Death by Oligarchy by Chris Hedges

“Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to human beings…

“The repugnant characteristics of the rich are skillfully masked by armies of lawyers and publicists, a servile and intimidated press, good manners and the fig leaf of philanthropy. Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Jimmy Wales, Peter Thiel, John Mackey and the late Steve Jobs and David Koch—whatever their carefully packaged public image—champion or championed economic and social models that are designed to create a new form of serfdom for the working class and further consolidate the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the oligarchs. When a society falls into the death grip of an oligarchic class, the result is always catastrophic.

“Oligarchs, because they live insulated lives surrounded by obsequious courtiers that cater to their bottomless narcissism and hedonism, wield power based on fantasy. They propagate ruling ideologies, such as neoliberalism and the intellectually and morally bankrupt writings of Ayn Rand, which are not economically rational but justify their privilege. Their mantra, first uttered by a notorious serial killer and enthusiastically embraced by Rand, is: ‘What Is Good for Me Is Right.’ All our institutions—the press, the courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and academia—have been perverted to serve the oligarch’s narrow, selfish interests while an oppressed citizenry, struggling to survive, is seething with mounting rage and frustration. The corporate coup orchestrated by the ruling oligarchs over the past few decades gave us Donald Trump. If this coup is not reversed, far worse will follow. The oligarchs are the last to understand the consequences of their moral depravity…

“Oligarchs, freed from outside oversight and regulation, wantonly pillage the political and economic institutions that sustain them. They run up huge government deficits by slashing taxes on the rich. This forces an underfunded government to borrow from the banks, further enriching the oligarchs, and impose punishing austerity programs on the public. They privatize traditional government services, including utilities, intelligence gathering, large parts of the military, the police, the prison system and schools to make billions in profits. They create complex financial mechanisms that ensure usurious interest rates on mortgages, personal and student loans. They legalize accounting fraud and suppress wages to keep the public trapped in a crippling debt peonage. They loot trillions in taxpayer money when their speculative bubbles burst.

“They are no longer capitalists, if we define capitalists as those who make money from the means of production. They are a criminal class of financial speculators that rewrite the laws to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They are parasites that feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They manipulate money. And this gaming of the system and seizure of political power by finance capital is why the wealthiest 1% of America’s families control 40% of the nation’s wealth…

“Greed is bottomless. It is the disease of the rich. The more the oligarchs accumulate the more they want. This is the dark side of human nature. It has always been with us. All societies are plagued by social inequality, but when those on the bottom and in the middle of the social pyramid lose their voice and agency, when the society exists only to serve the greed of the rich, when income inequality reaches the levels it has reached in the United States, the social fabric is torn apart and the society destroys itself. Aristotle warned about the danger of oligarchies nearly 2,500 years ago. We stand on the cusp of social and political disintegration, bequeathed to us by oligarchs who have seized total power. The ruling oligarchs will stymie all attempts at reform. This makes a crisis inevitable. Once we enter this crisis, the oligarchs will become the most potent enablers of despotism.”

For the entire article, “Death by Oligarchy by Chris Hedges.” click here.

Commentary:

My essay, "Global Free Market: A Perspective and Admonition," was published on this blog August 16, 2011:

Free market principles, supported by neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism and perpetuated by a “corporatists’ crusade,” are aligned with the policies of the “Chicago School” ideologues, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. These doctrines perpetrate a blitzkrieg deconstruction of the middle class, privatization of public ownership and industry (downsizing and parceling out public companies and services to private interests), government deregulation and cuts to spending (thus, stimulating deep economic recessions) and cutbacks or the elimination of the public sphere and all social funding – hence, turning the working class into the “disposable poor” – to loosen control of the flow of money and to produce “freer trade” in the global market marked by an intransigent belief that “it should be left to correct itself.” Global free market theory has surfed “the waves of fear and disorientation” while advancing an ideology of “unfettered capitalism,” leaving inequality and degradation in its wake (Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, fellow at the London School of Economics, author and filmmaker).

The free market theory caters to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of other peoples’ lives, all the while promising “freedom and prosperity.” Free market plutocratic advocates believe the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; that, for example, public education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized; they believe in the elimination of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; they believe environmental protections should be deregulated and climate change denied; they believe any publicly-owned companies, services and their assets should be auctioned off to private investors and systematically dismantled; they believe labor unions should be eliminated and that universities and colleges can easily be held hostage with exorbitant donations in exchange for indoctrination of right-wing ideologies and the firing of any dissenting professors; they believe the U.S. tax code should be reformed advantageously for the wealthy, privileged elite; and besides allocating vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership, they believe in the transfer of private debts to the public sector.

