The U.S. Is At The Center Of The Global Economic Meltdown

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

While the economic implosion progresses this year, there will be considerable misdirection and disinformation as to the true nature of what is taking place. As I have outlined in the past, the masses were so ill informed by the mainstream media during the Great Depression that most people had no idea they were actually in the midst of an “official” depression until years after it began. The chorus of economic journalists of the day made sure to argue consistently that recovery was “right around the corner.” Our current depression has been no different, but something is about to change.

Unlike the Great Depression, social crisis will eventually eclipse economic crisis in the U.S. That is to say, our society today is so unequipped to deal with a financial collapse that the event will inevitably trigger cultural upheaval and violent internal conflict. In the 1930s, nearly 50% of the American population was rural. Farmers made up 21% of the labor force. Today, only 20% of the population is rural. Less than 2% work in farming and agriculture. That’s a rather dramatic shift from a more independent and knowledgeable land-utilizing society to a far more helpless and hapless consumer-based system.

What’s the bottom line? About 80% of the current population in the U.S. is more than likely inexperienced in any meaningful form of food production and self-reliance.

The rationale for lying to the public is certainly there. Economic and political officials could argue that to reveal the truth of our fiscal situation would result in utter panic and immediate social breakdown. When 80% of the citizenry is completely unprepared for a decline in the mainstream grid, a loss of savings through falling equities and a loss of buying power through currency destruction, their first response to such dangers would be predictably uncivilized.

Of course, the powers-that-be are not really interested in protecting the American people from themselves. They are interested only in positioning their own finances and resources in the most advantageous investments while using our loss and fear to extract more centralization, more control and more consent. Thus, the hiding of economic decline is enacted because the decline itself is useful to the elites.

And just to be clear for those who buy into the propaganda, the U.S. is indeed in a speedy decline.

In ‘Lies You Will Hear As The Economic Collapse Progresses’, published in summer of last year, I predicted that “Chinese contagion” would be used as the scapegoat for the downturn in order to hide the true source: American wealth destruction. Today, as the Dow and other markets plummet and oil markets tank due to falling demand and glut inventories, all we seem to hear from the mainstream talking heads and the people who parrot them in various forums is that the U.S. is the “only stable economy by comparison” and the rest of the world (mainly China) is a poison to our otherwise exemplary financial health. This is delusional fiction.

The U.S. is the No. 1 consumer market in the world with a 29% overall share and a 21% share in energy usage, despite having only 5 percent of the world’s total population. If there is a global slowdown in consumption, manufacturing, exports and imports, then the first place to look should be America.

Trucking freight in the U.S. is in steep decline, with freight companies pointing to a “glut in inventories” and a fall in demand as the culprit.

Morgan Stanley’s freight transportation update indicates a collapse in freight demand worse than that seen during 2009.

The Baltic Dry Index, a measure of global freight rates and thus a measure of global demand for shipping of raw materials, has collapsed to even more dismal historic lows. Hucksters in the mainstream continue to push the lie that the fall in the BDI is due to an “overabundance of new ships.” However, the CEO of A.P. Moeller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line, put that nonsense to rest when he admitted in November that “global growth is slowing down” and “[t]rade is currently significantly weaker than it normally would be under the growth forecasts we see.”

Maersk ties the decline in global shipping to a FALL IN DEMAND, not an increase in shipping fleets.

This point is driven home when one examines the real-time MarineTraffic map, which tracks all cargo ships around the world. For the past few weeks, the map has remained almost completely inactive with the vast majority of the world’s cargo ships sitting idle in port, not traveling across oceans to deliver goods. The reality is, global demand has fallen down a black hole, and the U.S. is at the top of the list in terms of crashing consumer markets.

To drive the point home even further, the U.S. is by far the world’s largest petroleum consumer. Therefore, any sizable collapse in global oil demand would have to be predicated in large part on a fall in American consumption. Oil inventories are now overflowing, indicating an unheard-of crash in energy use and purchasing.

U.S. petroleum consumption was actually lower in 2014 than it was in 1997 and 25% lower than earlier projections predicted. A large part of this reduction in gas use has been attributed to fewer vehicle miles traveled. Though oil markets have seen massive price cuts, the lack of demand continued through 2015.

This collapse in consumption is reflected partially in newly adjusted 4th quarter GDP forecasts by the Federal Reserve, which are now slashed down to 0.7%. And remember, Fed and government calculate GDP stats by counting government spending of taxpayer money as “production” or “commerce”. They also count parasitic programs like Obamacare towards GDP as well. If one were to remove government spending of taxpayer funds from the equation, real GDP would be far in the negative. That is to say, if the fake numbers are this bad, then the real numbers must be horrendous.

And finally, let’s talk about Wal-Mart. There is a good reason why mainstream pundits are attempting to marginalize Wal-Mart’s sudden announcement of 269 store closures, 154 of them within the U.S. with at least 10,000 employees being laid off. Admitting weakness in Wal-Mart means admitting weakness in the U.S. economy, and they don’t want to do that.

Wal-Mart is America’s largest retailer and largest employer. In 2014, Wal-Mart announced a sweeping plan to essentially crush neighborhood grocery markets with its Wal-Mart Express stores, building hundreds within months. Today, those Wal-Mart Express stores are being shut down in droves, along with some supercenters. Their top business model lasted around a year before it was abandoned.

Some in the mainstream argue that this is not necessarily a sign of economic decline because Wal-Mart claims it will be building 200 to 240 new stores worldwide by 2017. This is interesting to me because Wal-Mart just suffered its steepest stock drop in 27 years on reports that projected sales will fall by 6% to 12% for the next two years.

It would seem to me highly unlikely that Wal-Mart would close 154 stores in the U.S. (269 stores worldwide) and then open 240 other stores during a projected steep crash in sales that caused the worst stock trend in the company’s history. I think it far more likely that Wal-Mart executives are attempting to appease shareholders with expansion promises they do not plan to keep.

I am going to call it here and now and predict that most of these store sites will never see construction and that Wal-Mart will continue to make cuts, either with store closings, employee layoffs or both.

As the above data indicates, global demand is disintegrating; and the U.S. is a core driver.

The best way to sweep all these negative indicators under the rug is to fabricate some grand idea of outside threats and fiscal dominoes. It is much easier for Americans to believe our country is being battered from without rather than destroyed from within.

Does China have considerable fiscal issues including debt bubble issues? Absolutely. Is this a catalyst for global collapse? No. China’s problems are many but if there is a first “domino” in the chain, then the U.S. economy claims that distinction.

China is the largest exporter in the world, not the largest consumer. If anything, a crash in China’s economy is only a REFLECTION of an underlying collapse in U.S. demand for Chinese goods (among others). That is to say, the mainstream dullards have it backward; a crash in China is a herald of a larger collapse in U.S. markets. A crash in China is a symptom of the greater fiscal disease in America. The U.S. is the primary cause; it is not the victim of Chinese contagion. And the crisis in the U.S. will ultimately be far worse by comparison.

I wrote in ‘What Fresh Horror Awaits The Economy After Fed Rate Hike?’, published before Christmas:

“Market turmoil is a guarantee given the fact that banks and corporations have been utterly reliant on near-zero interest rates and free overnight lending from the Fed. They have been using these no-cost and low-cost loans primarily for stock buybacks, purchasing back their own stocks and reducing the number of shares on the market, thereby artificially elevating the value of the remaining shares and driving up the market as a whole. Now that near-zero lending is over, these banks and corporations will not be able to afford constant overnight borrowing, and the buybacks will cease. Thus, stock markets will crash in the near term.

This process has already begun with increased volatility leading up to and after the Fed rate hike. Watch for far more erratic stock movements (300 to 500 points or more) up and down taking place more frequently, with the overall trend leading down into the 15,000-point range for the Dow in the first two quarters of 2016. Extraordinary but short lived positive increases in the markets will occur at times (Christmas and New Year’s tend to result in positive rallies), but shock rallies are just as much a sign of volatility and instability as shock crashes.”

Markets moved immediately into crash territory after the new year began. This was an easy prediction to make and one that I have been reiterating for months — just as the timing of the Fed rate hike was an easy prediction to make, based on the Fed’s history of deliberately increasing instability through bad policy as the economy moves into deflationary spirals. The Fed did it during the Great Depression and is doing it again today.

It is no coincidence that global markets began to tank after the first Fed rate hike; no-cost overnight lending to banks and corporations was the key to maintaining equities in a relatively static position. As the U.S. loses momentum, the world loses momentum. As the Fed ends outright stimulation and manipulation, the house of cards falls.

I have said it many times and I’ll say it yet again: If you think the Fed’s motivation is to prolong or protect the U.S. economy and currency, then you will never understand why it takes the policy actions it does. If you understand and accept the fact that the Fed is a saboteur working carefully and incrementally toward the destruction of the U.S. to make way for a new globally centralized system, everything falls into place.

To summarize, the U.S. economy as we know it is not slated to survive the next few years. Read my article ‘The Economic Endgame Explained’ for more in-depth information on why a collapse is being engineered and what the openly admitted goal is, including the referenced 1988 article from The Economist titled “Get Ready A World Currency In 2018,” which outlines the plan for a reduction of the dollar and the U.S. system in order to make way for a global basket reserve currency (Special Drawing Rights).

