Thursday 17 November 2011

How Many Clintons Does It Take To Screw An Intern?

Jean Baudrillard: "If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organiser of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction."

Prior to the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, La Clinton, in a strident manner, warned China of the dangers of state capitalism.
As The Economist stated: "A Congressional report released on October 26th railed against the unfair advantages enjoyed by state-owned firms and lamented that China is giving them 'a more prominent role...'"
To further market their brand, Roselyn Hsueh in a recent book "China's Regulatory State" claims the Chinese government obstructs market forces in several key sectors of the economy.

And no doubt it does.
But who doesn't?

As The Economist continued: "...state firms must pursue the state's aims, which include many things beside making profits."

But we should be careful in our analogies.
Although both China and the US are state-based economic systems, there is one monumental difference.
In China the state runs the system whereas in the US the system runs the state.

Jeffrey Sachs: "On many days it seems that the only difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that Big Oil owns the Republicans while Wall Street owns the Democrats." As The Economist again pointed out, "[Sachs] is particularly scathing of the 'revolving door' between Mr Obama's administration and Wall Street."

But it isn't just Big Oil and Big Markets that exert control, the arms industry, Boeing, military R&D, Halliburton, Big Pharma etc etc etc all control the state either directly or by extensive lobbying.
And then there are the Private Equity houses like the Carlyle Group who co-opt past and serving presidents onto their boards that they might better match the strategies of business and state.

Meanwhile two European countries have had their governments selected by the European Central Bank as opposed to their voters - a structure which we are expected to believe is a democratic one - while a democratic protest by Occupy Wall Street against all this charadery is violently broken up and dispersed by police as it was not apparently democratic!

Baudrillard: "Monopoly structures (and any state is a monopoly, since it claims a monopoly in the political and social spheres) cannot but secrete a para-political society, a mafia of some sort, to control this form of generalised corruption. It is pure hypocrisy on behalf of the political authorities to fight this mafia since it is an emanation of those authorities themselves."

Excellent.

In China, the state runs the mafia...
... while in the US of A, the mafia runs the state.
And in Europe, bankers run the peripheral states in order to stop the mafias from running them...
... while bankers run the financial centres that run the primary states on behalf of the mafia.

And that, girls and boys, is Democracy!!!