Republicans, "The Dark Side", and Terrorism

"Terrorists have seized control of Congress and are holding the US government hostage. The terrorists demand that the government pay them $2 trillion or they will force the government into financial meltdown using their secret weapon"

Sounds like a storyline from a bad Hollywood thriller, but in effect, the above situation, is happening now in the US Congress. The "terrorists" are called Republicans, and they are holding hostage the fate of the US economy.

As explained here the Republicans simply refuse to do business with the government if they do not agree to their demands. Due to the design of the American political system, it means that the US government can in effect be held hostage by the opposing party if they see fit.
As Michael Tomasky explains in the highlighted article, the US system of checks and balances wasn't designed to used for this purpose. The Founding Fathers developed a unique system to prevent tyranny on one hand and discourage anarchic decision-making on the other. While this had led to frustrations from time to time, it is hard to imagine that the political process could be so cynically subverted by one side in order to create inertia and paralysis in the government. But this is what the Republicans have been doing, and have created, as a result.

The paralysis and inertia is designed by a party that instinctively dislikes government, to make the government look ineffective and pointless.
Like minions of the Sith Lord Palpatine in "Star Wars", the Republicans wish to seek out and destroy all that is positive about government in America. To the Republicans, the Democrats, and Obama in particular (if you'll pardon the comparison!) are like the "Jedi", trying to defend the democratic and positive principles of The Republic against the schemes of "The Dark Side", who wish to destroy The Republic and replace it with something akin to an Empire Of Anarchy.

The "Empire Of Anarchy" that the Republicans support is never described as such: like the Sith Lord, they deviously justify their actions for the sake of saving The Republic. They claim that their actions are fighting for the principles that The Republic was founded upon: freedom and limited government. But whatever they might say, their plans create only freedom for the super-rich elite, and anarchy for everyone else.

Democracy, meanwhile, has been conveniently forgotten by these Republican financial terrorists. The majority of the population do not support their views; for the Republican extremists who have hijacked the party (and have done for at least the last twelve years), this is merely a further sign of the righteousness of their path. They are the chosen few who understand the "wider picture", supporting their superiority over the "unenlightened masses" with the idea that the Founding Fathers, too, were wary of the anarchic potential of "full democracy".
This Republican logic is also that found amongst all extremist ideologies - from the Fascist (and Bolshevik) contempt for the softness of "liberalism" (which contemporary Republicanism closely resembles), to the disregard for democracy and their casual attitude to the rule of law. The Constitution and rule of law that Republicans claim to worship is only adhered to when it is convenient, as we found during the tenure of George W. Bush.

What is all the more ironic is that Republicans' disregard for the concept of government is even supported by their own record in office over the past thirty years. Modern Republicanism's "Founding Father" is Ronald Reagan; prior to that, there was more of an agreement on most issues between the two US parties. Considered as a near-deity by Republicans, Reagan's tenure in office was one of gross financial irresponsibility, continued (for the most part) through the tenures of other Republican Presidents, George Bush senior and junior. Put it another way, Republican distrust for government therefore runs into self-hatred, as it was the Republicans who created the circumstances for the financial crisis in the first place. They hate government not only because the Democrats support it, but because they are so bad at it themselves.

It is the Republican neophytes (AKA "The Tea Party"), who are the most selective, disingenuous, and deceptive with these facts: they choose to deify Ronald Reagan and their philosophical inspiration, Ayn Rand, while simultaneously praising and crucifying them whenever the need arises.

In another sense, "The Tea Party" faction that has effectively hijacked the Republican Party, and held the US government hostage to its demands, is a group of nihilists: they seem to believe in very little, finding it hard to rationally explain their thinking, and resort to tactics of posturing to say only what they oppose. They are against government, against taxes, against abortion, gun control, and so on.
The things the are positive towards are very few: the freedom to make money and owning guns seem to be the main ones, which both naturally advantage those who are already rich and those who are suspicious of government and people in general.

The agenda of today's Republicans then is this: simply, to dismantle and frustrate the normal functioning of government, by any means necessary (within the law).

I wonder how much further Republicans would be prepared to go to reach their aims. They are already holding the government to ransom. And if that fails, what then? Does "the law" then become malleable, as it is for those who feel they are above it?

There does appear to be very little in moral terms, between today's Republicans and some terrorists.

The Conservatives' "Five Year Plan"

It's not often that you get to compare Conservatives to Communists, but the thing that David Cameron's Conservative government shares with Bolshevism is its love of the "Five Year Plan".
But theirs is no ordinary plan.

