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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

If You Don't Like Gangsterism and Financial Fraud, Go to Russia! (UPDATED!)

Apparently, dead-eyed money-man Mitt Romney is now accusing those who disapprove his own preferred crony capitalist/financial fraudster pathway to personal fortune (well, that and, you know, being born already rich) of "flirting with communism." If only!

(I keed! I keed!)

Talking Points Memo summarizes this gesture as more or less the tried and true Cold War rhetoric "if you hate the obvious and correctable flaws of American style capitalism, then move to Soviet Russia!"

This is true as far as it goes, but it does pay to dwell for a moment on the fact that not only was this a completely idiotic gambit during the Cold War (why wouldn't efforts to reform what passed for "capitalism" to better serve more people be seen as an effort to strengthen and support capitalism rather than an effort to subvert capitalism and give comfort to the Red Enemy, dun dun DUN, for instance?), but it is surreally idiotic now that the Cold War is over and Soviet Russia no longer even exists for one to go to (not that the Russia reform-minded Americans were being invited to move to ever really existed as much more than a paranoid fantasy in the minds of scared stupid assholes whose kids would grow down to be anti-civilizational Teavangelicals in the first place).

This absurdity is compounded when we realize that the fall of the Soviet Union was heralded by libertopians and neo-cons as the End of History and the inevitable opening for the spontaneous order of virtuous maximally efficient markets to provide indisputable evidence of the righteousness of their assumptions and aspirations -- and left an immiserated wasteland of gangsters and dysfunction and fraud.

Rather than social democrats "going to Russia" Russia went to anarcho-capitalism, and the "flowering" of anarcho-capitalism yielded pre-civilizational disorder and misery.

As Lawrence Lessig pointed out in Code, the abject failure of the libertopian existence proof playing out over and over again in the laboratory of post-Soviet polities lead the irrationally exuberant market fundamentalist ideologues to migrate Libertopia into cyberspace, whereupon a thousand crypto-anarchist long-boom post-nationalist digital-capitalist manifestoes and frauds bloomed (as Naomi Klein went on to provide the next chapter, when the cyberspatial libertopian existence proof failed just as abjectly, the market ideologues had already moved on to the laboratory setting of "Baghdad Year Zero").

To Romney and other one-percenters who invite democratic reformers to take a trip to Soviet Russia via the Wayback Machine I am tempted to invite them to take a permanent vacation in Somalia, except that I would rather collaborate with the good people of Somalia to build a sustainable social democracy there than foist our own rich evil assholes on them. I daresay it would be enough to soak them in taxes and throw the worst of them in the jails that would be emptied by ending the (racist) War on (some) Drugs.



UPDATE: See Also, TPM's Campaign in 100 Seconds for Today:

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