It is astonishingly foolish to assume that even though the U.S. has held the title of king of global consumption share for decades, that our economy is somehow not a primary faulty part in the sputtering global economic engine. Economies are falling because demand is falling. Demand is falling because Americans are not buying. Americans are not buying because Americans are broke. Americans are broke because central bank policy has created an environment of wealth destruction. This wealth destruction in the U.S. has been ongoing, but only now is it becoming truly visible. The volatility we see in developing nations is paltry compared to the financial chaos we now face. Anyone who attempts to dismiss the dangers of a U.S. breakdown or the threat to the unprepared public is either an idiot, or they are trying to divert and distract you from reality. The coming months will undoubtedly verify this.

Leviathan and Behemoth

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Shaw

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

Introduction

The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent power of the state. However, who is this growth for? While absolute poverty has been rolled back, and in many Western nations completely eliminated, we still see a large, indebted underclass, a Global South regularly sold out to the interests of capital and a system of vast wealth that only seems accessible to a privileged few. Economists may say that if we look at BRIC countries we see an equalisation of wealth and growth with the West, but these BRIC markets are used as cogs in a hegemonic state-corporate machine. Third World entrepreneurship isn’t encouraged, but rather sidelined for corporate dominance. This is a system that needs to end. The debt economy, big government, the corporate-state partnership and modern globalisation all need to end. In their place we need truly free markets, where cooperation and exchange are paramount and aren’t controlled by corporate or government interests.

Our neoliberal society is composed of corporate hegemony backed by state power. By corporate hegemony I mean the power modern capital has over governance. This isn’t just found within corporations, but within guild-like occupational boards (Lawyers and Doctors and their licencing requirements) and corporate trade unions that support the maintenance of wage labour at the expense of worker independence from the structure of capital. Any markets we see are rigged in favour of corporate interests. The major monopolies of government control make sure that markets are a tool of big business and the ability of workers to break free from this paradigm is limited if not impossible. The entry barriers to markets, the restrictions on self-employment and the continued lobbying of government for patronage and favourable legislation leads to a corrupt, crony system that relies on the indenture of the poor in favour of employers and business.

There are many libertarians who unfortunately see this system as just and fair. They see sweatshop labour as an excellent solution to Third World poverty. The idea of growth is given religious prescience, without realising cultural antecedents and the importance of community within the realm of the individual. They don’t understand the power dynamics at play, and the continued collusion of corporate and state interests. They fail to see the monopolisation of social institutions and the commodification of culture and life. The destruction of livelihoods all in the name of GDP growth. This is not a free market, but rather capitalism at work. To move away from this we need to understand that free, or freed, markets are economic organisations free from coercive control, where the individual and community are the key players and profit is not reliant on its exploitative features, but rather the ability to meet real demand.

We need to look at the current capitalist system from the anarchist perspective that I put forward in this paper. Modern capitalism is a state-based system, reliant on enforced hierarchies and the provision of false choice. Real choice would confer power on individuals and communities, while under today’s system real choice is in the hands of bureaucrats and corporate oligarchies. Chartier’s definitions of capitalism, “capitalism: an economic system that features a symbiotic relationship between big business and government”[1] and “capitalism: rule—of workplaces, society, and (if there is one) the state—by capitalists (that is, by a relatively small number of people who control investable wealth and the means of production)”[2] shines light on this conception. Rather than capitalism being a system of free markets as posited by some libertarians (Block, Mises, Hayek, etc.) it is instead a system reliant on big government and its institutions and the control of said institutions via capital.

The vulgar libertarians who view the capitalist economy as some form of free market do not understand the forms of power present. If a worker wants to start a collectively-owned business, can he? Not without huge capital requirements and regulatory hoops to jump through. How about setting up a mutual credit system with a different currency? Well there are legal tender laws that in the United State are enforced with more brutality than the punishments given for heinous crimes[3]. When talking of free markets, we need to understand that freedom is only relative to where the power lies. If it lies with the state and its subsidiaries, then freedom is conferred on large employers and corporate unions whom receive forms of state funding and favourable regulation. If it lay with individuals and communities, we would most likely see a move away from one-size-fits-all regulation, the processes of commodification through rentierism and arbitrary entry barriers.

The Regulatory Apparatus

The regulatory apparatuses found within the economy also benefit the capitalist structure. While generally seen as a bulwark against corporate power, the regulations found in an economy create entry barriers to markets and a form of implicit subsidy to big business, as these businesses rent-seek government for more regulation, allowing for a monopoly within particular economic sectors. We can see in the banking, energy, manufacturing and retail sectors that this is the case. Childs noted this in relation to the development of monopoly power in American business during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states “this, then, was the basic context of big business; these were the problems that it faced. How did it react? Almost unanimously, it turned to the power of the state to get what it could not get by voluntary means”[4]. In particular Childs saw this occurring in the rail industry in America during the late 19th century. Massive competition had begun in the rail industry, which massively sunk profits for established companies and encouraged many start ups and smaller competitors. As large rail companies weren’t competitive enough in this environment, they came to rely on government intervention, where regulatory boards were created staffed mostly by executives from the large rail companies.

This is what regulation is really about. It isn’t a way of protecting the hapless consumer from the ravages of a free market, but is rather a tool of corporate power that forms entry barriers and enforces particular dichotomies of ownership and organisation in an economy. Capitalism becomes a system of patronage, where corporations gain favour due to their money and power, which itself comes from the state in the first place. As Paul notes “the rich are more than happy to secure for themselves a share of the loot – for example, in the form of subsidised low-interest loans…bailouts when their risky loans go sour, or regulatory schemes that hurt their smaller competitors”[5]. Rifkin shows a similar process, describing how “the critical industries that made up the infrastructure…banded together in a mega lobby to ensure…financial underwriting, as well as industry-friendly codes, regulations, and standards to ensure market success”[6].

The regulatory apparatuses also have the effect of distorting economies of scale, decoupling supply from demand and favouring largesse in business and ownership models. Thus we see the development of high overhead costs which restrict market entry to best capitalised of entrepreneurs. By limiting competition, we see perverse operations occurring that favour the interests of business over the worker and consumer. Thus things like planned obsolescence, guaranteed markets and a continuation of private gain and socialised loss. As had been noted by Childs, private cartels were difficult to maintain. Even the rail trusts, themselves built in contrived, government-produced markets, were ravaged by competition from smaller rail providers[7] that favoured more local economies of scale. So these corporations looked to the government, who enshrined their demands into acts and legislation which created cartels that were much more easily enforced. We just need to look where wage laws, licensure laws and planning/zoning laws are coming from and who lobbies for them. Invariably its dome by corporations and their lobbying arms. We also forms of legal privilege, as in the case of limited liability and corporate personhood, which are really only accessible with very high capital costs and a developed shareholder clientele. These systems are purely artificial, and whether they would work voluntarily is not the question. Rather it is, if they are efficient, why do they need the government to provide these privileges and apparatuses. The answer is simple, they aren’t efficient.

Even when there are laws supposedly to ameliorate the effects of marketisation, as in the case of welfare and government-provided services, they are usually built on the back of resilient communities who developed their own systems, and usually end up allowing employers to pay subpar wages and benefits and lessen the strength of community relations. It builds layers onto a poor foundation. Or to put it another way, the corporate-state nexus is putting a cinderblock on toothpicks. Bureaucrats don’t fully understand the problem with this but realise it is unstable. So to stabilise it, they put more toothpicks under the cinderblock, thinking it will stabilise. However, the system is inherently unstable and propping it up denies the inevitable.

This assurance of market success shows that under a truly free market they wouldn’t exist, or if they did it would be on a much smaller scale. The regulatory web is just another power dynamic that allows for capture and control. To describe this as a free market is laughable. These processes are completely involuntary, reliant on extortion through taxation and allow for the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich and privileged.

The Money Monopoly

While regulation, which “far from coming against the wishes of the regulated interests, was openly welcomed by them in nearly every case”[8], is an important part of the corporate state, the original four legal monopolies (as identified by Tucker), money, land, tariffs and patents, allowed for the development of rent-seeking corporations. These four monopolies, or as I see them structural monopolies as they create the structure of the socio-economic paradigm, are fundamentals of capitalism.

The money monopoly allows for the restriction of credit and the development of debt-based models that destroy stores of value and make individuals slaves to the desires of governments and banks through modern forms of debt peonage. As Dowd notes, over the 20th century “the US dollar has lost almost 85 per cent of its purchasing power even by official government statistics; for its part, sterling has lost 98 per cent of its value over the last century”[9]. The restriction of credit coupled with the inflationary tendencies of modern fiat currencies mean the poorest are effectively forced into wage labour, as they rely on pitiable increases in nominal wages and are unable to gain any real credit for self-employment or collective worker-owned enterprises. What happens is a redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest. Long shows that “inflationary monetary policies on the part of central banks also tend to benefit those businesses that receive the inflated money first in the form of loans and investments, when they are still facing the old, lower prices”[10]. The pre-inflation money allows investors and banks to capitalise on new production and investment while the poorer elements of a society receive minimal benefits as the inflationary course makes its run, with prices rising and wages following later.

