What The Devil Is This Weirdness We Used To Call "The System"?

What on earth is "The System"?  Recently, I've been reading and hearing about "The System" and how, somehow, the government is "The System", and that "The Establishment" is to blame for all the ills of the country.  Both terms, now trendy among the spokespeople and propagandists of the fraudulently self-named "conservative" mass movement, stem from the 1960s anti-war movement.  

Today, many supporters of the antiwar movement have reached the age of retirement, and of course, after they moved the US government to end the draft, because many of them reentered the conventional wisdom of a mainstream life of the house and car and wife and kids mentality, many have a great deal of power in terms of economic coercion.  Apparently, the anti "System" propaganda is that these people are the ones Donald Trump and other 2023 GOP primary candidates are combating.  

Indeed.  A very weird co-optation of something that has a definite meaning into something that is essentially meaningless seems to be taking place--on TV, on the radio, and in print news.  It's really easy in other words, to simply toss out concepts without defining them in hopes of bamboozling people prone to be too credulous to think for themselves. 

But what is "The System"?  What is "The Establishment"?  Since this is suddenly all-important as a means to the end of slamming a Democratic presidential administration, as propagandists on the far rightist fringe are currently doing, shouldn't these self-described "experts" take the time to explain their use of the two terms?  

Naw.  Why pressure them to be half-assed honest for a change?  

From a general perspective, what does the instrumentalization of a valid concept into a means to an end qualitatively different from its actual meaning do toward the goal of understanding complex phenomena in the contemporary world?  More importantly, how do these concepts affect localities?  In the latter example, many who live in small towns and rural areas that are far removed from the power politics of many urban centers and are in fact somewhat alienated from decisions made from afar that have profound negative effects on their lives, may see "The System" in a way far different from what those in the urban centers see it.  Inculcating often and politically unsophisticated people that "The System" is solely the federal government, a government supposedly inhabited by self-interested "Liberal extremists", or worse, "the extreme left", is a form of disinformation.  

In other words, The System is claiming to be on the side of the common American while waging war with a redefinition of that The System really is.  Orwellian, right?   

A few months ago, an exemplar of the money-maimed zombie-robots we used to call "The System" came calling.  Into my life like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman "The System" arrived, and immediately after kinda-sorta identifying itself as "a bargain" and "profit for everyone", The System tossed dirt onto the rug and then said, "Here!  Lemme clean it all up for ya!"  

Proverbial: The offer you can't refuse.  Unless you want to hang out with a soiled carpet.  

Of course, this seeming absurdity didn't literally occur.  No stranger showed up to mess up my carpet in order to sell me some contraption.  Rather, as a sort of facetious allegory, the little vignette seems to capture what happens when The System decides that everything around you needs to change.  To suit The System.  

In the past, some of the really doctrinaire detractors of the interrelationship between capitalism and government here in the United States saw this systemic interrelationship to be more of an imperialistic confidence game whereby the government concocted spurious reasons to defend commercial interests against often imaginary enemies like the North Vietnamese.  What could ever have gone wrong for the US to use the full force of its military power to subdue a tiny Southeast Asian country that was in the midst of a civil war?  In many ways, after all, The System mightily profited.  There was no express danger from Hanoi.  There was no Domino Theory.  The only real threat to the American way of life--or so we were told--involved another imperialistic power, that of the USSR, vying for world dominance in a competition with the US that was slowly boiling and sometimes coming to blows.  

The real reason for the Vietnam conflict was to boost the economy and make money for wealthy special interests: The System.  

Most of us who still remember the antiwar movement's demand for the United States simply back off as they read the Riot Act to the military contractors and wealthy interests manipulating the democratic impulse for imperialistic ends; we recall that nobody really appreciated the idea that special interests could wield such power over a government and manage to get away with it.  

There.  The System: Work the government like a profitable whore.  Stand back at a distance and let the whore take all the blame for what you, the pimp, forced the whore to do.  

If we go back farther into the American past, we come to the knowledge that, beginning over 100 years ago, the American people fought hard to keep this republic sovereign from the influences of commercial interests, passing rules, establishing boundaries to commercial activities and behaviors, and basically reforming capitalism to make it safe for democracy.  That was a pitch fight, and for a time, the American people won.  The result?  A pretty nice place to live.  

