The Myth Of The Free Market, Part II: Steve Forbes Needs His Cranium Occupied

By Manifesto Joe

Recently, Steve Forbes joined Sarah Palin in saying something to the effect that the Occupy protesters need to go occupy Congress, not Wall Street. According to reports, the one-time Republican presidential candidate said that the protesters need to protest cumbersome regulations that he believes stymie business and seem intended to destroy the financial industry (Huh? Does he mean the one that was so unwisely deregulated during the late 1990s?)

Most of those who know Forbes' history, I'm sure, realize that this is yet another fool who, to paraphrase Jim Hightower's line about George H.W. Bush, was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

Forbes personifies all that is corrupt and twisted about the current system of rigged games, and the privileges that the system's 1% beneficiaries have the absurd nerve to deny that they have.

During his first campaign for president, which fortunately didn't go far, Forbes proposed a flat tax of 17%, and even suggested that the first $33,000 of a family income could go untaxed. That lured in an awful lot of uninquiring minds. I remember talking to a small-business owner who thought Forbes' idea was just wonderful -- until I explained to him what the catch was.

In the Forbes plan, income from dividends and interest, pensions, and capital gains would all be exempt from any and all federal taxation. For the most part, I just described what makes the difference between a very wealthy person and one of more modest means.

My friend hadn't heard that part, and had to back down and say, "You're right." I told him that a modified flat tax probably isn't such a bad idea, at least compared with the convoluted mess we have now. But the Forbes plan clearly wasn't the right one. I recall even Pat Buchanan, nobody's bleeding heart, commenting caustically that Forbes' plan sounded like something the boys in the boardroom would come up with.

What Forbes personifies is ironic -- he's the most dogmatic of "free-market" advocates, yet he represents all about the so-called free market that is, for all practical purposes for the vast majority of people, a joke and a hoax.

The U.S. is a plutocracy, not a democracy or even a republic

I've heard a lot of argument back and forth about whether the U.S. was constitutionally designed to be a "democracy" or a "republic." I'd have to say that it's supposed to have been some of both, or what could be described as a "democratic republic." It was obviously meant to be a "republic" inasmuch as our government is largely representative, divided and subject to certain checks and balances, as opposed to a "direct democracy." There are many democratic features in the system, but our founders seemed to clearly have the concept of the "tyranny of the majority" in mind.

But in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the country was largely composed of yeoman farmers and small-business people. Women didn't have the vote, and black people -- well, the proposition that they were even people was often a minority opinion among whites. In much of the nation then, they were property.

Much has changed since those days, some very much for the better, and some very much for the worse. Corporations have attained a supremacy over the economy (not just ours -- the world's) that even the visionaries of the 18th century might not have imagined.

Money is officially considered speech

Two rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court have pretty much established plutocracy as our obvious form of government. The first, Buckley v. Valeo, came in 1976. Here's a link to a Wikipedia article on this ruling.

The second ruling was in 2010, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Here's yet another link to a Wikipedia article on this ruling.

The general effect of these rulings, in tandem, was that in America, money is speech, and for all practical purposes, elections can be bought and sold, as though public offices were on the marketplace.

It has, of course, become quite clear to some of us that they are. Obama perhaps thought he could change things, but he ran up against that nasty and hard brick wall that is Corporate America. Wall Street more or less controls both major political parties, and its agents seem to have an awful lot of pull on Obama himself, whether he knows it or not.

Why does the myth of the "free market" persist?

It's very simple: People find this ideology to be very profitable in certain places and circumstances. Supply-side and "free market" theorists can be proved wrong again and again, but as long as some people find this ideology supremely profitable, they will embrace it, without reservations, and can find plenty of economists to rationalize it.

There's a great irony in all this. "Free market" thinkers point to the need for incentives, and the will to power and wealth, as defenses for their viewpoint. Where they go wrong is in thinking that, when you have a lot of people living by this philosophy, an "invisible hand" tends to move self-interest in a socially productive direction, toward competition and hard work that is supposed to ultimately benefit all who live in such a society.

I have felt that "invisible hand" many times. It always felt much more like a fist to me.

The inexorable lure of people toward a position of great wealth and social dominance lays waste to the very thing that is supposed to make this ideology work. Capitalism thrives on competition, yet every capitalist wants a monopoly. The practitioners of the system are generally opportunists who will do what is necessary to establish that arrangement, even if it involves breaking a few rules. And it's especially convenient if they can arrange things in such a way that it's all quite legal and accepted as good and standard business.

And so, Steve Forbes, and Sarah Palin -- the temptation to rig the game so that the supreme competitors can win, over and over, is far too great. That is where lobbyists come in, and where the ultimate codification in favor of the winners happens over and over. The politicians become the "enemy" only when they stubbornly fight in favor of the public interest. More often, they are the stooges and dupes who do the bidding of the fat-cat "winners" such that the public loses much more often than it wins.

