We’re All Lumpenproles Now (Part 2)

>

I’ve had people accuse me of “Manichaeism”, and while I used to bother to dispute this, there’s actually a truth to it. Not that I’m the Manichaean (and not that I claim to represent the absolute Good), but that I recognize the fundamental assault of Evil on everything outside itself including everything I value.

 

(Of course, I’m also not Manichaean in the technical sense that I don’t recognize this evil as being some necessary element of the universe. On the contrary, I recognize it as gratuitious, pointless, worthless, easily rid of if we only found the will to rid ourselves of it, and we’d be infinitely better off if it ceased to exist. That’s a major part of what’s so obscene about it. Like the Ancien Regime Tocqueville described, its wickedness is exceeded only by its worthlessness.)

 

Contrary to the lies propagated by system hacks and ”progressives” in unison, we’re not at all “in this together”. Even Marx thought the capitalist was integral, played for a time a progressive role, and was only at the time of his writing (in Europe) reaching the decadent/malevolent stage. But unlike in regular Marxist analysis, under colonialism capitalism was always purely alien and imposed itself by main force. Today Fanon’s mid-century analysis sounds more convincing. The world of colonialism/imperialism, and today globalization, has always been a Manichaean world. There’s no co-existence, let alone dialectic, only total, zero-sum war.

 

The “native” sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront one another, but not in the service of a higher unity. They follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous…

The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of “native” towns and European towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa…

The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. [I add: Today it's more sublimated - the credit card and privatization fire line. But de jure violence is always ready to provide support.] In the colonies the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier…

This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched where it comes to the colonial issue. It’s not just the concept of the pre-capitalist society which needs to be reexamined here. The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status. In the colonies the foreigner imposed himself using his cannons and machines. Despite the success of his pacification, in spite of his appropriation, the colonist always remains a foreigner. It’s not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the “ruling class”. The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, “the others”…

The colonial world is a Manichaean world.

The Wretched of the Earth pp. 3-6.

 

We can look to Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism to find the mortal peril of the economically superfluous, those even the capitalist cannot and does not want to economically exploit. These are in imminent danger of becoming the targets of genocide. This is technically our position today, any of us. When those who rejected Obama’s health racket bailout would say of it that its real policy was, “If you’re not rich, then either don’t get sick, or else die”, this was no exaggeration. Death to the non-rich in a very literal sense is the ideal goal of the elites.

 

It’s unlikely the enemy can directly exterminate overwhelming numbers of us, and anyway they have us earmarked for restored serfdom in the post-oil fields (where vastly more manual labor, backbreaking work to maintain the corporate mode of agriculture by hand, will be necessary). But any particular minority, however defined, which they find obnoxious, will be in immediate danger of literal extermination.

 

Isn’t all this already visible in outline? There’s no doubt about the nature of imperialism. Nor is there any doubt that this imperialism has fully come home, as its critics were warning it would eventually do since the latter 19th century. Yes – the banks, the corporations, their thug-and-bagman government, are worthless to the people. They’re nothing but alien parasites and predators. They do nothing but steal and destroy. They partake nothing of indigenous family, community, civil society, democracy, landbase. On the contrary, they viciously assault all of these with the goal of eradicating them completely. The land is stolen, the people driven off, and the productive essence of the land itself then destroyed. There’s zero relationship between these aliens and the people. We’ve been internally colonized.

 

But we are the humans of this land, and this land is the landbase of our humanity. Our families, friendships. communities, society, democracy, morality, humanity are the natural and rightful shoots from this soil. We can’t conceive or have any order or prosperity other than those native to our land and ourselves on this land. Today we’ve been driven into the political and legal shantytown of being mere vagrants on our own land, and increasingly we’re being driven into physical ghettos. It’s a purely foreign excrescence which is perpetrating this infinite crime, a vile disease rotting on the face of the earth. We can free ourselves, restitute and cleanse our great land, re-assert our humanity, restore our prosperity, redeem our democracy. To do so, we must recognize our human imperative, and denounce everything superfluous to it, and everything harmful to it.

 

Our fight shall, on the strategic and tactical level, mostly be one of building outside the colonial structures, renouncing, refusing, withdrawing to build elsewhere, where necessary evading or resisting. But in principle this is total war to the most bitter zero-sum end. We didn’t start it, but we must finish it. Either kleptocracy or humanity must perish completely from the face of the earth. This shall be the great question which settles the fate of the earth itself.

