The Confidence Men

Avedon Carol points us to "Government by Control Fraud," a post on Blog for Arizona.

The post's author, apparently one Michael Bryan, starts by introducing the idea of control fraud:

Control fraud occurs when conspirators are able to take control of an institution in order to exploit the trust and authority of the institution to convert its assets to personal use.

Control fraud relies upon holding off any accountability or scrutiny by a combination of bribery, deception, co-optation or subornation of the mechanisms of checks and balances either intrinsic and extrinsic to the corporation such as auditors, government regulators, the board of directors, and shareholders. The longer the charade of business as usual, or more often, fantastically better than usual, is able to be maintained, the more damage is done to the institution on which the control frauds are preying. If it goes on long enough, as in the case of Enron, there may be nothing left at the end but a smoking crater of debt and broken lives.

Bryan takes a side trip to remind us that not only were Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, and Worldcom examples of control fraud, but so was the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s, and reminds us also that John McCain was one of the Keating Five, the group of sitting senators who pressured federal regulators to keep the heat off of S&L swindler Charles Keating in return for massive campaign contributions.

But the money quote from Bryan's post is this:

The whole point of the Bush Presidency was to commit control fraud, he never intended to govern as we understand the concept. He had no mandate. No program. No goals as President. The government was turned over to a control fraud in the election 2000 and the goal of that criminal enterprise was to bleed as much out of the massive coffers and credit of the Federal Government of the United States as possible for his friends, allies, and himself. Geroge W. Bush’s goal as President was what the Proconsuls of the Roman Empire aspired to in the provinces they were awarded: to squeeze out every drop of profit possible.

The best way to do that in modern America was a war - preferably a long, sustained, grinding, quagmire of a war against a despised enemy that no one could doubt was hostile to us. A war in which unlimited amounts of cash could be dumped into single source and no bid contracts with little or no oversight and even worse accounting (remember that 8 billion is said to have just disappeared in Iraq due to poor accounting and cash controls). If you are going to take over a government as a control fraud in a democratic society with an advanced legal system and a professional bureaucracy, there is really no other way to convert sufficient amounts of wealth to private use without being detected or questioned. Better to do the deed under cover of a wild and wooly foreign war, where the rules are made by the guy with the most guns.

I don't believe this is the whole truth — the imperial wish-fulfillment fantasies of the Neoconservative movement surely play a role here — but its plausibility level is high.