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The Four Horsemen of Neoliberal Capitalism
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Friday, July 03, 2015 · 1:55 PM CDT
To describe the current state of our democracy, just substitute "Usury, Class War, Beast-starving, and Privatization" for the Biblical "Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death". Make no mistake, the oligarchs have decided it's Apocalypse-time for our middle-class democracy, and they have set the horsemen upon it.
It is impossible to call what we have in America today capitalism. What we have is looting, asset-stripping, sweat-shopping, extortion(politely, collecting monopoly rent), cronyism, and the purchasing of the government with the intent to destroy it. As far as the oligarchs believe, any physical task of genuine economic value (as opposed to shuffling money around to make a killing), is worth doing only in foreign countries with cheap, submissive labor and minimal environmental and health regulations.
In a previous diary The Future of the Middle Class: Slumlords, sharecroppers, and racist vigilantes I described the end goals of the Billionaire Class. In this diary, I describe, hopefully in soundbite-able terminology, the means by which they intend to get there.
The orange trumpet blows and the horsemen are loosed.
1. Usury as Pestilence
Pestilence: a contagious or infectious epidemic disease that is virulent and devastating; something that is destructive or pernicious.
Usury is all of the above: virulent, destructive, pernicious, and contagious. From the 1980s dawn of the neoliberal era, usurious interest rates have been a constant parasitical drain on citizens and an absolute plague for manufacturers. I cannot write better than the classic article on the subject by the labor lawyer, Thomas Geoghegan:
we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to
the end of Jimmy Carter's term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school. That's when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.
Here's what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to thirty percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing...All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor, and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.- Thomas Geoghegan, Infinite Debt
Coupled with usury, credit card companies employ massive fines and fees (which they generate by manipulating the order in which bills and payments accrue to accounts), as well as unscrupulous collection agencies. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the slightest of shelters against the racketeering that passes as a legitimate business. As for payday loans, they are nothing more than loan sharks. It is disgusting that this practice is not outlawed. It is so awful that even Evangelicals have come out against it.
High-Frequency Trading, as well documented in Micheal Lewis's Flash Boys, is another cream-skimming scam by the bankster elite. Billions are made by computerized front-running that would have long since been declared illegal if the banksters did not own the DOJ, lock, stock certificate, and barrel.
In short, citizens and manufacturers are plagued by usury and other forms of financial parasitism; and, in an age when every step of a transaction can be turned into a mouse click, we are shaken down by fees and click-through licenses at every turn for every action. The internet is crawling with digital highwaymen (your money AND your rights). Financial pestilence is bleeding us, and bleeding the poorest among us to death.
2. Class War
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
― Warren Buffett
Only propagandists and ideologues actually believe there is no class war from above. You have to put out both eyes not to see it. From the union-busting of Thatcher and Reagan down to the give-away privatizations of national land and mineral rights, the assets and infrastructure paid for and built by the middle class has been looted or demolished.
As I wrote earlier, the rich behave towards infrastructure the same way a slumlord behaves towards his properties. It is a fixed asset to be milked until useless. That is, the ruling class does not build, it extracts.
Another front of the class war is the assault on skilled labor via the H1-B visa program. This program replaces American workers with lower-cost, foreign, contract tech workers. There are many horror stories of Americans being forced to train their replacements under the threat (extortion) of losing what pitiful benefits they might get upon being dismissed. Big tech firms keep getting the number of visas raised, even as tech workers' organizations point out the "can't find suitable American workers" canard is a lie unless, by suitable, you mean "able to work for third-world wages while living ten to an apartment".
One of the most repeated soundbite justifications for the class war (despite it being a pathetic humbug) is "Shareholder Value", a philosophical fiction invented in the 1970s.
In American business...one key theory says that the purpose of corporate enterprise is to “maximize shareholder value.” ...(The) theory, in a nutshell, said there was an inherent conflict in business between owners (shareholders) and managers, that this conflict had to be resolved in favor of the owners, who after all owned the business, and the best way to do that was to find a way to align those interests by linking ...executive compensation primarily to the stock price...
There are many problems with this idea, which appears to be more of a solution in search of a problem. If the CEO is driving the company into bankruptcy or spends too much money on his own perks, for example, the previous theory of business (and the company bylaws) say shareholders can vote the bum out....The only problem is the alignment of interests suggested by (shareholder value) works just as well – maybe even better – if management just cooks the books and lies. And so shareholder value maximization gave us companies like Enron (Jeffrey Skilling in prison), Tyco International (Dennis Kozlowski in prison), and WorldCom (Bernie Ebbers in prison).- Robert Cringely, Who is killing the computer industry and why
This strategy is so bad that it has been denounced by even the likes of Neutron Jack Welch.
