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Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds Concentrated Wealth and the Purchase of Political Power: Democracy’s Death Spiral William Banzai - The MachineDemocracy’s Death Spiral is a positive feedback loop between ever-greater concentrations of wealth and the ever-higher costs of retaining political power. Positive feedback loops lead to "death spirals" in which destructive forces reinforce each other until the dynamic implodes. One example is an "arms race" in which ever more costly and complex weapons systems must be matched lest one nation in the race fall behind. Since the number of weapons and their cost are essentially unlimited, then the race continues until one contestant is bankrupted. Though many would claim it is a simplification, this dynamic was at the root of the Soviet Union’s collapse: as the U.S. embarked on a massive expansion of its military and technological power, the Soviet Union exhausted its much smaller resources attempting to keep up. Though statistics from the Soviet era are not entirely reliable, various scholars have estimated that fully 40% of the Soviet GDP was being expended on its military and military-industrial complex. The U.S. was spending between 4% and 6% of its GDP on direct military expenditures, even during the height of the Reagan buildup. If you include the Security State (CIA, NSA, et al.), the Veterans Administration and other military-related programs (DARPA, etc.) then the cost was still far less than 10% of GDP. The greater freedom to exchange information between government-funded research labs, private firms and government-funded universities enabled the U.S. to outdistance the Soviets technologically. Once again a positive feedback loop can be discerned in the way that increased spending on military-related R&D in the U.S. led to increasingly networked nodes of technological advancement which led to greater advances and more spending to develop those technologies. The U.S. emerged victorious as the sole superpower, but a more closely matched rivalry might have ended with the collapse of both competitors: a Death Spiral of the sort Jared Diamond describes on Easter Island in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In the U.S., the ever-greater concentrations of wealth gathered by an ascendant Financial Power Elite has entered a positive feedback loop with the costs of gaining or retaining political power. The costs of winning an election have skyrocketed to the point that fundraising is the key function of any politico who is not independently extremely wealthy. This quantum leap… continue reading Tags: arms race, concentrated wealth, corporate media, Democracy, financial elite, lobbyists, political campaigns, political power, positive feedback loops, Propaganda Posted in Phil's Favorites | No Comments »