Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [210]
Shrill cries to "defend free market capitalism" by weakening the State's already fatally weakened regulatory structures are tailor-made to support the Elite's unopposed concentration of capital and power. Thus the "conservatives" are the most blindly vociferous supporters of the Elites' strip-mining of the American citizenry and economy.
In a third locked box are Libertarians who place a naive faith that a passive, weak State is the "solution" to the Elite/State partnership's dominance. But they fail to understand that concentrations of global capital and power are delighted to find passive weak States, as they offer no resistance to exploitation of a multitude of windfalls. Weak, passive States are ontologically kleptocracies, as the citizenry have no feedback into either the State or the "shadow" government and financial systems of the Power Elites.
As I noted before, all the ideologies are catastrophically wrong in their understanding of the dynamic between State, markets and Power Elites. "Progressives" are convinced that free markets are rapacious and a vast central State must dominate and control the market lest it devour the citizenry.
The real dynamic is precisely the opposite: the Elites' primary drive is to subvert competition and establish the lowest risk, highest return situation which is monopoly or cartel protected by the State. Rather than protect the citizenry by throttling transparent markets, the State hands dominance to the Power Elites who have eliminated the threat of competition by partnering with the State.
For their part, "conservatives" are blind to capitalism's intrinsic drive to eliminate competition and exploit all windfalls without regard to the social and environmental consequences. Thus weakening paltry State oversight--the exact goal of the Power Elites' monopolies and cartels--does not "strengthen" competition but speeds its destruction.
All of this can be illustrated with the insanity of the food-disease-sickcare complex which I have described previously.
As it stands now, a handful of agribusiness, fast-food and packaged food cartels manufacture blatantly unhealthy simulacra of real foods and relentlessly market them as "good tasting" and "trendy" via the mass media cartel.
A toothless set of State agencies, totally dominated by Power Elites via a "shadow" system of governance-- elected officials who demand loopholes and favors, "fox hired to guard the chicken coop" revolving-door high-caste technocrats, and cartel lobbyists writing regulations and laws--enables simulacrum "consumer protection" which is predictably ineffective.
Having addicted a media-enthralled, distracted citizenry to sugar, salt and fat-laced fake-foods (please read The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by the former head of the FDA for a detailed, scientific elaboration of this dynamic), then the resulting chronic diseases and ill-health are managed by another set of Power Elites under the guise of "healthcare."
Once again, the State partners with the Power Elites to funnel a rapidly increasing share of the national income and wealth to these Elites via State-managed "free money" programs like Medicare and Medicaid which are falsely packaged as "healthcare for the citizenry" even as the actual causes of the citizenry's worsening health is essentially ignored.
Regulations which once protected citizens from direct advertising of medications are dismantled as the pharmaceutical industry (and the mass media which profits so immensely from the adverts) institutionalizes the idea that there are "magic pills" for every condition--and when no condition exists, then the industry creates new ones out of whole cloth.
An unholy alliance of concentrations of power and