Somewhere A Banker Smiles

[Wiley50]

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2006/12/somewhere_a_ban.html

Somewhere a Banker Smiles

Muffled noises from the ranks of the babbling paranoid

By Joe Bageant

Smiles It's hard as hell to keep conspiracy theories out of one's mind these days. And I'm not talking about "Who really brought down the Twin Towers? or the "Are Zionists behind the Iraq War?" kind of stuff. The booger stalking my ragged old mind these days puts both of those in the shade. And it runs like this:

Is the consumerist totalization of this country and the world really a conscious plot by a handful of powerful corporate and financial masters? If we answer "yes" we find ourselves trundled off toward the babbling ranks of the paranoid. Still though, it's easy enough to name those who would piss themselves with joy over the prospect of a One World corporate state, with billions of people begging to work for their 1,500 calories a day and an xBox chip in their necks. It's too bad our news media quit hunting with live ammo decades ago, leaving us with no one to track the activities and progress of what sure as hell seem to be global elites, judging from the financial spoor we find along every pathway of modern life.

In our saner moments we can also see that it does not take dark super-centralized plotting to pull off what appears to have been accomplished. Even without working in overt concert, a few thousands of dedicated individual corporate and financial interests can constitute a unified pathogenic whole, much the same as individual cells create a viable dominant colony of malignant organisms -- malignant simply by their anti-human, anti-societal nature. We don't see GM, Halliburton, Burger King and CitiBank lobbying the state for universal health or clean rivers, do we? But mention unions or living wages, and the financial colony within our national Petri dish shape shifts into a Gila monster and squirts venom on the idea and shits money all over Capitol Hill. I looked at all this as coincidence for years until the proposition finally strained credulity so much that I threw in the towel and said, "Fuck it. There is only so much coincidence to go around in this world."

Put another way, the global decision makers, international planners, financial institutions, political parties, media conglomerates, corporations, banks, a hegemonic, accumulative bloc working in concert to coordinate the extraction of wealth from first and third world alike. A series of privately held international institutions to which and from which money can be moved to leverage nations and populations according to their needs is probably gonna do just that because they can. National territory doesn't mean shit to such people, and those who govern said territory mean even less, except to the extent they can obstruct or incite resistance. People like Castro and Chavez. But even they are they are just the thorn in the lion's paw.

Consider this: The war in Iraq has been immensely profitable for the people who make weapons and for the contractors who supposedly rebuild what the weapons destroy. They profit in either case. And the longer war goes on the more they will make.

Meanwhile, the money for both is obtained through extraction practiced upon the world's laboring poor. But the big money, the "juice" as street people used to say, comes from squeezing the orange of American society for more work, more production and tax money. Some of us older oranges are feeling pretty wrung out these days and are getting hard as hell to get along with. Yet, the squeeze doesn't seem to bother most Americans at all. The pressure has been so great and so constant that no one any longer feels it. It has become so pervasive as to be incomprehensible to ordinary people. For example, seventy cents of every income-tax dollar goes to pay for past, present, and future wars. Education gets two cents. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, the cost of military aircraft parts and ammunition kept in storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined federal spending on pollution control, conservation, community development, housing, occupational safety, and mass transportation all put together. And the US Navy spends more money in its never ending development of a submarine rescue vehicle than is spent for public libraries, occupational safety, and daycare centers combined.


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[rumpel]

1. the past few days...

I was thinking along those lines...and how we can undo the grip of these multi-nationals. Considering many of the workers retirement plans being invested, unwittingly many are contributing to the scheme.
It will take many years, I thought...even with Socially Responsible Investing efforts and share holder activism. I came across an intersting article about a shareholder revolt against Haliburton the other day (I am looking for it - but can't find it at the moment).

Perhaps we can only hope for a collapse under it's own weight...