This also leads to massive levels of debt found currently throughout the globe, as credit instruments are used to make up for stagnant wages that can’t afford increasing land prices and subsequently rent prices, as well as an increase in the price of consumer goods that are a significant chunk of working people’s wages. The process of rent extraction via high interest rates follows from this, as “the money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high”[11]. Carson notes further that the elimination of controlled interest rates would lead to “significant numbers (of workers) retiring in their forties or fifties, cutting back to part-time, or starting businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary”[12]. The current banking system leads to the necessitation of wage labour through restricted credit dissemination and debt-based forms of finance.

The Land Monopoly

The land monopoly is another lynchpin of capitalism. Most modern land is either nationalised or corporatised through state structures, leading to massive land centralisation and the process of land expropriation that is visible in much of the Third World. Alternative land arrangements, such as those organised by tribes and local networks, are swallowed up in this process. Many commons regimes that have existed for centuries are being eliminated in favour of the interests of capital. This process of enclosure of common lands began at “the end of the Medieval Age, when royal and feudal landowners began to enclose common lands, especially in Tudor England and Trastamara Spain. Through legal and political manoeuvres, wealthy landowners marked and hedged off sections of the commons for their own profits, impoverishing many villagers and ultimately destroying their communitarian way of life”[13]. The enclosures have continued into the 20th century, where “common lands have suffered a third, global wave of commodification and enclosure, ‘land grabbing’ spurred by the dominant neoliberal doctrine and competition for non-renewable natural resources and supported now by the evolutionary theory of land rights”[14]. The modern enclosures of land occur most noticeably in Africa and South America. We see the elimination of common land owned by native tribes and the raping of natural resources. The Niger Delta and its oil reserves show this acutely, with oil spills being common and almost no compensation to the farmers and workers who rely on the Delta for their livelihoods.

In effect this is a process of neo-colonialism pushed through via the Washington Consensus that is epitomised in international groups like the IMF and WTO. The plight of Bangladeshi workers is caused by this problem of neocolonial practices. In Bangladesh “wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments”[15] which has led to a result of “Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping”[16]. What follows is a continuation of the development of a landless mass of cheap labour as a result of the nationalisation and corporatisation of land.

Then there are planning and zoning laws and property laws which act as a form of implicit land nationalisation in many Western countries. Among their many effects, they artificially inflate land prices, which has a knock on effect of making housing unaffordable and making the purchase of land extremely difficult for small businesses. This further encourages the process of rentierism and indebtedness as individuals have to get out mortgages or rent accommodation, and individuals looking to start a business are priced out, thus favouring large corporations. If you want to self-build a home or business, it becomes impossible. Instead a series of state-favoured land developers are able to land bank and rent out at extortionate rates. They aren’t subject to competition and making new land isn’t possible, so you create a system of patronage and favouritism, simply adding to the enforced necessitation of wage labour.

These processes of land appropriation lead to the development of land speculation via government-favoured industries, creating artificially high land prices which price out small businesses, community groups and anyone who isn’t able seek rent from the state. This speculation also fuels boom-bust cycles, with much of the credit used by investors and businesses being put into the easy investments of land and housing. This creates economic bubbles through the wide diffusion of mortgages and an increase in house and infrastructure building that isn’t necessarily needed. In London, we see this playing out with high-price apartments and high-rises that don’t address the needs of the wider population and are fueled, at least partially, via QE-induced credit. The development of a rentier society occurs. With land prices held artificially high, rich landowners are able to rent out their properties at high prices, creating economic precarity and stimulating the larger wage labour monopoly that is caused by a combination of this monopoly and the money monopoly.

The Larger Wage Labour Monopoly

As previously mentioned, credit is restricted thus funding options are limited for workers. Add to this high land prices, and the ability to buy a house or develop a business are severely restricted, developing the large pool of wage labour seen today. This obviously favours large-scale employers such as corporations who are able develop to their current size due to this wage labour monopoly. It leads to a means of surplus value, or rent, extraction. As Solow notes “one important reason for the failure of real wages to keep up with productivity is that the division of rent in industry has been shifting against the labor side for several decades”[17].

Alongside the two monopolies, the increase in precarious wage labour is compounded by the restriction of collective action and the development of monopolist unions that complement the centralised economic actors. The legislation governing strikes and the ability to make a union add to this problem, making it difficult for freelance workers to unionise and stopping the development of radical trade unions and company unions. Thatcher’s trade union reforms in the UK created such a problem as the majority of private sector unions are part of the corporate system of economic centralisation. The final nail in the coffin is the minimum wage. This creates a wage ceiling and simply allows corporations to price smaller competitors out of the market while subsequently limiting the hours and benefits workers receive. As most minimum wages aren’t enough to live on, many workers rely on debt-based credit which pushes individuals further into wage labour, creating debt-led wage slavery and maintaining a massive, centralising economic monopoly on the choice of workers.

As Solow explains, in the US “in the past 10 years productivity has increased 12.3 percent in the non-farm business sector of our economy while real compensation of labor has increased by only 5.1 percent”[18]. So what we see is a form of surplus value extraction, whereby the excess product of labour is captured by the interests of capital and removed from the compensation of labour. This can’t simply be explained away by using the marginalist critique. The value of a product is at least partially informed by its labour input. Marshall’s analysis shows that “price was determined, at any given time, by the balance between the demand and supply that actually existed at that moment. As the time factor came into play…price approached closer and closer to cost”[19] thus showing that the equilibrium of supply to demand moves from subjective criteria of value toward the input of labour in that value. Again looking at Solow’s productivity figures, the compensation of labour isn’t in proportion to production.

Hodgskin’s idea of a market artificially privileged with rents, profits and interest becomes a reality in the modern context. The increase in freelancing and labour market individuation means the expropriation of rent and the limitation of choice, particularly as unions are simply a representation of the corporate interest, particularly since the Wagner Act in America and the trade union reforms in Britain. The individualisation of labour serves to increase these artificial privileges, meaning can be paid less and thus become more reliant on debt instruments such as mortgages and credit cards to simply earn a living and have a roof over their head. This system is even more acute in the Global South, with the restriction of choice via the structural monopolies being almost explicitly enforced via the government as land in enclosed and regulations used to restrict microeconomic activity that doesn’t serve the interests of global value chains. Their human capital is monopolised, wages restricted, collective action completely banned and working conditions extremely poor. The main profit garnered from this is simply the mark-up created by internal tariffs and intellectual property (to be discussed later in this paper), which limits domestic market production and serves only the interests of capital and big business, as both the workers and consumers are given low wages and higher prices respectively.

What happens then is the construction of a monopsony situation in wages and labour, where the product of labour isn’t adequately paid, becoming widespread due to companies paying below this level. This is compounded by wage laws favoured by corporate interests, and an inability for the worker to capture this value through collective bargaining or through the means of owning one’s productive capacities due to market entry barriers that restrict self-employment and worker or community ownership. It constrains the real choice of workers and puts the power dynamics upon employers and bureaucrats.

Tariffs

The next two monopolies that Tucker highlighted further the centralisation of economic power toward corporations. Tariffs are simply a form of direct state intervention to favour domestic industry over foreign competitors. There are arguments favourable to this position, such as those by List and Chang. However, there is a significant time limit on the ability of tariffs to produce any sort of growth (usually artificially induced by state policies), and eventually many of the protected industries become bloated and begin to rely on further government subsidy.

The use of tariffs today is much more limited than it was during the mercantile years of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, one area where tariffs are still largely used is modern agriculture in the West, particularly the US and the EU. The Farm Bill in the US creates price distortions within food markets that favours large agribusiness over small, family farms. As Reitzig explains “the farm bill perpetuates the myth of cheap food. It subsidizes Big Ag so that BA can sell its food to the market cheap and you find it at the grocery store for less than you’d pay for it from your local farmer”[20]. However as “it costs the small local farmer about the same to produce the same food as the Big Ag farmer”[21], all the Farm Bill does is redistribute tax money toward large agricultural firms. The economies of scale thus get changed, with farmers forced into retail sector bulk sell offs that are increasingly inefficient and perpetuate the agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

There also forms of internal tariffs that protect large industry through direct subsidisation. For example “between 1973 and 2003, the US government paid out $74 billion in energy subsidies to promote R&D in fossil fuels and nuclear power”[22]. This was despite these companies having huge profit margins, which shows the actual profitability of these industries. They are reliant on institutions of theft to simply develop critical infrastructure as a result of their internal unproductiveness and their falling foul of the economic calculation problem. It creates a system of perverse incentives as these firms aren’t induced to work and develop in smarter, cleaner ways and instead produce the same limited output. This is corporatism at its finest, with government purposefully favouring large firms over small firms, and thus encouraging wasteful practices. Returning to farming, the EU holds similar policies, which in many ways restrict crop diversification and mean that certain farmers are favoured over others. This leads to artificially low prices which allows for retail monopolisation due to farmers being unable to sell their own product due to EU regulations which create this system. It is a continuation of the obstinate incentives that leads to overproduction, false demand and the entrenchment of economic disadvantages and inefficiencies.

