THE POVERTY OF POLITICIANS
c 2013 Tristan Winter
I was thinking as we went to pay another passel of surtaxes and insanely high bills, leaving us -like most people here- with nothing for rent or food, about why the national governments are so determined to destroy their citizens these days. What is different now that has them seemingly set on flaying the natives down to their very bones?
The job of an elected politician used to be simple; They distributed money on behalf of the state. A politician entered office with large amounts of tax money already collected and then apportioned it back out -in principle to keep citizens alive, or to ensure their safety, or to improve their lives.
Subsequent revenues were guaranteed to arrive from taxes on the same individuals and businesses, which already made the post suitable for people of no wit or talent. Now the job has been inverted and politicians’ only purpose is to simply extract money from the citizens. Once collected, the money raised from the people as a treasury for the above-stated social purposes is in fact withheld.
Instead of being distributed for its original purposes, the public money is said to be urgently needed to sustain the ‘state,’ by which they mean ‘all of us.’ But this stark inversion of function automatically changes the definition of the state, as well as its constituents, who can no longer be ‘us,’ since the public’s lives are no longer assured by the protection money they continue nevertheless to pay.
Strangely exempted from the growing demands for money, and increasingly excepted from the flood of legal minutiae submersing the general public, are large organizations of business. These businesses have also become recipients of gargantuan amounts of money taken from the treasury established for the public good and legally delivered to them by the politicians -yet again in the name of the state. Curiously often, politicians all over the world have personal financial investments in these businesses, and, in more opera buffa nations, politicians regularly have in them their own miniature monopolies (the garbage industry being one common, and apt, example).
While the largest businesses silently continued to grow and devour lesser ones, the speculating banks participating in phantasmagorical financial inventions oversold to meet the demand they’d created, resulting in delirium tremens and bankruptcy in all but name. To this day, globally, the public has been forced to assume the debts of the banks and repay them. And what percentage of the deposits to bail out are illegal -strictly illegal- laundering of sundry mega-contraband operations? Repeatedly, cases are being discovered in which 100s of billions of dollars of drug and arms money and even terrorist accounts are laundered. And for which not one bank officer is imprisoned, thanks to the protection of the political Brahmins.
The quotidian effects of this are clear; In Europe, the destructive ‘austerity’ came first from suppurating American banks urgently transferring the weight of their loses to another bloc in an ongoing attempt to break up a counterbalancing currency -which happens to mean the EU itself. From shorting a big-bloc currency to stomping individual states and seizing their national resources was a logical aim. The Greeks now know this better than the rest of Europe, and they know that the great restorative of austerity will be a continued and exacerbated underfunding of the already deteriorated vital services and institutions to the extent that demands will be made to fix them by selling into private ownership or putting them under the regimes of efficiency experts from the abattoirs. The broad strategy always comes back to removing any and all ‘safety nets’ and immiserating everyone below the political class and their commercial kings. Hoping to resume capital expansion as per usual, the vision is a future of ever more immiseration, and a worldwide market of slaves ever more habituated to it, which will naturally establish starvation wages as the norm, no matter what business upswings occur. Here, as the initial experiments have begun to produce hard results -suicides, fascist gangs, ‘emergency’ government taxes cleverly attached directly to utility bills- the palaces of parliaments are, incredibly, still standing. No one has yet roasted them down, despite everyone knowing who roister therein.
So perhaps we need a new definition not only of ‘state,’ but also of the political system being driven by global businesses. We need a new assessment of Western capitalism, because it appears to consist of the collapse of representative democracy and possible metamorphosis into the current model of authoritarian capitalism of the East. The ideological premise that bringing free market capitalism to new or obdurate lands inevitably creates a democracy is absurd and has been proven rather to focus authoritarianism, even when the mummery is dazzlingly performed. Vaporous, murky or steely, this authoritarianism is essential to force societies to accept a wholly unnatural ecosystem.
