Feedback Loop

You may have noticed an article in the Washington Post comparing the popularity of various institutions to that of Congress. The approval rating of the U.S. Congress, at 9%, beats Fidel Castro (5%) and ties Hugo Chavez, but is below the approval for the concept of the U.S. going Communist, at 11%. The fact that at least one in ten Americans is willing to reverse the Cold War is interesting in itself. However, my focus is on Congress, and why even BP during the Macondo oil spill (16%) beats their approval rating.

I have written in earlier posts about the concept of hyperscopic life. (You may wish to review here, here, here, and here.) The short version is that a corporation fulfills all the qualities that scientists use to identify a living organism. My conclusion – if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, etc. The problem with corporations is that a duck is a lot smarter than a corporation but a corporation has political power.

Human beings serve corporations, and so naturally corporations have many of the characteristics of human beings. To be more specific, psychopathic human beings, as defined by their behaviors and psychiatric literature. One thing that humanity does very effectively is to modify our environment. We cut down forests, drain swamps, build roads, dam rivers, and blast the tops off of mountains. We build houses and breakwaters and other barriers against the forces of nature. Corporations modify their environment as well, but we must consider that their environment is both physical and legal. We might say that the legal environment is as physical to them as air, water, and land are to us. Law is also DNA and connective tissue to a corporation, meaning that it can modify both its internal and external environment.

As with the physical world, there is resistance to this modification. It is institutional, active, and consequential. By institutional I mean that human beings put into place legal strictures that limit corporate agency. These could be campaign finance laws, lobbying restrictions, conflict of interest laws, and transparency laws. By active I mean groups of citizens actively opposing corporate reach into legislation. By consequential I mean that corporations are too short sighted and narrow of vision to properly calculate the consequences of their actions. If either law or enforcement is inadequate they end up like Enron or Lehman Brothers, collapsing from the excess they pursued.

The tide turned for corporations back in 1976, with the Buckley vs. Valeo decision by the Supreme Court. The Court decided that donating money was the constitutional equivalent of political speech, thus making plutocracy official and ending our progress towards democracy. Corporations have gained ground continuously since then. It is a positive feedback loop. As they gain more political power they are able to reduce the resistance to their modification of their environment. This includes all three of the modes of resistance I outlined above.

The millionaires and billionaires who engage in symbiotic parasitism on the corporate herd have veto power over entry into politics. Candidates have to raise those two-thousand dollar donations in order to stand a chance. This restricts the boundaries of legislation to initiatives acceptable to corporate remoras, which means fewer restrictions on corporate power. Once enough presidents and senators have been elected this way, then the Supreme Court can be stacked, and the Constitution gets interpreted to benefit further corporate power. Witness the Citizens United decision.

Similarly, information (or, more likely, disinformation) is supplied to citizens by a shrinking handful of ever larger communications conglomerates. Citizens can’t oppose what they don’t know about, and they won’t oppose what they have been convinced is in their interests. The internet has provided some outlet for human voices, but the behemoths of the business are always making efforts to fence that in as well. The latest outrage is the ProtectIP/SOPA bills, which would allow the big media players to shut down competing sites without due process.

Even the consequential restrictions on corporate action have been buffered by massive government intervention. Instead of taking over bankrupt financial firms and writing down mortgages to market prices, the government just stuck a funnel in the top of the banking industry and poured in a trillion dollars.

So there is a feedback loop going on. The accelerating accumulation of power by corporations allows the increasing acceleration of their accumulation of power. The problem for corporations in this situation is that some restrictions are necessary to prevent them from destroying their own environment. The idiocy that culminated in the 2007 financial meltdown is one symptom of corporate self-direction. Another symptom is the congressional approval rating.

Corporations are so short sighted and so programmed for self interest that they habitually overreach. Eventually even the cleverest psychopath buries too many bodies in the backyard and it begins to stink. The stink of political corruption has gotten so obvious that even the propaganda efforts of corporate media can’t cover it. In good times a certain amount of corruption can make it past the public with a knowing eye roll, but when everybody knows (or is) someone who is one of the long term unemployed, and when everyone knows (or is) someone on the wrong end of an underwater mortgage, public consciousness shifts. As long as most people were on an upward economic trend, or at least there was a promise of upward mobility for the next generation, people could put up with their lot. Now we’re looking at structural unemployment and underemployment, while college has become too much of a financial burden for too many, with no reasonable guarantee of a benefit. Corporations and their elite parasites have simply sucked too much wealth out of the economy.

