Stealing Everything

[Jim Sagle]

Every day, a world of degraded and oppressed inhabitants tries to make sense of the horrid future unfolding, much as six billion blind men might try to describe the elephant that is trampling them. A new post at Corrente presents a potentially useful viewpoint:

Understanding Kleptocracy

Mon, 10/18/2010 - 2:13pm — Hugh

Foreclosuregate has focused attention yet again on the scams and frauds of the banks. And with it has come a revisiting of all the other scams and frauds the banks ran, and in most cases are still running, in the housing bubble and its aftermath, in CDOs and CDSs, in the greater world of derivatives, and in markets and the economy generally. But will it last? Will it lead to effective action? I don't think so. For there to be an effective response there needs to be a reasonably complete understanding of the problem. And I don't see that happening.

We're too close to the problem (and some of us are too hungry or too sick or in too much pain) to see the common thread. Hugh believes he has seen it:

We, of course, know it as kleptocracy. Kleptocracy is not a sometime thing. It is about looting anything that can be looted, as much as it can be looted, anywhere it can be looted. It is a serious, and very criminal, undertaking. And it has real victims. People's lives are ruined by it. People die from it.

Kleptocracy thrives because virtually all of our society's official apparatus promotes it and benefits from it. You have only to look at the Obama Administration's casting foreclosuregate as nothing more than a technical glitch in the paperwork, hardly worth bothering about, certainly nothing to justify a national foreclosure moratorium. Immediately taking the side of the banksters against distressed homeowners, and these are the Democrats, you know the party that is supposed to care about ordinary Americans.

Those of us who believe this are now tasked with connecting the many dots (although I believe they mostly connect themselves) and spreading the word:

This is where all economic and political analysis should be focused, and where almost none of it is. But to understand what is going on and how it will play out, such a focus is absolutely necessary.

Let us begin.

[Lilith Velkor]

1. It's inverted totalitarianism.

Yes indeedy.

[lonestarnot]

2. It is totally fucked is what it is.

[leftstreet]

3. Wasn't there a time when Congress actually had investigations and hearings?

or am I dreaming?

K&R

[Jim Sagle]

5. Your delusions are troubling and potentially dangerous to the financial order..

A Homeland Security Positivity Squad is on its way to assist you. Shortly a full range of aversive therapy tools will be literally at your fingertips.

Won't you please leave the door unlocked? It would be best.

/futurism off :cry:

[noise]

4. To talk of kleptocracy is to

question the motives of government officials. To suggest they are corrupt as opposed to weak or incompetent. It kind of puts a damper on the election cheerleading now under way.

One recent example. Condoleezza Rice referred to mistakes made after the Iraqi invasion. The documentary No End in Sight and the book The Bush Agenda by Antonia Juhasz (just to mention two sources) made it clear that what she calls mistakes were actually deliberate policies.