The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed
By Charles Hugh Smith
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed.Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed.
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed. This
reality is being masked by the mainstream media, mouthpiece of the
ruling class, which is ceaselessly promoting two false narratives:
1. The "great divide" in American politics is between left and right, Democrat/Republican
2. The ruling Elite has delivered "prosperity" not just to the privileged few but to the unprivileged many they govern.
Both
of these assertions are false. The Great Divide in America is between
the ruling Elite and the governed that the Elite has stripmined. The
ruling Elite is privileged and protected, the governed are unprivileged
and unprotected. That's the divide that counts and the divide that is
finally becoming visible to the marginalized, unprivileged class of
debt-serfs.
The
"prosperity" of the 21st century has flowed solely to the ruling Elite
and its army of technocrat toadies, factotums, flunkies, apparatchiks
and apologists.The Elite's army of technocrats and its media
apologists have engineered and promoted an endless spew of ginned-up
phony statistics (the super-low unemployment rate, etc.) to create the
illusion of "growth" and "prosperity" that benefit everyone rather than
just the top 5%.
The
media is 100% committed to promoting these two false narratives because
the jig is up once the bottom 95% wake up to the reality that the
ruling Elite has been stripmining them for decades. As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the
code word for maximizing private gain by any means available, including
theft, fraud, embezzlement, political fixing, price-fixing, and so
on)--it is neofeudal,
meaning that it is structurally an updated version of Medieval
feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the
engines of wealth and governs the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to
pay student loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages and taxes--all of
which benefit the financiers and political grifters.
The
media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of
the century is between unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and
financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the privileged ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information (information asymmetry) and political influence.
The cold truth is the ruling Elite has shredded the social contract by skimming the income/wealth of the unprivileged. The
fake-"progressive" pandering apologists of the ruling Elite--Robert
Reich, Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian Cargo Cultists--turn a
blind eye to the suppression of dissent and the looting the bottom 95%
because they have cushy, protected positions as tenured faculty (or
equivalent).
They cheerlead for more state-funded bread and circuses for the marginalized rather than demand an end to exploitive privileges of the sort they themselves enjoy.
Consider just three of the unsustainably costly broken systems that enrich the privileged Elite by stripmining the unprivileged: healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare because
sickness is profitable, prevention is unprofitable), higher education
and Imperial over-reach (the National Security State and its partner the
privately owned Military-Industrial Complex).
While
the unprivileged and unprotected watch their healthcare premiums and
co-pays soar year after year, the CEOs of various sickcare cartels skim
off tens of millions of dollars annually in pay and stock options.
The
system works great if you get a $20 million paycheck. If you get a 30%
increase in monthly premiums for fewer actual healthcare services--the
system is broken.
If
you're skimming $250,000 as under-assistant dean to the provost for
student services (or equivalent) plus gold-plated benefits, higher
education is working great. If you're a student burdened with tens of
thousands of dollars in student loan debt who is receiving a
low-quality, essentially worthless "education" from poorly paid graduate
students ("adjuncts") and a handful of online courses that you could
get for free or for a low cost outside the university cartel--the system
is broken.
If
you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a
fat pension and lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the
next day by a private "defense" contractor--the famous revolving door
between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works
great. If you joined the Armed Forces to escape rural poverty and
served at the point of the spear somewhere in the Imperial Project--your
perspective may well be considerably different.
Unfortunately
for the ruling Elite and their army of engorged enablers and
apologists, they have already lost the consent of the governed. They
have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but
their phony facade of political legitimacy and "the rising tide raises
all boats" has cracked wide open, and the machinery of oppression,
looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn't being paid
to cover their eyes.
Brimming
with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media
cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed. The
disillusioned governed have not fully absorbed this epochal shift of the
tides yet, either. They are aware of their own disillusionment and
their own declining financial security, but they have yet to grasp that
they have, beneath the surface of everyday life, already withdrawn their
consent from a self-serving, predatory, parasitic, greedy and
ultimately self-destructive ruling Elite.
Charles Hugh Smith, new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition)For more, please visit the book's website.http:// charleshughsmith.blogspot.mx
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