{"id":537790,"date":"2010-04-21T08:29:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T12:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9864176.post-2357226539063977513"},"modified":"2010-04-21T08:30:32","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T12:30:32","slug":"american-kleptocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/537790","title":{"rendered":"American kleptocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Salon has an article by William Astore looking at the state of play in American politics – The business of America is kleptocracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Think of socialism and fascism as the red herrings of this moment or, if you\u2019re an old time movie fan, as Hitchcockian MacGuffins — in other words, riveting distractions. Conservatives and tea partiers fear invasive government regulation and excessive taxation, while railing against government takeovers — even as corporate lobbyists write our public healthcare bills to favor private interests. Similarly, progressives rail against an emergent proto-fascist corps of private guns-for-hire, warrantless wiretapping, and the potential government-approved assassination of U.S. citizens, all sanctioned by a perpetual, and apparently open-ended, state of war.<\/p>\n

Yet, if this is socialism, why are private health insurers the government\u2019s go-to guys for healthcare coverage? If this is fascism, why haven\u2019t the secret police rounded up tea partiers and progressive critics as well and sent them to the lager or the gulag?<\/p>\n

Consider this: America is not now, nor has it often been, a hotbed of political radicalism. We have no substantial socialist or workers\u2019 party. (Unless you\u2019re deluded, please don\u2019t count the corporate-friendly \u201cDemocrat\u201d party here.) We have no substantial fascist party. (Unless you\u2019re deluded, please don\u2019t count the cartoonish \u201ctea partiers\u201d here; these predominantly white, graying, and fairly affluent Americans seem most worried that the jackbooted thugs will be coming for them.)<\/p>\n

What drives America today is, in fact, business — just as was true in the days of Calvin Coolidge. But it\u2019s not the fair-minded \u201cfree enterprise\u201d system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines for American history textbooks; rather, it\u2019s a rigged system of crony capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy.<\/p>\n

Recall, if you care to, those pallets stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in excess of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full, thanks to them.<\/p>\n

If you want to know the true state of our government and where it\u2019s heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant: our kleptocratic Houdinis are hard at work, seeking to make yet more money vanish from your pockets — and reappear in theirs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n