Sociopathic criminals own and rule our world – let’s not kid ourselves otherwise

One of the things that the TV show ‘The Wire’ taught me was that crime doesn’t pay – because sociopaths and bullies can do far better inside the system than outside. Though raised on the street, even Stringer Bell realised that becoming ‘the bank’ for drug dealers was a far better option than selling the drugs himself.

How many of you have watched that clip from George Carlin where he explains why the American education system is so bad – here it is.

The key quote is “it’s a big club – and you ain’t in it”.

That’s right: the owners of this world, the owners of the USA and the UK and elsewhere own all the important assets, almost all of the media and journalists (including The Independent and The Guardian), nearly all of the politicians, the civil service and some of the judiciary. Don’t kid yourself otherwise.

If you want a metaphor for how the owners of this world regard you and the environment – go back to ‘The Wire’.  A young woman dies from a drug overdose at a party for members of a drug gang – so they rolled her up in a rug and threw her in the garbage. That is how criminals view people – as a product to be consumed and thrown away. That is how the owning class view you and your family.

Ask the (former) workers at BHS about who owns the world.  Their pension fund, paid for by their contributions went from having £43 million pounds in it – to owing £345 million. Meanwhile the Green Family who owned BHS paid themselves £307 million in dividends. Sir Phillip Green said he was “sad and sorry” about the demise of BHS – but he could reflect ruefully from the decks of a $100 million yacht as he had already dumped BHS and its workers in the garbage.

By 2015 the fund’s position became so bad that a plan proposed internally to Green would have taken 23 years to make the fund whole again. Green rejected that plan and decided to sell the company instead, offloading the failing pension plan onto the new buyer.

Even that solution required a sleight of hand. “Sir Philip Green acted to conceal the true state of the BHS pension problem from RAL and its advisers” in order to make the sale go through, the report says.

Now the pension funds of many people got raided in 2007/8 – not by bank robbers or drug barons – but by bankers. Do watch the wonderful documentary ‘Inside Job’– which explains the following sequence of events:

(a) Financial services ‘industry’ is progressively de-regulated in the run up to the 2007/8 crash – to the warm applause of the political and media establishment.

(b) Bankers oversee an explosion of ‘products’ based purely on financial speculation that are knowingly and fraudulently mis-sold to pension funds with the collusion of ratings agencies.

(c) Bankers and ratings agencies pocket huge fees and bonuses – fuelling a culture of conspicuous luxury consumption,  drug taking, expensive hookers, strip clubs and private jets.

(d) When various Ponzi schemes based on fraud and high risk gambling inevitably collapsed, the bankers held the world to ransom – demanding taxpayer’s money or they would crash the entire global financial system. The US government dutifully agreed to hand over $700 billion to underwrite the excesses of the banking industry – in the UK £850 billion was abruptly found.

(e) The banking industry lobbied successfully that no meaningful legislation should attempt to restrict the activities of banks or their bonus regimes. Not a single banker is jailed for their role in the biggest bank robbery in the history of mankind (except in Iceland)

(f) Millions of innocent people lose their jobs, homes, savings and pensions.

(g) Business as usual is resumed – the clock is ticking on the next crash….and the next bailout.

You see, friends, you don’t have to operate outside of the law to have a criminal personality. Indeed it’s far easier to make what should be illegal, legal and ensure that only the innocent need pay for the excesses of narcissism and sociopathic greed. Criminals with money always seem to find friends in politics and the media – and because of this, all of the biggest criminality in the world is legal.

Recently in a rare gesture of defiance towards the owning class, the EU has insisted that Apple should pay the Irish people €13 billion in back taxes: taxes that Apple has evaded using complex accounting tricks and a labyrinth of shell companies in tax havens. Ireland has one of the largest debt to GDP ratios in the world because this small nation signed up to a €60 billion bailout of  bankers in 2008. Ireland suffers from high unemployment, low wages, homelessness and poverty – so how does its right wing coalition government respond to this break for the hard pressed Irish people? They want to tell the EU to take their money away and let Apple off the hook – now do you understand who owns the political class?

Politicians in the US, the UK and Ireland will resist any and all attempts to force corporations to pay taxes in the countries in which they operate because the political class is corrupt and seen by those within it as a well trodden path to joining the owning class – not holding it to account.

