I was listening to Chris Hedges being interviewed by Bob McChesney this weekend (his Sunday, December 19, broadcast), and am not quoting him precisely but have his meaning – he said that the reason that Noam Chomsky is so despised by liberals is that Chomsky spends so much time exposing liberals.

That is one of the truly hard concepts to grasp about our nation – that our “liberals” are as much spear-chuckers for power as our right wingers. Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives are the same animal. They are totally in the game.

Thomas Friedman is a liberal, as are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They are somewhat reserved about certain actions – for instance, they might think that the Iraq invasion was not well carried out, tactically. But they would never, ever go so far as to say that the Bush people had dishonest motives.

That would be offensive, and would quickly move them to the margins with those who are true dissenters. Like Chomsky, they would never be heard from again.

This is why, when Bill Clinton took office, he closed the door on the crimes of Bush I, and why Obama has slammed closed the door on those of Bush II. As “liberals,” they represent the furthest we are allowed to go to the “left” in dissent. Those who go further are automatically marginalized.

Those Democrats who hoped that Obama would haul up Bush Administration officials for torture, preventive and aggressive war, and other crimes, should have adjusted their perceptions to instead understand the American liberal.

We need to relieve the term “liberal” of all its baggage. Liberals are not concerned about mainstream social issues, nor are they in any sense pacifists. They have no problems with the use and abuse of American power, whether it is used to attack innocent people and countries or be used righteously. It is safe to say that most American liberals are pro-legal abortion, but beyond that it is not safe to say that they differ much at all with conservatives or right wingers.

I chuckle when I hear someone call an extreme right-wing “liberal,” like, say, Joe Lieberman, a “moderate.” Perceptually, that’s the only way we can describe him that makes any sense within our two-party structure. He’s not in the Republican Party, but he acts as if he is. Because, there is only one ideology.

To say that our liberals and right wingers are all the same overstates the case. But not by much. From this vantage point, then, it should come as no surprise that Barack Obama won the 2008 election because he had more money to spend that John McCain, and that this was due to a shift on Wall Street from right wing Republicans to “liberal” Democrats. They have no problem backing either party. (Obama’s largest bundle of corporate contributions came from Goldman Sachs.)

This is Carl Oglesby speaking at the SANE march on Washington DC in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War:

“Think of all the men who now engineer that war, those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.”

It was not any different in 1965. It has not changed since then. We are not a different country now than we were then. Journalism has not changed. American foreign policy has not changed, and does not change when we switch from one party in power to the other. And this gives the lie to the ultimate fraud: We are not comprised of two major parties.

There is only one. And it has been that way throughout the entire post-war era.

We are past the portal now and well into our new world, which isn’t new at all. Corporatism goes by many names, the oldest being feudalism. It’s a natural regression to the mean when we cease to be constantly vigilant: a few who have accumulated wealth and power presume to know that they “earned” it, and for that reason believe themselves to have superior wisdom. From there it’s a quick succession from superior wisdom to superior essence, from a big house to a big house on a hill to a gated community.

From that insulated viewpoint, all of us become rabble, outsiders, sometimes glimpsed at through the window of a limousine. Somehow their eggs are on their plate in the morning, somehow their garbage is carted off, but in the meantime they are going on about the important business of amassing more wealth. In their lexicon, which their pet economists are trained to repeat, it is called “creating jobs.”

In fact, didn’t I just hear this from Obama? Didn’t he even say that economists had told him if he kept the Bush tax cuts in place, that our employment picture would improve? (AP restricted story: Yes, he did! He said that “Economists predict higher job growth in 2011-2012 if tax deal passed!” Yes, we can!)*

The best expression of how unregulated and untaxed economies function is the board game MONOPOLY. There are strategies at play that can help, but the important life lesson to take from the game is this: once a player reaches a certain critical mass of wealth, it takes on a life of it own, and it builds on itself. And the “economic driver” on the board and in real life and is a set of dice.

In corporate world, post Citizens United, we are all of us going to be second class citizens. As I awoke this Christmas morning, as my mind began to focus, I found myself wondering if us white folks are going to be very good in the roles we used to assign to non-whites.

Will we accept our Wal-Mart jobs with good grace? Will we accept that most medical conditions just can’t be dealt with on Wal-Mart income? Will we easily give up this high-falutin’ notion that education will improve our lot in life?