Maximizing shareholder return is bad policy both for public companies and for our society in general. That’s what Jack Welch told the Financial Times in 2009, once Welch was safely out of the day-to-day earnings grind at General Electric: “On the face of it,” said Welch, “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products. Managers and investors should not set share-price increases as their overarching goal. … Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.”
- Robert Cringely
An entire financialized ecosystem of asset-stripping, outsourcing, junk bonds, and vulture capitalists has been built upon this nonsensical theory that green-lights the most sociopathic behavior of CEOs, who already had dictatorial authority within their corporate dictatorships. This foundational kaka of the class war is what the progressives need to denounce constantly until the repetition and the linking of all this horrible financial fundamentalism finally shows up on the middle class's radar.
And this is but one facet of the total immersion propaganda that the market is God and can do no wrong. Labor, having been pummeled by it for forty years, clearly understands the war and tries to fight back:
the neo-liberal model (is) that the universe revolves around the financial sector as religion. It is a theocracy, but of the most ancient, it is the transformation of the worship of the golden calf; but now money...
...we must also revolt against this economic order. It is the same order that saved JP Morgan Chase, but let Detroit and now Puerto Rico fail. It is the same religion that would sacrifice the earnings of American students with rising student debt and de-invest in public higher education. It is the same religion that would sacrifice American jobs and labor standards and back the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must see these as the same struggle to restore sanity and purpose to role of government and its servant, the economy.- AFL-CIO, Economics as Religion
Warren and Sanders are the most active in exposing and denouncing the class war. The fact that all the smearing (socialist, elitist, professor...) has only increased their popularity says that it is possible to talk over the corporate media and their "the market is God" propaganda. We desperately need to continue to do so.
3. Governmental famine, or "starving the beast"
Large numbers of formerly middle-class people have yet to figure out that a war on government is a war on the middle class. They simply do not understand how today's society came to be.
- It is the government that legislated the 40 hour week (now largely dishonored and avoided) and the benefits tied to it (unemployment insurance, pension security, overtime pay, sick leave, etc.).
- It is the government that legislated a tax-writeoff for home mortgages and that subsidized the FNMA system until it was privatized.
- It is the government that provided some semblance of a retirement system (Social Security) and a medical care system for the elderly (Medicare), both of which ruthless oligarchs like Peter Peterson have been actively trying to loot and destroy for the last thirty years.
- It is the government that built and funded many great state universities with affordable tuition, and even free tuition via the GI bill. Now, reactionary fascists like Scott the Sociopath Walker brazenly defund education. The Congressional GOP fight to politicize science and cut liberal arts funding. And the government eats the seed corn by making tens of billions of dollars from overpriced, undischargable student loans, often from crooked, for-profit "universities".
If you take away education, health care, home ownership, and retirement security, there is no middle class. And that is exactly what the oligarchs want. They want ignorant, insecure, unhealthy peasants who will not make any trouble, and who will die young, sparing the oligarchs having to spend any money on "useless eaters". Again, see my take on the future of the middle class.
If you take away education, health care, home ownership, and retirement security, there is no middle class. And that is exactly what the oligarchs want. They want ignorant, insecure, unhealthy peasants who will not make any trouble, and who will die young, sparing the oligarchs having to spend any money on "useless eaters". Again, see my take on the future of the middle class.
The flip side of the coin is the obscenely bloated military budget, in all its disguises: the military itself, the Department of Energy and the nuclear weapons complex, the $80B black budget for intelligence, all the NGO front organizations involved in overseas political agitation, the hydra-headed and incompetent and constitutionally beyond-the-pale Fatherland Security apparatus. There is always plenty of money for this death-dealing, soul-killing machinery, even as all the peaceful programs that support the middle-class are put on the chopping block. The military feasts while the government starves.
In some ways, the starving of government is a vanity project. The oligarchs want to show that they once again dominate, like the Second Coming of the Robber Barons. Demanding that the government never grow, but always shrink is, in a way, akin to the barbaric practice of footbinding among Chinese nobles.
