Brainstorming Future American Neo-Feudalism Today
See if this sounds familiar to you:
…governments and global elites pursue short-term economic gain above all else. Their aggressive focus on growth, efficient markets, and robust trade eventually causes financial volatility as a result of poorly organized uncoordinated responses to crises in global health, environmental change, and other international issues. The global economic system appears robust and successfully promotes prosperity, but this type of globalization has a dark side: trafficking of illicit goods, human rights violations, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Health and environmental disasters—some sudden and others slow-burning—frequently overwhelm domestic agencies, which are increasingly understaffed. Climate change becomes an acute concern, exacerbating resource scarcities and damaging coastal urban centers.
While it’s not an exact match, it sounds pretty close to what I was talking about in my post on health care as a significant step towards neo-feudalism, or Glenn Greenwald’s must-read piece on corporatism.
The piece is from an Office of Director of National Intelligence Scenario developed for the Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review. It is, ODNI seems to think, just one possible future–a future it places in 2025, 15 years away–though not the most likely one.
I raise it because Congress’ failure to pass health care reform that actually promises health care, and its upcoming failure to pass climate change legislation that actually fixes climate change (which was one of the things preventing Copenhagen from being more successful) show that key elements of this scenario are already in place. The reason Mary Landrieu and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson (though Landrieu is the only one who will consistently admit this) refuse to pass legislation that will introduce competition in the health insurance industry is because they want to ensure that the health care industry remains at its 16% of the economy, if not grows. The profits of our corporations are effectively taking precedence over the urgent need to both give everyone health care and cut the amount of money we use doing it. And while the health care bill will put off the time when our failure to do what every other industrialized nation has managed to do causes a major crisis, it will not prevent it.
Now the interesting thing about this scenario are the things that it gets–in my opinion–wrong. For example, it suggests that citizens in this world would have the ability to demand privacy protections from the government; yet we have already ceded so much privacy to corporations, and the corporations have taken over governmental functions, I see little chance of demanding real privacy from our government, or even rolling back the surveillance the government has already put into place. (Though note the scenario’s fear that “profit motivated state actors dominate the information environment, limiting the Government’s access to critical data”–it seems the intelligence community’s big fear is that they won’t be able to continue collecting our data.) I also find it ludicrous that our IC (!) suggests that the time when terrorists and other criminals will exploit cross-border flows to further their causes lies 15 years in the future; do they really not know the degree to which this happens right now? And while the government is currently dumping stimulus dollars into our infrastructure–something this scenario envisions happening to stave off natural disasters–it’s not clear that we’re making substantive advances in our infrastructure, rather than just doing the maintenance that has been neglected for the last decade. And frankly, I think this scenario is far too placid about the types of organizations that average people will be forced to form in response to their increasing vulnerability.
It’s a weird thing, this scenario. While it recognizes the real threat of the rising neo-feudalist world, it seems more worried about whether the IC will be able to exert the power it does today than about what it means for people more generally.
So with the Senate bill as it is, either it is rejected and the right wingers pop champaign corks or it is passed and the corporations pop champaign corks. Nice maneuvering Rahm.
EW, it’s not as weird as one might think.
The study is written from the perspective of a bureaucrat for bureaucrats. As such, implicit in the authorship is the Bureaucrat’s Prime Directive: “Always act in such a way as to justify the continued existence (and, if possible, expansion) of your job.”
The bureaucrats – be they intelligence or whatever flavor – don’t really care about anything other than preserving and expanding their jobs and budgets. Any belief in doing the public good or something similarly naive is sanded out of them within their first year or so on the job as a junior cubicle droid.
“The study is written from the perspective of a bureaucrat for bureaucrats.”
Something like the reports that Micheal Moore presented in his latest film “Capitalism a Love Story” The Insurance documents that referred to some of the insured as “peasants”. I think they called them “DEAD peasants”
Yep “dead peasants”
Clip about the “dead peasants” life insurance.
This practice is pervasive
http://suzieqq.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/capitalism-a-love-story-dead-peasant-insurance-video/
‘written from the prespective of a bureaucrat for bureaucrats.’
The practice is also repugnant and repulsive. Where are our Congresscritters?
dead peasants/feudalism/corporations who rule the world all fits
with their heads up the Insurance Industries huge ass
That, I think, should be the campaign issue of 2010 as pushed by progressives. A majority of the country is asking the same question.
Teabaggers have created a fantasy narrative to answer that question, but that narrative only delivers more of the same.
I think that progressives can come up with a more persuasive narrative that can move the center, which is tired of Reagan-Bush fantasies.
“That, I think, should be the campaign issue of 2010 as pushed by progressives.”
Along with campaign finance reform–one that is mean and lean and has a full set of sharp teeth.
I think Gogol called them “Dead Souls”.
As for the scenario you dug up, EW, it reads not like some futurist vision of dystopia, but a fairly trenchant description of — today! Except it is not a worst case analysis, but a step better than what we endure currently. For instance, “The global economic system” does not appear “robust and successfully promot[ing] prosperity.” But it is certainly true that “…governments and global elites pursue short-term economic gain above all else.”
All the rest — i.e., globalization with a dark side: “trafficking of illicit goods, human rights violations, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Health and environmental disasters… Climate change… an acute concern… — why this is nothing more than an apt description of our current era.
I’m with Bob, too. This is fascism, or some iteration of it, not neo-feudalism, although the latter term may be useful for describing just how reactionary current political currents and formation are, i.e., they are undoing even the progressive aspects of the capitalist era that previously had swept away feudalism in Europe and North America (and left feudal remnants in other countries, or — and this is a vital exception never noted outside the hard Marxist left — were eliminated in other countries by ostensible social revolutions that eschewed capitalism, at least in the initial anti-feudalist stages, e.g., China).
I would say that we live in an age of neo-barbarism, as the term captures the devolution of society into something dark, violent, without modern conceptions of law or ethics, or the latter are twisted into something that exists only to serve power (as was amply expressed by the recent District Court decision, which SCOTUS declined to review, by the Gitmo prisoners, where the Westfall Act is used to give a blanket immunity to crimes against international law, against jus cogens crimes).
What else but a barbaric descent into social madness could bring about the following quote, from the excellent and chilling article on the Predator war by Jane Mayer (emphasis added):
You can’t live in such a society and not be sickened every day by its unrepentant evil.
And we’ll be seeing neo-barbarism in the near future as millions–billions–begin moving desperately in search of water, food and higher ground.
EW,
I appreciate, as usual, your fine analysis of this situation. But I am still uncomfortable with your choice of “Neo-feudalism” as the label for what is happening. Neo-fascism would be a more appropriate label (per Naomi Wolf).
I do not understand this fear of using the Fascist label. To do so continues to consign the word fascism to the Museum of Language, never to be used again for anything other than Nazism and Mussolini’s Italy. It is like saying that the only genocide was of Jews by the Nazis, and that none of the other genocides that have happened since them are worthy of the label.
Feudalism was never as corporatist as Fascism is. So, despite your previous diaries on this, I just don’t get your neo-feudalism label.
Bob in AZ
I think that neo-Fascist would apply if it were a single monolithic state and a single monolithic cartel.
But today, the reality of trans-national corporations is that they are trans-national, and not every corporation has captured the governments other than the ones in which it is headquartered and where its executives live and pay taxes.
Consequently, workers have to shop for security among a variety of corporations. Workers at Honda in Maryville, OH have one liege lord. Workers at General Motors in Ontario have another liege lord. With different obligations of service and different bargaining power. It is closer to fuedalism than to Fascism. But the twentieth century paradigm of politics dies hard.
