Putin’s Prison Win

It’s always interesting to see how other country’s view ours. Russia’s state media organ, RT, offers propaganda mixed with facts. It spins sham with shame into a universe of plausible deniability for some of us, and seeming hopelessness for others of us.

An RT piece about Russian agitator, and burgeoning US Republican Party superhero, Maria Butina (link) lauds the fortitude she displayed while behind bars in US prisons. At the same time it harshly, and correctly, criticizes the stupid brutality of the US penal system.

Sadly, RT’s claims about our prisons are demonstrable. They ring the same dark tone as thousands of other US prison stories.

I’m reminded of Tim DeChristopher who spent three years in a Federal prison for non-violent environmental activism. After serving his sentence he said that the US prison system is filled with psychopaths and 90% of those are employees.

I know why we face these massive challenges, the failing systems, the seemingly real but mostly imagined divisions, the degradations of the environment, the privatizing of the commons, the suppression of the national conscience. I know why we are sliding down the slug’s trail psychologists call ethical fading: we are crumbling morally and physically because we are ruled by monopolies.

And that’s really it. It is that simple. Monopolies rule. Plutocrats are your betters. And any power structure that might venture an argument otherwise must be crushed in its infancy.

At the moment, quarterly profits are the only American ethics and money is the only freedom really worth fighting for.

We have been here before. J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, et al, once ruled our country as viciously and condescendingly as any of our current plutocrats. Tricks of luck, violence, and legislation in the early decades of the last century shoved them back into whatever dark, lonely pit that mindset comes from and let democracy have a try at governing again.

There for awhile America had a shot at being great, not just for the wealthy, for everybody.

But once more the Rubicon has been crossed. US democracy, birthed a eunuch but occasionally an effective buerocrat, is currently impotent against the monopoly powers that rule our day to day lives.

It’s hard to place just when the latest crop of Corporate Caesars became inevitable. Was it a court decision? Some innocuous seeming bit of legislation? The SCOTUS Chakrabarty decision, Bush v Gore, and Clinton’s media deregulation come immediately to my mind. But none of those seems enough to explain our current reality. They are more symptoms than cause.

I suspect there is an unheralded, set of functionary decisions that were made decades before Bush v Gore crowned the monopolist’s coup. Back there somewhere, before Clinton became President, somewhere in the reams of federal legislation there are clues to what let loose the fierce careers of the current gilded aristocrats.

There is a moment, I’m sure, where some confused champion of the little guy, a pre Clinton Clinton, a plebeian believer in the wonders of the free market, there is for sure a moment when a would be ‘people’s’ Henry V swung a sledgehammer at the walls of our democracy, yelling the sad, easy tropes of ‘free markets’ and ‘deregulation’, ‘rational choice,’ saying, what say you, will you yield? Or guilty in defense be thus destroyed? 

And American democracy yielded and was destroyed.

Russia, currently ruled by the most rational of autocrats since Catherine the Great let Voltaire kiss her feet, wins a reward much greater than the division it has sowed among us when it prints demonstrable truths about our prison.

Nobody here  pretends Russian prisons are models of decency. But, now we can’t feign ignorance at our own failures. By accepting them, rather than addressing them as we might do in a functioning democracy, we become them.

Perhaps this is why one of our major political parties is cozying up to Russia. Is it a way to excuse our own failings, a mea culpa of a sort? Is the GOP’s sudden love of Russia just a bold whataboutism?

I don’t believe it’s more sinister than that, at least among those outside of Trump’s immediate circle. Propaganda becomes projection. Projection becomes common cause, after all.

Russian propaganda, printed by RT or screamed and finger-pointed at female American Ambassadors during Federal Government proceedings, has become more difficult to parse from our reality simply because our reality is Russian propaganda.