USA: NATION OF CORRUPTION

From Time Magazine courtesy of Eschaton:

The Twilight of the Elites

In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.

In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority. Scholarly research shows a firm correlation between strong institutions, accountable élites and highly functional economies; mistrust and corruption, meanwhile, feed each other in a vicious circle. If our current crisis continues, we risk a long, ugly process of de-development: higher levels of corruption and tax evasion and an increasingly fractured public sphere, in which both public consensus and reform become all but impossible.

More here.

The essay goes on to assert that the way out of this mess is a strong dose of institutional transparency, so we can all see just what the hell is going on within the power structure, combined with an end to top-down institutional authority, such that better and more diverse ideas are able to trickle up to the people with the ability to act on them. You'll get no argument with me on that. Great reforms, if they can actually be pulled off. But I think distrust of institutions, as well as their catastrophic failures this last decade or so, is only a symptom of a much greater cultural problem.

That is, pro-capitalist messages have literally bombarded Americans for some three decades, and we're now paying the price as those messages have become embedded in the culture. I'm not talking about stuff like "business is good" which is obviously true on its face: I mean the stuff that makes morally acceptable the funneling of the vast majority of wealth created by the nation to a relative few who hold the reins of power, the stuff that encourages people to spend and acquire without restraint, the stuff that tells us that life is competition and we're fools if we don't try to win. You know, capitalism as a kind of morality tale, rather than capitalism as an economic system.

Capitalists have always propagandized their actions as good and necessary because people instinctively understand that in order for capitalism to function, the masses must necessarily be exploited. Think nineteenth century "social Darwinism" and you'll get my drift. But it wasn't until the Reagan era that such propaganda was put on steroids. Rank and file Americans now days believe that their fortunes lie with the vastly wealthy elites who literally own and run the country, even though the truth is the exact opposite. The net effect is that we now have a Robber Barron mentality prevalent throughout the country, cutting across race and class lines, from the top to the bottom.

That is, we now have enough people who believe and behave like the rich assholes who pushed the whole philosophy in the first place that the civil society is crumbling at its foundation. Institutional transparency and democratization is a damned fine idea, but it won't work if everybody is out for themselves and nobody else. Somehow, we've got to find a way to unravel the philosophical pollution that is now choking the life out of our country.

That's going to be hard to do when most people don't even acknowledge the problem.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$