Europe tries government/industry "partnership"

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It's a fact that Europe has a long history of experience in government/industry "partnership," dating back to Renaissance-era royally chartered corporations up through its 20th century experiments with centrally controlled fascist and socialist economies. But now we have the governments of Greece and Italy, the very cradles of democracy, diving head-first into partnerships that must be the envy of American corporatists:

The question now, in both Italy and Greece, is whether the technocrats can succeed where elected leaders failed — whether pressure from the European Union backed by the whip of the financial markets will be enough to dislodge the entrenched cultures of political patronage that experts largely blame for the slow growth and financial crises that plague both countries.

Some said there was cause for optimism. “First, the mere fact that they have been asked in such difficult circumstances means that they have a mandate,” said Iain Begg, an expert on the European monetary union at the London School of Economics. “Granted, it’s not a democratic one, but it flows from disaffection with the bickering political class.”

To understand the government/industry partnership aspect, you need to know that the new "technocrat" Greek Prime Minster, Lucas Papademos, is an MIT-educated economist who has worked for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank. Italy's new PM is likely to be "technocrat" Mario Monti: economist and politician, a two-term member of the European Commission, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and international adviser to that most ancient of US democratic institutions, Goldman-Sachs.

Atrios translates this trendy new European "technocrat" phenomenon for regular people:

Well the consensus seems to be we need to just install bankers as the leaders of all the countries, and the only way any of us can survive is if all the richest countries of the world are turned into 3rd world hellholes after the middle class gives all of their money to rich people.

I believe this concept is what is really behind the sentiment expressed by certain celebrity pundits that what American really needs is a billionaire philosopher-king like NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the helm because, after all, he's so rich that he has no reason to seek personal gain from the presidency. Mitt Romney is the poor man's Michael Bloomberg.

When government "partners" with industry

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The US Constitution assigns to Congress the authority to regulate commerce. The idea that the Commerce Clause is widely understood to mean that the federal government should encourage or promote the development of commerce doesn't seem outlandish to most of us. However, the idea that the government should be a "partner" of industry is fairly new, at least in America. What that means, practically speaking since the Reagan Revolution, is that Industry (with a capital I) considers it the duty of the federal government to remove barriers to corporate profit-making irrespective of the justice of social usefulness of doing so. That expectation has come to include the even more dicey concept that government operations should be conveyed into the hands of Business (capital B) for purposes of "efficiency," which is a euphemism for wealth transfer from the US taxpayer into corporate bank accounts.

This idea was expressed most elegantly by Robert Kennedy Jr. in a speech I heard broadcast on my local pubic radio station a coupla months ago. Asked by an audience member to explain his understanding of the controlling legal ideology of the Roberts Supreme Court (the current one), Kennedy quoted his law partner: "corporations always win."

When it's person versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

When it's government versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

And when it's the person versus government, government wins. This happens because government is the "partner" of industry, whose job it is to look after the legal interests of the corporation. In general terms, their interests have largely merged over the past few decades. Industry is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of America; the federal government is the Executive Vice President for Human Capital.

Republicans are at least candid about this; Democrats are not. That, in my opinion, makes the Democratic Party the more detestable of the two.

I offer the above as a spirochete's-eye view of some mental synthesis I've been working through in order to reboot my thinking process. I think all of us could benefit by trying to refresh our perspectives on who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Today, for reasons of news topicality, I'm thinking that the typical Democrat plays Joe Paterno to the Republican Jerry Sandusky. The Democrat goes through the motions of doing the right thing in the eyes of his "base." But everything he does is for the aggrandizement of The Corporation. Any way you look at it, humanity is considered only an incidental feature of the environment, and one that The Corporation won't miss when it's gone.