It's The Corruption, Stupid

 

We hear occasionally that someone has died, “of nothing.” They had not been sick, they just withered and died. I think that it is more accurate to say that such a person has died, “of everything.” All of their systems aged-out and failed, and they simply expired, like the long-suffering engine in an ancient third-world taxi cab. They just got tired and quit. The person with a death-rattle; the taxi with the characteristic sigh of a dying old motor.

Something like that is happening right now, before our very eyes. It's a twofold problem: it is happening to America's sociopolitical traditions, and it is happening to the earth itself. This does not bode well for anyone who lives on the earth, and it's a double whammy for Americans. The ultimate process of massive systems failure resulting in death has begun in both cases.

So here we are! Where the rock meets the hard place; where Scylla meets Charybdis; where push meets shove; where the irresistible force meets the immovable object. Welcome to hell!

The Eureka Moment!

Why is all of this being allowed to happen to us? It is, after all, avoidable in all of its particulars. It occurs to me that there is a unifying theory for the existential threats currently besetting us. That would be corruption.

Corruption drives our politics away from our best interests. At some point in the mid-Twentieth Century, American politics gave up completely the goal of promoting the security and prosperity of the American people. Everyone in politics decided to “follow the money” instead. Some had the brains and drive to use their political power to accumulate their own profits; others simply found wealthy interests who would trade lucrative favors for votes and legislation.

Corruption has changed the focus of corporate America completely. The big companies, and not long ago, were mostly focused on insuring their continuing market share and profitability. And increasing it, of course, over time. Long term. Top management at the time received top wages for the time, on a par with successful doctors. Happy employees were seen to be an important part of this long term, stable stream of profits. That has all been discarded in favor of short-term profits. Investors now want high returns in this quarter, not consistent returns over time. Top management now lines its own pockets with vast amounts of money and company stock, often to the detriment of the company. Directors may assist them by raising their salaries, and in return management may reward the directors. If the company goes tits-up because of this self-dealing, you can be sure that management and the directors, and the largest stockholders, will mysteriously divest themselves of the company's stock before it collapses. Employees are now seen as a simple budget item, and no good manager wants to waste money on any individual budget item. Politicians assist in this profiteering, for a small percentage of the profits.

Corruption tempts corporations and politicians to work together to create a labor environment in which employees can be deprived of vacations, health insurance, sick days, and overtime. Wages have been kept artificially low for fifty years now, while prices and productivity have skyrocketed, along with corporate profits and donations to politicians. People live paycheck-to-paycheck, and famously most Americans cannot meet a relatively small but unexpected expense without difficulty. Average people no longer matter. I guess there are now so many of us, and so many jobs are semi-automated (like most service jobs), that we have become interchangeable and expendable. I read a great story by Heinrich Boell when I was student, belatedly finishing up a BA. One line has stuck with me. “Sie dienen nur genug Geld, um weiter arbeiten zu koennen.” (They earn only enough money to be able to continue working.) He wrote that in the 1960s, and now it has become true.

It's worth mentioning here, AGAIN, that corporations are an illusion. They have no reality of their own. Any one of them could easily be broken up, with the parts renamed and reassembled elsewhere, with no alteration in their essential reality. Which is their owners, the people whose wealth includes almost all of the stock in almost every corporation. The corporations are the rich, and visa versa. Now all of our rich, our corporations, and our politicians, have been joined into one coherent oligarchy. That oligarchy is now in the process of perpetuating itself in the form of a fascist autocracy.

What's that you say? You love freedom? Well, all you're going to get is patriotism, law and order, higher taxes and prices, lower wages, more debt, and probably more of this new “prosperity gospel” style of Christianity. (Mostly to justify the incredible wealth of the super-rich.) Freedom is quite out of the question, and “white privilege” is about to become wildly more important to the white people who already enjoy it.

Corruption drives our brightest minds to concentrate their efforts on the accumulation of wealth. By now our brightest minds are working closely with our elected representatives to figure out ways to drive the money upwards. This COVID mess, for instance, has been a disaster for lower income individuals in America, and a serious challenge for people doing a little bit better than them. The virus has, however, been a bonanza for America's billionaires, adding $850 billion to their already embarrassing wealth so far this year. (As of late September, 2020.) That's a lot of coin, and none of them needed any more, I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that.

Comparing the monthly increase in the wealth of Jeff Bezos, which this year is calculated in billions of dollars per month, to the monthly income of workers in Amazon warehouses, should be enough to shock anyone with a conscience into firm action to make such disparities impossible, but somehow everyone just says, “wow,” and moves on to the next funny cat video. Why is this so? I don't know, but if I had to guess I think it might be a combination of corruption fatigue (people have become accustomed to it and don't even see it anymore) and the false hope that if people are getting so rich, maybe some day they, or their grandchildren, can also get rich. The former reaction is lazy minded; the latter is foolish.

The fact that much of this money that is shooting to the top earners is un-taxed is disgusting, and the fact that an even larger portion of it is taxed at a lower rate than the tax rate paid by average wage earners is insulting. The more you make, the less you pay. The state of our tax laws only proves what I said about out politicians, above. It is corruption and the love of wealth that is driving this move towards fascism that we are seeing now.