Until The System came calling again.  It was like the warning in The Book of Revelations about the Beast that was here, then gone, then here again: In the Eighties, under Ronald Reagan, a vast blowback and backlash began to gain steam.  Attacks on collective bargaining, and by extension attacks on the very idea of employees exercising political agency while on the job; attacks on banking and financial regulations; a wholesale "unleashing" of commercial interests in a vast push for deregulation of commercial activities--all under the guise of "winning" the Cold War.  

I remember that period too.  Pretty goofy.  Prior to the overblown hype called The Reagan Revolution--one that did produce some hopeful short-term goals but one that also has turned out to be an almost absolute failure in terms of its long term effects on the quality of life of most Americans--the US economy was slowing down.  New competitors--mainly Germany and Japan--were cutting into what the Soviets called "US economic hegemony", and Reagan and his hunchbacked hoodlums decided to rev-up the economy like magic.  Voodoo Economics.  Real wizardry, right?  People liked seeing the economy temporarily bounce back.  Of course, deregulation did result in a resurrection of boom and bust cycles that had been vanquished in the 1930s, but if one was wealthy that was almost imperceptible.  

What have been some of the more widespread results of the Reagan era backlash against the government?  Reagan's goal seems to have been to re-empower already quite powerful commercial interests in order to literally combat what he called "too much government".  Government, per Reagan, was oppressive.  But to whom?  Who was being oppressed?  

Oppression.  This is a term that involves a subjective value judgment.  Anyone can claim to be oppressed.  But oppression is either real oppression that influences the material and physical needs of relatively powerless people--or it is a spurious term to be instrumentalized into a cudgel, a means to the end of gaining money, power and enabling an almost imperialistic sense of endless expansion.  

Since this "Reaganesque" period of often absurd surrealism passed off as reality, a form of what I call reactionary capitalism has become quite powerful, too influential, and far too self-interested-- and all to the point of eroding its generalized relationship to the public good.  

After all, not everyone is involved in the economic theatrics of power, money and endless expansion, and far too often, since those "ethics" are not subject to any true ethical foundation,  what we've habitually come to accept is a capitalism that is flailing out of control because those "values"--power, money, and endless expansion--have not only been politicized, they've cut into everyone's freedoms in a way unanticipated by Ronald Reagan, the paranoid actor who was the first MIA president in US history.  Who else could get away with telling Iran-Contra investigators "I do not recall" 157 times in a single afternoon?  

So.  How did The System Reagan amped-up land on my doorstep?  If all politics is local, then when a new apartment management company purchased this out-of-the-way complex, suddenly all of us, every tenant, was confronted by a wildly flailing, rootless capitalist expression devoid of any ethical foundation.  It's been a weird ride.  Whereas the former company did a good job backing its tenants, the idea the new Pharaoh might follow suit has been sorely put out of its misery.  Out here in the urban badlands, the new management company's tactics look to be a pairing of happy talk and incompetence: a pretense.  But what seems to be happening is that real estate developers have found a future of profits in this neighborhood, and likely, have big plans on chasing the poor tenants, many of them veterans of that Vietnam war, right out of the area.  An apartment complex in a struggling neighborhood is now being retranslated into "luxury living", and the management company is "upgrading" all the apartments with essentially pointless things like "stone counter tops" and new cupboards.  Whoa.  And all for more money.  

I've never seen such penny-pinching in my life.  A perfect example of this penny pinching and outright brutality for the sake of greed and "more" involves a strange gap between the old and new regimes.  The old company had employed a utilities bundler, a company that would bill tenants for all the utilities each month.  The old system pro-rated these bills, essentially billing for the previous month.  This took pressure off tenants.  The timeline for paying those utilities offered tenants some latitude in when to pay.  When the new regime took over like Mussolini in drag, a new bundling system billed for the current month.  This left money owed--sometimes as much as $1,000 to complete that gap.  

Of course, the new regime, had it done its financial due diligence before it signed off on the purchase of this complex, would have made some kind of settlement with the old management company simply in order to back the tenants: "Let's ask for the payment of that lost month of utilities bills to be mixed into what we're going to pay for the complex!"  That would have been the sane way to handle this.  But New Pharaoh isn't having it.  It's billing all the tenants--and worse, it's threatening tenants with eviction if they don't pay up on time.  Beyond that, all late payments for that missing month are being hit with exorbitant late fees.  It's a ridiculous set-up that tells me the foundational "value" of the New Pharaoh is this: 

"Just gimme some money!"  

