One of the big stories of the day in the US is the sly means by which mega-corporations are finding less-than-open ways to give their CEOs disproportionately gargantuan packages. Everything from super-cars to private jets to high-profile academic posts to private security. The companies — if and when they respond — bleat about how hard it is to find good CEOs these days and how important it is to keep the ones they’ve got.

Most of the rest of the world blames many of those CEOs and their platoons of debtor force henchmen and women for the global economic crisis in the first place. Suddenly banks, carmakers, energy suppliers, airlines and credit card companies rank alongside Vlad the Impaler in popularity stakes. Credit card companies who received mammoth bailout packages have brought nothing but opprobrium on themselves with arbitrary and heavy interest rate hikes so they can pay back their bailout funds.

And still the uber-capitalists are finding devious ways to give themselves uber-rewards. Meanwhile, Jack and Becky Averageyank are literally under attack on every front.

While that is on the practical day-to-day level, people still need something solid to believe in. That’s where the hurt hits too.

What is also under attack are many of the fundamentals of capitalism. For hardcore capitalists like myself, this is a tough truth to chew on. I still hold firm to the belief that one should reap the fair rewards of one’s own hard work, ingenuity, foresight or blind luck, and not be forced to dump it all into some communal kitty for lazy but nefarious freeloaders to help themselves. Any society that penalises success is a bridge too far for me — probably is too for the Oppenheimers, Ruperts and Motsepes (SA’s only dollar billionaires, according to Forbes magazine).

Despite its Christian basis (Acts 4:32-35) and obvious benefits for all members of society, I find centralised communism reprehensible in every possible way. I suppose, when all is said and done, my dilemma is that like pure democracy, pure communism is as morally desirable as is pure capitalism. The practical reality is, of course, that pure democracy is as much a chimerical myth as is pure communism or pure capitalism. Human greed has ensured that ideal is fubar.

At the same time as the Obama administration and those of other developed nations are trying to rescue their financial systems and still avoid plunging down the vertical face of creeping socialism, back in SA equally devious and covert mechanisms seem to be emerging to ensure the yet-to-be-formalised Zuma epoch does exactly the opposite.

I’d value other informed insights, but from here in Washington DC it looks as if the ANC will do everything it can to centralise as much power as it can. No matter what outrageous spin they try to camouflage it in or how seductive their illogical ideology of ensuring service delivery appears, this all comes from the masters of illusion.

Sadly, even Barbara Hogan has proved herself untrustworthy and thereby solidified the entire masquerade of honesty, credibility, trustworthiness and integrity in which the ANC has unsuccessfully tried to cloak itself. Wake up, Luthuli House! This is not Hogwarts, you’re not Dumbledore or Harry Potter and the fate of all centralised government always has been and always will be dictatorship. Your inherent greed and megalomania make that a no-brainer.

As if the centralisation of power was not bad enough, the foul stench of hardcore Soviet communism is embedded in the ANC’s list of potential ministers. It has not gone unnoticed in the US nor anywhere else.

Thus, as devious as the hardcore capitalists are being at one end of the spectrum in distorting their system to feed their greed, as equally devious is the ANC being at the other end in sowing the seeds that, in time, will feed their greed.

Que sera, sera.

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