America’s Managerial Elite Has Failed, But We Can’t Get Rid Of Them
by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 06/18/2019
The system is broken, and the managerial elite will keep it broken because it serves their interests to keep it broken.
America’s managerial elite came to do good and stayed to do well–at the expense of everyone beneath them. Now that they’ve entrenched themselves at the top of the status quo, there’s no way to dislodge them, even as their failure to address what’s broken, much less actually fix what’s broken, insures systemic breakdown.
In government, the managerial elite is known as The Deep State: those who remain in power regardless of who’s in elected office. In local government, managerial elites often shift positions, moving from elected office to a plum position in the bureaucracy where they can draw a big paycheck out of sight until they retire.
In Corporate America, managerial elites also move around, leaving sinking ships (that they may well have helped sink) as needed, and moving to think tanks or academia if their failures start multiplying.
Changing elected officials does nothing to dislodge our managerial elite overlords. The new mayor, governor or president comes and goes, and all the major institutions–education, higher education, healthcare, national defense, critical infrastructure–continue down the same path of enriching entrenched insiders while the institution fails its core missions.
If you think this chart of soaring student loan debt is a sign of “success,” you are 1) delusional 2) protected from the dire consequences of this failure 3) getting your paycheck from this failed system. That in a nutshell is the state of the nation: those who are protected from the consequences of failure are loyal to the Establishment, as are the millions drawing a paycheck from systems they know are irredeemable failures.
Let’s review the central institutions of the nation:
1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation.
2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS.
3. Higher Education: a bloated, failed system that is bankrupting an entire generation while mis-educating them for productive roles in the emerging economy. (I cover this in depth in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.)
4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on?
5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law.
The Rest…HERE
