First exit polls give victory to Henrique Capriles

[JDPriestly]

47. Aside from the corruption in our government, when the market-capitalist side of

the state dominates the democratic-government side, business, the market itself becomes corrupt. Companies are corrupt and then corrupt our government. That is very true of the really big companies in our country -- the banks, the oil and gas companies, the health insurance companies and so many others. The companies themselves are corrupt in both their internal and external dealings. The management cheats and tricks both customers and shareholders.

Even in our democratic market-capitalist state, companies don't obey government regulations. They introduce new products without doing the basic safety research that they should do. We get things like Enron, like the BP spill. And we don't even hear about most of the horrors that occur. Companies lie. If you pay attention, you become aware of their corruption. If gun sales are profitable, then they sell more and more guns no matter what the costs in human lives and in social disruption. A buck is a buck, and being rich, rich, rich makes any price worth it for this market-capitalism at its extreme.

I am beginning to think that the natural course of the free market is not to achieve equilibrium and promote creativity (as I had always thought) but to funnel wealth to a few and promote the formation of monopolies and trusts. I suspect that ultimately the increasing concentration of wealth combined with the increasing oppression of the rest of us will lead to some sort of dictatorship or monarchy.

The dominance of the utterly corrupt monopoly/trust result is what we have gotten each time that we have reduced the checks of regulation and government. The most obvious manifestation of the monopoly/trust extreme appears to me to be the boom and bust which generally results in consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of even fewer companies or people than was the case before the boom/bust cycle began.

We saw that in banking in 2008. We had a huge boom in the housing market so it seemed. In reality it was a boom in the financial sector. Yes, houses were built and sold and bought, but the real boom was in the mortgage industry. Banks grew big during the boom period, and during the bust period, corrupt power in the country manipulated the government and the Federal Reserve so as to do away with some of the smaller banks and we ended up closer to a monopoly than we were before the boom and bust.

And now we will start another cycle. Assuredly the boom will take place in what appears to be some sector of the economy other than finance, but in reality, in the end, the wealth and power will become more concentrated in the hands of the same wealthy people who come out on top in each cycle.

Rockefeller was the master manipulator of the process. It took Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busting laws, in other words, strong government, to bring a little balance into our system at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, of course, we landed right back in a boom that lead to a bust in 1929 and it took FDR and strong laws to hold back the greed in the stock market and banks.

That held for a long time although we had several greedy surges toward monopoly again. OPEC took us for a ride as we attempted to pay off what we owed for the Viet Nam War through reducing the value of the currency with which we had paid for oil. Then came the 1980s and the S&L crisis, then the dot-com boom of the 1990s followed by ever laxer laws governing the financial sector culminating in the bust in 2008.

Today the small group of the very rich are richer than ever. The lucky among us do well to "own" or owe on a small city lot with a tiny house on it. We now call having the right to pay taxes forever on that small city lot the American dream.

Our system still supports a limited amount of creativity. But the greed and corruption usually crush it before it benefits the majority of Americans.

For many young Americans the entire American dream boils down to having an I-Phone with unlimited texting. Wow! How far we have fallen thanks to the failure of our democratic institutions to master our market-capitalism. I am very disappointed in market-capitalism. It has run amok and has far too many apologists paid to root for it.