Patents

Patents act in a similar way. They privilege large businesses in rigged markets and allow for centralisation and monopolisation. “The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it”[23]. Patents act to lock up innovation in a legal quagmire. It puts new technology into the hands of capital, limiting its distribution and creating a rentier system, where the privilege to use new technology and even knowledge is commodified by large corporations in collusion with the state.

This inability to access new technologies and knowledge creates a form of entry barrier, with smaller competitors being unable to afford this access. Most modern tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) are in effect monopolists of knowledge and technology, limiting its accessibility and collecting the rent they charge on these products. Their market position becomes entrenched with restrictive data laws and copyrights that mean the passage of information is blocked by virtual, artificial toll gates that wouldn’t exist if not for coercive legislation.

Then there is the direct government subsidisation of research and development (R&D) spending that allows for large companies to reap “monopoly profits from technology it didn’t spend a penny to develop”[24]. Modern tech companies then are not only monopolists of patented of knowledge but also rentiers of technology they had no real part in developing. So while small inventors and start ups toil away trying to create a product that can only be sold on a rigged market, large firms benefit purely because of their power and the revolving door of government benefaction. Similar processes occur in military-based R&D spending, where corporations are given large grants and procurement contracts to develop military hardware and weaponry that on a freed market would not even necessarily be required by any customer or business. As Chomsky notes, in the US “the Pentagon system has long been the country’s biggest welfare program, transferring massive public funds to high-tech industry on the pretext of defense and security”[25]. These companies’ profits and growth are not then created in a market mechanism of competition and demand-led supply, but rather in a bubble of government-led protection, where they ride on the coattails of stolen innovation and forms of theft AKA patents and taxation respectively. “If they had to face the market, they’d be out selling rags or something, but they need a nanny state, a powerful nanny state to pour money into their pockets”[26].

Further, this process of patenting becomes a pure form of commodification as they remove products and ideas from their cultural origins. For example, the Human Genome Diversity Project used DNA from certain indigenous tribes in Central and South America. Some of this DNA was patented, and thus removed from the culture it came from without any sort of compensation by the HGDP and the beneficiaries of this knowledge. Biocolonialism and biopiracy are the best terms for this occurrence. By extracting culturally sensitive information and knowledge, a process of commodification occurs, and the whole concept of property, that of the sovereign ownership of the individual or collective, becomes redundant. Further the innovative capacities that supposedly come from intellectual property are limited if not completely negative. In fact the information that was patented was found to be 30% less innovative than the information released for full public use[27].

This analysis is backed by evidence from Scherer, who showed “a survey of 91 companies in which only seven ‘accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments.’ Most of them described patents as “the least important of considerations.’ Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be ‘the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales”[28]. Thus patents and intellectual property “eliminate ‘the competitive spur for further research’ because incremental innovation based on others’ patents is prohibited, and because the holder can ‘rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent.’ with no fear of a competitor improving his invention”[29].

Transport Subsidies

The fifth monopoly, transport subsidies, is one that has been identified by Carson. As Carson describes, “spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to ‘externalize its costs’ on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses”[30]. These transportation subsidies allow for the development of large business operations, particularly in the retail and manufacturing sectors. By subsidising the movement of goods by heavy duty vehicles, it means they are given a state-based competitive advantage against smaller, local competitors.

Companies like Wal-Mart and Tesco are able to price their goods artificially cheaply as a result of not adding the transportation costs. Many of these companies actively lobbied for such infrastructure projects. When the interstate system was being built, it “had both an immediate stimulus effect on the industries that participated…oil companies, general contractors, cement manufacturers, steel companies…were among the dozens of industries involved in the building of the great interstate highway system”[31] showing the degree of corporate-state cooperation. It was because these infrastructure projects benefitted their products and models that they lobbied for them.

Of course Carson’s view of this quite US-centric. In much of Europe, particularly the UK, we see other regulations that create a very different kind of transport subsidy. While these nations do subsidise transport via taxation to pay for roads rather than using user fees or road pricing, they also have high fuel duties and regulation on forms of transport, such as regulations on truck design and usage. The fuel duties act as a subsidy in the sense that they destroy small transport firms and simply monopolise the transport industry as only larger companies can afford the higher prices. The forms of regulation mentioned mean that innovation into new vehicle design and competition between firms is limited and simply continues the dominance of particular transport and production companies that aren’t subject to market competition. Thus what we see are two different types of transport subsidies that both act to continue the current economic paradigm.

These subsidies serve to amplify economies of scale, creating national and international markets largely in the control of corporate interests. These large markets create systems of disequilibrium, with monopoly interests being able to develop oligopoly markets from which rents can be extracted. A modern example of this is the creation of HS2 in the UK. It serves as a vanity project for political and bureaucratic elites, who can gain well-paying jobs as political advisors and construction directors. It also allows for the continuation of the North-South divide, with large London-centric firms sucking out talent from the North and Midlands, at little expense to themselves. As Wellings describes it, it’s an example of externalised costs and internalised benefits, with vested interests serving to gain[32]. Economies of scale are created artificially, with competition in local markets suffering due to a project only favourable to London-based businesses. Local economies of scale, which are more natural and more open to individual considerations and supply and demand, are priced out by government intervention. Local transport projects, like roads linking market towns and local rail infrastructure, are ignored due to a lack of political prestige for politicians and their donors and lobbyists.

Road and rail subsidised by the state leads to the current economies of scale that favour large, centralised business entities. It also prices out and discourages private infrastructure projects that could actually make an economic difference by increasing competition and lowering prices, while maintaining local economies of scale which benefit large swathes of areas that currently don’t benefit from the subsidised corporate model. These three monopolies further the wage labour monopoly, by erecting entry barriers against small business and self-employment and by creating feudalistic patent regimes and transport systems that create favourable economies of scale. National markets serve larger companies and hierarchical organisation, and international markets continue to serve and enlarge this. It pushes real costs onto the consumer/taxpayer, and further creates illegitimate profits taken from oligopoly markets.

The Corporate Infrastructure

This wage labour monopoly, with the five structural monopolies feeding it, is the basis of the modern corporate dominated economy. As a result, modern corporations act as oppressive actors on the world stage, using wage slaves and forms of indebtedness to develop the massive growth seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Carson states “in a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else’s labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery”[33].

Then there is the system of incentives created by this corporate-state monopoly. Infrastructures are developed that maintain the inefficiencies. Rifkin’s analysis of a series of Industrial Revolutions shows this to be the case. The Second Industrial Revolution, the current economic system we live in according to Rifkin, is reliant on state-invested infrastructure and subsidisation[34]. The subsidisation of natural capital is one example of this. Roberts shows that “the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP”[35]. The term natural capital is obviously a broad, all-encompassing term. The specifics are those of the production of pollutants that is subsidised by specific tax breaks and forms of limited liability. These follow from elements of the land monopoly which means pollution becomes an externalised cost upon taxpayers, furthering the inefficiencies of a particular economic paradigm, which Rifkin calls the Second Industrial Revolution but what I would call capitalism.

The maintenance of this system means most companies that are reliant on fossil fuels and the energy and transport infrastructures that follow from them have no incentive to divest into new market ventures, but instead have an interest in resource and capital accumulation. It creates ‘revolving door’ government, where lobbyists persist in convincing policy makers for subsidies here and tax breaks there all the while relying on the rent extraction they gain from state intervention.

This process within resource extraction and energy use is more widely seen in the general production processes of capitalism. The levels of overproduction and continued consumption are fed by the structural monopolies, as well as justifying the wage labour monopoly. To fund the levels of consumption needed to continue production means people are put into a paradigm of working longer to buy more things to enjoy. Its paradoxical as you spend more time at work, thus limiting the amount of time you have to actually enjoy consumer goods. Further, as goods become more expensive due to increasing cost mark-ups and inflationary policies, and housing prices and rents go up due to land speculation and monopoly ownership, more people become reliant on debt instruments to fund their everyday lives and their increasing consumer spending. This has created a precipitous debt bubble as Steve Keen’s work has shown. It has also meant that much of the current growth seen since the Great Recession has been on the back of consumer spending, as Blanchflower has documented.

Incentives are created which lead to increasing, unnatural growth and increasing levels of debt. In particular, levels of corporate debt have skyrocketed during the recession of 2008. This is due to systemic overproduction and waste that has developed due to mass production systems used by most multinationals. The structural subsidies create this system where large production facilities with forms of guaranteed profit are needed for massive market areas, usually on a national or international level. Carson has pointed out that modern markets are hardly an example of spontaneous order and aren’t reliant on supply and demand[36]. Rather the system is reliant on a system of planning, with codified relations between suppliers and distributors and systems of guaranteed consumption through external market control in the form of internal sales tariffs and the financialisation of the economy.

