But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils . . .
1 Timothy
One of the more inconvenient passages of the Scriptures, one of those many involving money that are never mentioned as people concentrate on several about S. E. X.
Yesterday the estimable Charles Pierce in writing about Robert Mueller's subpoena of Trump's business records said
It looks as though he’s [Mueller] decided that everything with which this president is involved is so irredeemably corrupt and lousy with dirty money that trying to split the difference between which corruption was involved with the campaign, and what dirty money financed it, is an impossible rat’s nest to untangle. So the easiest thing is to light a match and see what burns in what color flame.
Which reminds me that, witnessing the floridly complete corruption of the successor regimes of the great Marxist experiments, I've concluded we were all suckers for ever believing any of that was a product of ideological conviction or principle, that was always a part of a huge, old-fashioned con job conducted by gangsters who, like all successful con men rope in suckers when necessary and, once in power, rule by ruthless terror, intimidation, and normalizing cynicism and discouragement. I am convinced that is a more fruitful means of understanding most of the corruption of the 20th century, the non-royal, pseudo-democratic, pseudo-republics than trying to fit their actions to their claimed beliefs. Something which works, as well, to explain the evil of the whole series of "most Christian highnesses" and, really, just about anyone who has held power and managed to work it like a con.
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, etc. are all more relevantly seen as massively successful gangsters, others like Trotsky, the pathetic American communists in all of their myriad of penny-ante syndicates, unsuccessful gangsters, often agents for the successful one. Donald Trump being installed with the help of American and, especially Australian American gangster punks is simply a Russian gangster oligarch succeeding in doing what his predecessors tried all during the 20th century tried to do and failed because American oligarchs found they could do business with him. The role that the unregulated media played in creating Putin's puppet and installing him in office is an epic in the idiocy of an ideology that values freedom to lie over the truth, something which, I'll give him credit for, Putin understood how to corrupt in the most effective way.
The United States has a long history of florid corruption under a Constitution that is alleged to prevent it, arguably, at times, it has managed to reign in some of the worst of it, though the conquest through genocide of the native population and slavery, both pre and post-civil war, flourished by that document. And several times there have been great advancements, always on the basis of the distribution of wealth and opportunities, the G. I. Bill, Social Security, Medicaid, in the 19th century The Land Grant Act and Homestead Act, The Morrill Act - which created the great land-grant universities* . . . So we know that the easily cynical dodge that all of government is inevitably corrupt is a lie and that when government is not corrupt it can be the means of relief of poverty and destitution and the creation of material well being and far more.
The abstract models of such things that are so popular with pseudo-sciences, such as political "science," even the simple geometric figure of a line from right to left has suckered us for a long time. So have the ideological systems that turned out in real life to be no more than a con man's patter with a college education. I do think it's telling that with all their many degrees, with all of their academic esteem - Stephen Cohen, I'm thinking of you - don't seem to know what the author of 1 Timothy knew about the origin of that kind of evil. And yet they wonder why people don't trust them.
I don't think anything much new is required to change this, at least in the United States. One thing that is necessary is to stop the media from lying someone like Trump into existence then putting him in office. I do think that the career of Rupert Murdoch and his gang makes allowing someone like him into the country where they can propagandize us into, first the toilet, then the sewer, the river American was sold down by "free speech - free press" can serve as what needs to be changed. Merely making it unprofitable for the media to lie through allowing them to be sued out of it would probably go a long way to protecting us. And by the media I don't mean as imagined by Herbert Hoover in the early days of radio, I mean any media which has a political or likely political effect, cable is largely what got us Trump though "social media" was certainly a big help to Putin.
I do think one of the things we have to change is that ideological position which has left us so vulnerable to the corruption of a foreign enemy, but which was always a source of vulnerability to our domestic oligarchs. The press has to serve the interests of The People in our, individually and collectively, knowing enough of the truth to avoid electing our enemies. To create a mature enough electorate that will not have a large enough population of suckers led mostly by emotion and, worse, an attraction to spectacle and entertainly outrageous display. Our media has created the supporters of Trump as surely as they created Trump, the ideology that says they must be allowed to because Madison and Hamilton and John Jay couldn't imagine the modern media and so said what they did about that is unworkable in the 21st century. It has to be junked for a position that protects the media when it tells the truth but prevents it from lying us into disaster for its own profit.
But in the end, it was and always has been about the love of money and the power that allows its accumulation.
* I do think it is a tragedy that the great advance in educational opportunity happened in a period when the religious motivations of those such as Jonathan Baldwin Turner were supplanted by the scientistic hegemony and materialist ideology of the late 19th century, which planted the things that would destroy the very basis of such democratic advancements. The total corruption of scientism and materialism on display in the 20th century dictatorships and, especially, in the Americans, enjoying, often employed by institutions created by beliefs which they were taught to disdain, who supported those anti-democratic ideologies and dictators is a real life example of why those are not sustainable. The collapse of that into the dictatorships of Putin and, as it may or may not develop, Xi Jinping, following on the other, various "scientific" regime, from extreme right to alleged-left, the ideological support they have had from American intellectuals should discredit that ruse for any thinking person. Marxism leading to fascism seems to be something of a pattern, all they had to do was dump the socialist ruse that, as used by the Nazis, was as much of a ruse when used by Communists.
I'm tempted to go again into the various corruptions introduced by such as Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. and the source of them again, but that will have to wait.
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