This theme of a "Five Year Plan" first became clear when the former key strategist, Steve Hilton, said that "Everything must have changed by 2015".
This coincides with my thoughts on my previous article "Boris Johnson for PM? I sense a cunning plan..." here, when I said that the key point about the "neo-liberal revolution" taking place at Number 10 was that by the time of the next election, the changes made by the government were meant to be practically irreversible, so it wouldn't matter who won the next election.

This is worth thinking about for a moment, because it explains some of the reckless thinking that the government has towards its own popularity. The key point is this: the Conservative government is privately indifferent to what happens after 2015 regarding who is in power, because if they succeed in their plan, by that point it won't matter who is in power. All that matters to them is that their agenda is completed by 2015, as explained here. The government is therefore behaving psychologically like a group of ideological "suicide terrorists" - making sure that they carry out their plan by 2015, come what may. Whatever happens after that is not important.

This fatalistic thinking strangely reminds me of another of my previous articles "From Gotham City to Gorky Park..." here, where I talked about the psychology of the Batman character "Bane" being similar to Lenin - both ideological warriors determined to carry out their plan, regardless of the consequences. "Bane" was determined to destroy Gotham City, even at the cost of his own life. The Conservatives in government in the UK seem to have developed a similar do-or-die mentality, a radicalism that is indifferent to democracy and the popular will.
The Conservatives' contempt for democracy is therefore plain to see - chillingly calculated, they are determined to revolutionise the UK as we know it, regardless of what the electorate might think of them. Indeed, they are so focussed on their goal that all that matters to them is completion of their goal, to ensure that nothing can unmake the "revolution" once it has been completed.

This anti-democratic radicalism, and their indifference to their own popularity, should be worrying at the very least. It is chilling to think that the Conservatives were voted into power only by a minority of the electorate, but were so determined to implement their revolution, their "Five Year Plan", that nothing else mattered - not respect for democracy, not respect for the the UK's future, not even their own popularity; nothing.

It is difficult to think of a contemporary political comparison to a government being run in this way. When put into this perspective of the "Five Year Plan", George Osborne's lack of concern at his own appallingly-construed Budget makes more sense. The same can said of Cameron's determination to ignore Osborne's incompetence, and vow to keep him in position till 2015. The same logic explains Cameron's lack of concern about the tit-for-tat with the LibDems over breaking of clauses in the Coalition Agreement, and the determination for the Coalition to endure until (or close to) 2015. When they know that they really have only five years to complete their goals, it makes them blind to criticism, and gives their radicalism an even greater sense of ruthless urgency.
This is because the wider plan is economic, social, and philosophical: other matters are trivial by comparison. The Coalition exists principally for their agreement over how to run the economy and redesign the social fabric of the UK, on which the LibDems are largely in agreement with the Conservatives over. As long as the core tenets of their Five-Year-Plan are adhered to and implemented, it doesn't matter what happens to them after 2015, because their "neo-liberal revolution" would have been achieved, regardless of whoever is power afterwards.

When they are not really that bothered about their own electoral prospects, what does that tell us about their attitude to government as an institution? Apart from the radicalism I mentioned that permeates their logic, the Conservatives by definition are not a "party of government" but a party against government. Echoing Ronald Reagan's mantra that "government isn't the solution to the problem; government is the problem", the Conservative plan is to replace public sector services by large-scale private sector companies wherever practically possible. These private sector behemoths (like G4S, Serco, and so on) then act as parasites on the public purse: feeding off government, government protecting the behemoths' financial solvency at all costs, while the behemoths get to keep any profits - allowing them to have their cake and eat it. This is the economics of fascism, as I've explained elsewhere.
The Conservatives are not that bothered about who governs after 2015 because they are not that interested in "government", only what they can help the private sector (and by extension, themselves) to get out of it. As the party of big business, their plan is to ensure that big business has the handle over the government of the UK, so that after 2015, the "government" has as little real power as possible. So, therefore, why would the Conservatives be bothered about being in charge of an effectively powerless institution, when the private sector oligarchy will be ones really in charge?
Besides, it would give the Conservatives the first call on all those plum jobs in the private sector "providers" that they had helped create...

This is the Conservative plan for 2015: the complete reshaping of the UK as we know it, so that by this point it is a paragon of "neo-liberal" virtue, a paradise for the financial sector and the corporate oligarchy, linked through patronage by the Conservatives themselves. Who cares who's in power after 2015, when the quiet  revolution that sustains those at the private sector hierarchy will have already been completed?

With the "neo-liberal revolution" achieved after completion of the Conservatives' "Five-Year Plan", democracy is irrelevant.

The Inside Job

Recently watched the documentary "The Inside Job", a chillingly effective and analytical look at the causes of the Financial Crisis. It is narrated by Matt Damon, who also acts as interviewer to those people of influence who were happy enough (or foolish enough) to want to be interviewed.