[Wiley50]

3. That halliburton shareholder thingie you are looking for

Ask CorpGovtActivist

I think he can point you right to it

[OneBlueSky]

4. the bottom line is that corporations -- and their need for ever increasing profits -- . . .

are the root of all evil in this nation and across the planet . . . corporate capitalism, in its current form, is largely responsible for EVERY major problem we face today . . . for example . . .

corporations that make ghastly profits from the Iraq war -- and from increasing oil prices . . .

corporations that pollute the air, water and land with no regard for the environment or for the future . . .

corporations that cavalierly move jobs overseas to increase shareholder profits, regardless of the impact on American workers . . .

corporations that create all kinds of new chemical compounds that pollute the environment and cause diseases like cancer . . .

corporations that degrade the food supply with genetically modified crops . . .

corporations that overfish the oceans to the point of destroying fish stocks . . .

corporations that endanger consumers through horrific factory farming practices . . .

corporations that make healthcare in the U.S. the most expensive and inefficient of any developed nation . . .

corporations that literally (and secretly) control the voting process and, more importantly, the vote counting process by which we "elect" our leaders . . .

corporations that write the laws "regulating" their own industries in ways that pretty much allow them to do whatever they wish in pursuit of bigger profits . . .

and on, and on, and on . . .

unless we recognize how toxic the current system of corporate capitalism is, and take drastic steps to reign it in by strictly regulating corporations, their behavior, and their profits, the problems we face today will seem like mere annoyances in future decades . . .

[rumpel]

9. Perhaps, we have to also start with demanding

that elections finance has to drastically change. It is spiraling out of control.

I always felt, how idiotic and insane it is to spend so much money on elections, when all that money could do so much to help those in need.

Since the networks are just licensees and the airwaves belong to us all, we should demand they air messages of candidates and debates for free. If we can have this enacted, it does no longer matter who owns the media, it can no longer be skewed in any direction, and candidates with or without money will have a fair chance.
None of the corporations should be allowed to contribute to any candidates. We have to repeal that corporations are legally considered "persons". This is one of main culprits of this blurring and mixing of interests, resulting in many of the corruptions, and feeding the monster with more power.

We have to cut off our elected officials from all these conflict of interests. After all they are public servants. Fairness & ethics has to come back into focus.

[hfojvt]

10. you should create a journal

and add that post to it.
Well said :thumbsup:

[ComerPerro]

2. this is and pretty much has been the general assumption here

[leftofthedial]

5. color me paranoid

[Selatius]

6. I agree with this completely.

When you think of Movement Corporatism, you should not assume it is a unified front at all. Rather, like he says, it is a cobbled-together bunch of interests with several common goals. They fight, and they argue as expected, but...

...when it comes to people, they know they must work together as far as keeping the people from organizing into a threat to their empire over workers. In the past, plantation owners' worst nightmare was a slave revolt. Today, they're known as corporatists, and their worst nightmare is a worker revolt or the thought that workers would grow a brain and try to exert control over their collective destiny.

[Printer70]

7. We need a global capital gains tax...NOW

Why do the super-rich (almost all billionares) pay a lower tax rate than someone making $30,000 a year? They don't need a single loophole to achieve this either. Simple- they pay long-term capital gains, and pay 15%. Us poor saps who work daily pay income tax, pay up to 35%. Unlike workers, investors can move from country to country for opportunities. So raising capital gains in one country is counter-productive, because the investments move somewhere else. A global capital gains tax is the only way to ensure that the super-rich pay their fair share of the burden.

I know its controversial. And I don't believe it will happen soon due to the lack of a global body that can enforce it. But its a direction we can move in and a dialogue we can begin.

[Wiley50]

8. It's definately Time to Eat the Rich

They've been Munching on us too long

[eppur_se_muova]

11. All these people have the same general goal, and are working towards it by

whatever means is available -- independently at times, in collaboration at others. There is no need for a conspiracy, master plan or 'guiding intellect'. When each follows their own impulses, the net outcome, reached blindly, is the same as if there were a conspiracy, .

[Joanne98]

12. I read this the other day. Someone else posted it.

I rec it but nobody else did and it dropped. This is a great description of the real economy. They are bleeding us blind. K&R again