Internal sales tariffs limit what stores/areas products can be sold in, and are only viable as a result of intellectual property regimes that allow for increased costs and a further disconnect between production and consumption. Financialisation on the other hand simply maintains the production systems as well as processes of commodification. It makes corporate debt a commodity, and puts value into meaningless products, which allows for more accumulation and overproduction as business isn’t rewarded for genuine wealth production and creation, which comes from artificial processes, but is rewarded rather by debt financialisation, unsustainable growth in bureaucracy and the continued expropriation of surplus value, or human capital. This also represents a commodification process, as the social relation of debt, as identified by Graeber and Martin, is put into an economistic context, with debt serving the purposes of profit and capital. The debt relationship, that’s shaped by community relations and gift-giving and receiving[37], is taken as a value of capital. And this debt is allowed to build up and shape other economic activity. Consumer purchase after consumer purchase represents this. It is encouraged, and when it slows the government takes over and funds through quantitative easing programs, allowing for the construction of bigger, more complex bubbles. It shows that corporation and government are two sides of the same coin.

We have to remember that as much as governments, corporations are just as likely to be effected by the knowledge problem. To get around, every relationship and process is effectively planned. Business to business relations, as seen in distribution and supply chains, are maintained for decades by large manufacturers so as to continue guaranteed buyers of their products. In other cases, the supply and warehousing operations are subsumed by the manufacturer, owning every process from production to sale. Global value chains are an outgrowth of this hierarchalised control and planning, with much of their success being guaranteed by government. It is dictatorial governments in the Global South (who usually have the backing of the US government and its interests) that ban collective action among labourers through extraordinarily harsh measures, it is trade agreements with their backing by Western governments that maintain artificial property rights such as patents and it is government that externalises the cost of global transportation of these goods onto the taxpayer, thus distorting economies of scale to favour the large corporations and forms of state-corporate economic planning. In other the words, the commodification and Sovietisation of the economy.

Culture Under Capitalism

A paradigm that enforces this economic hierarchy is created, where life is work and your main identity is around the soul-crushing job you inhabit. Social relations are commodified and local economic activity is strangled. The whole idea of community in the 21st century is being replaced by a centralised state and economic activity that has no interest in that community, but is inward looking, determining profit margins rather building strong societal relations. The ability to escape this paradigm is extremely limited by the coercive hand of the state. It restricts collective organising, eliminates common and private property and develops extremely insufficient systems of economic organisation.

What we’ve seen is the disembedding of markets from their cultural and social origins[38]. Relations of debt and consumption, which were as much in political institutions and based around social relations, have been expropriated by capital. Thus instead of markets forming one of many different idea of economic organisation of which it could complement, we see the neoliberal discourse of praising markets and even seeing marketisation in what have been social relations up to this day. Thus public services such as health and energy are wrapped in discourses of competition and corporate ownership. However, markets aren’t actually like this. If we look to genuinely free markets, which are few and far between, we don’t see large production and corporate ownership. Instead we see markets crafted around local institutions and genuine demand for certain goods and services. Ownership is much more decentralised. However, due to government-based price and scale distortions, culture and its institutions are brought into the marketised economy, creating the marketised society.

It leads to the development of modern consumerism, creating warped identities based around products. It kills culture and intelligence in favour of an advertised individual. Carson shows that “mass production divorces production from consumption. The rate of production is driven by the imperative of keeping the machines running at full capacity so as to minimize unit costs, rather than by customer orders. So in addition to contractual control of inputs, mass-production industry faces the imperative of guaranteeing consumption of its output by managing the consumer”[39]. The consumer is separated from the producer. Mass production means a consumer culture. Rather than supply meeting demand, demand is made to compensate for oversupply. It also creates forms of consumer inequality that mean Third World workers have almost no access to the products they help produce. The development of domestic markets in consumer goods is massively restricted via patents and tariffs.

Within the Western world there is similar consumer inequality, with a creation of an underclass who desire consumer goods that their limited wages can hardly afford. Bauman’s analysis of the London Riots in 2011 saw an element of this consumer yearning, with products like high-end trainers and flat-screen TVs being taken. Bauman notes that “from cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension”[40]. The cultural backwater caused by modern consumerism creates a form of stigmatisation and symbol status, with haves and have nots developing into distinct classes in a consumer culture. As Bauman states “for defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled — and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning”[41].

The processes of commodification amplify this systemic crisis. The divorcing of production from consumption leads to the most atomistic forms of individualism. It becomes a process of overconsumption and hoarding, without any appreciation of the product development. Cultural and societal obligations and considerations get uprooted by what is wanted and what can be bought. It puts value squarely into the hands of capital, with the determination of worth being decided in social hierarchies that follow from the enforced economic hierarchies of modern capitalism. It is a symptom of the false choice of employment or death, of work creating one’s value in life and of a market shaped not by workers, communities and cultures but by the interests capital and the state that props it up.

Conclusion

This system is massively unsustainable, and becomes more and more reliant on tax revenues to make it profitable. The price system becomes distorted, encouraging the mass production that “leads to ever-increasing demands on state services”[42]. This then shows the inefficiency of large corporations. They are as much subject to the economic calculation problem as the state. Their reliance on the theft of individual income via the taxation system means in anarchist society they are completely unviable. As a system of economic organisation “capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer’s market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market”[43].

In systems of anarchy, there would be an end to corporate dominance due to their inability to seek state rent and thus collapsing in their inefficiencies. As noted by Carson, there were two paths that could have been taken to organise industry and the economy. The one that was followed was “centralized production using expensive, product-specific machinery in large batches on a supply-push basis”[44]. However a better system was possible. One of “decentralized production for local markets, integrating general-purpose machinery into craft production and governed on a demand-pull basis with short production runs and frequent shifts between product lines”[45]. This would have required localised industry, networked communities and what Rifkin calls lateral, distributional, collaborative markets. Workers would be independent of capital, and have an ability to take back their surplus value. It would involve voluntary governance structures and self-organised communities. It would be an end to the corporate-state nexus.

By having this centralised system, we open the floodgates to the continuation of boom-bust cycles through monopoly government control. Since the delinking of production from consumption, there has been a development of mass production and the apparatuses that prop it up. Marx noted this particular phenomenon, with “the birth of large-scale industry this true proportion had to come to an end, and production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on”[46]. This process in the end favours the capitalists. It destroys real value in an economy and allows for more government involvement. Further, it leads to capital accumulation through government subsidisation and the monopoly position many modern corporations hold within their respective markets.

It’s a process of artificial wealth accumulation and creation, backed by the five monopolies previously mentioned. High land prices, restrictive credit access and the use of interest rates to effectively distort the value of currency, the use of market entry barriers through regulations and patents and the use of transport subsidies all favour the main monopoly, that of wage labour. Because of the diminishing returns that many of these companies are finding, they are becoming increasingly reliant on the extraction of surplus value from their workers. As mentioned earlier, wage laws allow them to eliminate smaller competitors and the development of varied, precarious work contracts mean a diversification of their workforce, which allows them to reduce hours paid and thus reduce their labour costs. However, the compensation of a worker’s product isn’t necessarily met. Thus the accruing of capital simply means the extraction of rent from workers, which is enforced by the limitation of worker’s to pool their labour value and capital and develop their own industry in a truly free market.

Government is the glue which holds capitalism together. Without it, the economies of scale, the appropriation and centralisation of land and the distortion of inputs and outputs would be impossible. Without a central bank, the destructive tax of inflation wouldn’t be feasible in a competitive currency market. The redistribution of wealth and malinvestment couldn’t occur on the same scale as markets would act as a corrective against these activities. The use of tariffs and patents to lock up technology and create artificial wealth couldn’t happen without the state’s coercive power. Economic organisation is a fluid concept, that changes from place to place and people to people. What is right for one community or tribe is not what is necessarily right for another. A freed market would reflect this, as it would embed markets in pre-existing cultural/social structures and stop the developments of commodification and neo-colonialism that persist presently. This is a world free of state-action and corporate control. This is anarchism.

Bibliography

Bauman, Z. (2011). The London Riots – On Consumerism Coming Home To Roost. Available: http://www.socialeurope.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/. Last accessed 21st Sep 2015.

Carson, K (2007). Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. United States: BookSurge.

Carson, K. (2010). The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies. Available: http://fee.org/freeman/the-distorting-effects-of-transportation-subsidies/. Last accessed 15th Sep 2015.

Carson, K (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. United States: BookSurge.

Carson, K. (2002). The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand. Available: http://www.mutualist.org/id4.html. Last accessed 25th Sep 2015.

Chartier, G. (2010). Advocates of Freed Markets Should Embrace “Anti-Capitalism”. Available: http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/chartier.anticapitalism.pdf. Last accessed 14th Sep 2015.

Childs, R. (1971). Big Business and the Rise of American Statism. Available: http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

de Ugarte, D. (2015). Biomedical patents reduce innovation by 30%. Available: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/biomedical-patents-reduce-innovation-by-30/2015/09/09. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

Dowd, K (2014). New Private Monies. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

Long, R. (2008). Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now. Available: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-t-long/corporations-versus-market-or-whip-conflation-now. Last accessed 15th Sep 2015.

Martin, F (2013). Money: The Unauthorised Biography. London: Bodley Head.

Paul, R (2007). The Revolution: A Manifesto. 2nd ed. United States: Grand Central Publishing.

Polanyi, K (2002). The Great Transformation. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.

Reitzig, L. (2014). Farm Bill 2014 or “The Destruction of Small Family Farms”. Available: http://nourishingliberty.com/farm-bill-2014-just-how-bad-is-it/. Last accessed 21st Sep 2015.

