by CHRIS HEDGES
The choice in the elections is between corporate and oligarchic power. Corporate power needs stability and a technocratic government. Oligarchic power thrives on chaos and, as Steve Bannon says, the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Neither are democratic. They have each bought up the political class, the academy and the press. Both are forms of exploitation that impoverish and disempower the public. Both funnel money upwards into the hands of the billionaire class. Both dismantle regulations, destroy labor unions, gut government services in the name of austerity, privatize every aspect of American society, from utilities to schools, perpetuate permanent wars, including the genocide in Gaza, and neuter a media that should, if it was not controlled by corporations and the rich, investigate their pillage and corruption. Both forms of capitalism disembowel the country, but they do it with different tools and have different goals.
Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison in their book “Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism,” refer to corporate power as “housebroken capitalism.” Housebroken capitalists need consistent government policies and fixed trade agreements because they have made investments that take time, sometimes years, to mature. Manufacturing and agriculture industries are examples of “housebroken capitalism.”
You can see my interview with Monbiot here.
Monbiot and Hutchison refer to oligarchic power as “warlord capitalism.” Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.
The political champions of warlord capitalism are the demagogues of the far right, including Trump, Boris Johnson, Giorgia Meloni, Narendra Modi, Victor Orban and Marine Le Pen. They sow dissension by peddling absurdities, such as the great replacement theory, and dismantling structures that provide stability, such as the European Union. This creates uncertainty, fear and insecurity. Those that orchestrate this insecurity promise, if we surrender even more rights and civil liberties, that they will save us from phantom enemies, such as immigrants, Muslims and other demonized groups.
The epicenters of warlord capitalism are private equity firms. Private equity firms such as Apollo, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, buy up and plunder businesses. They pile on debt. They refuse to reinvest. They slash staff. They willfully drive companies into bankruptcy. The object is not to sustain businesses but to harvest them for assets, to make short-term profit. Those who run these firms, such as Leon Black, Henry Kravis, Stephen Schwarzman and David Rubenstein, have amassed personal fortunes in the billions of dollars.
Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”
Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and a Trump supporter, has waged war on “confiscatory taxes.” He funds an anti-tax political action committee and proposes the construction of floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.
Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, with an estimated net worth of $35 billion, has given Trump $100 million for his campaign. While Adelson, who was born and raised in Israel, is a fervent Zionist, she is also part of the club of oligarchs who seek to slash taxes for the rich, taxes that have already been cut by Congress, or diminished through a series of legal loopholes.
The economist Adam Smith warned that unless rentier income was heavily taxed and put back into a financial system it would self-destruct.
The wreckage private equity firms and the oligarchs orchestrate, is taken out on workers who are forced into a gig economy and who have seen stable salaries and benefits eradicated. It is taken out on pension funds that are depleted because of usurious fees, or are abolished. It is taken out on our health and safety. Residents of nursing homes, for example, owned by private equity firms, experience 10 percent more deaths — not to mention higher fees — because of staffing shortages and reduced compliance with standards of care.
Private equity firms are an invasive species. They are also ubiquitous. They have acquired educational institutions, utility companies, and retail chains, while bleeding taxpayers hundreds of billions in subsidies which are made possible by bought-and-paid-for prosecutors, politicians, and regulators. What is particularly galling is that many of the industries seized by private equity firms — water, sanitation, electrical grids, hospitals — were paid for out of public funds. They cannibalize the nation, leaving behind shuttered and bankrupt industries.
Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner document how private equity works in the book “These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs-and Wrecks-America.”
“Routinely lionized in the financial press for their dealmaking and lauded for their ‘charitable’ giving, these unbridled capitalists have mounted expensive lobbying campaigns to ensure continued enrichment from favorable tax laws,” they write.
“Hefty donations have won them positions of power on museum boards and think tanks. They’ve published books on leadership extolling ‘the importance of humility and humanity’ at the top, while eviscerating those at the bottom. Their companies arrange for them to avoid paying taxes on the billions in gains that their stockholdings generate. And, of course, they rarely mention that the companies they own are among the largest beneficiaries of government investments in highways, railroads, and primary education, reaping massive perks from subsidies and tax policies that allow them to pay substantially lower rates on their earnings,” they explain
“These men are America’s modern-age robber barons. But unlike many of their predecessors in the nineteenth century, who amassed stupefying riches by extracting a young nation’s natural resources, today’s barons mine their wealth from the poor and middle class through complex financial dealings.”
Scheerpost for more