by Charles Hugh Smith
October
05, 2020
from
CharlesHughSmith Website
Italian version
Systemic corruption and the implosion of the social contract have
consequences:
It's called
collapse...
Social and economic decay
is so glacial that only those few who remember an earlier set-point
are equipped to even notice the decline.
That's the position we
find ourselves in today.
Many Americans will discount the systemic corruption that
characterizes the American way of life because they've known nothing
but systemic corruption.
They've habituated to it
because they have no memory of a time when looting wasn't legalized
and maximizing self-enrichment by any means available wasn't the
unwritten law of the land.
If you don't yet
see America as little more than an intertwined collection of,
skims, scams,
frauds, embezzlements, lies, gaming-the-system, obfuscation of
risk and exploitation of the masses by insiders,
...please
read,
How Corruption is Becoming America's Operating System.
Here on oftwominds.com, you might want to read
No Wrongdoing Here - Just 6,300 Corporate Fines and Settlements.
(May 2015)
When JP Morgan Chase engaged in fraud and was fined a wrist-slap
$1 billion, nobody went to prison because nobody ever goes to
prison for corporate fraud and criminal collusion:
JPMorgan to pay almost $1 billion fine to resolve U.S.
investigation into trading practices.
Simply put,
corruption is cost-free in America because most of it is legal...
And whatever is
still illegal is never applied to the elites and insiders, except
(as per Communist regime corruption) for a rare show trial where an
example is made of an egregious fall-guy.
Think
Bernie Madoff:
whistleblowers'
repeated attempts to expose the fraud to regulators were blown
off for years. It was only when Madoff ripped off wealthy and
powerful insiders did he go down.
There are three
primary sources for the complete systemic corruption of America.
-
One is the
transition from civic responsibility for the social contract and
the national interest to winner-take-most legalized looting.
This transition is visible in the history of empires in the final
stage of collapse.
The assumption
underlying the social order slides from a shared duty to the
nation and fellow citizens to an obsession with evading civic
duties:
military
service, taxes, and following the rules are all avoided by
insiders and elites, and this moral/social rot then corrupts the
entire social order as elites and insiders lean ever more
heavily on the remaining productive class to pay the taxes and
provide the military muscle to defend their wealth.
That corruption is
now everywhere in America is obvious to all but those adamantly
blinded by denial.
The JP Morgans pay
fines as a cost of doing corrupt business, while "public
servants" game the system to maximize their pensions with a variety
of tricks:
-
colluding
to boost the overtime of the retiring insider
-
finding a
quack physican to sign off on a fake "heart murmur" so the
insider pays no taxes on their "disability" check,
...and
so on in an endless parade of lies, scams, skims and insider
tricks.
The excuse is always the same: everybody does it. This is of
course the collapse not just of the social contract but of morality
in general: anything goes and winners take most.
Insiders look the
other way lest their own skims and scams be contested, and elites
and insiders view those who aren't skimming and scamming as chumps
to be pitied.
-
The second dynamic is that
financialization has completely
corrupted the American economy, and that corruption has now spread
to the political and social orders.
Once the financial
sector conquered the real economy, it began siphoning 95% of the
economy's wealth to the top .01% and their toadies, lackeys,
apologists, enforcers and technocrats.
As they hollowed out the real economy, distorted incentives and made
moral hazard the guiding principle of the American way of
life, the recipients of financialization's domination gained the
wealth to buy political power from the pathetically corruptible
political class.
The corruption that we call financialization corrupted
democracy and undermined the social contract by eviscerating the
value of labor and creating a pay-to-play political order that's a mockery of democracy.
-
The third factor is the decay of America's institutions into
fronts for personal gain.
While Higher
Education insiders are masters of self-serving PR, the truth is
they're not concerned about their debt-serf "customers" (students)
learning the essential skills needed in the tumultuous decades ahead
- they're worried that the revenues needed to pay their enormous
salaries and benefits might dry up.
"Education" is
nothing but a front for the corruption of self-enrichment by the
elites and insiders at the top.
The same is true of "healthcare."
The concern of
insiders isn't the declining health of America's populace, it's
the decline in revenues as fewer "customers" come in for the
financial scalping of emergency care.
"Healthcare" is nothing but a front for the corruption of
self-enrichment by the elites and insiders at the top.
Thanks to
the Federal Reserve's endless
free money for
financiers and endless federal borrow-and-blow deficits, the
unstated belief is since there's endless "money", my petty
frauds and skims won't even dent the feeding trough -
there's always another trillion or three to skim and scam, and
there will never be any limit to the feeding trough.
There is no limit
until the system implodes. Then the collapse becomes limitless...
Ironic, isn't it...?
The oh-so
convenient belief that America's wealth and power are eternal and
godlike in their glory fosters the crass corruption that has
weakened America to the point of no return:
systemic
fragility and brittleness...
American
Exceptionalism has
been turned on its head:
America is now
as perniciously corrupt as any developing-world nation we smugly
felt so superior to, and with extremes of wealth and income
inequality that surpass even the most rapacious
kleptocracies.
This destabilizing
"exceptionalism" is now the defining characteristic of the American
economy, society and political order.
Systemic corruption and the implosion of the social contract have
consequences:
It's called
collapse, baby, and the rot is now
too deep to reverse...
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