Yes, The System: Straight to my room from its Temple of Doom.  

Sadly, insofar as all tenants who are enrolled in HUD- or VA-backed housing programs, the new management is rumored to be refusing to renew the leases of individuals who, as VA housing recipients, did all the fighting in the wars some cheap-o plutocrats found profitable.  The System. 

My sister, when I told her of my 87-year-old friend being pushed out, said, "That's horrible!" 

A friend called the new management company, "Bastards!"  And another urged me to get a lawyer.  

Getting a lawyer would likely do no good, even if the discrimination the new management company is employing in its bid to create a new group of tenants in "luxury apartment living" were illegal.  Landlord / tenant laws in this state are heavily-weighed in the favor of landlords in a kangaroo court kind of way.  Evicted?  Go before a judge who'll slam down his hammer, no questions allowed, and rule for the landlord.  Every.  Single.  Time.  

Redlining on the basis of economic class is totally legal here in this state.  A state whose leadership claims  it "owns" all the Christianity.  The System.  Using theocracy as a way to limit the freedom of its subjects.  Just like 1,300 years of Catholic Church oppression.  

Meanwhile, maintenance calls remain unanswered out here, the complex's mailboxes are now a shambles after repeated break-ins, and tenants are being issued eviction notices for the crime of being held responsible for a new apartment management company's failure to do its financial due diligence before signing off on its purchase of the complex.  

In other words, the policy of "just gimme some money!" isn't buffered by any sense of reciprocity at all.  "You pay us, we blame you for the fact we can't even correct our own financial accounting".  

Every time I mention to the new Pharaoh that a maintenance issue needs to be addressed, she passes the buck.  Usually, it's either my fault, or the fault of the landscapers, or the fault of anyone else on earth but the management company.  Pretense.  

It's more of that Trumpian shifting of the blame: The company fails to do a competent job--and  then saddles the negative responsibilities on the tenants.  It's The System: blame someone else, victimize those who are not involved in the money-making venture.  None of those humanesque gizmos seem to bother imagining that it is we, their tenants, who are paying their salaries.  The game?  Get rid of poor people, upgrade, and then sell luxury apartments for big money.  No ethics necessary.  Money, power, and endless expansion.  A little Elmer Gantry of a commercial empire, right here in a town dominated by feral real estate developers.  Literally.  Real estate developers run this big city of over a million people in an area that it's estimated is the home of five million.  After all, as said before, this state offers tenants no relief from those meat robots.  The opening for corruption and injustice is wide.  The idea is that the developers should be set upon us like rabid dogs, and this is where the cannibalism of the American Dream begins. 

Here's part of the big grift: Many denizens and advocates of "free" market economic ideology pretend that "the market" can somehow (nobody knows how) dispense justice and promote equality.  Apparently, according to the more libertarian extraterrestrial kidnapping victims, "the market" preserves economic justice because, if a business is conducting itself badly, consumers won't buy.  Right.  When consumers are basically a captive audience besotted by crass lies and happy talk, apparently some kind of collective inner crap detector goes off and the company is sent to the dustbin of bankruptcy.  Happens all the time, right?  Exxon doesn't pay any federal income taxes--and thus the people are refusing to buy gasoline or natural gas until Exxon decides to be a good citizen that puts its money where its red-white-and-blue mouth is.  Not navy blue like that in the US flag; royal blue.  As in a strange brand of "neo-monarchism".  

Meet the new monarchs, same as the old monarchs.  

Exxon.  I remember reading how, in the early 2000s, Exxon had made a huge oil discovery in the African state of Chad, one of those banana republic kinds of tyrannies, and when Exxon planned to pay the Chad government money for oil leases and purchases of property--as well as large percentages of oil money profits, the United States exacted a foreign policy law that forbade Exxon from simply paying Chad's government--because, in the opinion of the US government, Chad's dictator would use it to buy weapons to use against rebels trying to topple him.  And because the dictator would use oil profits to enrich himself.  Under Rex Tillerson, later a Secretary of State under Trump, Exxon, which made bookoo bucks off its Chad deals, simply ignored US laws and paid the Chad government.  Which bought weapons to kill poor subjects.  

One goal of the US government was to help direct those oil profits to help the people of Chad.  Instead its dictator enriched himself to the tune of millions upon millions.  

