coerced., or say a government product is under-charged for or setup in a way to discourage less established players from even attempting to compete.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2020-10-14 10:03|| 2020-10-14 10:03|| Front Page Top

#7 The current egregious level of corruption is a carryover from embedded Obama administration personnel, who spent his eight years in it up to their necks, many rehired from the Clinton administration or connected to them. Not that Republicans are all angels in white, but clearing out the holdovers will go far to reducing cause for complaint.

Posted by trailing wife 2020-10-14 17:31|| 2020-10-14 17:31|| Front Page Top

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