If we could think, this is what we might call the no-information age. It is 2013 and people still believe in money. What was no more than another intangible system of enumeration is now a mandated commodity. Finding answers is like trying to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex, while questions are barrens of exuviates. Tools of global communication have become technological shackles to loop us in isolation. A passport is a pass to nowhere –it only legalizes who owns you.1 Speaking to international or even national press agencies is treason or espionage. And the democratic process is won by the prevention of votes.
From municipal to state to senate and all offices in between, politicians have indisputably become the purest parasitical caste. These people with the minds of traffic cones plonk themselves into their positions in need of easy pay, free meals, housing, health coverage and permanent pensions, regardless of how many days or hours they put in. Beyond the initial notion to win the campaign their money can buy, no mental ability is required or sought. Their position being won or simply appointed, and with nothing more than animus inside them, they then fit themselves into associations run like amateur corporatist-religious associations as emoji drones working for the promised rubber ladder -reveries fed by new media built for limitless self-promotion. They join with hooks baited for money-backed agendas and publicity-building ’causes,’ either upon declaring candidacy or while at loose ends once in office (à la Joe McCarthy). Winos, weevils and whore-chokers, they destroy lands -even moreso than architects- in the service of their superiors’ lust for immediate capital gain, their puny efforts going to ‘sponsoring’ their sponsors’ initiatives to cloak asset stripping, or building defensive fortifications for multinational companies who contribute no taxes to the nation. Thus the state is no longer a state, but is now comprised solely of the functionaries who connive to fund and protect supra-state capital.
In the myth of western civilization, law developed from the philosophical grounds of ethics. Present-day politicians test their ethics during their election campaigns, and their moral strength is measured by how steadfastly they deceive. Since most of these titans can neither read nor write, the bills they offer up for legislation are actually written by industry lobbyists and long-scheming corporations dressed up as ‘institutes.’ Once in a rare while, like lonesome children struck by a sudden urge to participate, the politicians themselves will clutter our lives with toys such as these real and current laws strewn around the world: In Italy, any corpse in a moving vehicle must have active health insurance -this is truly mafia-strength lobbying in action; In Switzerland it is illegal to recite poetry while skiing -surely proposed by some toothless tree hugger; And, in America, it is illegal for humans (of any gender) to have sex with a porcupine -this no doubt being the elucubration of a demoralized congressman.
Thusly the world has become overpopulated by laws beyond count, as attested to by experts who’ve tried, while the embryos of reasonable progress are aborted before the lawgivers allow them a breath. However, the real point is that the political chimera continues only when fed by money. Look beyond the politicians to their kings. I’ve said it all my life: money means nothing except to the monsters who use it. If all of us were to suddenly renounce it, those who have it would be left with millions of meaningless dollars. Their power gone…and we could do this overnight.
Present day Greece is already resorting to this quite natural development. Many areas have issued their own (very) regional coupons of exchange -basically printing their own currency. This might amaze most westerners when they realize it means removing one’s community from the state -and, since all currency has been defined as local-value coupons, this means taxes as well, which starves out the parasites in parliament. Still, strangely, everyone recoils when I suggest the abandonment of money and yells it ain’t possible, but even aside from what’s happening in Greece right now strong examples of its successful implementation can be found in both Weimar and post-World War Two Germany -i.e., in one of the most modernized countries, in recent times- amongst other examples.
Furthermore, countless other intermediate versions have been tried with salutary effect, and many are being tried today. Time Banks, for instance, have sprung up, in which hours of any labor, be it intellectual or manual or in-between, can be logged and then drawn upon for one’s needs (in an exchange of goods). Such a model is easy for doubters to understand, since it would even ensure that ‘pensioners’ received all they required, as they would have obvious and ‘banked’ proof of their fifty or so years labor contribution upon conversion to this model.