And that's just America.

Corruption leads the “undeveloped” and the “developing” world to work with selfish external interests for the personal enrichment of a few families or individuals. That's if they are lucky. If they are unlucky, they are directly controlled and exploited by external interests, today usually governmental and private interests in cooperation. Their resources are stolen, and the profits go somewhere else. Oddly, the profits always go somewhere else, because even if the beneficiary of the theft is a local citizen, the cash is sent overseas and laundered into foreign banks and property investments. In any case, 99% of the population of the target country is left penniless, uneducated, desperate, and hungry.

Countries that are completely given over to corruption and gangsterism have become a commonplace. These are countries with no functioning government at all, just some gangster clique maintaining a semblance of order and stealing all of the money. Some of these countries are large; some are small. Some of the gangs are famous; some are obscure. All in all, these gangster oligarchies are numerous, murderous, and very profitable. I won't start naming them, because I am fearful of reprisals.

There are a few countries in Europe, and elsewhere, that have gotten corruption well under control, and are being run by decent people for the good of all citizens. They are very prosperous, because it's not that hard to do, absent corruption. Taken together, my estimation is that they have no more than 150 million people under their benevolent protection. More likely thirty percent fewer than that. That's out of a world population of almost eight billion people. The rest of the world is a pure sea of corruption.

Corruption Is Likely to Be the End of Us

Corruption is endangering human society as we know it, the entire developed, industrialized world, and everyone else, because the individuals who are driving the corruption all over the world believe that addressing the screaming problem of climate change threatens their precious winnings.

I said in another post recently, “Politics is a venomous creature that drags behind it poisonous tendrils, like the stingers of a man-of-war jellyfish.” The same is true for climate change. High temperatures are moving northward (and southward) into formerly temperate zones. A couple of weeks ago the thermometer rose to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) in Woodland Hills, California, which is a lovely suburb in the inner rings of Los Angeles. Not out in the desert somewhere, although technically all of Los Angeles is desert. I lived in California for thirty years, and the highest temperatures that I recall were 107 F (41 C) a few times, in the same valley as Woodland Hills, and in Oakland once. By this pattern, vast swaths of the world will routinely see temperatures that are unlivable on more and more days per year. (There will be a new scale! “4” will be, “only for travel in air-conditioned vehicles between air-conditioned locations,” and “5” will be “remain at home under risk of death.”) These new hot zones will bring with them new vermin, new crop pests, vast numbers of climate-migrants, new flesh eating bacteria (see Australia, and the Long Island Sound in New York), crop failures, and new diseases (Lyme disease, anyone?). Rainfall patterns are changing, bringing drought to some formerly fertile areas (sub-Saharan Africa), and crop destroying floods to others (China). This is only “already.” It's going to get much, much worse.

The corrupt bastards who are about to seize autocratic control of our world have taken the position that climate change is a myth, or a hoax, or simply an expression of the normal cycles of the earth itself. In other words, the same people that are driving the corruption in the world are also driving the climate change. They say “myth” and “hoax” because to fight against climate change in a meaningful way would be very expensive, and would cause disruptions in lucrative businesses that are important to the new autocrats. It would interrupt money streams that the super-rich have become quite fond of. So fuck it.

The biggest business in the world right now is providing safe havens for the multi-billionaire class. Bunkers, and other heavily fortified havens. You can look that up. Some of these underground paradises have swimming pools or bowling alleys. The billionaires gather for seminars in how to address the inevitable problems with living in islands of luxury amid a world of suffering, hunger, and death. Like, “how do we maintain loyalty among our armed security staffs?” Imagine the fun when the staff realizes that they outnumber their bosses and possess most of the weapons! Some kind of deadly shock collars are postulated as a solution to this knotty problem.

The rich don't care what happens to the billions of plain-Joes in the world, and their experience as billionaires has convinced them that they and their families will be fine, whatever happens. They know that the end is coming, and that is the reason that no amount of money satisfies them. When they reach one hundred billion dollars, the goal is immediately re-set for two hundred billion. That extra hundred billion dollars will improve their odds for cheerful survival. None of that strikes me as a workable scheme, but as my ex-wife used to say, “why should anybody listen to you? If you were a good lawyer, you would have made more money.”

The BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, are all heavy polluters and major drivers of global warming. They resist corrective measures, claiming that the major industrialized countries have been polluting the earth for centuries! This does not make any sense, unless you read it as, “now it's our turn.” Countries further down the development ladder are taking similar positions. They build new coal plants, suggesting that it is acceptable for them to do so, because America still sends out twenty times the pollution per capita compared to their little country. I am not suggesting that those countries are corrupt in their politics and in their business practices, although I might be tempted to do so if the world were not so given over to frivolous lawsuits. Read that sentence again. It unravels easily.

It's unfortunate in the extreme, but I think that this climate-change road also leads to doom. On the one hand, I am very concerned about the future of my grandchildren. But on the other hand, extinction is all that we deserve.