Why Does This Keep Happening?

WolvesWoolOver

SheepsEyesVille


Cory Doctorow on how the 'bezzle' is a critical part of turning everything in our modern world to crap:

When it comes to the modern world of enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "bezzle," JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"...

Now, Doctorow was speaking of how bad businesses flourish in that portion of the embezzlement period wherein the victims have no idea what hit them.

But here's the thing...

Given that the business of many that govern us is more and more often bad business bent on turning everything to crap while they take their profits during the bezzle, consider for a moment the following from Norm Farrell:

...While Canada’s Trump-inspired conservatives can be accused of a broad range of faults, right-wing politicians in this country seem particularly smitten by crony capitalism. Premiers Danielle Smith and Doug Ford, along with avaricious associates, seem to be prime examples. Before them, we had Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell in British Columbia.

This week, Ontario Auditor General found that a small group of well-connected developers with direct access to Ford government officials could see an $8 billion increase in the value of protected greenbelt land that Ford’s government opened for development...

So.

Why does this keep happening?

Well, in the specific case of Mr. Ford's pre-mediated assistance of the greed-driven green belt dismantlers, and who is facilitating the bezzle that is helping to make it all possible without the average citizen knowing and/or even caring, Evan Scrimshaw knows what's up:

If you picked up a National Post today – a physical newspaper, not the website – do you know where you’d find the first news article about the Auditor General’s report into Doug Ford’s Greenbelt land swaps that are due to make his developer friends $8B in profit? Page 5 of the front section...

{snip}

...Oh, and on Page 9? A op-ed from “Doug Ford”, aka his staff, defending his position that this is necessary for housing, despite his own task force saying it’s not...

{snip}

...If this were one newspaper, I’d care less, but (Postmedia owns) almost every single daily in this country, and are trying to buy the Star now too. At a bunch of different stages of this the consolidation should have been stopped – when the Citizen and Gazette were sold to them, when the Sun papers were, when the Irving holdings out east were – but they weren’t. Now, we need to have the conversation we should have, but didn’t, have before.

Postmedia as a company is a failure – it keeps buying assets, stripping them to become essentially mini Post operations with a tiny bit of local news, and then finding out that nobody reads them in part because there’s no actual point to reading the Gazette if all anglo Montrealers are getting is Torontonians’ writing. In theory slashing costs at the local dailies and then pocketing the savings is a good idea, but the part they miss is that the slashed costs end up reducing readership, which means they just end up in a death spiral, propped up by Federal subsidies that clearly aren’t buying their editorial independence, as some claimed it would when they started...

Big picture moral of this and so many similar corp-gov bezzles wrapped within bezzles?

There is a long-con fusion happening here, there and everywhere between corporate and governing interests of a certain authoritarian kind that is not being actively challenged, or even acknowledged, by a neutered 'free' press.

Of course,  such a fusion has long been defined.

Unfortunately, we seem to have bamboozled into forgetting it.

That definition I mean.

.