Our elite preach meritocracy but display everything but the morality and competence that equates merit.

Though the scandal has moved out of the news there’s a term for our unaccountable elite–the “Epstein class”. This is shorthand for the feral elite who’ve been responsible for: causing the Wall Street Crash; offshoring our manufacturing base; the K-shaped economy; starting and losing numerous wars for made up reasons; and manufacturing a completely dysfunctional political/economic system that has left an American society plagued by massive inequality and deaths of despair. All of this carnage while the Epstein Class eagerly participated in a sexual blackmail operation that compromised American security for Israel.

Nobody faced any real consequences for lying about evidence of WMDs in Iraq or for the Great Financial Crisis. After the 2008 Wall Street Crash, government funds were used to “foam the runway” for banks while homeowners were left to twist slowly in the wind. No banks or brokerages were broken up and no executives were jailed. Americans were told to suck it up lest there be a “moral hazard”. Mr. Hope and Change instructed us to look forward rather than back as he codified W. Bush’s torture archipelago, while ramping-up the post 9/11 war of terror.

When regular people fuck up, they see themselves restricted and punished, fired, their credit ratings dropped, evicted from their houses, embarrassed in front of their friends and peers. But when the wealthy or corporations fuck up, it’s a completely different story where the captured government and corporate media spring into action, informing us that while mistakes might have been made the system of financial capitalism that manages our polity is self-correcting. The system moves to damage control where the powerful are insulated against the fallout, even if it means simply acting as if no crimes were even committed.

Hypocrisy this blatant is noticed and acted upon. The failure to hold our feral elite accountable has had political consequences and is a fundamental underlying driver of the popular disillusionment with an economy that has for decades failed millions of people and has now eroded the social underpinnings of America to a breaking point. One of the stories of the last decade plus has been the lived realities of rising inequality, and of working class Americans becoming economically and politically disempowered that taps into a shared sense of resentment and powerlessness.

The problem is that all of blatant lying and gaslighting about how things should be vs the lived reality of average Americans has become more than obvious under the second Trumpian regime. Real life and the official narrative are increasingly divorced and every major financial crisis, disastrous war or sexual scandal coverup only deepens the distrust and nihilism. We’ve had fuck-up after fuck-up along with massive looting and corruption but no one is held responsible.

What’s to be done?

Ian Welsh says “If you want to dis-incentivize bad executive behaviour, you have to really go after the execs. The only way to restrain capitalists is real prison sentences or execution (Vietnam is fond of executing corrupt execs) and taking their money, and thus power, away. The idea of corporations being used to shield decision makers and beneficiaries of illegal or evil behaviour from liability has to go away. Corporate personhood has to end, as well, or they have to be given the disadvantages of personhood. Committed a serious crime? OK, the corporation is dissolved.

Government and business are two different things. There has to be some understanding between them, since government must regulate business, but government’s job is to make the people better off, not to make businesses richer.

When government operates this way it can control private enterprise so that markets work to the benefit of society. When it doesn’t, usually because it’s been corrupted by capitalists, it enables monopolies and oligopolies and exploitative practices and when there are crises, it bails out the rich, not the people.

All of this is well understood, really, it’s just that there’s a lot of money to pay for scummy intellectuals and journalists and experts to obscure the fact and pretend that there’s a trickle down effect or that what’s good for rich is good for society. (Hello Milton Friedman, you corrupt hack.)”

Preach.

What’s become apparent is that failing to hold our elite accountable has created a corrosive political dynamic similar to Gresham’s law–the economic theory that states “bad money drives out good” or fraudsters drive out honest businessmen. In political terms bad leaders, in concert with corporate media’s propaganda, have driven out the good and we end up with monsters like Donald Trump, Hakeem Jeffries, Mike Johnson, Chuck Schumer and MIA “Glitch” McConnell.

Update: Speaking of “Glitch”. Has anyone seen him? I’m thinking we need to put his mugshot on a milk carton.