Ever wonder how the world might look if the $1 trillion spent on the USA’s ‘War On Drugs’ since 1971 had instead been spent on pursuing corporate tax evasion and prosecuting corrupt bankers? The USA has the biggest prison population on the planet with 2.4 million behind bars – but the owning class are not among them, instead they are making a fortune from running private prisons and militarising the police force.

Ever wonder what might be afforded if the USA didn’t spend 1.6 trillion dollars on weapons every year – without even a proper audit trail on where all the money goes?

Could not the UK find a better use for £205 billion than handing it to the American manufacturers and operators of Trident nuclear weapons? You can be sure its political class won’t be able to think one.

Selling weapons so that Saudi Arabia can commit war crimes in Yemen? That’s legal.

Selling weapons to Israel so that it can commit war crimes and continue an illegal and brutal occupation in Palestine? That’s legal too.

Conducting an illegal and aggressive war that has lead to the deaths of 1.5 million people in Iraq? No problems here, no arrests, no nothing.

UK complicity in torture? No arrests.

A survivor of serious sexual, physical and emotional abuse trying to resist cuts to her care package? Well we might need to look into that urgently and watch as she goes to the toilet and takes a shower. That’s different.

It’s depressing to acknowledge the extent to which gangsters and crooks (let’s stop using euphemisms like ‘the 1%’ and ‘corporate power’ to define these people) have taken over the world, but it’s a necessary first step to fighting back.

Gangsters are always frightened of state institutions like the law, the police and the courts – and that is why the criminal owning class is ever eager to dismantle all state power and transfer it into private hands where it can do them no harm.

Do you know what the ‘trade agreements’  like TTIP and CETA really are? They are legal frameworks that will not only grant corporate crooks immunity from prosecution (they already have that) – but will allow ultra-wealthy sociopaths to sue nations states if they have the temerity to interfere with their plans. Forget any hope of preventing climate catastrophe or investigating criminal acts of environmental destruction or any corporate crime, they will have cowed all governments in advance of even an investigation.

In any sane society, the damage wrought against our shared biosphere by the fossil fuel industry and the fraudulent cover up of that damage would see the perpetrators thrown in jail for life – but in our society they get huge pay offs and are upheld as pillars of the community, patrons of the arts and peers of the realm. 

I could start writing now and write all day and all night, turning this post into a Wikipedia of examples of aloof criminality from big corporations and the ultra wealthy. I could post hundreds of links to heart-breaking and blood boiling stories of powerless innocent people being bullied and hurt by the usual suspects. In every area of life we can see how our society is infused with the ethics and morals of the criminally minded – but they wear suits and ties and own PR companies now. 

Organisations like the IMF and the World Bank are ran by people with the mind-set of criminal sociopaths.

The media is owned by the wealthy.

The BBC is owned by the establishment.

The political class is an extension of the owning class.

Senior civil servants working in tax collection and legal oversight can work through a revolving door into a nice job with the very people they are supposed to be regulating at any time. Hardly surprising that HMRC can’t collect all the tax it is owed – even when it tries to go after it.

Two party politics is mostly a sham designed to trick the weak minded.

There are sparks of hope though. The recent engagement in grass roots politics in the UK prompted by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party is a great thing. Only in the neo-fascist climate of contemporary British politics could Corbyn be regarded as ‘hard left’ – he is in fact a moderate social democrat.

Corbyn has one shining quality above all others – he can’t be bought. He is that rare jewel – a man inside the system who won’t take the money.  That is why he is so popular and that is why the usual suspects hate him so much.

I don’t have much optimism that Corbyn will ever become Prime Minister of the UK – but perhaps, just perhaps, he might provoke a grass roots revolt against the owning class and inspire a generation of young politicians with an agenda beyond money. Perhaps Bernie Sanders has set something in motion in the US too.

Only a wholesale rejection of the entitlement of wealth to rule our lives  will make a difference in the end. More and more I think it will be this new generation of political activists that are the only hope for the future.

It is sad that we have to highlight how corrupt the world has become – but no progress can be made until we admit the scale of the task facing us and them.

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