The Limits to Racketeering

[merkins]

According to Joseph Tainter’s theory of imperial collapse, as societies become more complex, they must expend an ever greater portion of the energy they have available simply on maintaining their complexity. Although social and technological advances may achieve profitable returns for awhile, once a certain level of complexity is reached, diminishing returns set in. Eventually, at the late imperial stage, the complexity of the power structure, the military infrastructure, the bureaucracies, all the rents involved in maintaining an ever more bloated parasite class, their luxuries, the police state required to extract these rents and keep the productive people down, and the growing losses due to the response of the oppressed producers, everything from poor quality work to strikes to emigration or secession to rebellion, reaches a point where the system can only cannibalize itself and eventually collapse.

###

The way things are today, anyone who wants to reform anything, anywhere (or in the case of politicians, pretend to try to reform) finds himself blocked by some vested interest which pops up to resist. There’s always a particular criminal who, in defending his own piece of the action, also takes the lead in defending the corporatist system as a whole, in that particular fight. The resources of change are always more thinly and broadly distributed than the force of the status quo, which concentrates immediately in the form of that special interest. That’s the way kleptocracy works. That’s also part of the reason regulation of rackets can never work.
However, there’s also a reverse vector here. The system is dedicated to the growth of every wealth and power cell. So the federal government never has any intention of rigorously regulating anybody. If it ever tried, it would face the same concentration of resistance. But it’s also constantly importuned by the aggression of those same concentrations, usually many or all of them at once. Each interest is not only a conservative defender of the status quo, but a reactionary aggressor.

###

It follows from this that there’s no way the system can rationalize itself or retrench in its own self-interest. Trying to do this, it would run into the same special interest resistance at each point. It too would find itself more dispersed than the concentration which resists. Nor can it even keep up its sham pretenses to democracy, two conflicting parties, the rule of law, since there’s no way for it to distribute responsibility for anyone in particular sustaining a loss. Nor is there anyone who would be rewarded for imposing this loss on anyone within the fraternity. Each racket or individual racketeer says, “Why should I take the hit for the common (elite) good? Let someone else take it.”
The recent doubling down on the ethanol mandates is a good example. The ethanol racket is absurd even by this kleptocracy’s standards. Many other rackets opposed this blend wall extension. All rational observers think the mandate should be repealed completely. It will only exhaust the people even further (exhaust their economic capacity and perhaps their political patience; everything runs that risk) and render the infrastructure even more prone to breakdown. But the system is helpless. At each point, like this one, there’s one aggressor against a dissipated front. It’s the same as when the people try to fight them.

...

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/the-limits-to-racketeering/">More here...

[OrwellwasRight]

1. this is so bleak though

there has to be room to make things better, otherwise why bother caring?

[starroute]

3. It's saying the system can't be reformed, it can only collapse

So there is a path to making things better -- and it involves planning for what happens on the other side.

First we have to know more about the ways in which corrupt systems fail. Some involve massive infrastructure breakdown. Others -- like Russia in the 90's -- lead to even greater corruption. But some may be able to collapse more gently. If there are alternatives, we have to be able to recognize the more positive paths and work out how to steer things in that direction.

We also have to be prepared to make the psychological transition. My husband commented the other day that what he sees happening on DU is like the stages of grief. Anger, bartering, and all that stuff. But it needs to be worked through -- and in this situation, what's on the other side is not death but simply a calm acceptance that the system is unsalvageable.

There's a catchphrase I've started seeing around lately: Bypass authority.

I suppose it comes out of the hacker community. It's not a call to revolution or armed resistance. It simply says to bypass the current failed system. Work around it. Find other ways to do what needs to be done. And in so doing, plant the seeds for a simpler, cleaner system to follow.

And always remember, as Bob Dylan said, that "he not busy being born is busy dying."

[RandomThoughts]

2. Yea, that makes sense.

I thought about it as consolidations increase, the relative structure and size of the consolidated decreases. Unless you can make 'power' some arbitrary thing that can be dispersed unevenly like money.