Will we too begin to drop out of high school in droves? Will we join the underground economy – the drugs and crystal meth one? That too is mere capitalism, free enterprise of a sort that lands one in a different type of gated community.

My suspicion is that us white folk will not be very good at being black folk, or Hispanics or whatever other color we look down upon. I fear we will turn hateful, and having been taught that there are none to hate above us, will turn our hatred outward and downward.

This is the function of the Tea Parties. They are a product of the public relations industry – no doubt the idea sprung up in a Hill and Knowlton office in DC, or some other such place. They are a political device, but also serve for misdirection. They take our discontent, which is real and reasonable, and direct it away from the real cause of the problems.

Welcome to corporate world. Merry Christmas to all.
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*[Note to self: Economists don’t know much about the past or the present (what’s a cause and what’s an effect and all of that), and so restrict themselves to the future.]

I am regularly visited here by two ghosts – people unknown to me who present themselves as skillful and successful entrepreneurs. Each assumes suggestive names and persona that mask their real identities. (This leaves open room for speculation that such success would not require anonymous blog identities to advertise their success. But leave that aside – even if they are fictional characters, they present a great opportunity to throw ideas around, and are fun to boot.)

(One of the two is supposedly off in the Southwest now doing reach-arounds for millionaire investors, and so isn’t able to access the Internet, which is not available in that part of the country, and which millionaires know nothing about anyway. But I’ll leave this hanging for his return.)

Here’s what troubles me – each of these literary devices posing as humans preaches the infallibility of market mechanisms in guiding us towards proper outcomes in all areas of life. Government is a negative force, and where governments and markets operate together, the former always screws things up, while the latter picks up the pieces. Our long term survival depends on the elimination, or at least minimization, of government, so that markets can work their magic.

According to one of these Jungian dreamscapers, all of life is about economic transactions. Humans know of no other way of dealing with one another than to exchange value for value. Where we act without economic motivation, we inevitably end up in disastrous consequences. Further, any transaction that enriches one at the expense of another is theft. So the concepts of social insurance, or even private insurance, are forms of theft, as are, of course, taxes and transfer payments. Economic regulation is, even if seeming effective, redundant, as markets self-correct, so that even when regulation appears to have worked, it is just an illusion. Regulation, by definition, interferes with market efficiency.

Econ101 tells us that people acting for their own benefit inadvertently help all of us, so that selfishness is a virtue. We are free from any care or concern for our fellow humans, as by merely creating wealth, we are charitable. Government, which can only exist by expropriating wealth created by private individuals operating in markets, is by definition intrusive, overbearing, and even evil.

That’s my take on my two regular visitors. If I’ve put words in their mouths, I apologize.

I only have two questions:

1) When human transactions are reduced to an economic exchange, not everyone affected by that exchange has a say in the matter. As a thought experiment, place two people in a cold room with a wood-burning stove. One person has control of the wood supply, and so offers to sell the heat from burning the wood to the other. They agree, and one builds a fire, and both benefit from the heat and survive the winter. But the fire also produces smoke, which the owner of the wood conveniently vents into an adjoining room, where people choke and eventually die. They have no say in the exchange, as they are not part of the economic transaction. Is this not market failure?

2) We often don’t know the outcome of our economic transactions for years, sometimes decades. Yet we need to be paid in the present to survive. So, as another thought experiment, imagine bankers from a place called “Wall Street” create elaborate financial instruments, free of government oversight. Because these instruments appear to be immediately profitable, they pay themselves huge rewards for that profitability. Later, when the instruments prove defective (in fact, destructive and harmful), these same bankers refuse to repay their bonuses. Is that not market failure?

Just as a thought experiment, suppose that we changed the measuring period for profitability of economic transactions from one year to, say, twenty. Suppose that our retirements hinged on the long-term consequences of our current affairs. Add one more step – suppose that we measure profitability by including all outflows from transactions, whether the people affected are involved in the financial exchange or not.

Would the world be better, or worse off?

These two questions are fundamental. Obviously I have my opinions, and I’ll put them out there right now so there is no guessing. In my view, market economies and “free” markets are destructive of wealth, societies, positive human values, and in the end, the planet.