Who Will Stand Up Against the Military-Oil-Banker Mafia?

[midnight]

Lest there be confusion around the matter, the richest 1% of Americans own 40% of financial assets and the richest 10% own 80%. The soaring stock market symbolizes the ascendancy of a tiny economic elite with all social resources dedicated to consolidating its power. Remove financial and oil company profits, two industries existing on government transfer payments, tax breaks, business guarantees and occasional wars, all at public expense, along with the nearly $3 trillion in Federal Reserve asset purchases designed to boost the value of wealth ‘owned’ overwhelmingly by America’s plutocracy, and the stock market would be trolling the lower depths of hell. Through their mouthpieces in the capitalist media the wealthy put forward their wealth as fact of nature when it is anything but. As Mr. Chavez was able to demonstrate, from whence it came to where it goes, social wealth can be made to once again serve its social purpose.

A thought unlikely to occur to most Americans is the profoundly anti-democratic sidestep around habeas corpus that Mr. Obama’s claim to the right of extra-judicial murder of citizens implies ties directly to his economic policies. At a time when the U.S. uses murder robots around the globe to slaughter people charged with no crime, launches ‘pre-emptive’ wars of aggression, incarcerates millions of overwhelmingly people of color in for-profit prisons and returns immigrants to countries U.S. trade policies have rendered economically dysfunctional, the economic and political elite here enjoys near complete immunity from prosecution for any of a large number of war, political and economic crimes. As the informed left might have it, the concentration of wealth so facilitated by Mr. Obama’s economic policies ties directly to the concentration of political power amongst America’s plutocracy. While Republican voter suppression efforts appear directly anti-democratic, Mr. Obama’s policies to revive the fortunes of the rich while leaving everyone else to rot renders voting irrelevant to the formation of public policy through the relation of economic to political power.

Although circumstances between Mr. Chavez’s Venezuela and the U.S. differ, Mr. Chavez took his (their) fight to the people of Venezuela and he repeatedly and consistently won majorities of the vote in free and fair elections. The received wisdom in the U.S., a pathetic lie no doubt, is that deference to the wishes of the plutocrats is the prerequisite to fighting in the interests of ‘the people.’ The rank oblivion evidenced in the passions of purportedly thoughtful people in favor of Mr. Obama (‘New’ Democrats—Mr. Obama is but a placeholder) in the recent election supports this capitulation in the quasi-religious hope that if we give the plutocrats everything they ask for they might be nice to us in return.

What is in fact taking place is economic pillage with the full cooperation and facilitation of Mr. Obama and his administration. From banker bailouts to stolen homes, incarceration for profit, student loan penury, wars for oil, profit extracting sick-care and social insurance cuts, class war was launched and is being fought from above. And the non-conflictual economic theories of classical and neo-liberals have rendered cooperation the mechanism of self-subjugation. Against far greater odds Hugo Chavez fought back the forces of global capital, plutocracy and their servants in the oil mafia (CIA) to improve the lot of Venezuela’s poor. What he showed is the straightest path to achieving social justice is to fight for it.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/08/where-is-americas-hugo-chavez/



It does make one wonder why their is not:

A massive jobs bill

affordable health care not balanced and payed for on the backed of the middle class

banking holiday for the working people

mortgage relief for those in need

or peace.....


Then again one has to remember that their are stay behinds ,aka bush appointees, working in this current administration that keeps the status quo going....

[OnyxCollie]

1. Corporate capture of government.

Nothing's going to change.

[midnight]

3. I don't remember where I read this, but it was stated that the Corporation is to big not

the Government... But I think your wording sums it up more succintly...

[OnyxCollie]

4. The relationship between corporations and government

is similar to a relationship with a demanding partner and a needy partner. While both are independent entities, they need each other to exist.

Corporations (the demanding partner) need to be persuaded and provided for to perform the functions the government depends on. Due to constitutional limits, government can't force corporations to act. Government (the needy partner) must submit to corporate demands at the risk of being "p-whipped."

Government can say, "Your ass is on your own," and go about doing it themselves, but that takes balls and a spine.

The mass public, the child in the relationship, doesn't get much say in the matter. Sure, they can cry a lot, but they don't get to determine how the relationship between corporations and government operates. They are, after all, children and children don't decide how their parents act. The parents do have obligations to feed, clothe, and provide shelter, however.

In our scenario, too much power has shifted to the demanding partner, a female meth head, who forces her desperately needy sex slave boyfriend to go burglarize houses in order to maintain her habit, while the baby, malnourished and in need of changing, wanders about in the middle of traffic.

Corporate capture of government is a nicer way to say it, though.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. They smear our faces in their illegal behavior, taunting us with their immunity to prosecution.

And soon their 30,000 Drones will fly your neighborhood.

[yurbud]

5. I would say "military contractor." If generals knew they couldn't become execs at defense corps,

they might not carry their water as enthusiastically.