Right, Exxon: The System strikes back.  A new episode of Star Wars--where Exxon is the star. Good people die, evil people buy--mansions, big cars, resort townhouses.  Yay, Exxon.  Always dispensing justice and equality wherever Exxon goes.  

And yes!  By all means!  The US government is bad, bad, bad!  Right Ronnie Reagan?  

Back to my locality.  The huge apartment management company, headquartered in Atlanta, boats that it controls something like 200,000 apartments nationwide--but if one checks their Better Business Bureau rating, one finds the company has received and F-.  That's right.  As bad as it can get.  Worse, BBB refuses to accredit the company.  Over 200 unanswered consumer complaints too.  Apparently New Pharaoh is pulling the same stunts on at the very least 200,000 Americans.  The System.  And there is nothing stopping The System.  That's part of how The System operates: regulatory capture, massive campaign expenditures, ideological allies within the State government, and BOOM.  Kismet if you're wealthy, oppression if you're poor.  

Is that freedom?  Justice?  Equality?  The System says YES!

In this area, as mentioned, the real estate community is literally a huge collective.  It's a feral animal.  Since another brusque Reagan move in eradicating 80 percent of the money of an LBJ-created program to aid financially-troubled big cities, most major American urban areas are having financial trouble.  Some are resorting to raising property taxes to make up for what the loss of that program has done to exacerbate financial drownings across America.  Hence, the city here has engaged in a sort of marketing campaign to bring young, single professionals into the wonders of dense urban living--just like San Francisco!  Just like New York City!  But don't mention Baltimore or Pittsburgh please!  This has indeed made the inner city a lot more "neato torpedo" for people who have the big money to spend on luxury apartments and luxury condominiums, even luxury houses.  But on the dark underbelly of this resides something else: 

Not job creation.  Homelessness creation.  

That's right.  The fact developers raise the rent to cover higher property taxes, and to simply exploit the bejesus out of tenants and mortgage holders, is a fact that is pushing entire families into the already overcrowded emergency homeless shelter industrial-complex.  And HUD?  It has plenty of money to help people who can't rate the high rent.  The big problem with HUD's ability to actually help people is that the real estate developers "don't feel like" creating affordable housing conditions.  

Why is that?  Obvious.  The money.  Big profits, and the poor can lump it under the excuse-policy of "what the market can bear".  If the market in one sector of the city can bear a higher rent than elsewhere, the developers all get on the extraction-extortion-exploitation bandwagon and raise the rent everywhere in the city.  And homelessness grows.  

Just the other day, a spuriously boosterist monthly magazine here chirped at the "wit" of one real estate developer who seemed to think that building big, 20-story glass boxes is "improving the city's culture".  Moreover, he even said he was building commercial real estate "to scare homeless people away".  

Ah yes.  The social mission in privatization, right here before our eyes.  Remember?  Because "the government can't do anything right", the privatization of government services will benefit all as we use public funding for private gain.  BAM!  The System strikes again.  

I hate to see such distortions in how we are conditioned to view the government.  The government itself, as a concept, isn't to blame.  The government's tax base has been so reduced it cannot man or fund federal agencies designed to keep an eye out for the kind of idiocy being committed according to the "conventional wisdom" of real estate barons who are basically feral vermin in the eyes of many in this area.  

I found an interesting thread on Facebook, the social network, just the other day.  On the post's thread, many locals were commenting on real estate developer hegemony in the area.  Weighing in with my opinion, I suggested that what needs to be done is for the City to "bag" some of those robber barons with tranquilizer guns, ship them outside the city limits to reeducation camps out in the country "where they can't hurt anybody", and teach them how to be good citizens.  

Then I added, "Who would have thought that the country's real estate robber barons would literally buy the entire country right out from under our feet!"  

One typically ignorant response?  "So.  Money bad".  

And there you go: The System speaks like a ventriloquist through a little wooden dummy.  And you can see this almost every night on TV.  

"Just gimme some money!"  We love the hand that feeds because the hand feeds.  Now bark.  You're Pavlov's new dog!  

As I've indicated many times before in this blog, I don't "hate" capitalism.  What I don't particularly appreciate the idea that a highly influential, deeply powerful, and excessively self-interested faction that is the one faction that actually "controls the economy" has based itself on specious ethical grounds.  When did running one's life from the stomach up come to be better than running one's life from the brain on down?  Appetite.  Impulse.  Instinct.  Domination.  Economic coercion.  Gain by force or by fraud.  

