Image credit: NBC News. This post was first published on my new Substack platform, Illusions Transformed.
The idea that economic growth is the road to progress is so ingrained in the minds of we ‘moderns’ that the growing disconnect between capital accumulation and human wellbeing is hardly noticed. Yes, we know about poverty, but the pitch of my Econ 101 teacher in 1964 still sticks: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
That of course, is a weak metaphor that attempts to make increased profits and wealth for the now infamous “One Percent of the one percent,” as convincing as the “trickle down” theory of the distribution of wealth and income, which has been debunked by the evidence repeatedly over decades of economic experience. Yet, propaganda and censorship keep them alive. They may not follow the science, but most folks know that something is very wrong. The Trump-Musk coup is taking censorship to the extreme, stifling all manner of government information sources.
Social Illusions and the Facts of Modern Life
‘It’s the distribution, stupid!’ The classic quip about what is important in elections, by James Carville in 1992—“It’s the economy, stupid.”—reflected the insight that for most people, the state of the economy is a vital part of their lives and is therefore expressed in how they vote. But as is shown by the many times voting was not a direct product of the GDP or the growth of ‘value’ on the stock market, voting resulted from how people believed the economy affected their own wellbeing, much more than aggregate inflation or employment figures.
As much as anything, people vote on the basis of their perception of how an incumbent’s economic policies have affected their wellbeing, or how the other candidate’s promises resonate with their economic fears and hopes. Unfortunately, such perceptions are more often than not, a reflection of their receptiveness to propaganda rather than grounded in either personal experience or economic data.
First, economic conditions typically reflect policies initiated several years before their results are seen. For example, Joe Biden’s economic policies were blamed for economic conditions that occurred before he took office—the COVID-19 pandemic—instead of reflecting the much improved economy that existed as he left office. Whatever other faults we may see in him, Biden took charge and acted to minimize the damage COVID caused and via the Inflation Reduction Act put money in the pockets of many citizens who had lost their sources of income as supply chains dried up and so many businesses were closed.
By clever exploitation of widespread pain and resentment, Trump and his followers effectively blamed it all on the politician who did the most to compensate for the pain and disruption caused by the pandemic. His infrastructure legislation created jobs, and his other disbursements helped many through the period when they lost their regular income. It took most of his term in office before the effects of those policies—reduced inflation rate and near full employment—were seen in the economic numbers. But the damage had been done. Even though fuel and food inflation abated, prices were still very high, and increased wages were not enough to compensate for the inflation that occurred before the economic recovery. Prices were still higher and wages only moved up slightly.
Opportunity and Destabilization
One of the core ‘features’ of great wealth—a phenomenon that is quite explicitly ignored or denied by mainstream economists and the power elite’s propagandists as well—is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is to gain more wealth. It is a self-amplifying feedback loop, There are several reasons for this.
First, the simple logic of power is that power enables action, and it enables whatever action the powerful may choose to initiate. It seems that a very large proportion of billionaires, for example, are actually power/money addicts. No matter how much they have, it is not enough. So, that is the focus of their actions. Because of their wealth and power—and their addiction—they have far more resources to put to work making more money and influencing politics than anyone else.
Second, some research has indicated that the higher positions in executive and political hierarchies are occupied by far more sociopaths and narcissists than at any lower levels in the hierarchy. Seeking power and wealth becomes a habit, then an addiction, as its achievement only brings on more desire for more—it is financial Fentanyl. This results in some very powerful people gaining far more money and power than one can possibly imagine are earned by hard work and smart business practices. Why does that bring Elon Musk to mind?
Third, the first and second ways that the wealthy have more power to make more money and achieve more political power, result in an exponential power curve that is self-amplifying. In its geometric form it is no different than how the effects of the heating of the earth include the creation of additional processes that further heat the Earth. Some of those processes become self-amplifying.