I’m not afraid of the word fascist. I think it is the wrong word, because it implies a strong state, and that is precisely what is dissolving, by design.
i guess i was thinking that the fight for control of the state was being won by corporations. which is slightly different because it implies that the corps still need the power of the state (see bailouts, banksters). once the corps have the power to tax though (see health insurance reform bills)….
A lot of my thinking comes from the way the Treaty of Westphalia is being eroded. The govt and international finance keep looking for spaces that are not-quite spaces (Gitmo, free trade zones). States don’t really control their borders anymore (because of the volume of stuff coming across. Corporations manage to be in a state when they want to and outside of it when they want to. The increasing number of failed states and stateless refuges. States increasingly choose not to enforce their laws in certain circumstances.
In other words, you can no longer say every place belongs to just one and only one state. And that’s largely driven by economic factors in an effort to continue creating competitive disadvantages to exploit. And as a result, individuals no longer have the protection that states used to promise.
“States increasingly choose not to enforce their laws in certain circumstances.’
“Trickle down” over the last eight years. Selective enforcement. But that has been going on a long time. The peasants who are still alive are very aware that the fat cats are ABOVE THE LAW
I think there’s a book in there somewhere.
Since when has the generating of revenue been so, shall we say, simple? It comes and goes all over the place, and I, for one, can’t begin to track it. An example: I have a friend doing high-end research at Harvard on prostate cancer. The source of her funding? The DOD, of course!
Of course…She isn’t aware of any mandate for the DOD to sponsor prostate cancer research, and neither am I (not that it doesn’t exist). But by your reasoning, which is also mine, the NIH should be funding that research. I pay taxes to support the NIH, and then I pay taxes to support the DOD, and the DOD funds that research? Am I not being “taxed twice” for her research–“before”, in your own words, “starting to get the benefit”.
Or have I missed your point (which also happens now and then)?
ah, ok. that helps me think about your ideas more clearly. thanks. i don’t know much history, so this is probably more confusing to me than it should be, but would a form of debt peonage fit into your ideas about neo-feudalism? it has certainly been an issue in the relations of developed countries v developing (with imf acting as faux independent enforcer) and reading your comments it struck me that our relationships with our feudal overlords is based today more on debt/credit than it is on land. not important, it’s just that brainstorming appeals to me and if someone else starts doing it….
…….
re the economic factors (and cognitive capture). this i think actually is important. after the bailout last fall, i’ve tried to spend some time investigating various economic ideas (beyond the little bit i did years ago re “free trade” issues in the run up to the ftaa negotiations). have wasted A LOT of time going down intellectual dead ends (and spent way too much book $$) but there are some ideas that have been very helpful to me (although – warning – they require paradigm changes) and i think would be extremely useful to progressives in general if widely known/understood.
here are a couple based on my Qs above:
* fed spending is not funded by either taxes or borrowing
* fed spending comes first, in order for taxes to be paid
* bank loans create bank deposits
for me, this was exactly the opposite of what i previously assumed, but i am now persuaded that i had it all wrong. if this is all old stuff to you, my apologies. but if not, i strongly recommend randy wray’s book, understanding modern money, the key to full employment and price stability, to you. there’s lots more, but wray’s book is imo an absolutely critical read for progressives and if you are willing to read any one thing i ever recommend, his book is it (i should also say it’s a pretty easy read).
ok, that’s my pitch.
i don’t expect you have any free time, and i wouldn’t have made the pitch if i didn’t think it was important.
(p.s. i’m also going to recommend wray’s book to bev for fdl book salon and suggest bill mitchell or james galbraith as host)
Not sure if you read my earlier piece on neofeudalism, but the dramatic change the health care reform will make vis a vis paymens to insurance companies is why I got (back–I was on this a few years ago, too) onto the neofeudalism beat. When we pay taxes to the state we know what we get in return. But when people pay insurance premiums under this new scheme (with the IRS doing the debt collection for the insurance companies), they are getting zero guarantee in return that they’ll get health care, as opposed to insurance, for the very unaffordable money they’ll be paying.
I’ll check out the book if I can find the time. Have you read Greider’s Secret of the Temple?
i did read your earlier post. maybe it didn’t quite click for me then. or more accurately, maybe the ideas you put forward have been have been simmering and it’s just taking me awhile.
thanks for even considering wray’s book (i forgot to mention that he was phd student of minsky’s). if you read it and don’t like it, i’ll owe you big time. but i don’t think that would be the case.
re greider’s, secrets of the temple, i only started it (loved what i have read though). and now that i think about it, it’s probably all greider’s fault that i went off in the direction i did. he made me realize that i really didn’t understand money (on a macro level) or the fed and i should try to try to get a better understanding before returning to his book. hope to do so in the not too distant future.
You said
Really? We know how politicians and bureaucrats are going to abuse the taxes we pay and fund their pet projects at our expense?
P.S. I know I didn’t provide details but there are so many to choose from.
Great book!
The part about bank loans creating bank assets is described in the following books (available free under Creative Commmons by mises.org)
The Case Against the Fed
The Mystery of Banking
I echo what Coral said @ 26.
One example to add to your list is the so-called war on terror itself, so much more indefinitely useful to the corporatists than a war on a real state would be, especially when it can still be sold sentimentally as a matter of loyalty and patriotism within individual states.
It’s a war that empowers corporations. That’s because of its vagueness and permanence, and the incessant outsourcing of its waging, combined with a denial that we need greater personal participation in or even recognition of it via war taxes and a draft. We are asked, instead, to wage it by giving up our rights to the state and to the corporations it gives its powers to surveille and its obligation to fight.
Economic factors– and transnational corporations. I think George Orwell and Aldous Huxley foresaw this back in the 1950s.
EW responded to me earlier,
I appreciate the concise response. I’ll have to think about this some more. It may be that the Fascist model requires a strong state, but the feudal model, as I have understood it, has no place for strong corporations. Perhaps we are dealing with an entirely new situation here, such that none of the old models work. The feudal model just does not ring true to me.
Thanks for your efforts to think this through.
Tarheel @ 11:
You write as if workers are free to shop. In the feudal model, the relationship between Lord and serf was one of mutual obligation. A lord could not just dump extra serfs and cut them off. Today, however, layoffs and terminations have no parallel in feudal societies as I understand them. When a company can lay off workers who are under contract, how feudal is that?
Who were the “unemployed” in feudal societies? Maybe I just don’t understand feudalism as well as I thought I do.
Bob in AZ
I’ve been calling this feudalism since January. I thought it was because I had to take and retake Medieval History as an undergrad (how I hated Winter Quarter! For three years running I had bad luck). But I finally aced it.
I think feudalism fits. Especially the practice of subinfeudation. And I like the way it provides us with a complex vocabulary for recasting our illusions of self-sovereignty.
Maybe we should ask, what is feudalism? Are we talking about the same thing? Here’s how I understand the concept.
“Collapse of public authority” undermines the use of the term fascism. Privatizing our military supports using feudalism.
Our patchwork political landscape is a result of subinfeudation. It has little or nothing to do with public interests, since, in the minds of feudalists, there is no public interest, it’s all private.
Look at the economies targeted by Perkinsian economic hit men. The ones rejecting our transplants, like Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador: how are their middle classes fairing compared to Columbia or Honduras? Has the meltdown been a deliberate hit-job? Spitzer, Portnoy, and Black sure think so.
I’m asking sincerely, not rhetorically, since comparative economics is one of my weaknesses (ask my bankruptcy attorney!). Hey, cut me some slack, I’m a poet. My three R’s are reading, writing, and rhythm. ‘Rithmetic? Not so much.
