We bitch a lot about how we have arrived in this precarious position in a nation once considered th emost powerful on our wobbly Globe. Things have been teetering with increasing motion of late, and we thought it might be useful to do a quick iteration of the steps that have brought us to a time when our Government- the one most of us served- is not our servant, but an active opponent.
Most of our discourse starts with an assertion that something untoward has occurred in the miasma of our Domestic Affairs. Accordingly, let’s get that part out of the way, as we do with the official Disclaimers section of the Daily that keeps us safe from legal ploys: “They want it this way.”
That is two words longer than the old explanation, which went something like ‘Follow the money.”
There is wisdom in old words, and not much more complex than that. Many- if not most- of the ways to quickly and easily pile up money rely on practices that could be considered as “unfair.” By that we mean conduct that most people- be they Kings or in Congress- have codified as “illegal.”
That is a mutable concept, of course, and only limited to a generation’s ability to scheme their way around the laws of their parents adopted to prevent what they desire, Easy money..
See? Our generation’s version of that- which will become illegal once our opponents in Government connect the dots for our Grandchildren’s generation- are things called “Non-Governmental Organizations,” better known by their generic abbreviation of “NGOs.”
That term is deliberately non-threatening and naturally deceptive to ensure that they can continue across generations with plausible deniability. Remember when President Nixon shipped the jobs that once supported Detroit and Cleveland to Wuhan Province, China?
If you do not, that is the sort of timespan these machinations take to progress. We call our Midwest cities the “Rust Belt,” now, and a question about what the consequences of donating our industrial base to a bunch of Communists probably would not have been a winnable argument then. And one that we simply have to deal with as an unredeemable “fact of life.”
That sort of activity, had it been revealed as a plan in which a small number of people in China and the US made an enormous amount of money at the expense of hundreds of thousands of hourly workers who spend their hours here in America.
That is one of the larger schemes only coming to maturity now, but it has brought about an economic system never debated in our Government. Or anywhere else. In the media today there is a flurry of discussion about an extraordinary amount of taxpayer cash being shipped to Ukraine. The reason for the transfer is in consonance with good intentions to resist Russian depredations.
So far, so good, right? What is not discussed in the allocation of public funds is where they are going. The new form of government we serve has an unwritten form of constitution. The Ukraine money will, in large part, be allocated to the crisis of the moment. We are not supposed to let those go to waste, and a significant chunk of the money (the unwritten Article 2) is going to wind up as donations from several unaccountable Ukrainian entities to the people who authorized the transfer of the cash in the first place.
In the case of Ukraine, this has now been going on for most of a new generation. It now has traditions and practices that will have to be made illegal in order for the system to adapt a new legal means to accomplish what was not.
You can see how this system has grown over time. It is now an alternate form of governance in which the people who pay the bills are never presented with them, only debited for the full amount. Please don’t take this as a castigation of fine organizations like The Red Cross or Purple Heart. But the path of donations- and appropriations- that permit their good works has also evolved to a vast system of interlocking organizations contributing to other organizations and individuals. And hence our Non-Government of Organizations.
To succeed, the overlap and duplicity of functions that conceals the destination of public funds is inefficient. But the terms “efficiency” and “good” do not appear in the unwritten rules. The only ones who actually understand the process are the ones it is designed to enrich. The rest of us- the ones who pay the bills- are not in the decision loop.
So, following this stream of cash helps reveal how we got to a system that is wildly expensive, dreadfully complex, and based on a foundation of falsehood. It started with decent expectations to overcome the natural selfish inclinations of our successful species. Over the generations, the system has created an inefficient but lucrative larder for those who not only follow the money, but put it in their pockets.
We stopped putting much confidence in numbers provided by the Government some time ago, since now virtually all official activities are devoted now to sustaining the system as it actually exists. Anything else would be like, illegal, you know?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com