The social contract

The US has become a de facto corpocracy. It is an almost wholly owned subsidiary of unaccountable mega banks and corporations. This is increasingly apparent in the privatisation of prison systems.

Under the Corpocracy shareholders and the state profit from the forced labour of a million prisoners. At the same time inmates are charged for board, rent, footwear, clothing, power, healthcare and other essential goods and services. Many become so indebted they can never escape the system, even once they have served their time. Those unable to keep up their repayments after release are-incarcerated

This Orwellian system relies on ever increasing numbers of bonded workers for industrial and economic growth. The FBI reports s that one third of Americans now have a criminal record.

To the banker’s mind it makes perfect sense that corporations should own the prisons with minimal state interference. The role of the state and judiciary becomes one of ensuring an abundant supply of cheap labour to ensure a rich return on investments.

Don’t think it can’t happen here.

Brute Utopia

Twisting and spinning their deceptive gyres;
so busy with their little webs;
The members do not hear the despised membership;
The social contract falls apart;
Democracy cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the land,
The corporate hounds let slip, and everywhere
The cries of the innocent are drowned
By the monstrous media.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity;
And the predator’s ferocious joy.
In an ecstasy of excess.

Surely some revelation is at hand?
Thatcher’s Second Coming ?
Or silly Rapacious Reagan?
Friedman?
Hayek at the very least.

The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a hideous image appears.
It’s not The New Jerusalem;
This wasteland of insatiable greed,

This bleak landscape of Consumer Land;
Where entitled Philistines rule in the people’s name.
Where Barons and Magnates of every kind;
bind all others in irredeemable debt.

These corrupt Servants of Mammon;
Who know the price of everything,
And the value of nothing.
Summon up their Beast.
This rough Beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Canberra to be reborn.
With a pig’s body and the head of a man;
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

It rolls its great thighs, and does its sums;
Puffs a fat cigar, self satisfied self server.
Dances a jig of unrestrained delight;
And pronounces our doom.

Has The Beast employed a J curve,
To shape a prosperous future?
Or used a Hockey stick,
To beat the people down?

While all about it wheel afrighted birds,
Their nests destroyed, all security gone;
Screaming to no avail.
The Beast is deaf.

The Beast’s Budget breaks open
Our fragile cracked democracy.
What has he released?
Spiderlings spill out; revealing Brute Utopia.

The Beast is but its midwife

And now bloated Corpocracy unfolds itself;
Many eyed, many limbed, black web spinner;
The insatiable predator that eats its young
That in the end consumes itself.

It strikes
Paralyzed democracy convulses
It gorges
The Common Wealth is no more.
The Brute Utopia triumphant

With apologies to Yates, Wilde et a