As the article you quote points out, there have been different uses of the term “feudalism”. The same could be said of “capitalism”, which incorporates modes of economic functioning and political structure as widely diverse as early 20th century America and its contemporaneous rivals, Italy and Germany.
We must remember these are “models” in a social science, and not reducible to truth terms. To do so would be to fall into several types of logical fallacies. Such terms are tools… of political analysis, of historical understanding, or economic comparison. Even within exemplar models of the form, for instance, U.S. capitalism of the 1920s, there were “feudal” remnants, as Douglas Blackmon documents in his book, profiled on a FDL Book Salon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, points out.
One chooses what model one like, or adheres to, for ideological or professional identificatory reasons, or purely to make a political or pedological point. Let us not reify terms, and then do battle over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin (given our definitions of “angel”). But I do think it appropriate to critique and re-critique our understandings and terms (as you, EW, and others do here), so we may move to an even closer approximation of the complex situation we are confronting. We must do this so that the choices we make on how to effect change will be more successful, because rooted in deep understanding, and not cant.
Point well taken, thanks. As I just wrote on a different thread:
I choose feudalism for its medieval connotations. I see our political economy as an expression of the beliefs of its dominant actors. People who believe the universe itself to be the artifact of a cosmic architect/carpenter/engineer, who rules by kinetic force and fiat, can be expected to produce a system of governance that embodies those beliefs.
About the only homogeneous trait of our dear leaders is their faith in a war god. Can you imagine a president not closing an important speech with, “God bless America?” I look to those beliefs for their role in informing the society I live in. And, not surprisingly, it looks to me like a patriarchal cult of kinetic force is our de facto state religion. Perpetual bogus holy wars for privatized profits is what we do.
That says “feudalism” to me, all day long. Maybe it’s because I know more about feudalism than fascism. At other times, it may be more revealing to look through that lens. Whatever. Playing with words is what I do. As you wisely caution, reifying terms doesn’t help.
Thanks again for the helpful remarks.
A nice, medieval analogy about pointless arguments, especially since the use of “feudal” postdates the period it describes by several hundred years.
It post-dates its historical referent; it pre-dates its contemporary use. Are there expiration dates or embargoes on words (I ask impishly, grinning like the Fool I am)?
I very much like the way feudalism brings to mind an overtly religious, patriarchal, war-loving undemocratic system of governance. I’m assuming, though, you don’t take the pointlessness of this discussion too literally, else why continue it? ;-}
I bow in all y’all’s virtual directions.
As you know, it was not those living in feudal times who described themselves as living in a feudal society. As Jeff Kaye points out, “feudalism” is an intellectual framework devised centuries later by analysts, however imperfectly, trying to understand the economic and political relationships that held sway in a much earlier period. As Norman Cantor has said, a good modern second-year history student knows as many facts about the period as a late 19th century “expert” medievalist.
EW demonstrates that it is the arguments you construct on the facts, more than the raw data, that is necessary to make fruitful analogies between past history and present trends.
One of the most fruitful analogies with early Medieval Europe was that it was a cashless society, in which one could enrich oneself only by taking resources from another. Today, that taking may be by imposing a legal mandate, instead of force of arms, but it’s still a taking. (Whether it’s a taking in US constitutional terms is a different matter.)
Yes, exactly. Semantics and branding are important, critical actually, for sale and consumption by the masses. Projecting how they understand controls how they feel, react and act. On the deeper plane that is generally dissected and discussed here, however, arguing over nomenclature when we are focused on the same idea sometimes may belie the point.
Hey, I’m back. (Why don’t we ever say “bow in?” No wonder some call us barbarians!)
I couldn’t agree more. Allow me to ask, if you will: how are these words, right here and now, conveying to you my meaning remotely? Rest assured, I wouldn’t pose it if I couldn’t also lay it to rest.
These words, right here and now, are functioning as self-emptying vessels. They get this way from the fundamental unit of awareness (in my poetics and psychology): the Sokolovian neuronal model of the stimulus.
Imagine you are holding in your hand a steaming hot cup of your favorite elixir. Or, imagine your are in a Japanese tea ceremony.
Just so, neuronal models of stimuli are the self-emptying vessels of mind; into which I am pouring my heartmind out to you; from which your awareness is arising like steam; and out of which our shared awareness is flowing like water.
This hydrodynamic nature allows for our getting jacked by interruptions anywhere along the line.
Propagandists and myth-makers are making mechanical use of this very medium, firing on us with results a thousand times more deadly than a lone sniper. They’re using words as discrete energy packets, targeting our vulnerabilities, and firing on us with intent to change our behaviors against our will.
That’s assault with the most deadly of all weapons imaginable: our own dreams, terrors, and aspirations. Talk about silent but deadly!
The missing element I see in otherwise erudite analyses of human social behavior regarding self-governance, is the mythological.
That’s why I end my caricatures of some myths with, “as god said so himself,” or some such thing. Many of our analyses are everything but human–they run the gamut of the -ologies, leaving out the beliefs, the mythologies, of our “subjects,” a word which, IMO, betrays on its face its kinship with “subjects” of royal personages.
Our beliefs, our myths, are what most humanize us. When we leave out the beliefs of the very people whose behavior we seek to explain, IMO, we dehumanize them, making of them Newtonian voodoo dolls, the behavior of which is ever and always determined by outside forces.
An appreciation of the role of lived experience is sorely absent from our analyses. Where are the beliefs of the people whose behavior is described? Reductionism, the late, great Stephen Jay Gould said in February of 2001, is dead, it doesn’t work for us complex biological systems.
So what’s my point? We need a radical reconstruction of our American homunculus. I’ll be arguing for more facility with speaking from within.
All these thoughts interrupted me while having a perfectly chilled Fat Tire in the back shed. I’ll be going back to it now.
Bowing out.
Fat tire or Phat one…? Or both!!
This isn’t the end of reductionism… just its evolution…
The deflation of hubris is blessedly positive, not cynically disabling. The failure of reductionism doesn’t mark the failure of science, but only the replacement of an ultimately unworkable set of assumptions by more appropriate styles of explanation that study complexity at its own level and respect the influences of unique histories.
The answer, I would think obviously, is both! Nice one, i bow in your virtual direction.
Sorry dude, I am much closer to The New Barbarians.
Ron Wood or Roy Wood?
Barbarian or Brontosaurus?
One of the benefits of the rise of the modern state was identifying and articulating public interests beyond the identity of individual actors – kings or barons or businesses. With its demise, we revert to the interests of whatever actors can be heard without being repressed.
“Fascism” implies a convergence of state and corporate power, an intermingling that we have. It is not simply when a state dominates its corporations and makes them do their bidding. It can be the reverse, which is closer to the end of the spectrum we’re on now.
The important point is that what’s left out of government’s concerns in the process is their own people. In either case, they become chattel to use or irritants that must be sent into remission or eradicated.
As I explained upthread, I use “feudalism” very deliberately, and not out of fear or ignorance of fascism (remember, my PhD included a great deal of study on Central Europe in the pre-war period).
Rather, I see what is happening to be a dramatic shift in the soveraignty of states themselves. Yes, the manor here is the corporation, not a lord. But that’s the neo part. Though there are persistent family dominance of the contractor/consultant firms that play a key role in busting open the sovereignty of developing nations, per John Perkins. And it’s that elite–at the border between finance, intelligence, and contracting, which is the equivalent of the feudal lord, IMO.
The whole plan of deregulation. Sold on the meme “less government, saves money.”
Riiiight.
