Astro Cat wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 3:59 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 3:46 pm
Right. They seem more and more determined to secure their own future positions, regardless of what it does to the country, and even regardless of whatever the public might actually want.
It's a strange paradox: the incompetents at the top are, without hesitation, elitist. They practice their belief that the right goal -- for them -- is the securing of their own futures and that of their parties, no matter what that entails for the democratic process. And they don't trust a free vote to produce a good outcome. They believe that the public has to be "managed" so as to "do the right thing." The irony is that they present as "democratic" that which is really
paternalistic,
patronizing and
manipulative, on their part; and the public seems to be buying it.
And the democratic mechanisms are vulnerable to that sort of manipulation, because they require the public belief that votes are always fair and open. So the elitists can insist that the cardinal sin is the doubting of any vote that appears to be "democratic," whether it was or not. And they can even keep reassuring the public that some part of its own number are simply unworthy of being included in any genuine "democratic" reckoning. Meanwhile, they can keep extending the franchise to the groups that they find the most manipulable -- especially to constituencies of those who depend on government largesse or fiat for their own survival, or who have naive expectations of government generosity (the resentful, those in debt, the very young, those dependent on government programs, non-citizens, criminals, and so forth). This keeps the process looking ever more "democratic," but creates a majority that is more and more manipulable to the elitists.
What's particularly troubling is that governments -- under all parties -- seemed to have stopped seeing monolythic business interests as suspicious or contrary to the public interest, and have instead sought ways to ally themselves with those interests against the people. Out of that Faustian bargain, the politicians get power, and the business interests get money, and the mass media get a captive audience -- all three get what they most desire: the ability to more freely exploit the average citizen in the particular way each prizes most. So they've stopped fighting with each other, stopped criticizing and undermining each other, and have begun to coordinate their efforts. That's very ominous.
The only loser in the bargain is the average citizen.
I have had nearly conspirational thoughts at times (just silly musings) when I see things like insulin costing four times what other countries pay for it in the US (or really, our entire for-profit healthcare system in general). It seems like the political leaders in the US are less caretakers for their flock and more selling the world's fattest pigs to the highest bidder.
Yes. And I don't think it's "conspiratorial thinking" that's telling you that. I think it's something as simple as "recognition of the obvious."
What's occurred to our "public servants" in the last few years has been something that probably should have been obvious to them long ago: that in fighting against big business and big media, in the name of the public interest, they were undercutting the most efficient conditions of their own advancement.
To illustrate: government used to consider as one of its most important roles to be vigilant against monopolies, and bust them when they appeared. They created a whole caste of public officials to monitor, prosecute and eliminate things like the forming of trusts or the concentration of too much power in a single business entity. They fought to maintain competition.
But somewhere along the line, they realized that they could get much farther much faster by not doing this. For while a monopoly in a given area might not be in the public interest, or in the interest of competition of consumer choice, it was much easier to collude with big business if big business was concentrated under a single head -- essentially, a monopoly. So they quietly allowed particular businesses like, say, Blackrock, to grow bigger and bigger, so long as they continued to support their political interests. It's so much easier to negotiate with one corporation than three or ten. Meanwhile, the big corporations sensed the opportunity; fund the politicians, get them elected and secured, and the constraints on business would quietly reduce until they became merely symbolic, or disappeared altogether.
So there was probably never a "conspiracy." There was probably no secret meeting in which the heads of big business sat down with the politicians and talked this all out surreptitiously. (I suppose there might have been, but I don't think it was at all necessary.) More likely, the politicians and the businessmen just came to realize, about the same time, that they could help one another "manage" the public. And both could get the thing they most wanted, so long as they didn't fight over the less-important differences. Big business, always attuned to getting more money, could happily cede poliitical power to the politicians, and even help secure them, so long as the politicians, always attuned to securing power, didn't fight them over business's plans to bilk the public.
It has the sort of horrific, simple logic of a bad idea that has its own legs to walk on. I'll bet they never even had to discuss it. It was always obvious; the miracle is that they didn't realize it sooner.