Paradoxically, it has always been the capitalists who do not understand capitalism. Despite the skittering wisdom of their wizards -and those who attempt to justify nominally socialist societies participating in capitalist economics- it is no system at all; it is a scramble of ad hoc tactics within directionless anarchy. Crashes come inevitably. Direction and development in reference to capitalism are hoaxes of history. Those who tried to analyze the engine, reassemble it or make its workings dependable turned out to be intrigued by hope not much less than others who peered at it with blind faith. Hegel, who aestheometrically always wrote around what he intended, indicated history was a spirit marching to freedom, but his freedom meant the ideal nation-state, viz. the Prussian state at that. Marx and Engels took his spirit and made it tangible, but it still wrestled them as the state in its various historical forms: in brutal conflicts feudalism was usurped by capitalism, which would cannibalize itself as monopoly capitalism, which would hopefully lead to socialism, which would tidy up as communism and only then could the state “wither away.” Thus far we’re stuck in the cannibalization stage.
By sheer might and the advantages of issuing preferred reserve currencies, the First World became intoxicated by insatiability, and, with the pieties of ‘democracy’ as their divine rites, they forced every economic model to become dependent on growth -growth that was conceived of as a perpetual motion machine. But such growth needed to engage the whole world (at least), and became unsustainable after barely 30 years. With the necessary consumers already sweating desperation at the impossibility of this dogma, the postwar economy turned to creating demand (advertising, new car per year, now pocket technology), and demanding it was, not to mention soi-disant. By the 1980s magical derivatives and ever newer financial flash-papers were becoming a greater percent of economies than material goods, and banks continued depositor-based pretenses when centralized banks could just digitally manifest sums, but where then was the consequent hyperinflation we’d all been sternly warned about? Because regular consumers were oversaturated and underpaid (the average American’s real purchasing power has not increased in 40 years), hyperinflation was edged out into the asset-class trade, from real estate to top-tier education to luxury goods like yachts and planes, because the markets below that simply could not afford it!
Traditional thinking would say that the working and middle classes are still necessary to capitalism as consumers, yet what has been happening in the southern European states is a clearly planned, brutal scrubbing out of the middle classes. The profits from consumer goods are negligible now. The real profits are in the financial markets themselves, and that has occasioned a devaluation of extraneous matériel like national citizens 2. Actual products that used to be amenities of joy, convenience and a gradual but implied improved life are now tawdry confections. The consumer goods marketed at this point are chiefly distractions to ward off any serious or social thought. People have become almost entirely inattentive to what’s going on around them, and when one is so unaware of one’s surroundings, one is blithely led to where others lead them -which appears to be the purpose behind the mindlessness intrinsic in the bling that is still produced.
But it is the political class that is no longer necessary. The concept of politicians in a centralized government is obsolete. Useless. One doesn’t need to harness a horse to the front of one’s car –it will only impede progress and shit on the means of locomotion. National governments serve no purpose any more except to facilitate the mechanisms of supranational capital, in exchange for which the political class gets a rake-off and the taxes. These include everyone from the former East Bloc to present-day Asia, where the former or current ruling Party is the largest for-profit corporation –a model not so distinct from their much-derided brethren in the southern hemisphere; A fully functional framework wherein the military and the political class openly own consumer products from soft drinks to household appliances. Since the ostensibly revolutionary organization was already in place, any twitch or leap to capitalism brought with it the existing cronyism and corruption, and the assignment of monopolies took a few minutes. The division of spoils is absurdly used to promote a sense of proud nationalism, which will elevate a politician’s local appeal, but only as long as the allocations appear to be holding globalist monopolies at bay.
As historical development kept raising the totem from tribute and slavery to the most fundamental mercantilism, to the wealth of nations, to imperialism, to heights where the national economies were crunching under monopoly capitalism, the edifice finally tore through any protective ozone with the pinnacle of hypercapitalism. But the gravitational pull of feudalism keeps sucking the tower down. Having overtaken the confines of the state, hypercapitalism has created its own empires, fiefdoms, strategic alliances and extortion leagues, who all miraculously escaped the fate of their submerged homelands; we have returned to a feudalistic age. And politicians have returned to the roles of feudal tax concessionaires. In those –and these- days the collection of taxes was a privilege purchased by private contractors (the cost of an election campaign) who, in order not to exasperate the aristocracy to the point where they would turn against their heads of state, would concentrate their enforcement powers and efforts on the mass of lesser beings. Their position always turned out to be lucrative to themselves.