 

 

Some Notes on the Interplay of Revolutionary Forces

>

One of the primary concerns of Hannah Arendt’s great meditation On Revolution is the interplay of two revolutionary goals: The foundation of freedom, and the liberation of humanity from the horrific travails of material misery. Her thesis is that a forced obsession with the latter in the French Revolution and subsequent revolutions decisively influenced by it (her analysis of the American Revolution doesn’t quite fit, since she admits that America also failed to found freedom even though its revolution didn’t experience the same development toward material liberation; I’ll write more on that later) caused these revolutions to abandon their original freedom goal, thus causing their own failure.

 

I’ll summarize the core of Arendt’s analysis (in chapter 2, “The Social Question”, section 1). It was the mass irruption of the poor into the activism of the French Revolution, driven by their sheer physical need, which caused the theorists of revolution to discard once and for all the old astronomical, cyclical metaphor for the term revolution and adopt in its place the idea of historical necessity, which is practically a biological idea. All subsequent “organic and social theories of history” have been dictated by this primal experience of the French Revolution. This became the new, quasi-biological conception of the general will.

 

This was the advent of “the social question” (Arendt’s term for the issue of mass poverty) and the commandeering of the force of history by the biological necessity which is the essence of poverty. This force overwhelmed the original freedom impetus of the revolution. Robespierre had to surrender his “despotism of liberty” to the demand for a new material dispensation. This fierce physicality of the revolution led to the terror and doomed the freedom aspiration of the revolution.

 

This transformation of the French Revolution’s goal from political freedom to material necessity was decisive for the ideas and actions of all revolutions to follow. Marx consummated this idea work, as he neglected revolution’s original freedom ideal in favor of the doctrine of historical necessity. Marx believed that freedom and poverty were incompatible, that the French Revolution had failed because it failed to solve the social question, and that the material uprising of the poverty-driven need was a political uprising for freedom as well. So Marx confused the original freedom imperative with the social question, coming to see political freedom as a material question as well.

 

Marx transformed the social question (a phenomenon of material necessity) into the concept of exploitation, thereby revaluing mass poverty as a political relation enforced by violence, and therefore politically mutable. This transformed the social question into a potent revolutionary force, since no one will rebel against what he thinks is material necessity, but many will rebel against violence and robbery. Only by convincing the people that poverty is a political phenomenon, not a natural one, and only by transforming an economic phenomenon into a political one, could Marx help bring about revolutionary conceptions and modes of organization such that mass poverty could fuel revolutions to success rather than doom them to failure. On the largest scale, it’s the difference between an organized movement and a rioting mob.

 

(Just to interject for a moment, Marx was certainly right that amid capitalism’s plenty, poverty is an artificially generated political phenomenon. This has only become more true since Marx’s time with the advent of the fossil fuel surplus. And he was also right that we need a key set of ideas to fruitfully muster this potential force toward the goal of its own liberation, although by now the content of the ideas needed has changed, since the nature of the material need, or in our case the incipient need as the middle classes are liquidated, has changed. Arendt’s own view of all this is somewhat different.)

 

Marx wanted to help the working class to achieve class consciousness, helping them attain the inner power to consciously take action, while at the same time maintaining the sense of material necessity (and thus the historical irresistability) this class experienced since its emancipation from serfdom. Hegel’s dialectic was the perfect device for this.

 

Marx started out recasting economic phenomena in political terms, but later re-transformed all political phenomena into economic terms. He started out recasting physical necessity as political contingency; later he transformed in thought all political phenomena into historical necessity. He ended up exalting a biological sense of the life process above all else, and as a result the goal of revolution was transformed from freedom to material abundance.

 

(Today, as we undergo Peak Oil and other resource limits, our goal can no longer be “abundance” in an absolute sense. But we can still aspire to material prosperity free of the criminal restraints of artificially imposed want.)

 

Since Marx’s theory was Hegelian in derivation, all its concepts were reversible. While he started out assimilating economics to politics, and necessity to violence, he soon realized he could also do the reverse. This was a streamlining of the theory since the explanation for all violence can readily be reduced to necessity, but not the reverse. The most profound effect of this was to subsume all striving for freedom under the auspices of necessity, which was tantamount to abrogating the aspiration to freedom completely.

 

So what’s my position on all this? I see democratic agroecology as melding the economic and the political. The evidence is that:

 

1. Economic: Post-fossil fuel, industrial agriculture cannot continue. It must crash completely. (And this is even leaving aside the impending crashes from the zombie soil, the hermetic monoculture of commodity cropping with hybrids and GMOs, and the microbial Sword of Damocles dangling over the CAFO system.)

