by From Finance as warfare by Michael Hudson The economy is polarizing because of how the 1% use their wealth. If they invested their fortunes productively as “job creators” – as mainstream textbooks describe them as doing – there would be some logic in today’s tax favoritism and financial bailouts. Rentier elites would be doing what governments are supposed to do. Instead, today’s financial oligarchy lends out its savings to indebt the economy at large, and uses its gains to buy control of government to extract more special privileges, tax favoritism and rent-extraction opportunities by political campaign financing in the United States (unlimited since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling) and by lobbying. Politics and the legal system have become part of the market in the sense
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from Finance as warfare by Michael Hudson
The economy is polarizing because of how the 1% use their wealth. If they invested their fortunes productively as “job creators” – as mainstream textbooks describe them as doing – there would be some logic in today’s tax favoritism and financial bailouts. Rentier elites would be doing what governments are supposed to do. Instead, today’s financial oligarchy lends out its savings to indebt the economy at large, and uses its gains to buy control of government to extract more special privileges, tax favoritism and rent-extraction opportunities by political campaign financing in the United States (unlimited since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling) and by lobbying.
Politics and the legal system have become part of the market in the sense of being up for sale. As in consumer advertising, ideological engineering is used to “manufacture consent,” using the mass media to broadcast an anti-tax and anti-regulatory ethic. Thorstein Veblen described the tactic a century ago in Higher Learning in America (1904). Business schools have been endowed, economic prizes awarded and public relations “think tanks” staffed with credentialed spokesmen to shape popular perceptions to accept widening financial inequality as natural and even desirable.