Of course, since Roman times, the word Senator has been synonymous with self-enrichment and mass sadism. Previous civilizations had their gourmandizing rulers, steered by viziers and misers, and the state-capitalist nations which called themselves Socialist and Communist had their nomenklatura, who simply transferred their class and structures to their countries’ new national –and nationalist—capitalist economies. Antonio Negri (in Empire) suggests that marxists must update their taxonomy to include information and service workers in their definition of the working classes, but I think that might be missing the point it raises; In most empires, scribes were slaves. A modicum of a working class is still needed, but in no more than a slave-class capacity; the middle classes no longer required in the capitalism of financial markets, are hence being eliminated and repositioned into that same remnant working class. The remnants of this remnant working class are suited only to dying off, and removing their work, money and survival-level services has been calculated to see that through. Politicians readily direct this culling by laws and proclamations corralling those in need of anything as enemies –as living rebukes to the glory of society- and as cultural garbage (when they are in fact garbage created by the culture), i.e., those physically excluded from the money-chain, into punitive tar pits. The reasoning barely developed from the workhouse to prison, and the benefits and administration of these social programs specifically run by men more suited to the running of prison boards.
But any token of exchange value is vulnerable to accumulation and manipulation, particularly one which defines accumulation for this person as depletion for that one. What should be no more valuable than any other system of counting has become a living, omnipotent, omnivorous deity. We must absolutely abandon all tokens of exchange, which have come to define culture and life itself.
Our dilemma is that no merely political revolution will achieve the needed scope of reorientation. Every attempt to convert the political structure with concessions to tokens of exchange (e.g., after a revolution in any one particular country, which then plans to engage economically with others) will result in War Measures, N.E.P., The Five Year Plan, The Great Leap Forward, etc., and, ultimately, Opening the Market.
In all time, there have only been perhaps a half-dozen societies which did not propagate an active hatred of the poor. And those were small civilizations which had no monetary basis.
Eventually something drastic will have to occur, whipping up a realignment of consciousness in general, and by this I mean a phenomenological awareness; man must assimilate the skill of advancing and simultaneously seeing how he operates before he can face any illusions. It was precisely the lack of this which brought us here.
The now complete confluence of despoliation, commerce and political salesmanship begets its own solution -the simplest cognitive test for the polity: If this is so great, why do you have to lie about it?
1 Just to remind our readers: from ancient empires through the late Romanov sprawl, passports were exceptional documents permitting subjects to move from one place to another within the realm, essentially explaining why one was temporarily unleashed from the land proprietor to whom he belonged. Without it one was AWOL. For the political caste it then became a safe-conduct letter used to carry out treatings, wheedlings and secret protocols. Only in the 19th century did the more civilized societies discard the grotesquerie of passports. With the Right to Self-Determination emerging from the imperial and colonial shrapnel of World War I, there came still more nationalisms, which brought the pride and paranoia that made passports required for all cross-border movement, which naturally led to the hopeless chambers of chains and walls which entrapped millions of civilians in the Second World War. Since that was the worst part, of course it was retained. Now, with global capital having reduced the nation-states and even geo-political blocs to functionaries of its cumulative empires, individual liberty is bartered along with trade tariffs, the workforce is trafficked, conquered, dragooned, or shut in or out of territories…and the man branded a citizen is slowly awakening from dreams of wonder only to find himself reeling backwards into feudal times.
2 In Italy -among other lesser nations of the European Union- because currency devaluation can no longer be used to maintain economic competitiveness, the road can only lead to more poverty unless external competitiveness is achieved by internal devaluation: looting pensions, public services, and wages. But America has no European Central Bank, so its internal devaluating is caused by supra-national capital demands made more or less for its own entertainment.