The free market economic theory was developed by Milton Friedman in the 1950's at the University of Chicago. It has come to underlie the basis for the exploitation of ecological, economic, political, and/or social catastrophes, documented in such places as Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Southern Cone, Poland, Falkland Islands, Bolivia, China, South Africa, Russia, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, former Yugoslavia, “New Orleans,” Canada, Iraq, Sri Lanka… (Klein) – all attempted transformations through invasion, occupation, and deconstruction, in other words, the ransacking of a country’s natural resources, its culture and industries, and thus forcing austerity on masses of people, while further dispossessing the poor. (Resultant violence, theft, and torture are often “thriving industries” in the world of global free market philosophy).

Whether inadvertently or not, Friedman’s theory results in a concentration of wealth and the creation of a plutocracy through unregulated corporate profits at the expense of eradicating the middle and lower classes’ rights to earn a decent income, public pension and the opportunity to acquire any semblance of dignity or satisfaction of basic human needs. This is also referred to as the “busting of unions, the slashing of payrolls and the shredding of employee benefits, without any attempt by government to constrain or reverse these practices…” (Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration).

The method employed by “corporatist crusaders” includes unilaterally imposing the free market ideology and its creed that freedom without government regulation (or unlimited, avaricious profit for a few people) will create the greatest benefits for everyone. Historically, it has been exercised with such corruptive force that it generates “economic genocide” (Klein). Often times, this is accomplished by manufacturing a “pseudo crisis” to be later used as leverage for such opportunism. This “crisis” is then transmitted vigorously through the media and funded by big banks and corporations. Moreover, the method has also been known to employ the “divide and conquer” strategy (to break unions) and hyperinflation to forward the free market crusade.

It is said that the free market economy is built upon “planned misery” for the masses, where the majority of the population is excluded from reaping any benefits despite promises for “freedom” and “shared wealth.” The notorious effects of global free market principles at work are the elimination of subsidies, layoffs or the loss of millions of jobs, especially in the public sector, and decreased or frozen wages while the corporate elite continue to procure exorbitant financial gains through the demolition of the public sector, the consistent outsourcing of jobs and inundation of cheap imports, tax loopholes, untaxed off-shore bank accounts (a “theft ex post facto”) and from laws, that David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Syracuse University law and business schools’ lecturer, says “continue to enrich the wealthy few at the expense of the many through auctions that are called markets but act instead like bid-rigging systems approved by government.”

We have witnessed legislators who pass corporate-sponsored reform bills that support privatization and deregulation (the slow destruction of labor unions, public jobs and pensions) in order to garner money for their re-election bids. We should ask: might there be a conflict of interest when it comes to some policy changes for politicians who have moved from the corporate world into public office and whose motive for service is market-based profit and/or self-interest?

The results of wealth being transferred to “disaster capitalists” while hundreds of thousands of people are subject to human rights’ abuses, mass poverty, repression, and other forms of political, economic, psychological and physical terrorism – “policies of dispossession” – are fully substantiated and documented. As many of us are aware, free market strategies have capitalized on national emergencies to meet objectives by initiating a “manufactured” debt crisis or through price and currency “shocks” crafted by a volatile and deregulated economy.

The global free market economy has proliferated unchecked corruption manifested in lucrative private contracts, tax cuts, and redistribution of public wealth to existing (or now defunct) profit-driven billionaires, corporations and banks such as the Koch Brothers, Halliburton, Blackwater, Lockheed Martin, FEMA, Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill, New Bridge Strategies, Ash Britt, Service Corporation International, Entergy, CACI, Booz Allen Hamilton, Koch Industries, Searle Pharmaceuticals, Monsanto, Wal-Mart, Intel, Caterpillar, Microsoft, IBM, Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Arthur Andersen, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Tyco, Sunbeam, ImClone, to name just a few.

Behind the entire plutocratic “corporatist crusade” are also wealthy, influential “think tanks” such as the Charles Koch Foundation, Cato Institute (Koch founded), the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, American Enterprise Institute, Freedom Works, Hoover Institution, the Carlyle Group, Milken Institute, Mercatus Center (at George Mason University), Club for Growth, the Heartland Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Illinois Policy Institute, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Civic Federation, et al.

-Glen Brown


Sources:

Johnston, David Cay. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.

Reich, Robert B. Aftershock: the Next Economy & America’s Future. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.