"Survival of the fittest, baby!"  

This is where the crack-up of the American Dream actually makes me chuckle: Social Darwinism--the concept whereby a bunch of self-interested animals got "survival of the fittest"--is itself a cheap, crass bowdlerization of Darwinism.  Darwin would have chaffed at the idea that civilized humans would base anything on mere survival of the fittest.  Sometimes, in the natural world, the least fit are the ones that survive--as the Great Big Survivors survive themselves right out of existence.  Perhaps because if aggressiveness and selfishness replace concepts of mutual self interest, and thus become hardwired, the killer instinct kills off the host.  

Then there's the libertarian pabulum that concocts civil rights as if by magic in its heehaw defense of "natural law".  Most of them may have an inkling that one of the great philosophers who helped pave the way for civil government, John Locke, used natural law as an idea in his Second Treatise Of Government, and that Jean Jacques Rousseau, also propounded the idea of "the noble savage", but most don't seem to understand that the savage world of nature is a far cry from the civilized one.  

In fact, civil government is one of many potential antidotes to a world overruled by "natural rights"--if it can be done in reality, then do it: If you want a thing, just take it by force or by fraud.  Be a savage.  Be an animal.  Win.  

Really?  

When Jefferson cited "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, he issued a rhetorical broadside against the King of England's advocacy of, not natural right, but of "divine right".  At the time of the Declaration, the idea that Nature is the source of reason, and that Divinity is more myth than method, was an important change in how humans had come to see themselves.  But leave it to today's advocates of The System to bowdlerize that in insistence that natural rights are the foundation of civil rights.  Actually, civil rights are the antidote to natural law.  Natural law is ineffective if humans want to live in close proximity to one another.  Natural law, unsurprisingly, is a basis of the nonsensical idea of "self interest" as some kind of loony universal solvent: If you're absolutely consumed by self interest, the interests of others do not pertain to you, your behavior or your actions.  Hence, in an odd turn, you are suddenly in pitch competition with all others, and eventually, only one of you will "dominate the field" and become the totalized, autocratic, authoritarian dictator to exercise your self interest to the detriment or betterment of all others.  To obtain your favor, your "underlings" will lie, cheat, steal and even kill to "win" over the other contestants.  

That is no way to be free.  

So.  We indeed do see The System in play right here in my locality.  Self interested rabble, those who have decided that the principles of justice and equality and fairness do not apply to their actions and behaviors, are running roughshod over powerless people, and all for the sake of profit, capital, and property.  And how do they deal with the contradictions in their own "happy talk"? 

They'll claim they're patriots.  Making the world better by doffing all the veterans to god knows where.  

Nope.  Not a way to defend freedom.   Not a way to privatize anything but the contents of other people's wallets.  

Let's go ahead and call this what it is: The Church of the Holy Wallet.  That's a strange cult that suggests the road to self-regulation is Jesus.  No need to have a third-party regulation regime oversee your actions; just claim to be saved, one of the Chosen, a Man or Woman In Christ.  That way, you'll always behave morally and ethically.  And yes, you'll defend the interests of the poor.  Just like the New Pharaoh is doing right here in the Big City.  

"That's life in the big city. . . . "

No wonder people without power quail at that sort of nonsense.  People from afar, looking for short term financial gain, operating under an absolutism involving self interest uber alles, come in as if from nowhere to muck up everything they can.  And if you're a commoner, relatively powerless, what can you do?  

You react against what the TV tells you is the real reason for those slick dicks in suits coming to ruin your life: The government.  

There.  That's The System's way of looking at the world: Conduct oneself unjustly, and unjustifiably, and then shift the blame onto the poor, or the powerless, or onto the one institution that defend the poor or powerless: the government.  

The System is a way to systematically rig the game by manipulating government to one's self aggrandizing advantage.  

And from there, understanding "The Establishment" is quite easily accomplished: An established group of powerful private interests who have established them as the de facto rulers who do so from behind the scenes with vast amounts of economic coercion, power and money.  

Right.  And while they're at it, they're happy to tell you "the government" doesn't belong to you.  They'll be happier when they insert themselves between you and the government. That's like being One Big Road Hog driving straight down the middle of the road.  Swerve to the side, groundlings, The Establishment with its System is coming through.