It seems to be headed toward Global Corporate Tyranny. Global economic depression and global warming will accelerate this movement as populations become increasingly desperate and unruly. (Not trying to enter into an argument, not trying to be gloomy, not trying to offer a proper noun that will please anyone or everyone. Just my perspective at this time. All are welcome to try and change it.)
i used to joke that global depression would be the elite solution to climate change.
Good Sunday immersion reading on this thread. It so beats TV because the discourse is elevated and everyone gets to chime in. And we were afraid that once a Dem was elected prez, we’d lose our voice.
The trajectory of the bubble economy is somewhat fixed and thus predictable. Japan’s bubble led the global economic surge on the upside and became dependently coupled on the downside. Our tech bubble rose to world records of capital accumulation followed by capital destruction on an enormous scale.
Right now China is ascendant and buoying the world’s perception of recovery. If, as I believe, the Chinese bubble pops then all of our economies will fall in a worldwide synchronous decline. Many disagree with this assessment but I expect it will be obvious in hindsight, much like the tech bubble and the subprime meltdown have become.
My thinking is that our economy is like a sewage treatment plant. In normal operation the system is sustainable at some cost for maintenance. When a pulse of raw sewage hits, the system is taxed in every way. The processing reduces the back pressure but the inevitable stresses cause breakdowns at critical stages which diminish the efficacy of the overall operation. It takes time to digest the effects of the overload, and that is called an “impulse response”. Right now, the US is choking on the toxic by-products of the financial sewage surges caused by our bubble mentalities. There are still pools of toxic sludge which remain potently destabilizing. I don’t see how anybody — individuals, small businesses, large and multinational corporations can survive the failure of the global financial system when the stimulated bubble pulse erupts in the near future.
Folks may try but they can’t stop the shit tidal wave bearing down on our financial system. Especially one so enfeebeled by mis-investment and lack of proper maintenance. How does this relate to feudalism? Bush brought back the dark ages and now we will seek to align with those who retain some semblance of power. To me, those would be the progressives who continue to analyze, actualize and synthesize in the face of insurmountable odds. Namely, emptywheel’s readers…
Thank you. Many points well taken. I’ll be pondering them.
It is not just the inevitable pulse you describe; it is compounded by a lack of the maintenance you also describe. Analogically speaking.
Lack of maintenance…even literally speaking.
You describe, in part, a chaotic pre-feudal arrangement transitioning to a feudal one. The state less and less directly determines and arbitrates the citizen’s rights and obligations. Their existence and the state’s power is becoming derivative of and dependent on the private power of large corporations. It is an evil development from the perspective of the rights of men and women. The future they will bequeath to their children is likely to be as hot as their climate.
Re the “feudal lord” – I have been struck by the way that the office of the President has been transformed into, in part a feudal lord, with the raising of the meme that the most important task of the President is to “protect the American people”. Transforming the duty of the President from the protection and defence of the Constitution to “protecting” the American people is trying to turn the clock back from the Enlightenment to the Middle Ages. Instead of a society based on the inalienable rights of free individuals, which was envisioned by the founders, focusing on the Leader’s “obligation” to protect the people is analogous to feudal social structures, leading to hierarchal relationships between lords and vassals and peasants, with the vassal performing military service for the sovereign and the peasant performing physical labour in return for “protection”, which tends to work out more for the protection of the assets of the nobility than the actual protection of the poor serfs and churls and peasants.
It is also a pre-Westphalia concept, where the protection of the Prince was based on acceptance of the caste system and even sharing the religion of the Prince.
Nicely stated. And it speaks quite poorly that the supposed Great America retains the puerile ignorance to not see through it. Hubris.
Good morning,EW.
This reminds me of the Stanford research paper done for the government over 30 years ago.
I have posted it several times on other threads,but with the subject matter at hand,it seems a good fit,imho.
If you haven’t read it, may I suggest you take a look?
The planned collapse of AmericaDec 7, 2007 … Online Journal Contributing Writer Dec 7, 2007, 00:38 … Changing Images of Man predicts an American economic collapse and a “garrison” …
http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2715.shtml – Cached – Similar
The Seminal » We are All Bolivians NowDec 5, 2009 … Changing Images of Man predicts an American economic collapse and a … http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2715.shtml …
seminal.firedoglake.com/?p=17704 – Cached
Howard Dean on the current situation with “health care reform.”
@5
And WHO was one of the biggest,if not THE biggest purveyors of COLI policies?
AIG
WalMart lost a billion dollar case against AIG involving these Company Owned Life Insurance policies aka “dead peasants’ insurance.
Wal-Mart Gambled, Lost $1.3B on ‘Dead Peasant’ Policies, Insurers Say
By FRANK REYNOLDS, Andrews Publications Staff Writer
Discount retailing giant Wal-Mart cannot sue its insurers just because it gambled and lost $1.3 billion on getting a tax break from thousands of insurance policies it took out on employees, according to a brief filed by the insurers in the Delaware Supreme Court.
Press reports have dubbed the “corporate-owned life insurance” policies at issue in this litigation “dead-peasant insurance” because most of the policies were purchased by companies that employ large numbers of workers at the lower end of the wage scale and most of the policy benefits went to the companies rather than to families of deceased employees.
The practice was curtailed in the mid-1990s when the federal government, which had previously called the financing scheme “tax arbitrage,” closed the tax loophole and began to pursue Wal-Mart for back taxes.
Meanwhile, outraged employees and their relatives sued.
After the Chancery Court dismissed the suit, Wal-Mart appealed, claiming that the lower court overlooked the duty of the insurers to deal in good faith with their client.
“Wal-Mart’s allegations of misrepresentation fail as they concern non-actionable expressions of opinion of law or future or contingent events not representations of fact,” the insurers say.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. et al. v. AIG Life Insurance Co. et al., No. 172, answering brief filed (Del. Aug. 12, 2005).
Delaware Corporate Litigation Reporter
Volume 20, Issue 05
09/08/2005
I wonder if the “dead peasants” policies that some insurance companies have out on their policy holders has been addressed in the 2000 page “Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act”
Wondering if they have given I companies more room to make money off of potential “dead peasants?’
Well, with the level of “health care” the bill “provides,” there are certainly going to be a lot more “dead peasants.”
I’m sure in the back rooms of insurance companies, the calculators & computer models are whirring.
re neo-feudalism
it seems to me that one of the ways we are controlled is our own cognitive capture that, among other things, limits the options we can imagine re economic policy space.
here’s one example:
what’s the purpose of taxation? of fed debt? how is social security funded?
if we don’t know the answers to these and similar questions, it’s harder to fight back because we don’t have very good alternatives to offer (for example, can we have full employment? if so how?)
It’s a good point. That’s one of the reasons I keep referring to this HC plan as the MaxTax or MyBarackObamaTax. To highlight not just how it works like a tax, but how it is different from one. With taxes, you pay money and get something in exchange. You pay money and the state defends you (or alternately, extends an empire for you). But they don’t ask for more moeny before you get that benefit. With the exception of a few toll roads, there is not a service we pay the government to provide where we have to pay twice to use it.
selise @ 16
federal debt is the manifestations of sociopathic politicians that they will save the world at your expense as if they know what they’re doing. Social security is not funded. It’s like a giant ponzi scheme.
And this is where Liarman is one step of Krugmans theory
Krugman: concede this round and pass the Senate bill
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/19953
I watched part of last week’s hearing where Liarman, Collins and Voinovich were flipping the economic script. “The Republicans (who voted for an unnecessary and immoral war and Bush’s tax cuts) are trying so hard to be economically responsible now.
