The Predator State: The US Government? (We are the Prey)

[Robbien]

By James K. Galbraith

<snip>

In the mixed-economy America I grew up in, there existed a post-capitalist, post-Marxian vision of middle-class identity. It consisted of shared assets and entitlements, of which the bedrock was public education, access to college, good housing, full employment at living wages, Medicare, and Social Security. These programs, publicly provided, financed, or guaranteed, had softened the rough edges of Great Depression capitalism, rewarding the sacrifices that won the Second World War. They also showcased America, demonstrating to those behind the Iron Curtain that regulated capitalism could yield prosperity far beyond the capacities of state planning. (This, and not the arms race, ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.) These middle-class institutions survive in America today, but they are frayed and tattered from constant attack. And the division between those included and those excluded is large and obvious to all.

Today, the signature of modern American capitalism is neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant feature—a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live.

Our rulers deliver favors to their clients. These range from Native American casino operators, to Appalachian coal companies, to Saipan sweatshop operators, to the would-be oil field operators of Iraq. They include the misanthropes who led the campaign to abolish the estate tax; Charles Schwab, who suggested the dividend tax cut of 2003; the “Benedict Arnold” companies who move their taxable income offshore; and the financial institutions behind last year’s bankruptcy bill. Everywhere you look, public decisions yield gains to specific private entities.

For in a predatory regime, nothing is done for public reasons. Indeed, the men in charge do not recognize that “public purposes” exist. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest—we’re the prey. Hurricane Katrina illustrated this perfectly, as Halliburton scooped up contracts and Bush hamstrung Kathleen Blanco, the Democratic governor of Louisiana. The population of New Orleans was, at best, an afterthought; once dispersed, it was quickly forgotten.

much more
a long but worthwhile read:
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html

[Demeter]

1. Yeah, But We Outnumber Them

This is what the Second Amendment is for, by the way....

[The River]

2. It Is Predatory Capitalism

which controls most of the World now.
Madison Ave discovered the power to manipulate our needs.
Corporations used that power to change America
to their own greedy ends.

Follow the link to to understand what "Predatory Capitalism" (aka Greedy Capitalism)
has done, by way of their "Media" departments, to America
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2005/12/the_simulacran_.html

[Robbien]

3. Good blog. He has a clear concise way of presenting the situation

The average American spends about one third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are.

We no longer have a country -- just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States.

Thanks for the link.

[dweller]

9. see: VIDEODROME : for example n/t

dp

[cliss]

13. Scary....and true.

Your last quote gave me the chills: We no longer have a country, just a hollow shell of one.

That is the most frightening quote around.

Thanks for posting Robbien.

[enough]

4. An analysis worth serious attention.

another snip:

In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the law and economics crowd don’t apply. There’s no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rules but by breaking them. They take the business-school view of law: Rules are not designed to guide behavior but laid down to define the limits of unpunished conduct. Once one gets close to the line, stepping over it is easy. A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.

Why don’t markets provide the discipline? Why don’t “reputation effects” secure good behavior? Economists have been slow to answer these questions, but now we have a full-blown theory in a book by my colleague William K. Black, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Black was the lawyer/whistle-blower in the Savings and Loan and Keating Five scandals; he later took a degree in criminology. His theory of “control fraud” addresses the situation in which the leader of an organization uses his company as a “weapon” of fraud and a “shield” against prosecution—a situation with which law and economics cannot cope.

For instance, law and economics argues that top accounting firms will protect their own reputations by ferreting out fraud in their clients. But, as with Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, at every major S&L control fraud was protected by clean audits from top accountants: You hire the top firm to get the clean opinion. Moral hazard theory shifts the blame for financial collapse to the incentives implicit in insurance, but Black shows that the large frauds were nearly all committed in institutions taken over for that purpose by criminal networks, often by big players like Charles Keating, Michael Milken, and Don Dixon. And there’s another thing about predatory institutions. They invariably fail in the end. They fail because they are meant to fail. Predators suck the life from the businesses they command, concealing the fact for as long as possible behind fraudulent accounting and hugely complex transactions; that’s the looter’s point.

more>

Thank you for posting this, Robbien

[Robbien]

8. Yes. It is an article to be read and re-read

there is also the other article

HOW GIANT PREDATORY CORPORATIONS DESTROY SOCIETY AND PEOPLE
by Stephen Lendman

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x207034


After absorbing both articles, it is hard to think of this world as a collection of countries and peoples. Also, it makes it easier to understand why Harper is trying to give up Canada's sovereignity to the US.

What a mess.

[teryang]

5. This is exactly what has been happening

There are no checks and balances. When corrupt croney capitialism takes over the state, it is called fascism. It isn't self correcting.

As the saying goes in a different context, if you want to find a drunk in a field go to the last place you saw him. In this case it would be interwar Europe.

[bananas]

6. RIP

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2255516

[dweller]

7. the author of this piece is the son

of the deceased.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2255516

dp

[rodeodance]

10. see also this thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x207159

[rodeodance]

11. WHAT IS THE REAL NATURE of American capitalism today?

> James K. Galbraith, Mother Jones
>
> WHAT IS THE REAL NATURE of American capitalism today? Is it a grand national adventure, as politicians and textbooks aver, in which markets provide the framework for benign competition, from which emerges the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is it the domain of class struggle, even a "global class war," as the title of Jeff Faux's new book would have it, in which the "party of Davos" outmaneuvers the remnants of the organized working class?
>
> The doctrines of the "law and economics" movement, now ascendant in our courts, hold that if people are rational, if markets can be "contested," if memory is good and information adequate, then firms will adhere on their own to norms of honorable conduct. Any public presence in the economy undermines this. Even insurance--whether deposit insurance or Social Security--is perverse, for it encourages irresponsible risktaking. Banks will lend to bad clients, workers will "live for today," companies will speculate with their pension funds; the movement has even argued that seat belts foster reckless driving. Insurance, in other words, creates a "moral hazard" for which "market discipline" is the cure; all works for the best when thought and planning do not interfere. It's a strange vision, and if we weren't governed by people like John Roberts and Sam Alito, who pretend to believe it, it would scarcely be worth our attention.
>
> The idea of class struggle goes back a long way; perhaps it really is "the history of all hitherto existing society," as Marx and Engels famously declared. But if the world is ruled by a monied elite, then to what extent do middle-class working Americans compose part of the global proletariat? The honest answer can only be: not much. The political decline of the left surely flows in part from rhetoric that no longer matches experience; for the most part, American voters do not live on the Malthusian margin. Dollars command the world's goods, rupees do not; membership in the dollar economy makes every working American, to some degree, complicit in the capitalist class.........

[nicknameless]

12. EXACTLY !!!

"Instead, predation has become the dominant feature—a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class."