“GOT MINE!” — An AI depiction of corporatism and ‘private equity’ as vultures; my own prompt
Politicians’ current blathering about the “affordability crisis” is basically an attempt to re-characterize the accelerating global political and economic collapse as a ‘hiccup’ in the current system that merely requires some expert managerial and financial tweaking.
It’s a deception in two senses:
- It attempts to divert attention from the understandable outrage of citizens at the current chaos, massive and soaring inequality, overt corruption, and staggering incompetence of our ‘leaders’, by reframing citizens as mere ‘consumers’, who should not worry their pretty little heads about matters of state, but instead focus on how they can buy and spend more.
- It conceals the large-scale theft of money and public resources by a small group of rich, powerful, insatiably rapacious, egomaniacal, terrified billionaires, from the rest of the world’s struggling citizens. Without this monstrous diversion of wealth from the poor (and the public purse) to the private pockets of the ultra-rich, there would be no (immediate) “affordability” crisis for the billions of victims of this larceny.
A recent article by Evelyn Quartz explains that this deception (and note that the perpetrators of it are often themselves victims of it) stems in part from “a political class that treats politics as a financing and management problem rather than a question of democratic control”. By this thinking, government (ie taxpayers’) money should be used primarily to “incentivize” the private sector to do things (by giving them tax breaks, loans, outright gifts, subsidies etc), rather than to actually provide goods and services directly to the citizens footing the bill.
This is not just an abrogation of responsibility (and arguably a fraudulent one), it is an acknowledgement that politicians have given up on the idea of government doing anything competently, so instead of administering a huge public service providing absolute essentials cost-effectively to citizens, they’re shrugging their shoulders, giving all the money to private interests, and hoping those private interests don’t just take the money and run. Which is, for the most part, exactly what those private interests have done — just look at “private” colleges, “private” ‘health care’, and “private” equity.
This private sector avarice and incompetence then requires the political class to engage in a relentless program of “perception management”: Government and the entire public sector needs to be portrayed as inherently and necessarily inefficient and incompetent, so that giving public funds and wealth to private interests can somehow be seen as wise. And the private sector, of course, then kicks back money to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, writes flattering stories about them in the corporate-owned media, and ghost writes the laws in their favour for the politicians to present as theirs, so that the corruption is guaranteed to continue and worsen.
The struggle of most people to put food on the table, pay the rent or mortgage, and deal with falling wages and lost benefits as the prices of essentials soar, is not an “affordability” problem. The problem is that far too much of the wealth being produced by the rest of us is being siphoned off by a tiny ultra-rich minority, and that our utterly oil-dependent economy is now in permanent decline even as the human population and its demands on the economy continue to soar.
The simple truth of increasing numbers and increasing demands in the face of declining capacity to provide even as much each year as in the previous year, means that there is no longer nearly enough to go around, and the situation is rapidly and inexorably worsening.
This tiny minority siphoning off everything they can get their hands on is completely aware of the accelerating collapse of our economy and what it bodes for the world in the coming decades. They’re hoarding for the collapse, exactly as the alpha rats in lab experiments do when food supply is increasingly constrained.
If there is an “affordability” problem, it is that the cost of extracting the increasingly-expensive and heavily-depleted hydrocarbon resources that have provided 100% of global economic growth for the last two centuries is now beyond what the users of those resources can afford to pay. In economic terms, the supply and demand curves no longer intersect, and the inevitable consequence is collapse. This is not an affordability problem, it is an affordability predicament. It has no solution. Collapse cannot be avoided.
But of course the citizens don’t want to hear this, so the political class won’t tell them. It would reflect badly on the political class’ ‘management’. Instead, the political class will play the blame game. They will invade oil-rich countries and steal their wealth. Or they will stall off the outrage of citizens by saying it’s just an “affordability” problem, and, with citizens’ continued, patient support, some technical solutions will soon “fix” it.
Eventually, as the precarity and scarcities get worse and worse, even our dumbed-down, lied-to, propagandized, deceived citizens will wise up to the con.
And then, watch out.