Forked tongue disease is going viral
December 17, 2009
LIEBERMAN, COLLINS LOOK TO SPECIAL COMMISSION TO RESTORE NATION’S FISCAL BALANCE
Exploding National Debt Undermines America’s Future Prosperity Alan Greenspan Testifies
WASHINGTON – Leading financial experts Thursday told Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Me., that the only way Congress can tackle the nation’s growing $12 trillion debt is through a statutorily-created, bipartisan commission.
At a hearing entitled “Safeguarding the American Dream: Prospects for our Economic Future and Proposals to Secure It,” witnesses urged creation of a commission whose recommendations would be put on a legislative fast track and would not be subject to amendment by Congress.
“The American people have reached a tipping point on this,” Lieberman said. “They see that we in Washington are incapable of dealing with the debt, ultimately because we are irresponsible. We like to spend and we don’t like to raise taxes. You don’t have to be Alan Greenspan to know that that will lead to an unsustainable debt…
“If we continue adding to the debt without putting in place meaningful measures to pay it back, we put at risk both our economic and national security; we place our nation’s economy at the mercies of foreign creditors who don’t always share our values; and we put in jeopardy generational promises we have made to ourselves and our children, like Medicare and Social Security.”
Collins said: “We cannot continue business as usual. This is the moment in history in which we must confront the conflict between what we want and what we can afford. It is time to reassess our national priorities, to make the hard decisions, and to set a new course.
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Press.MajorityNews&ContentRecord_id=9e4e8788-5056-8059-763f-0205e269fb08
Well then why the hell don’t Lieberman and Collins introduce a bill? Shut up and dance.
Devilstower has a must-read today.
Hey, Loo-Hoo — great Kos link…
You may remember the times past at FDL when certain soothsayers ran free.
Funny how the Babylonian experience has engendered new awareness of “history”. This recent FDL thread was such an example…
@77 Har har har! good one! Shiver me bumm-ers!
The forked tongue hearing on Dec 17
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Hearing_ID=9970f7b6-0f70-4373-87b8-d33e0f4c90c1
Interesting you should mention the Treaty of Westphalia; I have been wondering if Elin might abscond with the wee Woodies to her native Sweden and assert just that. In my next comment, I will work Favre in….
I do not apologise for being OT
I’m surprised and disturbed at recent postings. Not what you post on but what you don’t. I would guess most politically engaged media (and as you keep rightly telling us you are an important part of the media now)around the world is today primarily interested in climate change. I wished to look to you to help me understand where liberal America stands on the future of our globe. And I think I know – you don’t really care all that much. This is a bit sad, but perhaps explains why your President seems happy with a bilateral deal which as a part of its primary purpose commits to nothing at all. Please please tell me I am wrong. I do not underestimate the importance of healthcare to the USA and am as engaged as you on torture and the way the securocrats simply fell into doing it while some politicians looked the other way and some actively encouraged it. But today?
This is a political blog. You want climate-change blogging? Try http://www.desmogblog.com/ or http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/
Au contraire, it’s the politics of climate change I want to see.
Funny you should complain that I’m not talking about climate change in a post that mentions it several times.
The reason Obama couldn’t come to Copenhagen with something to offer, the reason it almost entirely flopped and largely did anyway, is because our country is not governable. We can’t even get our Congress to get its collective head out of its ass to pass something to save the globe, and without that you may not have the US in climate regime, and without it you don’t have a climate regime. And I think Obama genuinely does want to fix this (and yes, partly bc he can use it as stimulus for the economy). But the problem behind climate change is the same as health care: that our government no longer functions.
It is certainly not that we don’t care, we do very much; however, it is not really our bailiwick in the current period. There has been a concerted focus on healthcare, not only here and at FDL, but behind the scenes in a lot of ways that you probably do not see. From my perspective, Copenhagen was doomed to end up about as it did; actually could have turned out worse I suppose. There was no chance Obama was going to do anything noteworthy or commendable; his focus was on healthcare and not upsetting any of his precious applecart. Secondly, he was poorly positioned due to the failure of the Congress to be able to provide him with the backup to do what is necessary which, again, goes back to the freaking healthcare. That is assuming Congress could get the structure in place to start with, and given the current minority rule in the Senate, that is almost impossible to see.
At least from my perspective, the healthcare bill situation in the Senate is, by a light year, the most critical thing going on today. Not because I think the US can end up with a wonderful new system, I don’t, it is a stinking mess that is going to create a confusing clusterfuck for citizens and runaway windfall profits for craven insurers and further entrenchment of their power over the people and Congress. But even more primary than that, and that is a lot in and of itself, I think the backlash on the Democratic party from this stands a chance of decimating everything they have recently gained and returning Republicans, who are ever more controlled by a crazed right wing, to power and that would have tragic consequences for the nation and world. Beyond that, it is Marcy’s blog and she gets to determine where it goes, not others.
Someone has looked at the span of history and seen the American Experiment (even if you throw in the Enlightenment) as a fleeting aberration on a loooong canvas of empire, absolutism, and haves/have-nots. Seeking stability, which equates to preservation of their power, in their minds, they opt for the system which they believe has endured the longest.
Of course, they are mistaken. Look at the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt, which contains not the pyramid-builders but many of the grand names — the Ramses, for example. We think that Egypt went on forever, but that dynasty lasted “only” 233 years (give or take). It started from next to nothing and left next to nothing for the next batch of rulers to build on, except the farmers and the Nile. It was always the same old crap, over and over again, and none of those ruling lines had either long or happy times. It was the genius of The Founders (I’m starting to feel like Azimov …) to see a way to break that bleak cycle. These cretins want to restart it, and they’re well on their way to doing it.
They look at Rome and think, “That lasted forever, or at least a very long time, and we can be smarter and avoid the mistakes they made.” Well, it didn’t last forever. It didn’t even have much more than a couple of centuries of well-run empire. And it didn’t leave a whole lot to build on, either. Farmers and the land, again. These empire-addicts aren’t even going to leave us either farmers or land when they’re done. They may not even leave us a planet.
No, neo-feudalism is a good term. It was a real tussle for the kings (and very occasionally queens) to unite and subjugate the landed class, so your analogy between landowners and corporate personhood holds up, I think.
What is happening is stupid, stupid, stupid.
I meant to add that for me, at this point Europe is the place that has gotten it closer to right than the U.S.A. The French Revolution may have misfired, but it smoldered, and we have a nice, warming glow now.
Of course, Divine Right may be a hard sell these days. Oh. Wait … we seem to be laying the foundation for that right now. 6,000 year old earth, creationism, Rapture, The Chosen, … How long will it be before one of the candidates for President is touted as being ordained by a higher being?
The next time Palin runs.
Mmmmm. Reminded myself to watch for that.
This report is what good bureaucrats do: argue for a future that makes them indispensable and makes fear of their not having the unfettered right to do their jobs a prime motivator in creating that future. That’s pretty much the horizon of today’s political and corporate elites, too.
Government has already lost control of its ability to collect intel without continuous, widespread and arguably illegal corporate compliance. I think that’s one reason – beyond his innate drive to legitimize whatever authority he finds himself part of – Obama convinced himself so quickly to hide, and to aid and abet the continuation of the vast majority of Bush’s crimes. Looking back and exacting consequences of such crimes would mean depriving himself and his successors of eating their fruit without accountability. Obama didn’t hesitate to grab the whole fruit basket.
As you say, this report deals superficially with the people’s reactions to their increasing deprivation. I wonder if there’s a still secret annex that says more. It would still be secret because it would be, in essence, a war game pitting the people against their government, in which forcibly maintaining control and order supplants doing so by good governing.
