Corruption and Destruction at the Whim of the Powerful

The Declaration of Independence set forth certain ills which justified a revolution, thereby destroying British control. It stated that individual inalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness give rise to a government’s legitimacy. Because power is inherently greedy and steals everything in sight, the U.S. Constitution created checks and balances so that no branch would become too powerful as had happened with King George. 

The judicial system’s function is to provide for the rule of law rather than the whim of the powerful. Quoting New York Times reporter, Linda Greenhouse, “The rule of law provides confidence that what is true today will still be true tomorrow. It undergirds the resilience necessary to absorb the inevitable shocks any political system faces.” When the courts are controlled by the powerful, the rule of law disappears. That is today’s America. 

How Power Fatally Corrupted the Judicial System 

The how is simple. The powerful appoint the judges who do whatever the powerful people desire. None of the Wall Street felons who perpetuated the massive mortgage frauds, crashing the world economy in 2008, was even prosecuted. Instead, Obama gave bankers $15 trillion dollars, while the courts foreclosed on blue collar people’s homes. After the jobs in the Rust Belt were shipped overseas, workers were forced into bankruptcy. Their children became addicts and the courts sent them off to prison, but no one touched the wealthy people who made billions of dollars from the misery. 

How the Powerful Destroyed Keynesianism 

Vast ignorance among the American public about macro-economics made it easy for Wall Street to destroy Keynesian economics. Capitalism had ceased to function by 1936 and was replaced by the Keynesian approach. For good or ill, all economic systems depend on the law. When banking was illegal, poverty covered the land. Capitalism set up rules by which individuals could create wealth without the patronage of the king or Church. The semantic mistake that doomed Adam Smith’s capitalism was “the invisible hand.” 

Addressing Europeans in 1776, Adam Smith wrote for many people steeped in religiosity. Too many mistook the “invisible hand” to be God and hence no rules should be made. In reality, capitalism required government regulation to protect the price system. Since the laissez faire approach allowed the powerful to cheat everyone else, capitalism produced wealth and poverty. “Let the buyer beware” was as anti-Smithian as any doctrine could be. Since the powerful made the laws, supply and demand was infused with fraud which aggravated the business cycle of boom and busts. 

Lord John Maynard Keynes found another way to temper the business cycle as explained in 1936 in his “General Theory.” FDR adopted Keynes’s deficit financing and the economy improved. Fundamental to Keynes was not only deficit financing but the separation of regular banking for investment houses. When Wall Street investment firms could own banks where which based on the deposits of millions of Americans, there was no control over the investment bankers. Under the Great depression act of Glass-Steagall, investment houses had to raise capital from a relatively few wealthy individuals. These few lenders were not only economically sophisticated but also individually powerful. Thus, investment houses could not engage in wide scale frauds since the lenders were more powerful than the investment houses. The repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 allowed investment houses to own banks where there were too many millions of individual depositors to exercise any control. By 2008, the massive frauds crashed the economy. Since the powerful owned the federal government, including the judiciary, none of the criminals was prosecuted, but instead the federal government paid all their losses so that today the crooks are stronger than ever. 

Power Shuns Wisdom 

Seldom does power embody wisdom. The nature of power is to be free from control which means to do whatever one wants. As the Crash of 2008 showed, when freed from legal control of Glass-Steagall, massive frauds abounded. Greedy people never restrain themselves. Greed has no need for wisdom when it can simply steal what it wants. The system itself will eventually crash, but the powerful will use their power to steal whatever they want. 

Quality of Life vs the Profits of the 1% 

Los Angeles is a prime example how the Quality of Life of Angelenos played no role in the city government’s decisions. LA City Council has been a criminal enterprise for over a decade due to its illegal vote trading system. Basically, any developer can get whatever he wants by bribing one councilmember. Whatever project the councilmember puts on the city council agenda is guaranteed unanimous approval. Reciprocal votes are the essence of the vote trading -- each councilmember agrees to vote Yes for the project of any other councilmember and in return all the other councilmembers agree to vote Yes on his/her project. Quality of Life plays no role in the LA City Council’s thinking. As a result, Los Angeles is being driven down to the status of a third world nation where we have a few wealthy people and many who are the poorest in the entire nation. This corruption, with Judge Richard Fruin’s sanctification, manufactured a homeless pandemic death rate years before anyone heard about Covid-19. 

Corruptionism Gave Us the Pandemic 

Not only does corruptionism rely on power and shun wisdom, but it has kept Trump in power. Nancy Pelosi wants power, Donald Trump wants power, Mitch McConnell wants power, but power mongers never want the rule of law. Except for Trump, everyone knew the virus was coming and that it would turn into a pandemic unless immediate action was taken. While the president bears primary responsibility, all Washington knew he was a mental defective who could never comprehend the situation. During impeachment proceedings, Pelosi refused to cooperate with the GOP to Nixonize Trump so that immediate preparation to ward off the Pandemic could start. 

Had Trump been Nixonized, Pence would have invoke the Stafford Act and hundreds of millions of N95 masks would have been produced, so too with PPE and virus test kits, in addition to training thousands of people to Identify, Swarm and Isolate people who were infected. However, Pelosi saw a massive pandemic as sure-fire way to prevail in the November 2020 elections. 

During the cold war, Mutual Assured Destruction recognized that neither side would win. Both Pelosi and McConnell believe that they can prevail, so they are giving Trump free reign. Now Trump plans to dismiss his medical experts including Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and instead place his son-on-law in charge of rapidly opening the economy. Yes. Jared is to replace Fauci and Birx. Now do you understand how power corrupts and corruption destroys?

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams’ views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Illustration: The Guardian, Mitch Blunt. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.