The melting of Arctic ice due to atmospheric heating alters the albedo effect. Once the surface sheet of ice melts, the sunshine hits a dark body of water instead of white ice, and more heat is absorbed instead of being reflected back out into space. Because there are several such ‘positive feedback loops,’ such as the recently discovered acceleration of ‘organic sources’ of more methane release into the atmosphere caused by melting tundra and permafrost, further heating the atmosphere, which further melts the tundra/permafrost releasing more methane, in an accelerating feedback loop amplifying the process even more. The implications are many and dangerous.
The Systemic Seeds of Oppression
The temptation to “blame the rich” for the increasingly untenable mal-distribution of income and wealth is strong, especially among those whose ideology leans left. And, of course, n some cases, such blame is entirely justified. One might even ask why the richest of the super-rich seem to be the most ruthless and seem to have no compassion or empath for the ‘least among us.’ Well, it seems in the economic game, especially when unfettered by any rules of civil conduct, the most ruthless wins the contest for power more often than not.
From a systems maintenance and stability perspective, you don’t have to ‘blame’ the rich in order to feel justified in taxing them at least a greater percentage than Warren Buffett’s secretary pays. In the 1950s, the progressive income tax helped maintain a stable flow of money through the entire economy. In the decades since, the influence of the rich and powerful over government has made multi-billionaires out of millionaires by increasing the national debt.
So, we see the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos’s of this world and we either admire them because in our greed we identify with them, or we are repulsed by their personal perversions, greed, and crass lack of caring or compassion of any kind for anyone. However, while those responses make perfect sense, personal greed does not tell the whole story.
I have speculated when talking among friends and colleagues about this dilemma of growing extreme political and economic hierarchy, that there are probably many members of corporate boards of directors who would, if they thought that they could, would make some decisions that at least would consider their impact on the public interest and the wellbeing of larger populations. However, because so many corporate decisions are wildly antipathetic to the wellbeing of ordinary people that we must consider that something else is going on.
Well, several things are involved in corporate and even government decisions being counter to the public interest. First, corporate leaders are tasked with serving the interests of the shareholders first, which is sometimes subordinated to the interests of the top executives. That means maximize profits and the power of the organization—ie., the stock price, corporate growth, and extreme executive salaries and bonuses. Second, the culture of modernity reinforces that amoral and exploitative stance. Third, government, which is supposed to provide for the general welfare of the people, is more and more under the control of the corporations via buying candidates, gerrymandering, and by corporations placing their executive level employees in government regulatory agencies, as defenses against “over-regulation”—having to comply with limitations to protect the public from toxic chemicals, financial fraud, product liability, and other threats to human wellbeing.
On top of all that, we now have to contend with an outright attack on all federal institutions in the autocratic attempt of the MAGA extreme authoritarians to dismantle all ongoing operations of the government and freeze Treasury disbursements in order to initiate autocratic control and neutralize any and all legal requirements for following the laws and constitution, in part by firing any employee who insists on doing their job as mandated by congressional legislation. If this is not a coup, I don’t know what is.
So, what I have called ‘the corporate state,’ Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarian,” not to be confused by the “deep state,” the term used in the autocratic attempt by the MAGA and associated extremists to define as ‘the enemy of the people.’ Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE staff of wealthy executives, far-right ideologues and young engineers are simply a private gang attempting to dismantle all lines of government authority. They are trying to replace skilled career federal employees—civil servants—with techno-fascist loyalists in order to turn the ‘American experiment into democracy’ into a straight up fascist dictatorship.
The result of all this is, of course, the further degradation of not only the human and political rights as well as the wellbeing of the people, but the further concentration of wealth, power, and income in the hands of the mega-wealthy financiers and corporations—the oligarchy—with less and less of the fruits of the nation’s economy going to the people. Given the context of extreme destabilization of the entire Earth System by this blind acceleration of the end of the industrial age, it seems that the only plausible ‘solution’ to this extreme human predicament is the mobilization of a new social-ecological populism, which could muster the power of numbers to ‘drive the rascals out,’ and begin to form the only plausible alternative: an ecological civilization.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 