Picture of the week plus a rant

By Ron Beasley

 

OK, the picture of the week is an angry looking sky.  A sky that is a good illustration for an angry rant.  You may have noticed that the new boss is a lot like the old boss.  The Obama administration makes some populist pleasing moves on the economy but they refuse to actually fix anything.  The make noises about reducing the cost of health care but at best only attack a small portion of the problem without much enthusiasm and ignore most of it.  The Afghan policy is just as detached from reality as that of the Bush administration. And lets not forget a Justice Department that has not replaced any of the Bush administration's very political prosecutors.  How can this be you might ask.  If you were paying attention you would realize that we no longer live in a Democracy.  We may get to vote but on the national level that vote is about as meaningless as the vote in any other Banana Republic because in reality we live in a Corporatocracy.  Does this sound familiar?

Corporatocracy or Corpocracy is a form of government where a corporation, a group of corporations, or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country.

This belief is reinforced by two factors. First, corporations give to competing political parties and major political party candidates. This is seen as a corporation hedging their bets on the outcome of an election, and trying to get on the good side of whichever candidate is elected into office. Some say this is one of the hallmarks of a corporatocracy.

Second, in many cases former corporate executives serve as powerful decision makers within government institutions often charged with the regulation of their former employers. Meanwhile, former government employees often accept high ranking positions within corporations thereby providing their new employers with access to governmental decision makers. This serves to create the appearance of a revolving door between corporations and the institutions established to regulate their behavior.

Of course there is another word for corporatocracy coined by Benito Mussolini and that word was Fascism.

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

As Thom Hartmann explains the Roberts Court is going to take even further down the road  of corporatocracy/ fascism in the not too distant future.

Comments

[Earl]

I was going to try and calm you down, but I think you've got it right...

[geoff]

I won't really call it a rant Ron, more an apt description maybe and certainly following in good company, I think:
Chris Hedges interviewed by Christopher Lydon on Open Source;

Tony Karon at Rootless Cosmopolitan; and

Glenn Greenwald at Salon