The attitude that would generate such an approach, which tosses the Constitution and our system of government into Cheney’s wastepaper basket, is what we have to fear most. It was on full display throughout much of the health insurance “reform” debate. Perhaps it’s time to buy options in the stock of makers of sonic and water cannons and police body armor and telecoms. Can you spare a dime?
EW,
I still think an interesting point to push on health care would be to demand 100% MLR (medical loss ratio) and cut the loophole on ability to reducing the % MLR.
I bet republicans will scream and corporations scream louder.
Let the industry be the government. Call them on it.
If you don’t employ your people, you must coerce them, or you lose your hold on power.
Something else the health insurance debate made clear, is that those able to accumulate power do not willingly give it up. They accumulate more. That’s one reason I think a rising demand to toss the Senate legislation and work to pass the House version is important. The principal reason is that the latter, while flawed, is much better.
If Obama were the tiniest bit progressive, he would use that argument to pass the House bill, and then make us bow down in praise. I don’t observe that he is. He is more likely to work hard to pass the Senate version and let Rahm keep kicking DFH’s and use that to demonstrate that he’s a “centrist”.
Can we start an anti Rahm campaign?
I thought we were one.
I mean grow it bigger. A blizzard of faxes and calls on the White House.
Global warming – Human migration link.
Thanks Emptywheel @32 and Bmaz @33 and particularly for being more polite to me than perhaps I deserved. Unfortunately I share both your perceptions. I know it’s Marcy’s blog and I would not want it any other way.
I know any sensible country as rich as the USA would have a decent way to provide healthcare to its poorer citizens. And I agree that the healthcare debacle carries a real risk of retrurning the Republican crazies to control of the madhouse. How you got there will be one of the enduring mysteries of politics. Did no one in Rahm’s office run the tapes on Hilary’s attempt to reform healthcare and notice how much these guys would LIE??? Why was it all so reactive?
I also agree BMAZ that the outcome of Copenhagen could have been much worse and Obama certainly helped. Can you imagine the Shrub reacting so calmly to the insult offered by Hu Yaobang of walking out and sending a junior to negotiate with the US President?
But I think you have made the very point which many of us outside the USA are really fearful of. The healthcare debate is so domestically important and from the point of the deepest political philosophical differences that the actual future of the human race is really felt to be less important.
And if you are right then we are really in trouble, and we or our children are indeed doomed. Without significant and really quite prompt state action by the USA there will be no world agreement to achieve anything. If the USA falls back into the hands of people who disbelieve in the right of the State to do anything (except make war and torture foreigners obviously)there will be no US action. Many progressives elsewhere in the World will not understand. Despair seems to be the proper reaction.
Heh, don’t get me wrong, we are pretty screwed up here in the States. I have the fury and I am here, I certainly understand that from the Isles. It is a hell of a dynamic between the two. We have been asses and you have neglected to put us in our place; all to the great detriment of both I am afraid. Time, and learning, hopefully, marches on. Either that or ultimate entropy theory prevails and we all disintegrate to disorderly shit.
It’s my understanding — from, eg, here — that the U.S. government (and, worse, my own) didn’t just fail at Copenhagen but are attempting an end-run around the UN process.
I recognize that many people here are attempting to resist attributing malignity to any of the major actors, and maybe presidents of the U.S. (like my own current PM) don’t see anything malign in subverting the UN, which hasn’t had a good press in much of North America since we lost Eleanor Roosevelt.
I think that subverting the UN is malign, though, and I don’t see how to save it or the whole body of international law erected after WWII except by taking that stand.
I think you are being a bit absolutist. There is no way, let’s say, China and the Maldives will agree straight off. Their intersts are so different. Arguably each is correct. How many Chinese peasants do you want to starve, how many Maldivians to drown? Having in my time done a very little negotiation involving Governments, caucusing may be the only way to get anywhere. A few people get together and try to cobble up a solution everyone can agree to. At first no-one else will. So it gets refined, modified, changed until enough agree to make it worth proceeding because it will achieve something like the common intended result. That may be cynical but it may be the way.
I don’t have any qualms whatsoever with beating up on Obama; however, I am somewhat inclined to give him a slight pass on this. He may not have been great, but I do not think he was malign, and certainly if so not out of design so much as circumstance.
What happened to y’all? This sentiment summed up the situation and worked quite well, though I wonder if it’s even alive in Manitoba any more. At some point, y’all seem to have succumbed to our enticements. Dammit!
I keep trying to answer your question, fatster (and bmaz and chetnolian too), but then I keep wiping it all away.
We’re facing something like rising McCarthyism here. It has me kind of shocked. I would like to think it wasn’t true, or wouldn’t work, but I’m no longer so sure. In fact I’m scared — which is probably why I also sound cranky and absolutist, as chetnolian says.
Aw, it’s Sunday and all, dear skdadl. I sent you a Hugh/Wyatt link back on the thread before the trash talk. Go enjoy that for a while and give yourself a well-deserved rest. I do miss that “American Woman” attitude, though, and ya’ll’s independent spirit.
I saw him! First he takes off his vest. Then he shrugs off his braces (suspenders). And then he pulls off his shirt — over his head! OMG, but that was smelling-salts time for skdadl.
For your own good night, my treat, my tribute to Merkins with soul. I couldn’t find a live performance by Miss Peggy Lee, and I considered Miles, but I love Julie too, and I could almost imagine doing that the way she did it … or at least I might have come close … in 1964. That’s one of my favourite songs in the whole wide world — I can’t say why, but I love it dearly.
Wait. You guys are citing the Guess Who??
LOL. Me, I was talking about Hugh O’Brian and Julie London.
But Guess Who’s on first? fatster can explain it all to you. Make my bed and light the light …
Guess who what, bmaz?
Oh, thanks so much, ms. skdadl. Enjoyed that greatly. I got very curious about that superb bassist, and guess where he’s from? Alabama!
How did you find him? It looks as though he’s still playing — bravo. Julie’s gone — gosh, it’s hard to think of her ever having grown old.
Thanks, hadn’t seen that! The home of the brave.
It’s not just the poor which cannot afford health care or to buy in to the scheme meant to pay for it – health insurance. It is increasingly the middle class and sometimes the well to do. Americans’ hold on access to health care is becoming as tenuous as their access to higher education.
Tens of millions who have health care can’t use it, lest the debt it doesn’t pay to health care providers breaks them now, or the pre-existing conditions it documents breaks them tomorrow (by denying them any health insurance). The
CadillacChevy tax will accelerate that for millions more, as it gives incentives to employers to provide less insurance and pass on more costs to employees.As others have said, the current system is unsustainable from the perspective of the insureds. This reform makes it sustainable – but only from the perspective of insurers.
Going on-topic now, there is an extra element to the movement towards corporate from State control which is more evident to those of us who happen to live elsewhere. The corporations who control your lives control oure, they are the same ones and most of them are controlled from the USA so it is not just an extension of feudalism by stealth, it is imperialism as well.
And there is something even more insidious. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking of corporations as being inanimate. But they are not. In a very real way, News Corp is Rupert Murdoch. Xe is Erik Prince. Enron was Kenny Lay. I would extend the list if I could remember the names. And that’s an even worse part of it. These people are often faceless compared with politicians, good or bad. I once knew one of the US corporation CEOs slightly, and it was a seriously scary thought how much influence he had. A remarkably small proportion of the population of the USA is gradually coming to rule the world or at least the West. Another reason for despair.
I do not believe John Dean has been completely forthcoming with me.
He certainly blew off Marcy’s question.
That scenario is a misunderstanding of economics. Healthcare as most progressives want it will not work cause the costs will soon increase out of control.
