https://tan2tents.podbean.com/e/regulatory-capture/
Once upon a time i had an interesting experience while flying with our very competent local airline here in the yukon territory of what used to be canada. I say, used to be because nearly everything has changed to the point of being unrecognizable since i grew up in the place but i digress.
Anyway, on this flight i had the privilege of getting into a conversation with my fellow-traveler seated next to me who, at some point in our conversation thought it would be a good idea to begin bragging to me about the genius of his procurement department in funnelling government contracts to the people they desired to have them.
In his job, working for the government of the yukon, he held some position in procurement, the entity that facilitates the hiring of contractors for whatever projects the shot-callers decide will best further their interests. According to his own description, the means they use is to set the parameters of the contract itself in such a way that only the contractor they desire to use will be able to meet the criteria. He kind of smiled as he told me this, obviously pleased with the genius of the procedure and anticipating my appreciation of that disclosed genius of his.
I took in this information calmly but immediately saw it as absolute confirmation of what i had believed was happening all along. Personally, i had recently been rejected from a contract to supply firewood to government campgrounds after meeting all the criteria, and producing the lowest bid because the criteria had been apparently altered after i submitted my bid, so i knew a little bit about how it feels to be the gopher shoved off the road by the bulldozer, so to speak. Ok, fine, that is the way the world works, but it does make all the screeching we are hearing from the corporate media about equality and fairness and transparency seem a smidgeon hypocritical.
And if, my own experience were a one-time fun-time that would be no big deal. i focused my efforts elsewhere and did just fine and someone else got a nice fat check in the mail so what.
But when you realize that similar things are happening locally, and expand that outwards all the way to the international corporations you begin to realize the scale of what we are dealing with here. The tax-bases of whole countries are being cannibalized by corporate interests to the point where it is becoming almost “unpossible” to live a normal human existence even whilst working three jobs and substituting paper-thin baloney for your thanksgiving turkey.
In our still-tolerated rants about the many failings and cruelties of “governments” perhaps we should instead be using the term “corporate interests” because one very huge and glaring problem is regulatory capture. How many facemasks could i sell if i could force every other manufacturer out of the industry while forcing everyone with a pulse to wear them? Governments, or rather, the shot-callers within governments are routinely blackmailed and bribed or shmoozalizeded into following the instructions of the extremely wealthy. Remember Klaus Schwoob (oops) bragging about this very thing regarding canada’s cabinet? Also those other speeches of his about public-private partnerships (which is the very definition of facism btw) and “radical collaboration” and “stakeholder capitalism” and “numerous public, private and multistakeholder initiatives to improve the state of the world” how nice:
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Institutional_Brochure_2019.pdf ,
All of which smell like simply further attempts to gain access to every last stinking dollar in the pig-trough tax-base of every country on the planet. (There is a correlation between over-wordiness and the obfuscation of the discussed situation. Examples in political figures are not difficult to find)
Huge corporations are definitely interested in the regulatory and tax-structures and court systems of the governments of the countries in which they operate. Yes they are!
Of course they are! It would be simply daft to ignore the regulations and political direction of the country your business operates within.
And if the people or should i say ghouls that are actually running things through their lobbyists were as benevolent and angelic as they claim they are, our problems would be much smaller, but instead their minds appear lately to be filled with schemes to rob us into poverty, kill us, cripple us and otherwise make our lives as miserable as possible. And If you think i am overstating this, please recall being caged within your own home, being threatened with fines for not wearing a diaper on your face, being forbidden to visit sick and dying friends, and being punished with job-loss for not allowing yourself to have your humanity altered forever.
And, they are just getting started!
Hopefully, i have made my point and need not go on and on til i sound like a gif. There are some extremely wealthy individuals in the world with unlimited financial resources but limited humanity, who are still not satisfied with their holdings and never will be, regardless if they are successful in their attempts to own the air we breathe.
Fortunately, we will not have to wait much longer until they are overthrown and their hopes and ambitions come to smoking ruin. But in the meantime, many of us will have to learn some new skills, kind of like i had to do when i sprained my right thumb this summer.
As much as i disagree with the theory of evolution and how it luckily produced everything we see and feel in our lives on this amazing planet, does not even it teach that adaptation is essential for survival, and in that, even mr Darwin had a point.
We need to adapt to change if we are to survive what is coming and when the social programs and the rest of what we rely upon inevitably disintegrates from neglect, abuse and overuse all around us, that will be when we will all see feel and smell the truth of that portion of mr. Darwin’s theory.
Skulltripper 