Legislators. Regulators. Prosecutors. Broadcasters. Speculators. Perpetrators. Bedfellows all.

So, here we are, more than four years into the worst economic crisis since the First Great Depression, and no one in the high echelons of the global financial and banking community has been properly investigated or prosecuted for fraud or theft, despite plenty of evidence stacking up that an eye-popping level of corruption is rife in this sector. Of course, this means that not a single greedster has gone to jail.

Now, a lot of people in the general public - well, maybe it's only a handful who bother to look up from their mass media dumbing machines - are angry about this, and wonder why nothing has been done in terms of the exercise of the law. They probably think it's because the machinery of justice is moving painfully slowly, and that eventually some action will be taken, surely.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, but I contend that no member of the plutocracy (some label them the kleptocracy) will ever go to jail over the wholesale theft of taxpayers' money that has occurred since late 2007.

I won't go into details here about the mechanism in play that has resulted in billions and billions of dollars, pounds and euros of government (i.e. taxpayers') money being funnelled into the private accounts of the active orchestrators of the global "collapse". (Interesting that the collapse has resulted in an increase in the wealth at the top table.) There are plenty of other places on the web that explain this nefarious scheme - revealed by people more expert than I in fathoming the intricacies of the double and triple-dealings of those zero-empathy characters whom the infuriated commentator Max Keiser fetchingly terms the banksters. (He also calls them financial terrorists, which is an amusing ironic twist in this age of the eternal War on Terror.)

Regarding the lack of prosecution and conviction, the truth needs to be told that the legislators, the regulators and the prosecutors are indistinguishable from the perpetrators. Let me repeat this. The people who are appointed by the government and paid by public money to uphold The Law and act against criminal fraud are in bed with the fraudsters.

No comment

The evidence from near and afar is that the full weight of the law is applied to common street muggers, who get thrown into prison gulags with alacrity, but the lauded and lionised Wall Street heist-meisters continue to be accorded the blessings of their rapacious organisations, million-dollar bonuses and dinner with the president/prime minister.

To add luxury-priced gasoline to a raging fire, the mass media controlled by the plutocracy is playing the same game, focusing on titillating minutiae such as telephotographed celebrity breasts and the gaffes of minor politicians so as to shield the top tier perps from proper scrutiny. News Corp - primarily through Fox News and its sister gutter newspapers including the once esteemed (London) Times - is only the most blatant of the cabal of apologists who have usurped the previously sacrosanct role of investigative journalism. The BBC is far more subtle in its descent into dumb-dumb land, as befits a nation famed for the lovingly incestuous relationship between senior politicians and the news broadcasters.

The only kind of bias now discussed

The police forces of several countries at the heart of the world-spanning corruption have morphed into private protection forces for the puppet-masters, wading into lawful street protesters like stick-wielding zombies on acid. I'd dearly like to know how the boys in blue are being briefed (a.k.a. whipped up) by politicised senior officers before going into battle on the streets. If you knew the sheer scale of recent purchases of urban war weaponry and ammunition by those previously considered to be humble protectors of law-abiding citizens, you would either weep or run for the woods.

There's not a lot more to say about these cosy bedfellows. We're living in a world that works only for a few at the top of the mud heap. Except for brief moments, it has always been thus. The problem isn't that there's corruption - in nature, corruption is a natural process of decay, and our species is decaying, no question about that. No, the problem is one of denied optimism. For a short period, we grew up with dreams of making a better world, with expectations that there would be growing opportunity and at least a chance of building a society where people were tolerant and respectful of each other and where conflict and hastened death could be avoided through dialogue and equitable sharing and conservation of limited natural resources.

This optimism is all but extinguished. Governments have shown themselves to be mere shell companies that exist only to provide a thinning veneer of respectability for the financial rapists who from the shadows dominate economic life. Why anyone would wish to vote any more is beyond me. No one in any mainstream party has the slightest interest in representing the ordinary person - they only claim to when they are duplicitously hunting for votes. Time and time again to the point of exhausting ennui, after each election the "governing" group always revert to dancing to the puppeteers' tunes - these smarmy professional liars with their shiny faces, sharp suits and smug attitude that they know best, all of which denote limited intellect and naked personal ambition.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating, if only to make some sense of the mess. The core problem is our in-built defectiveness as a species. Although we are rather glibly defined as Homo sapiens, we are anything but sapient. We are on the whole bumbling, oafish thugs lacking wisdom, careering through the world consuming, pilfering and destroying everything in our path, with no thought as to consequences or the requirement to conserve. "Use it today, fuck tomorrow" is the unspoken mantra that pervades all economic activity, a perfect example of which is nuclear power generation - among a great many examples.

Astonishing foresight

We have got to where we are today as a natural outcome of the Darwinian process of so-called survival of the fittest. It took me a long while to understand this, but I now realise that 'fittest' has no qualitative meaning. We're not the best species in the sense of goodness, we're just the best in terms of adapting and utilising the environment for our own selfish ends. It is a blind process that has reached its pinnacle with the current insanity of annihilating the very fabric of the biosphere that has nourished life for billions of years.

The crude way of putting this is that we shit on our own doorstep, even though we apparently know that shitting on our doorstep threatens our future health and survival.

Occasionally I have wondered what it would feel like to have been a descendant of someone like Hitler or Stalin - to know that your forebearer was responsible for colossal levels of death, destruction and living misery. How could I live with myself, knowing that I shared genes with that monstrous being? Well, here's a wake-up call. We are all members of the gene pool that has dominated life on earth to the point of its serious impairment. En route to today, we exterminated all manner of other species great and small, including our stronger but less cunning cousins the Neanderthals. We are the descendants of the bad boy in the jungle - and this completely explains where we are in 2012.

The bad boy is still being the bad boy. Nothing has been learnt on a species level to moderate the bad boy mentality, save for a relatively few 'aberrants' who somehow summon the wisdom to question our collective behaviour.

The iota of hope for the future rests with these aberrants. It will take some kind of miracle, or some unexpected tangential mutation, but if sufficient numbers of nascent sapients survive whatever crisis culminates from the brutish bestiality of today, there might be another way of living life that puts the blind and stupid behaviour of Homo sapiens to bed, once and for all.