01111 Political Corruption

Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen — Woody Guthrie

Invisible structures are a primary method to impose injustice upon the population and to steal surplus and transfer it to those with privileged access to political power.

One popular method of political corruption, where those with power reward their friends and punish their enemies is known as rent, which today has two meanings. One is commonly understood as the price you pay to live at or commercially use a house or other property. However, it has a political meaning . . . often formulated as “rent seeking”. . . about which Wikipedia sayeth . . .

. . . rent-seeking is an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur . . .

In more plain language, rent-seeking rigs the economic and political situation to unfairly benefit those with access to political power, at the expense of those without access to political power. It is invisible structures at work making the world a worse place to live.

When dentists manipulate the law to prevent denturists (the skilled technicians who actually make dentures) from selling dentures directly to the public, they make more money at the expense of both the public, who pay higher prices, and denturists, who have lower incomes, as a result of this legal manipulation of the dental services market that has nothing to do with the quality of the dentures. The law indentures the denturist to the dentists and increases the prices paid by the customers.

When Devon Energy blackmailed Oklahoma City government into borrowing tens of millions of dollars, at a high interest rate from the corporation in order to do downtown improvements so that Devon would build a large building, Devon Energy and its stockholders profit from the economic rents in the form of high interest payments paid by the city’s general taxpayers.

When private prison companies lobby legislatures for “tough-on-crime-three- strikes-you-get-life” laws, they profit from the increase in prisoners, at the expense of the state government which rents space in their facilities for prisoners.

When makers of bombs and guns promote war, as they did against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, they profit by the destruction of war and the subsequent demand for more bombs and more guns.

Those who manipulate the system so that they have an advantage, and others have a disadvantage, gravely harm the common good for the sake of their own selfish special interest.

If you want to know why the rich are richer, and everyone else is poorer, why the top 1% own so much and everyone else has so little, look no further than the problems caused by our rent-seeking elites who distort economic markets to coercively extract financial advantage from those without the political power to defend themselves against these assaults.

Rent-seeking is at the heart of our problem of political criminality. The common good will continue to suffer until rent-seeking becomes impossible. That will require structural changes in the ways our governments operate.

We insulate ourselves from the thefts of the rent-seeking aristocrats by establishing systems and structures, internal to the growing sustainability community, that minimally participate in the economic system dominated by the corporations. As more economic activity shifts out of the mainstream economy, we deny rent-seeking aristocrats income. Less income for the wealthy means less power for the rich and more power to the people.

That’s the reason for seemingly small but important details like avoiding the use of plastic cards and always spending cash or using checks. The transnational financial system gets a small cut of every transaction on a plastic card. Over time, this siphons wealth away from local economies in order to feed parasitic financial elites who produce nothing useful, only manipulations of money. Each time we avoid the use of plastic payment cards, we deny the powerful their cut and vote to keep it in the local economy.

Plus, you spend more money if you use plastic instead of cash, even if it is a debit card.

Just as the financial and corporate leadership got their power one small transaction at a time, we can take it away from them one small transaction at a time.