One of the most important thing to do to get rid of the surveillance MIC is to get rid of the Federal Reserve System and fractional reserve banking. The monetary system is what enabled the MIC to get so much power in the first place.
Gee whillikers; thanks for the edification. I am gonna have to rethink everything now…..
Just skimming through the comments; sorry too tired to read everything.
Some people saying corporations have power. That’s another misunderstanding of economics.
Corporations have NO power. The only power they have is what governments give to them. They depend on people to buy their products.
What are they going to do – force you to buy their products?
Well I guess with this healthcare bill that’s exactly what they’re doing. Keep in mind that it’s the government that they’re depending on to force you to buy their product in this case healthcare insurance. They get the government to do their dirty work cause the government has enforcement power and people gave that enforcement power to the government.
That’s why less government is the best solution. Like the laissez faire Jeffersonians and the other anti-federalists wanted.
Well, see, you came in here challenging the premise and now you have laid ground directly supporting it; i.e. the blending of the corporate and governmental interests and power. The simpleton mantra of “less government” begets more corporate power; but that corporate power relies and depends on the government to exist, maintain and grow. It is simply a more complex dynamic than the Paulians and “conservative” mantra expousers let on. It always has been, and the those leading said charge have always understood it, they are simply using it as a tool to grab the reins of power for themselves and their interests.
If by Paulians you mean supporters of Ron Paul and the Campaign for Liberty I think they said the same things. Not sure the label conservative,a s it’s popularly understood fits the Paulian point of view.
P.S. Interesting blog. Talk to you all later.
You seem willing to engage on the merits; please do.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Goldman Sachs is really, really angry at the UK for imposing significant taxes on it and has threatened to move 20% of its staff to Spain. So there!
Great minds blog alike.
Wait until Spain decides it’s their turn to tax resident corporations.
Oh, I think Goldman can count in pesetas and euros, too, though I think they’ll find those who take them less impressed than those who prefer pounds and dollars.
An interesting conflation of ideas can be seen here, in Goldman Sachs’ on going feud with the UK and France, about their imposing a one-time 50% tax on executive bonuses. Never an organization to take slights to its imperial dominance lightly, it already converted some top execs’ bonus comp into stock options, to reduce the immediate tax cost of equivalent compensation. Now, it’s threatening to move 20 execs from the UK to Spain. Wives, if not lovers, will be unhappy, as will children. (Do they have them?)
This is meant as a shot across the bow, a threat that Goldman – and others – will move their staff where they are wanted – or at least where they can operate outside of the laws that bother them. Not just staff, but the deals and the infrastructure which yields them, including the issuance of securities, bank transfers, and the short and long term deposits of cash. The numbers are large. It’s all about the money.
The UK and France should stick to their guns. Goldman doesn’t want to be in Spain any more than Halliburton’s top two execs wanted to relocate to the Middle East. English remains the lingua franca of these deals, so it will be harder to operate from Spain. Besides, they’ll simply move their “domicile” to Spain and operate as they do now, by temporarily being wherever the deals are.
The UK should counter that by taxing these MOTU where they do business, not the location in which they live or have head offices. That’s something all governments will need to do as “capital” becomes stateless, relying on individual politicians and governing groups rather than traditional states to enable their work. So long as states consider such moves “quaint” (Germany’s Chancellor Merkel) or fight each other for Goldman’s leavings instead of cooperate with each other to regulate excesses and impose accountability where need be, that will never happen.
Take the US. It is more beholden to the “God’s Work” done by Goldman than the UK. It could cooperate with the UK and France, instead of Goldman, and impose a similar 50% tax. (Obama could come out strongly in favor of the House health insurance reforms, too.) But since “they” and “them” are increasingly becoming “us”, I won’t hold my breath until the Goldman team at Treasury, the Fed and inside the White House make that move.
No, I don’t blog at all but you sure do, sharing your sharp analysis and edifying us as we try to follow and make sense of these interesting times. Thanks for the compliment, though; loved it.
I’m scared.
One could think of this as a little like therapy. First comes the humility of accepting the need for it. After intellectualizing, denial and other defenses wear out, comes the awareness of which elephants inhabit your emotional living room with you. If your therapist is TheraP or someone equally talented, recognition and reality begins to shrink the elephant. Sometimes, it still grazes the ceiling; sometimes it shrinks to cat size and can be shooed out the cat door.
Unless and until more people begin to accept the permanent, systemic and sometimes evil changes about us, all our problems are elephants, instead of just some of them.
Bush spent eight years avoiding that, as he’s probably avoided most things in his life, such as the need to pay for what he breaks. Cheney spent those same eight years exacerbating rather than calming our fears, to further his political goals and, imagine, his own psychological ones. Obama, sadly, wants to appear as if the hard work’s done and we can carry on as if nothing terribly much is wrong, tweaking a little here and a little there, all with bipartisan good cheer. That way lies madness, except for the MOTU.
I agree, and thanks. We need to know exactly what was done under W, and cannot unless Obama opens things up. I’m sure you’ve seen Yves’ barn burner on AIG next door.
Why haven’t the financial houses yet been questioned? It’s hard to believe.
Curiously, most people, despite possessing two good eyes, still don’t see the pachyderms in the parlor. The Bush era provided the lens for recognition; however it seems to have been frosted, rosed and occluded by the three card monty Hope & Change extravaganza. PT Barnum was right. Go figure.
As is true for the many unable or unwilling to access therapy.
This story really got to me a few days ago, making me depressed. So, I’m relieved to see that “Polish Police Find Stolen Auschwitz Gate Sign.” Link.
I think we live at a time when great changes are going on, changes that relate less to globalization than a set of political and geopolitical shifts at the national level across several countries. Personally, I think globalization is dead, and the corruption the permeates our own country killed it.
1. effective takeover of the US government by proxy to corporations and corruption in general. We’ve gotten to the point where the US government is basically ineffective, so hamstrung by corruption, corporate manipulations and its own old and tired rules, that it’s become effectively ungovernable. Shrub was able to stage a coup, and nobody’s been able to put back together the system to which he administered a critical blow… the last in a long series.
2. massive geopolitical realignments around the world, the full meaning of which will probably not be seen for years to come, but, basically, as we saw at Copenhagen and at the G20 earlier this year, large parts of the rest of the planet are realizing that their interests are no longer aligned with our own, and they are acquiring both the willpower and the capability to do something about it. The difference with this and globalization is that their governments still retain power- whether China, or India, or Brazil or even most of the European Union.
There is no globalization. Globalization – as a stable system- requires either the corporations or the invisible hand of the market to rule – to act in some manner to establish control and restore stability. What we have a far worse than that. There is no stability, no control. Just the black rot at the heart of a dying empire, and the self-defensive instincts of others all along, who are threatened by the manner of that dying. This is not Rome in 44AD. It’s Spain in 1618 – Penumbra in Autumn. And the question is, well it take 30 years, until 1648, for a stable global order to be reestablished, after the bloodiest global war the world had ever seen up until that time.
And so the bulge brackets become the cratered brackets…
…In search of Bohemia
Man… always in search of new nation-states. Ergo feudalism.
Ew
Politics is about exercising power over others.
It may be about more than that, but it’s always about who can “influence” whom to
Do what.
To make the u.a. Governable again will require a focused, co-ordinated attack on the democratic party.
The proper place to start is with u.s. Senate.
There may be 24-30 den senators who could be replaced, temporarily, with
Republicans.
The”ungovernability” of the
U.s. Stems almost entirely from long-term dem senators who function as republicans,
In short,
We have a one-party
In this country at this time in our history
Liberals natural allies at this point in history?
Why the nutty right-wing, of course.
Cleanse the Augean stables of old dem horses AND their horseshit.
