August 3, 2022
The way things are in the U.S. right now has been really going to hell due to this sensitive Taiwan business. No one wants to admit it, but this has the flavor of another Straits Crisis because of the sensitive nature of the issues at stake. The cards are on the table. The only card that China had in this three-way contention was a certain knowledge of the area, and they were banking on the possibility that the U.S. wouldn't care enough to complete this crucial project, and secure this missing piece in assuring the safety and security of the 21st century economy. But there is now, a more full understanding of what is holding this 21st century economy together. And the very deepest strength of the US has been marshaled to connect these concepts together. Everyone knows that this has to happen for not only the short term but the long term health of the American body politick.
The challenge that we have to overcome in this diplomacy, which will continue for the long after this high-level meeting, is the suspicion on either side that the other side is not doing the essential things that need to be done right, absolutely correctly, at a high level relative to the cultural standard of literacy. There is a distinct hesitancy to bring out the best of the best in each side toward an accord because there's a very limited way that you can ask another if that is really the best example of that, that you do.
No illusions should be had that TW does the Condor-Eagle way of connecting cultures, but for us, the delegation that we sent over thre was legitimately a Condor-type mission. In this mission, Ms. Pelosi is representing the economy, which is internally not the standard governing structure, but she's meeting with the governing structure of the TW government which is not the ruling standard of the culture and Society. Ergo, it is a true meeting of the cultures at the very highest level we have seen.
On a strict diplomatic statesmanship level, if she is going there, the only government that is independent of the mission, here, is the president and vice president. The Senate is in dissent, and the Supreme Court is in recess. The rest of the country on a strictly hierarchical level, is clandestine. The left hand is shaking the left hand, and the evaluation of the strength of each culture is going on behind the scenes, in peacetime. The long recovery from this may extend out for several months: that is the real workout that is going to happen as a consequence of this huge deal.
I want to note a strange coincidence that happened in the Senate today that I see as two speeches in commentary on this moment. Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse took to the floor today to make two speeches critiquing our economy and legal system. In short, Senator Sanders reported out once more that many of our economic problems can be attributed to the continuing tendency in law-making for conservative criticism of economic projects to end up in stripping protections for workers, even as the final bill still presents the appearance of delivering the framework, on a wide scale, that the people of the country have been asking for. This concludes in the capture of these new programs by the forces of the moneyed elite, and its co-optation to serve the interests of what we can call the 1% and/or our new robber barons, as in the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or it's elimination, as in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
The following speech by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse amplified the principal critique by nailing down the fact that there is a class of moneyed elite that is scheming and manipulating to capture institutions of government and society. In particular, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund, for example, put millions of dollars of anonymous money toward the appointment of social conservative judges to the bench, while blocking the appointment of liberal justices. These are the same organizations, a 501(c)3 and 501(c)4, that were created and operated concurrently to block the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court bench, and subsequently assisted in the appointment of three judges supported by conservatives to the same Supreme Court bench. There's a standard operating procedure in the machine of elite conservative politics where one faction of this class gets tax breaks when they win, and the other gets social conservative judges. Jonathan Chait spilled the beans on that recently, but let's not take it out on him, he was just doing his job. Still, it's not a big secret. There have long been these organizations like the Federalist Society and the John Birch Society that have operated clandestinely to manipulate the appointment of judges. But it's relatively new for these old–money people to corporatize this endeavor to the purpose of capturing as much of our legal system as possible. We have a legal system based on common law as opposed to civil law, and the system of constitutional legality is to a certain extent grafted onto the common law system to deal with cases involving government action too. For these schemers to be trying to "take over" a system of common law is delusional unless they are betting on the American people not noticing it and calling them on it. The common law is a great protector of the people's basic liberty, because it gives them recourse to the courts. But the British common law system doesn't give anyone much leeway to challenge the actions of government. Britain didn't want anyone to be able to hold their monarchy liable for anything, especially corruption, and so the American system of law that has both common and constitutional law elements is a significant innovation on the British system of unaccountable governmental power. However it's this constitutional system of law, and in general, law regarding the administration of federalism, that is vulnerable to co-optation by the conspiracy of the rich and powerful in this country, and in the series of shocking scandals involving the American Supreme Court it has been revealed that this problem is very serious. As Senator Whitehouse said, no one puts that much money into appointing certain judges unless they have a purpose. And the scale of the donations gathered, and their anonymity, indicates that the class behind this mobilization of regressive social conservative judges is the class of people in this country, who, being rich and powerful, presume they are the ruling class. This doesn't have to be so exhaustively reasoned out in the dark either, because, it's just common sense that that's who it would be.
So not only do we have capture of our most important economic programs by bad actors among the rich and powerful, but we also increasingly have to contend with capture of our legal institutions, if not our actual legal system, by the functionally same social class of bad actors among the rich.
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