The real road to serfdom

We in America have been on it, for over 30 years. Only recently has a genuine grassroots movement emerged in which those brutally marginalized by the system have the nerve to stand up on their hind legs and say no. They finally see that the financial system has been a game rigged in favor of the so-called winners, and against them. They've finally seen that the misbehavior of the financial industry, with its subprime mortgages and derivatives and such, amounts to a tiny minority of privileged people using other people's money in order to rake in more and more money for themselves.

Unfortunately, not enough Americans see this, just yet. When you've got an economy that has doubled in size in 30 years, and yet the wages and salaries of the middle and working classes have stagnated, the purpose of this game should be obvious. But the "winners" have a propaganda apparatus that is unprecedented. There's an entire "news" empire -- no need for me to identify it -- that keeps spooning this bilge out to millions every day.

The first and most important way to fight back is to reject the ideology. It doesn't involve having to embrace "communism," as "they" would have you believe. Just say NO -- stop heeding. Listen, but with a critical mind, and a knowledge that the people who have profited most off this system for 30 years want to keep it going for at least 30 more. That's more than half the battle.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

'Occupy Wall Street' Protesters In Danger Of Becoming Dupes For The Republican Party

By Manifesto Joe

This isn't going to be a popular post among many on the "left," or what's left of it. Politics, for those who have studied the subject for a while, clearly emerges as the art of compromise. It's certainly necessary to have the activists outside on the streets, but perhaps even more important to have those nasty insiders who actually make the "sausage" laws that we have to live with for generations.

I'm happy in one sense to see lots of people on the streets in the "Occupy Wall Street" protest movement. It's high time that a lot of Americans understood that the system has long been rigged against them. Not that this is anything new -- it's just gotten worse over the past 30 or so years.

A sad thing that I'm seeing in this movement is the Mainstream Media spin on it, and how many people in the rank and file of it are playing into its hands. It's being depicted as a protest against "bad economic conditions" rather than against the fundamentals of a capitalist system that has reverted to its primitive and brutal roots, with few mitigating forces to shield ordinary people from its ill effects.

One laid-off worker in New York was interviewed by the MSM, and he said that he saw no real difference between Bush and Obama. The middle class in America, he "reasoned," is actually worse off after nearly 3 years of Obama than it was after 8 years of Il Doofus.

I would have to say to such a person that he was missing the salient point. If a Bush surrogate had been elected president instead of Obama, such people would INDEED be able to see the difference, quite starkly. Obama clearly hasn't been everything that the remaining progressives in America might have wanted. But they fail to see that the Il Doofus "kleptocracy" was given an almost totally free hand for nearly seven years before the meltdown got fully under way, and that Obama's policies, while not all we wanted, have served to keep things from getting much worse than they might have been.

I'm one person who was very unhappy and railing against the "kleptocracy" that we were seeing all through the '80s during the Reagan years, but I didn't notice many people raising any cain back then. It was, in fact, hard to get anyone to even listen to the alternative viewpoint. Now, we have political neophytes taking to the streets and railing against things that have been happening for decades, not just for a few years. Come to the party, folks. Some of us were telling you all this shit back in the days when you were dutifully casting your first votes for Republicans.

Again, Obama hasn't been all I would have liked, but in the current climate, it's unlikely that anyone electable could have been. He was forced to work with a Congress that wouldn't give him what he wanted. In November 2008, we elected a president, not a dictator. As an example, the public option narrowly passed in a heavily Democratic House of Representatives. In the Senate, it had a majority, but fell short of the 60-vote "supermajority" that our system requires to enact damn near anything. DINOs like Ben Nelson and "independents" like Joe Lieberman wouldn't put it over. For politically savvy people, this wasn't a surprise. Our system is awash in corporate money, and people like that know that they can't stay in office without that largess.

So, the public option fell short. And then, what was the reaction of the voters? Over 30% of the people who voted for Obama in 2008 didn't show up at the polls in 2010. The Republicans, fueled by the faux populism of the Tea Party and Koch brothers' money, won the House back in a near landslide. People like me told you what was going to happen after that. And you were surprised?

Get real, folks. Some of us out here were fighting this battle even before some of you were born. And it's been damned thankless.

Don't let the MSM distort this into something else. Even Newt Gingrich is trying to make this out into some faux right-wing populist BS. Don't let it happen!

Obama isn't what I wanted, and probably even less what you wanted. Would you prefer Rick Perry, who calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme? Or Mitt Romney, who wants to increase the military budget and add 100,000 troops to our fighting force, and yet still presumes to balance the federal budget?

Well, it's looking more and more like you're going to get one of those right-wing demagogues. Then perhaps you will see, the hard way, what the difference is between a hard-right-wing fool and a centrist compromiser. I'll take the latter, thank you.

Compromise is hard. Dealing with moronic ideologues is harder. You're about to find that out.

I'm reminded of lines from The Second Coming, a poem by William Butler Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Don't let it happen, protesters. Another presidency like that of Il Doofus could really, really do this country in.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.