The “ungovernability” of which is a direct
Function of liberals’ fear of revolution.
Clean several “poorly focused” dem senators out of the senate
In
2010 and 2012
And observe how
Quickly party coherence improved.
Again, in countries with
Electoral politics,
Political power is about the ability to harm an elected official’s chances of staying in power.
Liberals are
The rodney dangerfields of American
Politics.
Of the senate
Just googled fascism…under word iq..A key distinguishing feature of fascism is that it has a mass movement to attack the organizations of the working class: parties of the left and trade unions: Thus Fritzsch and others describe fascism as a militant form of right wing populism.
This mobilization strategy involves corporatism, corporativism or the corporate state, all terms that refer to state action to partner with key business leaders, often in ways chosen to minimize the power of labor unions.
Ladies and gentleman …I give you two stolen elections, two illegal wars for oil and poppy fields , genocide in New Orleans…TARP …among other things…and our current health care bill.Now we are looking at Venuzuela’s oil fields with a certain yearning. DU has a post up now re Chavez . Comments are exceptional . We are going in.
Sorry for the clunky post.
I’m struggling still with how to edit from an itouch.
I cannot move up and down the”l eave your comment” a screen to edit once I’ve finished my initial entry.
Ent
Fi isbe
If anyone is interested in our next war for oil. On DU…the post is about our spy planes violating Venuzuela’s air space. Huff Po has their trolls out demonizing Chavez over the same incident. One comment on the DU post is long but states there are a LOT of people leaving Columbia to go to Venuzuela.Quite a problem. Like the Palestenians having to leave their home so they won’t be killed by the Israelis. Odd . our guys are always brutal.
Isn’t this what Joseph Schumpeter wrote about in the Road to Serfdom?
Neofeudalism is certainly correct when it comes to the current path Obama’s abysmally awful Interior Secretary rancher Ken Salazar is on. Letting industries destroy the ability of the public lands to naturally sequester carbon and sustain wildlife by letting any big nasty entity that comes along build monstrous solar and wind plants in the middle of nowhere all strung together by new giant transmission lines. To produce energy out of sight and out of mind for the City State/Barons of Harry Reid’s Las Vegas or LA. Instead of following a different model of locally produced renewable energy and energy self-sufficiency like rooftop solar. Not all new infrastructure and not all windmills are “good”!
Interesting, high tension issue. Energy capture, storage and distribution are fundamental requirements for the survival of our species.
Powering our society should not compromise other species or diminish our own sustainability. We are moving through a period where the conflicts between power generation and social consciousness are highlighted by the constraints of capacity.
Nuclear waste is biologically hazardous, coal is dirty and unsafe to mine, Hydroelectric seems clean, but dams impede natural migrations of fish and predators. Windmills are cool but they make noise and can kill birds. Solar seems ideal, but cells are expensive to make and the process involves toxins. plus they have limited lifetimes and may not produce as much energy as it takes to make them. So there is no silver bullet.
If we pursue decentralized energy production (as we do regionally) it will lessen our dependence on Big Power. The danger is that Big Power will own the means of production, even at the local level. I wish we encouraged co-generation and micro-generation as social policy, but we still run into the politics of power. Plus it is hard to beat the economies of scale with respect to power generation. But we should try to get our use patterns to comport with limited plant capacity e.g. conservation. Even if it is a personal virtue.
It’s o.k. To use feudalism as a metaphor for the current state of American
Politics,
But it is ONLY a
Metaphor.
As I recall from barbara Tuchman’s wonderful history “a distant mirror”,
Civil authorities (princes, dukes, et al) had complete control over the means of
Production, e.g., the land
Farmers, aka peasants, farmed.
For “reasons of state” (state’s secrets), the civil authority might cede some land to the church.
So the two owners of the means of production were primarily the prince, et al,
And derivatively, the church.
In this social contract, only the prince or the bishop
Had any
Power over the outcome. E.g., taxes in the form of
Bushels of grain.
Today the “farmers” have power – not
Much individually, but
The power of the power of the vote collectively could provide countervailing power to that of
The
State.
But
That power
To vote has to be martialed and channeled.
Wow, I am blown away. There is so much euridition above as to make anything worthwhile that I might say comical.
Nevertheless, I forge ahead: Martin Luther might validly claim to be the father of the American Republic. He claimed to attack the entrenched Church, and yet forced a split between the Church and the Crowned Heads, and yes the bloodiest wars imaginable; leading to the full blossom of the Enlightenment.
They who imagine us “dead peasants” as docile sheep may wish to remember Cromwell’s Roundheads, not to mention the farmers at Concord Bridge. You may know where I might go from here, historically speaking. But nuf said.
You’re going to need to do some linking up there, buddy.
Which would be a problem even if all of the corporations were legitimate, well run businesses.
But what happens when the businesses and corporate entities are fronts for criminal activity?
What happens when criminals gain control of those very corporations that the ‘free market fundamentalists’ so ardently claim will be our key to economic growth? When the GOP market-driven twaddle enables brazen, corrupt criminal gangs to squeeze the blood from the remaining turnips?
Eventually, the parasites consume their host.
Only then do they die of starvation.
But by then, nothing is left.
Good lord, rORL. Thanks for the holiday cheer! Fuckistan, isn’t it?
“I’m not afraid of the word fascist. I think it is the wrong word, because it implies a strong state, and that is precisely what is dissolving, by design.”
That says it.
You know what might be an excellent exercise to assess directions away from neo-feudalism? Came to me after reading the ODNI report linked here.
We should try an online four-quadrant scenario planning exercise — in other words, extend the same scenarios but in directions which we see at street-level. The future not being linear but fluid and multi-dimensional, we have the ability to shape it as we watch it unfold during a prolonged scenario exercise.
There are caveats, though, based on my experience with scenario development:
— They never look out as far as they think they do; the ones in the ODNI-QICR are already here, therefore they are only good for about 5 years and maybe less.
— Scenarios are based on perceptions; if the perceptions are flawed, well…in the case of the ODNI-QICR scenarios, the October Surprise quadrant is flawed in its perception of key non-state players being separate from the state.
Ditto for the quadrant above it, “Politics is not Local.” The situation we see in Iran, for example, is directly shaped by U.S. interventions, as are politics in other parts of the world. This quadrant has been placed in the non-state portion of the scenario grid, but the politics are driven by other state actors, even if neo-feudal state actors.
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2009/12/19/updates-weekly-round-up-for-december-19/#comment-3989
Anybody really surprised at this pathetic story?
Report: Bush Admin Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man’s Al Jazeera ‘Decoding’ Scam
Justin Elliott | December 21, 2009, 9:32AM
Link.
Corporate Personhood-Demeaning Our Bill of Rights – Reclaim …Abolish Corporate Personhood by Molly Morgan and Jan Edwards. The PBS program NOW compiled some useful resources on the topic for this 2005 episode. …
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/ – Cached – Similar
Reclaim Democracy .orgReclaimDemocracy.org is committed to revoking corporate power and reviving grassroots democracy.
222 S Black Ave, Bozeman, Mt 59715
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/ – Cached – Similar
Wal-Mart
Corporate Personhood
About Us
Primers US Supreme Court v Democracy
Independent Business
Politics and Electoral
Volunteer
Lets call it what it really is: FASCISM.
We are already there. Note the transfer payments to Wall Street, Pharma, Insurance, Military-Industrial complex. Then add the surveillance state as well as the nice labeling authority for a President to name anyone he/she chooses as an “enemy combatant” and that person suddenly becomes a non-person with zippo rights who can be tortured at will.
The Constitution is just for kabuki.