Written by John Turner   

The story of America lately has been the tale of how business enterprises worm their way into the nation’s moneymaking machinery without contributing anything to the well-being of the people of the nation. This has now become what clever people do. Over the long run they destroy the social system they leech onto. But the long run is never part of their perspective. They are virtually all like screaming toddlers: they want it now, all of it.

Quite a few people are beginning to recognize that this process is not consistent with democracy. The commotion in Egypt has brought forth much comment to the effect that the Egyptian people are demanding democracy at the same time the American people are scrapping their democratic system. Bob Herbert, for example, made that point in his column this morning in the New York Times.

Whether or not it’s a farcical any longer to describe the United States as a democracy, the kind of thing only simple brains like Chris Matthews do, I’m not sure. There remain democratic elements in our makeup. But we can say with a fair degree of certainty that they are weak and growing weaker.

We are now closer to being a plutocracy than a democracy. That’s for sure.

A dominant feature of the plutocracy is a growing number of organizations which work to crush any dissent on behalf of ordinary people. In the news now is the story of H.B. Gary, a computer security firm, which has been trying to sell a plan to destroy WikiLeaks to the Bank of America. But not only do they wish to smash the data revealing web site, they want to ruin anyone who defends it in any way. H.B. Gary has singled out the Salon reporter Glenn Greenwald as a prominent target because he has recently been on a campaign to point out the lies that various elements of the U.S. government have been telling about WikiLeaks.

Bank of America is the deep pocket H.B. Gary is trying to enlist because the gigantic financial institution is presumably about to be embarrassed -- and perhaps hurt worst than that -- by the next batch of WikiLeaks releases.

You would think that by now most citizens understand that in order for institutions like Bank of America to behave as they do and make the money they do, it’s necessary for them to play fast and loose with the law. They also have to be assured that their illegalities will not draw the critical eye of law enforcement agencies in the way a seller of marijuana cigarettes does. Escape from law enforcement is pretty much what being “too big to fail” means.

It’s one thing, though, for most people to assume this and another for internal documents to make it blatantly and inescapably clear. The latter is what Bank of America fears. So a network of umbrella organizations grows up around it to protect it against the truth. And the officials of these organizations make vast amounts of money as compared to what ordinary workers bring in.

The officials of companies like these are rapidly becoming the ruling class of America. They have the money to buy the government, so that’s what they do with it. And that’s largely what American history has become: the buying of government by people who want to keep the truth away from a majority of citizens.

In the instance cited above, H.B. Gary was so ham-handed that they are probably suffering a temporary stumble. Glenn Greenwald is not without his own resources, and he has been employing them so resourcefully that Bank of America is trying to disavow any connection with the sleazy computer security firm. Actually, Greenwald’s task is fairly simple. All he has to do is explain what’s been going on.

Still H.B. Gary’s behavior will be largely forgotten in a couple of weeks. The mainstream media doesn’t have mind enough to concentrate on stories like this, or to spell out what they mean. So business as usual will probably be restored.

The theory of democracy is that a majority of the people will eventually see through what the “malefactors of great wealth” are up to, and will demand of their government action to reign in predatory behavior. Yet the prominent fear has now become that the American people have lost the ability to conduct a genuine democracy. To put it bluntly, they are too lazy and too stupid to do it -- or so it is said. Andrew Bacevich noted recently that the absence of self-awareness is an enduring element of the American character.

I wish Mr. Bacevich were wrong. But the evidence right now seems strongly in his favor. And if it continues to flow that way, the history of America in the early years of the 21st century will be the story of financial creeps buying the government and turning at least 90 percent of the citizens into their abject servants.