How Our Corporatocracy Works

The tragic human cost of living in a corporatocracy is becoming ever more clear to anyone who takes the blinders off and thinks for a while.

Our corporatocracy has been ratified by the Supreme Court, has intimidated our president and bought our Congress.  Tea Party Congresswomen to the contrary notwithstanding, that's all three branches of government.  Total control.

The budget submitted by Dr. Kidglove, created under the specter of the deficit bogeyman, proposes to make the poor, the old, the sick and  the uneducated pay for the economic crimes of filthy rich bankers and financiers. 

While the filthy rich count their profits and chuckle like Scrooge, millions of Americans remain jobless.  For the most recent quarter, the country has created barely one-fifth of the number of new jobs needed just to accommodate new workers entering the job market.  So the net number of unemployed Americans continues to grow.

Meanwhile, corporate America is sitting on a cash horde of well over two trillion dollars.  Their Republican puppets in Congress, willy-nilly cutting "job-killing entitlements," talk about the need for jobs even while opposing the very public policies that would create them.  The United States Chamber of Commerce prattles about the need for jobs even while plotting possibly criminal disinformation campaigns against those who support proposals to create them.

Dr. Kidglove, eying the corporate stash of cash, went to the US C of C, hat in hand, and begged them to please, sir, spend some of that money putting Americans back to work.  They listened grumpily, but have absolutely no intention of spending a dime of the cash horde to hire American workers.  The business plans of corporate America have committed all of that cash to huge stock buyback programs and increased dividends to enrich big investors and senior managers.  They did this in 2002-2006 with nearly three trillion in hoarded profits, which they dispensed just in time for filthy rich investors and managers to benefit from George Bush's first big round of tax cuts for the richest two percent of us.  The new round of payouts comes just in time for the filthy rich to benefit from the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Responding to the Big Bust of 2008,  the Bush-Obama strategy was to bail out out the too-big-to-fail financial institutions that caused it.  Obama's rationale was that the bailed-out banks and investors would eventually create jobs, lower mortgage rates and adjust terms to save homeowners and boost tax revenues of the cash-starved states.  None of it happened.

Now the corporations and their lackeys in Congress have coerced Dr. Kidglove into a policy of cutting the social services that poor, old, jobless and sick Americans depend upon for their very lives.  The cuts he offers won't satisfy them.  They'll cut more.

Meanwhile, there's no talk whatsoever about cutting the defense budget or ending the immoral wars that drove us into this deficit.  There's no talk of cutting the lavish subsidies to big oil and gas companies, to drug manufacturers, to health insurance companies, to the huge Agribusiness conglomerates.  These suckers at the teats of tax revenue are part of the corporatocracy that owns us; of course their subsidies won't be touched.

Meanwhile, a new tip of the corporate iceberg is peeking out above the waves.  It is the virtual merging of the government's massive spying on citizenry with corporate skullduggery against citizens who speak the truth to power.

The U.S. Chamber, through its rich and powerful Washington law firm, has conspired with government spy technology contractors to engage in possibly criminal disinformation campaigns against supporters of WikiLeaks and other progressive information outlets.  It has targeted online journalists and others for "disruption."

And just today, the New York Times and the economist Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated how financial institutions manipulate their Congressional puppets and the public to avoid any real regulation of the sort of crimes that caused the 2008 Bust.  They disclosed the utter fallacy of a major report commissioned by the "Derivative End Users Coalition" -- formed by the big banks to prevent implementation of the financial controls in the Dodd-Frank financial reform act.  It was prepared by a consulting firm called Keybridge Research, which falsified data and lied about its affiliations with responsible academics.

Confronted with the Stiglitz findings by a Times reporter, the president of Keybridge  replied that "the client had asked us" to create the report, which was "a hypothetical study."

Another term for it is lying, but it will serve as a rationale for the puppets of Congress to do the bidding of their corporate masters. The rich will get richer and the poor will pay.

Let them eat cake.