"The Inside Job" sets out in clear details the root causes for the Financial Crisis, and lays out in no uncertain terms essentially how amoral, all-powerful and corrupt the financial sector that controls the world's money truly is.
For those who think that to say "the banks and money men run everything" is a statement of a conspiracy-theorist, watching this film will show you how sadly correct much of that paranoia really is based on fact.

The Financial Crisis was not an accident. It was not inevitable.

It happened because thirty years ago the governments of the Anglo-Saxon world (Ronald Reagan in particular), threw away the rules that had protected the banking industry from carrying out the same amoral and reckless behaviour that had caused the Great Depression.
It happened because Ronald Reagan was a willing disciple to the views the the banking sector, who felt they had been constrained for too long by those same rules that had protected the economy from the irresponsibility of the banks.
In 1979, for example, the big banks of the USA (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs etc.) had a modest number of staff, on a modest wage. There was the example of one broker who actually had two jobs in order to make a suitable income for his wife and children. Due to the throwing out of the rules restricted the banks, ten years later that same broker would be a millionaire. Those banks now have a staff many times higher than they had thirty years ago.

But even that deregulation did not mean that banks could not be regulated in other ways. In the financial industry, there are what are called Ratings Agencies: these give values to the assets that banks have when trading. Attempts to regulate the banks in other ways during the Clinton administration fell on deaf ears, and by that point the banks had long had sufficient clout to arm-wrestle the Department of the Treasury to make it effectively a huge lobby for the banking sector.
The Ratings Agencies are a valuable tool to let other banks know how healthy the assets of other banks are. But by the start of the 21st century, banks were already paying bonuses to those employees in the Ratings Agencies who would give those banks the highest ratings. In other words, corruption and bribery.

These "bonuses" would soon come back to haunt the Ratings Agencies. Because by this point the ever expanding economy was being fuelled by speculation and a property bubble creating by those same all-powerful, un-regulated banks. Furthermore, due to the Ratings Agencies and deregulation, those banks could, by 2007, take out loans that were tens of times higher than the entire bank's actual value - in some cases, loans worth up to 30 times the bank's actual assets.

This massive overlending (called "leverage" in banker's jargon) was made possible by offering, for example, mortgages to those who weren't actually able to afford them. Because of the inherent risk of offering loans to such clients, the interest rates were higher. But the banks, blindly ignoring the obvious risks, saw only the high interest rates, so these types of "risky" but highly profitable loans because the norm in many cases.

The final thing to remember, piling risk upon risk, was that the banks were able to divide all these "risky" loans into one big bundle with other, safer, loans. This bundle was then divided into many segments, and each segment swapped with other investment banks for financial gain. The "reasoning" was that dividing up the "risky" loans with the safe loans, it would make it safer for everyone concerned. But if it came to a time when anyone wanted to know who held the "risky" loans, no-one would have any idea where they were. Perfect, eh?

So when the whole house of cards finally came crashing down in the autumn of 2008, all the major banks became effectively bankrupt due to their own recklessness and stupidity, as well as the immorality of the corrupt system of Ratings Agencies.

The goverments balied them out; they had to in order to prevent another Great Depression. The fact that the leading banks of the financial world, who were so all-powerful, could be so financially idiotic as to not understand that they had created a huge confidence trick on each other and the rest of the world, is breathtaking.

So you would think that the governments would see that deregulation doesn't work.

Some governments thought that; fewer of them actually did anything that would remotely prevent it from happening again.

The reason was simple: the leading governments of the world were getting their advice from the leading financial experts of the world. The leading financial experts were trained in the same theories that had created the mess; furthermore, many of them were bring paid by the same banks that had created the mess, to give their "advice" to the governments of the world.

The result is that the leading banks of the world, except for the brief period when they thought they would go bankrupt in September 2008, were not in favour of deregulation. And the problem wasn't just that the governments' advice was coming from academics who were already financially tied to those same banks.

The other problem was that, in the past thirty years since deregulation, the banks had not only become much bigger; they had also become far fewer in number. In other words, the banking sector was a kind of financial oligarchy. In the USA, there were effectively only four major banks in the country; others had either gone bankrupt or been bought out by others since 2008.
That was what created the term "Too Big To Fail". This helped the banks play on governments' fear of causing another, even deeper, crisis, and left the governments' mute in the face of the banks' demands for financial protection.

So what should have been a golden opportunity for goverment to right the wrongs of deregulation thirty years ago, turned into the banks' golden opportunity to cement their financial power over government. The banks did the crime; the government paid for the time. And now all government taxpayers are funding that "bail-out", through cuts to government services and tax rises. A bail-out, indeed: the biggest in history.

And what lesson have the banks learned from this disaster of their own making? That we can do no wrong. We are Gods.

I wonder what Ayn Rand would have thought of this.