The Monsters Conquest

The monstrous amounts of money being spent on this election--dwarfing even the many millions that here in CA the two superwealthy candidates have lavished on their campaigns--comes secretly from corporations that--at least at this point--would not pour millions into purveying simplistic lies on behalf of candidates whose strings they expect to pull, unless they could do it in secret. Which for the first election in recent history, they can. We may never know to what extent the expected outcome of the 2010 has been bought by this secret money, but we can sure guess.

Who are these people? The kind of people (or, as the sign at yesterday's Washington rally points out, legally "corporations are people too") that deny the Climate Crisis for the same cynical reason they denied that smoking kills (often employing the same tactics and p.r. firms to do so), that continue to squeeze out the American middle class and yet convince enough members of it that it's the fault of blacks and browns and the federal government, that cynically take the resources of the country for free while running candidates against these programs, that demand their own taxes be cut so their billions can become more billions.

It's all got a living metaphor in this Halloween horror story, a book called The Monster by Michael W. Hudson (Times Books.) The apparent conventional wisdom about the sub-prime mortgage crisis that plunged the U.S. into a near Depression is that it was banks giving in to the bad choices made by people who really had no business wanting those loans. In other words: shame the victims.

The reality Michael Hudson exposes is very different: a morally corrupt and systematic campaign of predation, with no conscience and an excess of greed, by a sociopathic financial system--not at the fringes but in its vital centers. The victims are most often lied to and subjected to relentless psychological warfare, the records falsified and legal obligations of the lenders are circumvented. That the book begins with a primitive act of forgery is the signature of what goes on for the rest of its pages.

It is this streak within American business, politics and American life that is being empowered now. That is empowering itself through the cynical and ruthless manipulation of the unfortunately willing, as well as the helpless. We are watching our monsters become bigger and more powerful. This is a really scary Halloween.