This has given them the power to change the economic rules so that they can suck out even more. Up to a point. Another symptom of the ever tightening feedback loop is the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as dozens of other movements focused directly on taking power away from corporations. Review any number of opinion polls from the last decade and you’ll find that a consistent 75% (or more) of respondents say that big business and their lobbyists have too much power. The question is whether these various political movements can turn this sentiment into real action and a real power shift. The corporate grip on the means of communication and legislation is firm. On the other hand, who would have thought a couple of years ago that Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya would have pitched out their dictators? I have no conclusion here, except to note that the fight is out in the open now. I guess that’s half the battle.

Afghanistan: Corruption is the subject

I just read a post at the always-interesting site Registan about corruption in the Afghan National Police. It is sordid and depressing. It would be shocking if I hadn’t long ago ceased being surprised by what people do with guns and without supervision. I’ll quote the original article from Al-Aribiyah about what British troops found when they fought their way into Helmand Province.

As the troops advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.

"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."

The Interior Ministry in Kabul said it would contact police commanders in the area before responding in detail.

When the Taliban arrived in the village 10 months ago and drove the police out, local people rejoiced, said Mohammad Rasul, a toothless elderly farmer who keeps a few cows and chickens in a neatly tended orchard of pomegranate trees, figs and grape vines.


Although his own son was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb five years ago, Rasul said the Taliban earned their welcome in the village by treating people with respect.

So, we have the ANP shaking people down like the local branch of the Mafia, and then engaging in brutal sexual abuse. Note that the farmer lost his son to the Taliban and yet prefers them to the ANP.

This is history repeating itself. Why, one might ask, were the Taliban able to take over and hold Afghanistan against all the other warlords? Were they better fighters? Were they better equipped? Better generaled? Nope.

They were honest. Damn them for a bunch of medieval, superstitious, woman-hating sadists, but they were, and are, a very legalistic bunch. Sharia law is a throwback to centuries ago, but it is law, and they rule by it.

After the Soviets were driven out Afghanistan had a not-very-charming civil war among the various warlord factions. From that time until the Taliban took over in 1996, a regular Afghan civilian could expect to be stopped on the road and robbed at gunpoint every few miles by the local militiamen. Businesses paid protection money. It was essentially a country ruled by organized crime, only less organized than Chicago in the 1920’s.

The Taliban, backed by factions within the Pakistani government, made headway in their successful fight for power by simply leaving people alone. If you grew your beard, kept your radio quiet and your women under wraps, you could go about your business in relative safety. Anybody who stole lost a hand, and unlike the previous non-administration, bribes and connections didn’t do the crook any good. Overall the Taliban were bureaucratic sticklers for procedure. It says something about the abysmal level that things had gotten to that Afghans preferred living in the legal equivalent of Europe in the year 1214. It says something about the failure of our efforts today that many still prefer it.

Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic partly because of the general chaos, partly because of our influence (more on that later) and partly because the country is tribal. Tribal societies work on the basis of familial and personal relationships, patronage, and nepotism. Afghanistan seems to have the worst of all worlds – the tradition of favoring relatives and rewarding followers without the original firm social structure that made it work. Endless war, the imposition of alien political structures, and huge flows of foreign cash have broken down the traditional safeguards. I’m not saying that Afghanistan ever had a golden age of lawfulness, just a set of traditions that were coherent enough to organize a society. The key to power in Afghanistan is eliminating corruption, or at least minimizing and regulating it.

How do we eliminate corruption in a country where loyalty is rented?

We could start by not underestimating the Afghans. The primary Afghan values are hospitality and practicality. They may not have progressive values about the role of women but they know how to adapt and survive. I have read accounts of local Afghan judges setting up mock “fair trials” for visiting UN representatives to show how well the reform efforts are going. Then, with the foreigners out of the way, the Potemkin courts get shut down and it is back to bribery and favoritism. They will get away with whatever we let them.

We could also start by cleaning up our own act. Our whole semi-privatized effort over there is riddled with corruption. Contractors are doling out bribes and protection money, which sustains and reinforces the present way of doing things.


Ultimately, we have to be willing to step away from our allies. Afghanistan has held greater importance in the minds of western governments than it really deserves. Great Britain and Russia played “The Great Game” of influence and espionage for decades in Central Asia, to no real advantage for either. We went in, ostensibly after Osama bin Laden, when with a bit more pressure we could have had him for a few diplomatic concessions. Now he is almost certainly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, so there goes that reasoning. Some see our interest in Afghanistan as relating to a non-Russian pipeline route for oil and gas out of the ‘stans. That is one pipeline that won’t get built for a while. The whole deal is such a loser that we could safely threaten Hamid Karzai and the whole wretched crew with abandonment if they don’t clean up their acts. That includes prosecuting the rapist policemen.

The two valuable things that we could offer the people of Afghanistan would be personal security and some kind of consistent justice. Until they see western presence as a source for these things they will find it in the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.