Richman, S. (2013). Bangladeshi Workers Need Freed Markets. Available: http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/bangladesh-needs-freed-markets/. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

Rifkin, J (2011). The Third Industrial Revolution. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Roberts, D. (2013). None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use. Available: http://grist.org/business-technology/none-of-the-worlds-top-industries-would-be-profitable-if-they-paid-for-the-natural-capital-they-use/. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

Shorr, I. (1996). On US Military Budgets. Available: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19960211.htm. Last accessed 25th Sep 2015.

Solow, R. (2015). The Future of Work. Available: http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-why-wages-arent-keeping-up. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

StopHS2. (2013). “Classic Example” of Vested Interests. [Online Video]. 18 November. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94VP3USOuE. [Accessed: 31 October 2015].

Vivero Pol, J. (2015). Transition towards a food commons regime. Available: http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=9851100240740070870950101221090931190350100270460840350111130010740820980970930810660540551030481120240140671180910151151060840400590600730100851021250261111. Last accessed 15th Sep 2015.

Notes:

[1] Chartier, G. 2010, 1

[2] Chartier, G. 2010, 2

[3] Dowd, K. 2014

[4] Childs, R. 1971

[5] Paul, R. 2009, 70

[6] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[7] Childs, R. 1971

[8] Childs, R. 1971

[9] Dowd, K. 2014, 85-86

[10] Long, R. 2008

[11] Carson, K. 2002

[12] Carson, K. 2002

[13] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[14] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[15] Richman, S. 2013

[16] Richman, S. 2013

[17] Solow, R. 2015

[18] Solow, R. 2015

[19] Carson, K. 2007, 50

[20] Reitzig, L. 2014

[21] Reitzig, L. 2014

[22] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[23] Carson, K. 2002

[24] Carson, K. 2002

[25] Shorr, I. 1996

[26] Shorr, I. 1996

[27] de Ugarte, D. 2015

[28] Carson, K. 2002

[29] Carson, K. 2002

[30] Carson, K. 2002

[31] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[32] Wellings, R. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94VP3USOuE

[33] Carson, K. 2002

[34] Rifkin, J. 2011

[35] Roberts, D. 2013

[36] Carson, K. 2010

[37] Martin, F. 2013

[38] Polanyi, K. 2002

[39] Carson, K. 2010, 50

[40] Bauman, Z. 2011

[41] Bauman, Z. 2011

[42] Carson, K. 2010, 111

[43] Carson, K. 2002

[44] Carson, K. 2010

[45] Carson, K. 2010

[46] Carson, K. 2010, 256

The Joy of Conspiracy Denial

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Carol Cleveland

Source: OpEdNews.com

Recently I read another stinging rebuke of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists for their frightful mishandling of evidence, their will to believe only what gives them psychological comfort, and their general state of delusion. It was not the first I had read, nor will it be the last. The writer held unwaveringly to the party line: all those who seek to discredit the official, announced version of the events of 9-11 are “conspiracy theorists”- and should not be listened to. That this position constitutes an attempt at prior censorship does not seem to bother the deniers, nor the fact that the central tenets of conspiracy denial are an ad hominem attack. We are told that conspiracy theorists are crazy, or at least cowardly clingers to delusions that they find comforting.

It occurred to me that I haven’t seen anyone examine the mental comforts of conspiracy denial, using the handy tools of amateur psychology. It’s my guess that there’s considerable comfort to be had, especially for men, from an acceptance of the official explanation for 9-11. This is not to say that many women aren’t happy with the Arab hijacker theory, but for men, the provision of a clear enemy to fight is always especially gratifying.

To accept the official announcements of the story of 9-11 is instantly satisfying in several ways. Commercial airliners, hijacked by suicide terrorists, flew into buildings at the behest of a really smart master-terrorist named Osama Bin Laden. This is an immediately credible scenario””many of us had heard the name Bin Laden, and “knew” he was a terrorist who lived on the other side of the world. Indeed, the WTC had been attacked once before. And terrorism itself certainly exists–both sides of the 9-11 controversy can agree on that. So, to accept the official announcements that followed the attacks enabled you quickly to locate all the blame for the attacks in a tiny evil army of foreigners, all out of immediate reach, but accessible to the U.S. Army, you bet. The hijackers themselves were all dead, and their leader was extremely hard to find, but American forces could find and punish them. No need, really, to conduct any investigations or solve any mysteries–an evil super-hero with a small army of mentally enslaved unfortunates was able to penetrate the defenses of the finest air force in the world to murder 3000 Americans. A fluke, but in life and in sports, stuff like that happens.

The fact that this reads like a comic book plot doesn’t seem to be a source of embarrassment for the anti-truther movement. In fact, an evil mastermind who, through mindless suicidal drones, wreaks havoc on good and decent people is the major plot driver of The Lord of the Rings, and many other fantasy and science fiction epics. Mythically speaking, it’s golden.

And under the broad strokes of the main story, there’s also a layer of historically accurate information that supports the main plot line. Joe and Jane Six-Pack would accept the unadorned story eagerly, but there’s something to satisfy the more thoughtful as well. The back story is that American foreign policy for the last 30 years could easily result in some very unhappy Arabs. CIA meddling in the politics of Iran and Iraq, and above all, our support for Israel, have been highly unpopular on the Arab street. Well-read people could find the anti-American sentiments of the terrorists quite credible, if regrettable.

So the psychological comforts of the official story are several and real: you get a clearly defined enemy, a simple solution to a complex foreign policy problem, you get to feel morally superior to your enemy because you’re more civilized and don’t kill civilians, and finally, if you know something of the history of American policy in the Near East, you get to feel superior to those who don’t.
It’s entirely understandable that any American should believe the official 9-11 story. And, of course, to consider seriously for an instant that there could be something seriously wrong with that story, to imagine that as possible, really does change everything, just like 9-11 itself. If there’s a chance that Americans colluded in those horrors, then the entire mental structure of our sanity, which we’ve lived in all our lives, has a serious crack, a San Andreas Fault, right down the middle. If we think it possible that “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” then everything previously unthinkable is thinkable.

In fairness to their enemies among the truthers, the conspiracy deniers should admit that there is much psychological comfort in their own position, and that conspiracy theorists do not have a monopoly on convenient but deluded assumptions. 9-11 is, after all, a heap of facts, and it is open to human inquiry. Whether the heap was created by our enemies’ hatred or something worse has yet to be decided.

Does “Creative Destruction” Include the State?

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When do we get to exercise democracy and fire every factotum, apparatchik, toady and lackey in the state who has abused his/her authority?

Everyone lauds “creative destruction” when it shreds monopolies and disrupts private enterprise “business as usual.” If thousands lose their middle-class livelihoods– hey, that’s the price of progress.

Improvements in productivity and efficiency can’t be stopped, and those employed making buggy whips and collecting horse manure from fetid streets will have to move on to other employment.

This raises an obvious question few dare ask: does this inevitable process of creative destruction include the state? If not, why not? Aren’t the state and the central bank the ultimate monopolies begging to be disrupted for the benefit of all? If government is inefficient and unproductive, shouldn’t it be “creatively destroyed” in the same fashion as private enterprise?

The obvious answer is yes. Why should a monopoly (government) remain untouched by new knowledge and competition as it skims the cream from society to fund its own monopolies and grants one monopoly/cartel privilege after another to its private-sector cronies?

Under the tender care of the state, we now have uncompetitive, inefficient parastic cartels dominating higher education, national defense, healthcare insurance, pharmaceuticals and hospitals– to name but a few of the major industries that are now state-enforced cartels thanks to the heavy hand of the state (i.e. regulatory capture).

Under the tender mercies of the state, prosecutors have a 90% conviction rate thanks to rigged forensic evidence, threats of life imprisonment (better to plea-bargain than risk years in America’s gulag) and other strong-arm tactics that presume guilt, not innocence. We have the best judicial system that money can buy, meaning you’re jail-bait if you can’t put your hands on a couple hundred thousand for legal defense and the all-important media campaign.

No wonder “we’re number one” in false convictions, innocent people rotting away in the drug gulag and overcrowded prisons. The citizenry are fish in a barrel for overzealous prosecutors and “get tough on drugs” politicos.

And for goodness sake, don’t get caught with cash–you must be a drug lord! Only drug lords have more than $200 cash on them at any one time. Once again, the state monopoly on force reckons you’re guilty until proven innocent–and in cases where your cash and car were “legally stolen” (a.k.a. civil forfeiture) by the state, that will cost you months or years and tens of thousands in legal fees to get your property back–unless you’re targeted for further investigation.

As I have described here in detail, the state can empty your bank account on the barest suspicion that you might owe more taxes than you paid. Due process and rule of law have been replaced with legalized looting and harassment by government in America.

Orwell and Kafka Do America: How the Government Steals Your Money–“Legally,” Of Course (March 24, 2015)

Welcome to the Predatory State of California–Even If You Don’t Live There (March 20, 2012)

The Predatory State of California, Part 2 (March 21, 2012)

Criminalizing Poverty For Profit: Local Government’s New Debtors Prisons

Pimping the Empire, Conservative-Style

Pimping the Empire, Progressive-Style

When the Savior State Becomes the Enemy of the People (October 30, 2009)

As for using your rights to uncover whatever illegal spying and dirty tricks the state imposed on you in years past–good luck getting a Freedom of Information claim processed. The state’s organs of security are busy targeting suspected terrorists with drone strikes, and your trivial concerns about constitutional rights don’t count.