In both cases, the role is to have a servant who is crippled and totally dependent but nevertheless serves as an ornament and testament to the power and "benevolence" of the master. What we have been unknowingly witnessing for the last twenty years are the screams of a victim being cruelly tortured by violently constraining its natural development.
4. Privatization as the Death of democracy
Every time a government function is privatized, the citizenry loses control over that function, and the power of government to regulate is diminished. The new owners get to play by all the class war and usury rules cited above. This strategy of taking a hundred small bites has been brilliantly profitable, and morally disastrous.
The Obama administration has rammed charter schools down everyone's throat, to the ultimate financial benefit of hedge fund investors. Studies now show that, corrected for cherry-picked student populations, charter students perform no better than normal schools. Plus, the list of crooked charters (busy "enhancing shareholder value" while going bankrupt and walking away from the wreckage) grows by the week.
Private prisons with no accountability are allowed to gouge prisoners for every necessity (phone calls, food, visitation), while using their literal slave labor to run honest businesses out of what little is left of a home market in America. In what passes for a "free market", the prison companies are guaranteed a certain number of prisoners. That is in the face of the massive over-incarceration in America. The soulless ghouls who vote for this stuff supposedly represent the people. I think not.
Mercenaries and contractors get no-bid defense contracts. The atrocities of their soldiers fall under no code of military justice. The State Department has "Blackwater/Xi/Academi" security teams. Gee, no possibility of corporate intimidation there. For this, we fought a revolution and a civil war?
In the crazier parts of the country, fire departments are privatized (Crassus of Rome is smiling from hell.) Gated communities abound.
The howls to privatize everything grows louder every day, but they are by and large a distraction. The real action, the death of real government, the reduction of it to a footbound trophy is coming.
The three secretly negotiated "trade agreements", TPP, TTIP, and TISA will enthrone secret corporate world government over and above any democracy. Nameless corporate judges in secret "courts" will decide what laws interfere with some sociopathic corporation's "future profits". This is fucking pre-crime for democracies.
We have already seen our very own Congress repeal "country of origin" labeling after losing a "case" in a NAFTA "court". A Canadian financial firm is suing to get rid of Dodd-Frank. Nothing to see here. Move along.
As for the citizens, what chance do they have when the government is sold out. After the educational system is dismantled, they will be as clueless about what is going on as a peasant in Chad, and as powerless as a striker in a banana republic.
For years, it has not been possible to sue certain corporations (so much for the standard "remedy" of the "free market" propagandists). Health insurance companies can't be sued for denial of coverage (although Obamacare did make it illegal to deny certain coverages). In Colorado, gun shops cannot be sued for selling massive quantities of arms to mass murderers. There is legislation before Congress to deny the right to use payday lenders. Because the GOP has no shame. These laws are but a preview of a completely corporatized government: it will be immune from petty lawsuits by the commoners.
And, in the most fascistic of Red States, Wisconsin, the lying scumbag governor (who uses his hand-picked State Supreme Court to dodge multiple payoffs and campaign finance accusations) has rammed through a law to make the deliberations of the legislature secret. He did this in our supposed "democracy". Just think how bad it is going to get when the three-Ts kick in.
The end
There is a straight line from payday loan sharking to Greek austerity. From individual citizen to the entire country, if you get caught by the banksters, you will be ruthlessly bled until there is nothing left or until you die.
The oligarchs have been tearing the leaves off the tree of democracy, one at a time, for decades. Now that the tree is all but dead, they are bringing out the chainsaw to take it down.
We are one vote in our completely corrupt Congress from giving up our democracy. It is that simple. The fact that only a tiny percentage of the population is even aware of these issues gives me little hope.
The reign of the corporate anti-Christ on earth is at hand, and only billionaires will be raptured. They will be laughing their asses off about the fundamentalists who enthroned the "greatest false prophet" of corporatism.
I weep for my country and for its honest, hardworking citizens. The cluelessness is strong in them.
What are the four horsemen? War, Famine, Death, and Conquest, This Youtube take a very hard look at of so call Free Democratic Capitalism system an show us some very hard cold facts about it! Very detailed information on this system and why it is failing to reach it true and original goals. Watch and learn how the "Four Horsemen" is in charge and why I believe the Darkbrotherhood of the Illuminati and other power elites group make sure it fails. They want the "Age of Darkness" to stay in place but the "Age of Light" is coming and most happen because it is the natural way of progress and to bring in a new age or dimension to complete the cycles. But they will not give up power without a fight!
