In a NY Times article, Former Fed Chair, Paul Volcker, has echoed essentially the same concerns and observations I’ve discussed here.
As I said a while ago, there’s nothing wrong with respecting the military, but when people in a democracy have more faith in the military than they do in their own ability to produce quality legislators, that’s really, really dangerous. Such a democracy is unsustainable. The temptation for the plutocratically-inclined government to politicize the military and to use it as a hammer to reinforce its rule becomes greater and greater over time.
Exactly - glad someone of his stature gets it, and is talking about it openly. But unfortunately most people under the age of 50 don’t even know who Paul Volcker is, or care.
But back to his point, the money interests are being used to corrode whatever faith in government is left. The plutocrats want to corrupt government so that people become convinced that the government can’t solve their problems, so that ordinary middle class people conclude that it’s a waste of time to regard regulation and distribution of public services as having any sort of personal benefit. That’s not the end of it or the worst of it, though: eventually, the government, under the control of plutocrats, transitions from plutocracy to kleptocracy. The government, the public tax revenue, becomes another income stream; it becomes a publicly-funded piggy bank that the plutocrats (kleptocrats) can raid, further engendering a generation of suspicion and doubt about the government’s ability to do good for the people who fund it through taxation. Initially, the theft of public money is somewhat subtle, but it becomes more obvious and more brazen. As people begin to notice and question and protest, the kleptocrats realize that some intimidation tactics are required. The first thing they will do is to attack your right to criticize and protest.
So much this. ^
And what’s more, they don’t intend to pay taxes - because taxes are for little people. They’re going to continue rigging the economy so that they take the lion’s share of the wealth during times of economic expansion, and the rest of us bear the brunt of the losses during economic contraction. They will get rich off of explosive growth in the stock market. They’ll cash out. They’ll buy up property that you rent and they’ll become your landlords. But they’ll make you pay for their losses through your taxes.
Our society has talked a lot about the failures of education at the K-12 level, but the reality is that higher ed is turning out people who are increasingly ignorant and unschooled in critical areas. Americans enter public service - coming from our elite schools in some cases - unable to govern. The focus over the past 20-30 years has gone from knowing how to perform in a bureaucracy to learning more about how to become influential, how to become a policy wonk and find a job at some think tank and spread influence. As is so often the case, higher ed figures out how their graduates can become ‘successful’ alumni and steer them in the direction of job hunting and career building, guiding their graduates to find ways to fit into the economy of our current political system, even if that system is utterly failing at safeguarding democracy for future generations.