The Quiet Coup - Magazine - The Atlantic

This interesting article is referenced a an excellent blog post.

I follow this Russian blog and recommend it, like the Economist or the Financial Times, an outside persepective of the US is often insightful. This blog - Sublime Oblivion writes:

Introducing the Karlin Corruption Index (KCI)the scale is 10 (least corrupt) to 1 (Most Corrupt - interestingly North Korea is a 2 with 4 areas in the 1 spot.) and the blogger describes the US as an 8 trending to a 7


You might also click over to his Democracy ratings to see if you agree that on his 6 level scale the US is slipping rapidly toward illiberal democracy. (he says about the US - ■USA – highest prison population; corporatist surveillance state; runs transnational Gulag; increasingly arbitrary power structures, institutional groundwork being laid for Caesarism? (1, 2); but strong freedom of speech traditions relatively unmarred by PC & libel laws; strongly trending to Illiberal Democracy. ↓↓)


Writing about corruption:

These are countries where corruption begins to acquire big dimensions amongst the elites, but remains small at the lower rungs. The United States (↓) is here because privileged corporations enjoy extensive government largess, often at the expense of ordinary citizens (especially in the defense, oil, and financial services sectors). For the skeptics, The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson is required reading.

The trends are negative. Corporate influence (disguised under Tea Party populism) is growing under the “socialist” (LOL) Obama administration: the overturning of corporate funding limits on political campaigns, BP’s requisitioning of Louisiana police to suppress freedom of speech, and the uncontrolled growth of the privatized anti-terrorism sector are just three examples that come to mind. Though these might not make it into the considerations of the experts and businesspeople gauging US “transparency”, I don’t think that makes it any less corrupt for all that.

Though the elites feed off the public trough, corruption is much less prevalent at lower levels. In countries like Russia or Mexico, corruption in institutions like the traffic police is the rule; in the US it isn’t even an exception – it’s practically unheard of. That’s because in rich, socially cohesive nations, corruption is simply too expensive for simple people. For this reason, I think the US is still above a 6 at the very least, and probably above a 7. But as the popular saying goes, the fish rots from the head. If the economy stagnates and corrupt elites continue misleading the public with “spontaneous” Astroturf organizations, then who knows, by 2020 you could be driving down Route 101 when a policeman pulls you ever and asks if you want to “reach an understanding”.

Other countries in this category include the UK (↓), France (↓), Japan and Israel (↓), where things are ostensibly all prim and proper but the elites live by different rules from the rest in the darker corners. US states like Texas, New York, California and Ohio are probably in this category.



Simon writes in the Atlantic:

The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. The Quiet Coup - Magazine - The Atlantic