DJ, in comments here, refers to a TruthOut article
Someone forwarded me this link: American Kleptocracy: How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft. It suggests that the fascism/socialism hysteria are red herrings to keep us busy while corporations loot the treasury. Funny, I said the same thing a few weeks back. And kleptocracy is a word often used on Polizeros. But no one I’ve read has put it as clearly as this.
I am so ready to hear the “pop” (of people’s heads coming out of an orifice) as we realize that the tea partiers and the progressives are not enemies. Both have been played, and the real enemy lives without a pulse
From the TruthOut article
Consider this: America is not now, nor has it often been, a hotbed of political radicalism. We have no substantial socialist or workers’ party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the corporate-friendly “Democrat” party here.) We have no substantial fascist party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the cartoonish “tea partiers” here; these predominantly white, graying, and fairly affluent Americans seem most worried that the jackbooted thugs will be coming for them.)
What drives America today is, in fact, business — just as was true in the days of Calvin Coolidge. But it’s not the fair-minded “free enterprise” system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines for American history textbooks; rather, it’s a rigged system of crony capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy.
That’s why I’m a populist. The real enemies are the criminals at the top looting the system. It’s called control fraud and it”s quite deliberate.
William Black, an expert in control fraud
As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds.When the person that controls a seemingly legitimate business or government agency uses it as a “weapon” to defraud we categorize it as a “control fraud”. Financial control frauds’ “weapon of choice” is accounting. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime — combined. Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a “criminogenic environment”
A “crimeogenic environment” is precisely what we have now, with our compliant, quite possibly corrupt regulatory system that works (not against) high level executives who plunder their own corporations and others as well. I’ll believe our government is serious about cleaning up the corruption when they start issuing criminal indictments, not just civil actions.