The key component to making everything about money, is money can be distributed without any moral or equitable thought, hence the removal of all moral thought, and a shift of everything being about money, is the only way the money state can maintain an unequal situations.

But at some point, they want even the money of the people that helped them consolidate up to the point they are at. That is when they take freewill and thought, what some have said is the concept of thinking everyone can be on top some day, or the request to be a slave, so that you can be a slave holder someday. Different then a serving because you think it is what is better.

It is also the two sides, if you help someone above you in the ^, eventually their will be one thing that has everything you will be enslaved to, with no way to stand against its control or power, hell basically, because it has no moral component, and when all the money is controlled, then it has to take things like free will, speech and thought, and even become sadistic.

In the V model, people are helped up to a larger size community at the top, where you always try to help people below you, and then society can move up relative to a universal comparison of what is best as the whole V moves up. In the ^ model it can not continue to move up, since at some point it must be supported by items below it, and the base does not hold at some point, that is why the taking of thought and speech and free will occurs, when that occurs eventually everything is an extension of the thing at the top, and no longer exists except as an extension of that thing. Then that one thing is alone. That is the difference from community all of one thing with free will, and controlled by something without free will, but still two different entities. The 0 sum gain world can not move to a better situation, the win win can.

Your presumption that tyranny can not last requires people not to allow themselves to be burned out. Instead they would choose to think and feel based on what they they view as better. For most sticking to the ideals of helping people, and thinking on what is better so that when the top needs its support it can not get that support from all the people it put in its base.

Why you don't break, and stick to what you think is best also.

If everyone follows blindly, it would never fail, hence why removal of thought, and various PR and conditioning is so sought after at some stage in that ^ structure, and how then it uses fear, and even enslavement at some point.

If every person became a mindless follower of what they were told to do, then that 'idea' could actually succeed, but there would be only one thing that actually existed, the rest would be burn outs under it. And it would be alone.

Then that leads to some concepts of respark, and a few other things, and there being many ^ in many places, not yet under central control being relit also, but that is a more of a thought problem. And as they are relit the controlled things under them are freed to think and feel again, and that allows for movement, or something like that.

That is also why people that do not burn out are tried to be excluded or removed from the ^ system, and why there are so many stories of the groups coming back to help when people are ready, a comment of when a ^ system is relit, and people are able to be relit also, that is in many stories also, and why waiting it out, while trying to help and educate if possible, is a common motif in many groups.

Funny thing they think knowledge is stored in society itself, and some think they can remove knowledge by scorching sky, or removing people from discourse, also why seems best to show knowledge can come from outside the system and so can not be removed, in that the ^ never succeeds, and none are lost that can be relit.

Or was going to write a story about that.

[felix_numinous]

4. The corruption is self perpetuating

-it is a closed system that enables, protects, defends and fortifies itself against reform. Trillions of dollars fund this militarized system that has become so bloated and psychotic that it cannot be expected to change from within itself.

Change can only occur from outside the system, people have to stop feeding this monster by somehow separating completely from it, and can only happen if we create a completely independent system capable of sustaining human life. I am not a social or political scientist, but this country has in it some brilliant people who truly care about our quality of life and the planet--we all need to start a discourse on what to BUILD to displace and eventually replace the corrupt system.

The MIC is enabled by a depressed economy--our youth are being enticed to join the armed forces both domestically and overseas--because there are few other options. We have to start creating other options for them!!
We will have to create a solution that houses and feeds the millions of people who are and will be collateral damage by the corrupt system. We have to build a system that provides education and hope and a positive vision for the next generation.

It is human nature to stand and watch a building burn. (I am certainly guilty of this!) But at some point we have to start collecting materials to build a new home. I have confidence that Americans are going through the normal stages of loss, denial is one stage--that as soon as we allow ourselves to progress to accepting the reality of our situation, we can then empower ourselves with this truth. Ideas are like seeds, I hope that positive ideas get planted in fertile ground and grow. We may not all be at the acceptance stage of our process, but for those who are, this is the time for creativity.