In fact, why exactly are you asking? Your inquiry is highly suspicious.

If there is a difference between the U.S. national security state and the Stasi, it is merely technological. We don’t have to depend on snitches; we got high-tech tools, pilgrim.

There are two systems under our state: one for insiders and one for the rest of us. Insiders get a free pass, everyone else gets the state’s boot on their neck. If you’re Hillary Clinton, rules are for the little people who haven’t managed to skim tens of millions in bribes ( a.k.a. speaking fees and campaign contributions). There is no financial crime that can’t be turned into a heroic expression of America’s greatness–if you can afford the bribes.

Here’s how bad it is: let’s say you’re a senior U.S. senator whose husband is the penultimate crony insider worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a power couple to be reckoned with, wielding state and private-wealth power.

So what did the national security state say when the senator asked for minimal factual reports on agency activities? Blow chow, honey.

The lady in question is senior U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, who is married to investment banker/financier Richard Blum. Interestingly, Feinstein had carried the national security state’s water for years in the senate, defending our Stasi/KGB from inquiry or even the dimmest light of media exposure.

Hey, America’s Stasi: you guys really know how to reward your water carriers.

The full story can be found in the new book Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare.

Here’s my question: when do we get to exercise democracy and fire every factotum, apparatchik, toady and lackey in the state who has abused his/her authority, trampled on our constitutional rights, participated in civil forfeiture, threatened innocent citizens, looted the system for personal gain and committed malfeasance? It’s called accountability and rule of law, people.

If you can’t fire your Stasi, KGB, corrupt prosecutors, greedy cops and parasitic politicos, then you don’t have a real democracy, you just have a phony facsimile of democracy, an empty shell that’s up held up as propaganda to a skeptical world.

A Unified Theory of Corruption – The Deep State

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

LongTime Capitol Hill Insider Exposes the Kind of Government We Really Have

By Jeff Schechtman

Source: WhoWhatWhy.org

The Holy Grail of physics has always been to find what Einstein called a Unified Field Theory, or, as we’ve come to know it today, a theory of everything. One idea, one set of equations that could explain the physical universe.

Imagine if such a thing existed in government and politics. If we could look at the last 40 years of upheaval, change, and political dislocation, and find the one thread that explains it all.

The term “The Deep State” originated in the Ottoman Empire — where the Turks recognized that their leaders owed allegiance to elites, and placed the opportunities and prerogatives of nationalism, corporatism, and elites over the interest of its citizens.

Today, the term is just as apt. Those same allegiances on the part of today’s leaders may just be responsible for income inequality, perpetual war, the dominance of Wall Street, and a Military/Homeland Security Complex far greater, deeper and stronger than anything that President Dwight Eisenhower could ever have imagined. Many thinkers have looked at this, including people like Peter Dale Scott, who has written much about it here on the pages of WhoWhatWhy.org.

Now, Mike Lofgren — a long time Capitol Hill insider, Senate and House Budget Committee staffer — shares 28 years of up close and personal insight which has led him to similar conclusions.

Lofgren thinks he has found the unifying theory. From his Washington perch,he has observed deep and intricate connections between Wall Street, the military, defense contractors, political operatives, the treasury, elected leaders, and unnamed others. And he has perceived the presence of a shadow government.

This complex web was made even stronger by 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown. And it leaves out ordinary citizens — the patsies — as more and more money is sucked out of the system and denied to those looking for even the most basic government infrastructure and services.

Lofgren is out with a new book and, in this week’s podcast, he’s interviewed by WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman. He talks the nitty gritty of the Deep State, showing once again that WhoWhatWhy is your Deep State Headquarters.

The book is called The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, and it is published by Viking.

WhoWhatWhy Radio podcast mp3

War, Repression and International Gangsterism: U.S. State Policy From Benghazi to Baltimore

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Ajamu Baraka

Source: CounterPunch.org

A mere two months after clashes between black youth and police in Baltimore following the murder of Freddie Gray while in police custody, President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of twenty-four year old Raymon Carter for his alleged involvement in the torching of a CVS pharmacy. The national government’s intervention into the case had an unmistakable message – if you engage in “unauthorized” forms of resistance – in this case, crimes against property – expect to confront the full power of the national government.

U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein made it even clearer: “Anyone in the future who participates in a ‘riot’ should know that police, prosecutors and citizens will track them down and send them to prison.”

This aggressive and speedy move on the part of the DOJ to criminalize poor, black kids in Baltimore differed sharply from the DOJ approach to high government officials, armed servants of the state at the local level and the big banks and investment firms. For the officials involved in torture under the Bush Administration, the financial gangsters who engineered the 2008 economic crisis, and the killer cops across the country who have yet to experience one indictment from Obama’s DOJ after months of “investigations,” DOJ-granted impunity has been the operative principle in practice.

But Obama’s DOJ has not been the only state institution involved in providing cover and impunity for repression and criminality in the service of the capitalist oligarchy.

Impunity for State Terrorism: the Real Story of Benghazi

What might seem oppositional and important in the game of U.S. politics is usually insignificant and diversionary. Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the House Select Committee, ostensibly established to conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the events that led to the death of Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. citizens on September 11, 2012, was a case in point.

Despite the supposed acrimony between the two ruling class parties in Congress, an ideological consensus exists around the overall strategic commitment to maintain U.S. global dominance. On that ultimate objective both corporate parties share an interest in shifting public attention away from state policies and actions that demonstrate the state’s absolute commitment to the principle of “by any means necessary” for maintaining and advancing the interests of the White supremacist, patriarchal, colonial/capitalist order.

For example, initially the Republican majority’s decision to launch another investigation into the events of 2012 was met with a considerable amount of consternation on the part of some democrats who saw the investigation as just another effort to sabotage Clinton’s run for the Presidency. However, when the republicans settled on the issue of Clinton’s emails the democrats were concerned that Clinton’s use of a private server might cause some embarrassment for her candidacy, but it was also clear that the hearings were going to be rigged and the real questions related to Benghazi would never be raised.

If the House Committee had really been committed to public accountability and surfacing the truth, there were a number of questions that could have been raised such as: 1) what was the role of the facility that was attacked? Was it a U.S. Consulate, a CIA facility or some other entity? 2) Why were those facilities set up so quickly even before a stable government was established in the aftermath of the destruction of the Libyan state? 3 ) Why were there estimated to be more than twenty CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi just miles from the facility on the night of the attack and what was the mission of those CIA personnel? And 4) Why did the U.S. government contract with an organization to provide security for the facility that had clear ties to Jihadist groups that the U.S. considered as part of the international terrorist networks?

These kinds of questions that would have delved into U.S. involvement in Libya were not raised for two reasons: 1) The Syrian issue – Congress didn’t want the public to focus too much attention on the question of the timeline of U.S. involvement. Although many right-wing republicans were upset that the Obama administration was not more aggressive with more open and direct support for its regime change strategy, everyone in Congress knows that the narrative of reluctant and recent involvement on the part of the Obama administration in the events in Syria is pure fiction. And 2) elements in congress and the Obama administration, with the full collaboration of the corporate press, have suppressed the facts around the mission of the CIA and the role of the State Department in Libya during the period leading to the attack on the two compounds because those activities contravened both U.S. and international law.

Investigative journalist Seymore Hersh revealed that a classified annex to a report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Benghazi that was not made public, discussed a secret agreement made in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administration in Turkey to run an arms supply line from Libya using arms secured with the overthrow of the Libya state to the so-called rebel forces in Syria. The operation was run by CIA director David Petraeus, and the elements that received support included jihadist groups, including the Al Nusrah Front, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate.

So even though information on the real role of the U.S. in the war in Syria is getting more coverage, the elites in Congress and the Administration were still not interested in calling too much attention to the fact that the U.S. provided material support to groups that it defined as terrorists which technically under U.S. law should have made that assistance prosecutable.

Vice President Joe Biden even stated publically that governments allied with the U.S. and their nationals were supplying arms to elements that they knew were terrorists and U.S. officials knew it:

“They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadist coming from other parts of the world. “

Yet not one of these individuals or government officials, many who travel on a regular basis to the U.S. and other Western nations have been charged or had sanctions applied to them. In fact, in a pathetic and disingenuous comment, Biden claims that even though it was pointed out to those states by U.S. officials that their support was going to extremist jihadists forces – “We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”

Obviously for the Obama Administration charging them, freezing their bank accounts, slapping sanctions on the government as was done with the governments and individuals in Iran and Russia was out of the question.

This is why for anyone whose vision is not distorted by the myopia of white supremacist, capitalist ideology, the crude class politics of the DOJ’s decision to prosecute the young resisters in Baltimore is so outrageous.

Benghazi is only a symptom of a pattern of criminal activity on the part of U.S. officials from both parties. From the illegal attacks on Iraq and Libya, subversion in Syria and Venezuela, surveillance, police state repression and mass incarceration domestically, coups in Honduras and Haiti, support for genocide in Yemen, and the continued occupation of Palestine, it is clear that what unites the elites of both parties is their unshakable commitment to maintaining the power of the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination as the institutional expressions of concentrated white power for as long as possible.

