How about this myth: that free market capitalism exist at all.
Unless you call crony capitalism and state capitalism “laizze faire”. Because that’s what it’s not. Indeed, the presidency of Barack Obama [a future Bilderberger] speaks volumes regarding how “the sytem” works.
He came to Washington to change things, remember?
There are very powerful men and women who comprise the interlocking elements of the Wall Street/Washington revolving doors, the military/media industrial complex, the war economy. America has always had a bi-partisan ruling class.
Above all else, Barack Obama is a member in good standing of America’s ruling class. The “liberal” rendition, as it were.
But not in the simplistic Marxist sense of “the class struggle”. That was more a manifestation of the industrial revolution. Capitalism has evolved light years beyond that.
Indeed, nominating something as “the ruling class” does not mean that once a month…literally…the folks from the corporate media [and their Wall Street advertisers] sit down with relevant committee chairmen in Congress, Obama’s economic team in the White House, the K Street lobbyists and Henry Kissinger’s “colleagues” from Bilderberg to meticulously plan the next month’s political and economic agenda. It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because it doesn’t have to. Besides, even within these corporate concoctions of wealth and power, there are considerable conflicts. For example, corporations based here in America may be strongly opposed to government policies that favor companies that shift all or part of their business overseas. And companies that oppose policies seen as favorable to the interests of oil industry do so because the higher the cost of oil the more costly it is in run their own businesses profitably.
That, of course, is where “democracy” comes into play. And some of these conflagrations are titantic because so much money is at stake.
No, America’s ruling class does not embody a bunch of secret meetings where secret conspirators secretly plot and plan to carve up the world in Dr Evil’s secret location at Goldman Sachs.
Instead, it is more like this:
From the Bullfrog Films review of the film The American Ruling Class:
[b]The American Ruling Class is one of the most unusual films to be made in America in recent years–both in terms of form and content. The form is a “dramatic-documentary-musical” and the content is our country’s most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.
At bottom the film is a morality tale, the story of two Yale students (played by Harvard men) who seek their opportunities upon graduation. As the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham conducts them through the corridors of power: Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, corporations, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations, and New York society dinners—our two representative graduates “one rich and the other not so rich” must struggle with their responsibilities in “a world collaterally damaged by the magic of money and the miracles of science.” The real-life luminaries they meet on their journey become characters in a story about power, its responsibilities and abuses.
All the while “the Mighty Wurlitzer” plays on, a reference to the massive propaganda apparatus invented by the CIA’s Frank Wisner, here used to signify the nocturnal philosophy of acquisition and imperial hubris which continually calls to the young men, the siren song of careerist myopia that was bred into their bones at school.
As we watch these two young men wend their way through what is only a slight fictionalization of their actual lives and choices, as we meet former Secretaries of State and Defense, directors of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the publisher of The New York Times, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Altman and a host of others, we have to ask along with Mr. Lapham: “To what end the genius of the Wall Street banks and the force of the Pentagon’s colossal weapons? Where does America discover the wisdom to play with its wonderful toys?” The possible answers move beyond the empty distinction of party affiliation and into the heart of American Oligarchy itself. By film’s end, the young men must decide: Should they seek to rule the world, or to save it?[/b]
Of course, Obama, the “progressive” capitalist, fits quite comfortably into this carefully calibrated circle of “cultured” friends. His administration is bursting at the seams with them. For example, the Bilderberg, CFR, TC folks alone include Hillary Clinton [and Bill of course], Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rahm Emanuel, George Mitchell, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Robert Gates, James Jones, Tom Daschle, Eric Shinseki, Michael Froman, Susan Rice, Jack Reed, EricHolder, Janet Napolitano, Mona Sutphen.
Though some are admitedly just “advisers”.
Hell, it’s just commonsense to point out that those who own and operate the political and economic instruments that sustain the global economy, are going to want to connect the dots with others like them around the world. They have “shared interests” that evolve from and center around transactions that swell well up into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, no, the crony capitalists don’t need to schedule a secret rendevous where they can exchange secret handshakes and secret code words with the other secret participants.
They especially don’t need to with an electorate patently blind to how the world really functions all around them.