Sounder » 02 Jul 2014, 03:43 wrote:If people want to know who is running things, just find out who is not being tapped. That would be a more useful and much smaller list.
My guess is, absolutely no one. There are doubtless those against whom the information yielded by the universal tapping is not being used, and they are, effectively, the protected core of the power elite. But if they make the wrong move, Robert Maxwells and Mikhail Kodhorkovskys and maybe even Rockefeller scions (depending on what that small plane crash last month was all about) can be sacrificed.
Theses:
(1) Even as it provides self-service to capitalist interests ("the corporations," the banks, some of the largest funds and fortunes) and cross-institutional networks of pillage and plunder and divine mission (the various parapolitical octopii, in RI parlance),
(2) the enormous apparatus of surveillance, force, propaganda, "foreign policy" and war-making centered on the prime U.S. power agencies (Pentagon, CIA-State, NSA, FBI, "Homeland") requires ideological unification and motivation based in obedience to hierarchy and a reigning idea (meaning a god!) of "national security" against enemies as these may be designated.
(3) Buried within that is the mission of preserving a system of social class against ideas of democracy. Within this ideology, this threat was traditionally understood as "communist." Nowadays, it is partly projected onto the decidely undemocratic movements of Islamism, or on to almost non-existent phantoms of "terrorism," whether false-flag or genuine.
(4) So national security ideology and, at the top levels, mutual blackmail are necessary glues for holding together a quite heterogeneous system of alliances among inherently corrupt and self-interested groups, organizations, and individuals (or perhaps self-directed rather than "self-interested," since many of them have a sense of higher mission).
So I tend to agree with WR's assessment that the national security state is where the power has its systemic center of gravity (if not its "bosses" per se).
And with this:
spiro c. thierry wrote:The apparatus is like an organism that functions without its parts being aware of the part they play in much of what it works. Naturally there are powerful people who game the system for their own purposes. But I think even the most influential don't always know precisely where they are headed.
There are those who endeavor to theorize how it works, and to influence it through their ideas (for want of a better word, since these ideas are usually little more than a simplistic and violent-minded realpolitik), by placing themselves at the strategic leverage points. Intellectuals, nowadays think-tankers, partly serving the power (and wealth), partly programming it, sometimes getting to write the policy directly. The Dulleses, McCloys, Huntingtons, Wohlstetters, Brzezinskis, Kissingers, Marshalls, Bakers, Gateses, Team B neocons, RAND, AEI-Heritage, Powell Memoists, architects of "Third Way" neoliberalism, etc. From another angle, the billionaire activists, the would-be shapers of the future, the "philanthropist" foundation-makers, Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies, Mellon-Scaifes (die again, mother-fucker!), Murdochs, Kochs, Gateses, Petersens (how is that fucker a Greek?!), Bloombergs, etc.
Also:
spiro c. thierry wrote:Herewith, I don't mean to say that individual actors should not be held accountable. On the contrary.
It's an absolute necessity.
(5) While the drivers behind the system's development function as always to head it in the same developmental direction as always, we have in the last 15 or so years crossed a threshold into a new plateau of lawlessness and global danger thanks to
(a) the escape from any consequences, first, of the political mob in U.S. and U.K. who openly engineered the unprovoked war of aggression of 2003; and second, of the entire Wall Street criminal class who conducted the mass fraud with MBS and derivatives prior to the 2007-2009 global crash that they caused and which exposed them.*
(b) The new U.S. administration that followed in their wake set up their getaway and consolidated their dark achievements under a new, liberally-tinged and legalistic system of state authoritarianism backing a financial feudalism.
(c) The EU powers abandoned any pretense to counterweight in a signal use of crisis capitalism to strengthen the same poisonous system and neoliberal policies that the crash had ostensibly discredited.
(d) The rest of the world's more traditionally authoritarian regimes (the ostensible antagonists in Russia and China, for example) are encouraged by the factual abandonment within the West of the pretense to rule of law and Western ideals as carte blanche to respond as they will in the midst of the global crisis.
The potential results are explosive.
* NOTE:
It's not that these two acts of class criminality were entirely without moral precedent, or (arguably) worse than earlier acts. It's that they were conducted so openly, so brazenly, backed by such awesomely stupid lies that were exposed even as they were spoken; that their perpetrators got entirely away and were allowed to double down, even after the predictable and dire mass disasters became manifest to the world; and that, in the fast-moving media and mentality landscapes of today, these recent disasters are essentially forgotten to the public, although their consequences are still determining current events. And by determining, I mean not as historical causes in a chain of causality, but still as direct, immanent causes. We are still in the economic crisis that manifested in 2008! Look at the situation in Iraq (and Syria), right now!
Furthermore, these acts were essentially cannibalistic. A functioning system of empire that can sell itself to the world and sees long-term future prospects would not have engaged in the high-risk self-sabotage of conducting the Iraq invasion against the oppostion of its key overseas allies; a stable system of exploitation still capable of growth would not have required predatory scams on the mass level of the Wall Street plays we've seen since the mid-1990s, let alone mid-2000s.
It's like an experimental confirmation with the lesson to sociopathic individuals and classes alike that they can commit such crimes again; that they should do it in big and brazen fashion; that they should recognize no limits, indeed cannot afford to recognize limits; that there will be no crisis and no protest, let alone an uprising, that cannot be easily weathered, or (like the legions of "Tea Party" idiots, some of whom are reading this) turned into a systemic support; that no law will be brought to bear on them, but that law will continue to function reliably as an authoritarian support against the lower classes and outsiders; that they will, in fact, be rewarded in direct proportion to the level of their criminality and ambition. This is a step beyond crime pays: Crime wins, and only crime wins.
Or so it appears, until, inevitably, a much larger breakdown or outbreak comes about, but that's not anything that should give us hope, in the fashion of leftist apocalyptism that sees opportunity in crisis. The 2008 crisis has yet to produce a credible populist threat. Do you think a Mad Max scenario would do it? At the scale and level of development we have reached, such breakdowns are incredibly unpredictable and chaotic for a period and then almost certain to result in the re-consolidation of a more authoritarian state with popular support, doubling down in backing an even more predatory economy. A breakdown that really destroys the system is unlikely to leave a world that can sustain civilization. Successful reform movements have to somehow be grown just as much within the pockets of relative prosperity (based on long-term and complex thinking) as well as among the most damned, with these lower and middle classes coming together even absent a breakdown.
In other words, good luck.
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