In the meantime, Raymon Carter is facing years in prison because the state claims it has a right to hunt down and prosecute who it defines as criminals.

But the social world is not static and the balance of forces is shifting. One day using that same logic but informed by an alternative ethical framework that centers real justice, the people will be in a position to hunt down and bring to justice the international colonial gangsters who destroy our earth, torture, exploit and bring death to countless millions.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” (CounterPunch Books, 2014). He can be reached atwww.AjamuBaraka.com

An Introduction to Technofeudalism Ascending

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By SARTRE

Source: BATR.org

The future of the planetary “Reign of Terror” has never been clearer. The pattern for global governance has been set into motion and operates under a model that has been used throughout much of history. The modern day version of command and control can be effectively described as Technofeudalism. The purpose of this introduction is to provide an outline of the arguments used by Steven Yates, Ph.D. The link to this significant treatise is provided below. In addition News With Views maintains an extensive archives of Dr. Yates’ work. Invest the time to read the entire essay for a full understanding of the linkage behind Technofeudalis and the course for top down dominance.

Technofeudalism Ascending comprises nine sections. Dr. Yates provides the following preface.

My book Four Cardinal Errors (2011) introduced the idea of technofeudalism. Though a bit of a mouthful, this is the best term for the political economy towards which an intergenerational superelite has been directing as much of the world as possible for at least a century. This existence of this group, I argue, is the foremost political-economic reality of our times.

Their goal, I argued in Four Cardinal Errors, is to institute corporate controlled global governance: de facto world government, managed for private profit and for control over national governments and populations. Technofeudalism is the resulting political economy. While preserving some of the vocabulary and outward features of market capitalism, technofeudalism has almost nothing to do with free markets, or free enterprise, as generally understood. It is about instituting whatever policies, instigating whatever wars, bringing about whatever revolutions, and causing whatever levels of misery are deemed necessary for enforced mass compliance. Its tools include both neoliberal and neoconservative ideology, artificial scarcity, education reduced to job training, and fear induction through constant pontificating about “terrorism” amidst random and often-depraved acts of violence, reducing as many as possible to a status of permanently cash-strapped, mentally paralyzed subjects — living amidst the most advanced technology in human history, but equivalent to serfs (“owned” as de facto property by “their” governments, employers, etc., as in medieval feudal systems of old). Hence, the term technofeudalism.

Introduction: Why Technofeudalism? (Technofeudalism is the best term for a kind of political economy that has been coming together very gradually for much of the past century, but accelerating in recent decades: it is technologically advanced but populations are controlled by various means and, in effect, made into serfs who are tied to whatever work they can find and to government programs. Technofeudalism is driven by those I call the superelite—a group of globalist-minded extended families whose primary motivation is wealth and power. It illustrates the primary problem of practical political philosophy and strategy: how to contain that minority in our midst that is drawn to power.)

The End of History? (The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to leave the world at a major turning point; Communism was dead, the combination of market capitalism and liberal democracy seemed to be catching on everywhere, and the U.S. was the sole superpower. It seemed conceivable that it really was, as Francis Fukuyama described, the end of history.)

The Neoliberal Illusion. (Things began to unravel almost at once, as trade deals such as NAFTA began to put an end to the largest financially independent middle class in history. Neoliberal ideology proved to have a dark side, as wealth began to be redistributed upward and millions of people ended up out of work.)

Precariatization and the Destruction of the American Mind. (Higher education faced multiple crises: rising radical left “scholarship” in the humanities, a rising corporate or business mindset in expanding administrations, the collapse of the academic job market creating conditions where control was possible, and the impoverishing of faculty via adjunctification, one species of the creation of a precariat — workers in an environment of part-time, temporary, and short term work. Liberal arts learning itself came under assault, as the thinking skills it provides threaten a political economy of power, domination, precarity, and corruption.)

The Empire of Corruption. (Ensuing decades have seen rising corruption and financial manipulation which eventually caused the 2008 meltdown and have brought about a steadily lowering of the standard of living in the U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United ensure a bought-and-paid-for political class, and articles now appear in refereed journals indicating that the U.S. is now a plutocratic oligarchy.)

The Global Corporatist Leviathan. (If the present political system is plutocratic oligarchy, the correct term for the present economy is corporatism, with technofeudalism its broader political-economic-technocratic instrument. Poor education ensures a systematic confusion between capitalism and corporatism. Under corporatism, corporations are in the driver’s seat behind governments, as we can see from their latest effort to dominate a section of the world’s economy: the Trans-Pacific Partnership.)

The New Serfdom. (You are living in a feudal system when there is one set of rules for those with power and another set of rules for those without power, with only token representation. Technofeudalism emerges in that its subjects are technologically advanced serfs — surrounded by technology but tied to low-wage work or to a government-based support system.)

“What Can We Do?” (You can educate yourself on issues ranging from the possibilities of expatriation to that of peoples separating politically from empires, which may become possible as a very severe downturn, worse than the Great Recession — a Greater Depression — is almost certainly inevitable.)

Preparing for the Greater Depression. (The world is on the verge of having to face the realities of financialization that will bring on the Greater Depression. You can prepare by building proper skills now. It is conceivable that the global superelite is planning on a Greater Depression. You should prepare anyway.)

Grounds for Hope: Real Sustainability and the Cycles of History. (Technofeudalism will prove unsustainable. It may be put in place, but its structure and the mindset that gave rise to it will cause it to decay and eventually disintegrate. We have come this way before, as empires have risen and fallen before. This provides hope, in that with the collapse of the technofeudalist state, separation and the building of a world of small states will become possible — again if we begin to prepare now.)

This summary outline attempts to persuade the compelling case to review the entire critique. Filling in the connections and relationships to achieve the eternal objective of worldwide ascendancy in an age of technological supremacy, means that the return to a feudal society becomes the undeniable 21th century danger.

Technofeudalism is based upon herding marginal and unneeded humans into ghettos of subsistent serfdom existence. The technocrats who administer the process of dehumanization become the executioners of civilization. Utopia for the select, built on the misery of the masses is a future not worth living. This fact is exactly the objective of the globalist. Destroying resistance through marginalizing survival rules a feudal society. However, building the achievement of a renaissance culture is based upon the liberation of the human spirit and decentralization of authority.

The global elites depend on acquiesce of the masses to accept and adopt the tyrannical systems and indoctrination methods propagated by the technocratic matrix. Liberty is despised by authoritarians. Technofeudalism is the enemy of all human beings. Once armed with the knowledge of this threat, what will be the response of the populace targeted for slavery or extinction?

The Hate-Filled Origins of the War on Drugs they Don’t Want you to Know

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jay Syrmopoulos

Source: The Free Thought Project

An eye-opening video produced by the folks at ATTN, lays out how cocaine was banned as a means of social engineering, using racism as the main tool in driving this agenda. The desired results were achieved by utilizing stereotypically false racist attributions, perpetuated in the media as a means of turning public opinion against specific substances.Cannabis was attributed to Hispanics, hence the coining of the term “marijuana,” as a means of correlating the drug with Mexicans immigrants. Cocaine was attributed to blacks while opium was linked to the Chinese, with each being associated with racist depictions relating to use of the drug in question.

As hysteria grew, mainly due to the racial demonization of drugs, Congress took action with the passage of the Harrison Act of 1914, which outlawed the production, distribution or importation of opium and cocaine.

These actions were then followed up with the outlawing of marijuana on a federal level with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.

The modern “War on Drugs,” which has been waged disproportionately upon urban minorities, has its roots in the Nixon administration.

Nixon dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

In the early 1980’s the crack cocaine epidemic hit the inner cities of urban America with a vengeance. It began the devastation of black communities and the disenfranchising of many of the socially conscious organizations, such as the Black Panthers, which were working towards ending institutionalized racism.

Journalist Gary Webb in his groundbreaking investigative series, Dark Alliance, exposed deep connection between the CIA and large scale drug trafficking, which many attribute to the crack cocaine epidemic.

The violence associated with the crack scourge was steadily fed to the living rooms of middle America on the nightly news, which once again manifested as fear in the public. The public then begged the politicians to save them from the media spoon fed menace.

Thus began the approach to “get tough on crime,” which can be seen in the disparate penalties for crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine. Crack, which was primarily used by blacks, was given a penalty 100 times more severe than that of powder cocaine, which was primarily used by whites. This sentencing difference was in spite of the drugs being the same pharmacologically speaking.

In 2010, the Fair Sentencing Act reduced this disparity down to an 18 times more severe penalty for crack vs. powder cocaine, but a massive difference in the way these almost identical substances are treated remains.

It’s quite clear what the impetus for making drugs illegal has historically been, racial fear. The violence perpetrated upon innocent people under the guise of a “War on Drugs” clearly shows that it’s actually a war being waged on all freedom loving Americans.

The manner in which racial prejudice has been used by the state to forward its agenda throughout history is consistent with the divide and conquer approach that continues to be used domestically and abroad, with the mainstream media seemingly ever ready to assist.

Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.

Related Video:

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: History