 

2. Economic: Small and midscale, relocalized, diversified organic production using minimal fossil fuel inputs can maximize food production post-fossil fuels. It’s our only chance to prevent mass starvation.

 

3. Economic: This could incidentally solve all employment problems, as all could find fulfilling work growing food for ourselves and our communities.

 

4. Political/economic: But none of this can work under neoliberal corporatism (which subsumes existing representative government). The only form of government which concurs with this agroecological relocalization is council democracy. The only economic dispensation which concurs is usufruct in the land and its resources based on grower-managed food production stewardship. (A similar dynamic would prevail in other sectors, but food is the keystone.)

 

5. Political/economic: Such a political and economic combination, which I call positive democracy, would also finally constitute the favorable environment for the flourishing of positive freedom, the ultimate human quality and activity. For the first time in the history of civilization, humanity would achieve the fullest human status as a self-directed worker enjoying the full bounty of his production and the full spiritual enhancement of his self-owned work; and the fullest human status as a participating democratic citizen.

Wikileaks, Hypocrisy, and Sunshine (2 of 2)

 

As discussed in part 1, the most important thing about Wikileaks is the simple democratic fact that we the people are the rightful owners of all system information. This information is our property and the elites have zero right to monopolize it. Anyone who leaks it or delivers those leaks is simply restituting stolen property to its rightful owners.

 

This can be distinguished from our private information as individuals, which is our individual property. For anyone – government, corporation, private scumbag –  to seize and organize that information without our full consent (contracts of adhesion are not consent) is the same theft, and generally perpetrated by the same elite criminals or their thugs.

 

But system secrets, the secrets of government and big corporations (which are all welfare leeches upon society), are public property. The information belongs to we the people. Therefore by definition a system secret is a theft, unless there’s some truly critical reason why it has to be a secret. As the Wikileaks deliveries prove, this is almost never the case. So far the Wikileaks record has been 100% illegitimately secreted information, stolen property, now restored to its rightful owners. (Since this record is so complete, so unanimous, so definitive, we now have proof, if there were any doubt before, that the press has an affirmative professional obligation to publish all system secrets, based on the presumption that the secret is wrongly classified, and/or is being kept in furtherance of crime.) 

 

But the elites themselves, by having betrayed their citizenship and humanity, reveal themselves to have no such private information either. That’s because in their essence, where they’re not conscious criminal conspirators, they are something far more odious, pure hypocrites. In On Revolution (chapter 2, section 5) Arendt discusses the hypocrite, who “is the actor himself insofar as he wears no mask. He pretends to be the assumed role, and when he enters the game of society he does so without any play-acting whatsoever. In other words, what made the hypocrite so odious was that he claimed not only sincerity but naturalness, and what made him so dangerous outside the social realm whose corruption he represented and enacted was that he instinctively could help himself to every “mask” in the political theater, that he could assume every role among its dramatis personae, but that he would not use this mask, as the rules of the political game demand, as a sounding board for the truth but, on the contrary, as a contraption for deception.”

 

This “mask”, as a public persona, was supposed to help clarify and enhance truth by serving as a buffer between the private person and the public citizen. In this sense it’s related to though not the same as Nietzsche’s concept of the mask, as discussed e.g. in Beyond Good and Evil sections 40, 270, and many other places. As Arendt discusses elsewhere in the chapter, it can be horrible for personal secrets to be dragged into the light. So for the individual to participate as a citizen requires some mediation of the concept of political persona, if only as a boundary between public life and what’s legitimately private.

 

But the greedy, power-seeking political hypocrite abuses and betrays this humane concept. His mask protects nothing, since his private essence is the same as his public crimes; he’s simply a criminal, nothing more or less.

 

All this is bound up with the bizarre obsession and debate over Obama’s state of mind. Obama’s actions as an aggressive neoliberal corporatist and warmonger are crystal clear. So why the obsession with motive? I suppose it’s progress that so many people are now reaching the stage of at least questioning what he really stands for, however absurd it is that this is not obvious to everyone already. It seems like a proxy for figuring out the real nature of the kleptocracy itself. For many people the real nature of the corporations and their goon government is still a paradox. The belief in the goodness of these things (or at least their necessary evil) is dying hard. Can the expanding argument over Obama be a working out of broader psychological issues among the masses, a solving of the conceptual problem, a withdrawal from the brainwashing?

 

The mere possibility of this demonstrates why transparency is so important, why the criminal suppression of information is so destructive, and why the hypocrite is so morally repugnant. If they can keep the crime secret, they can lessen the chance of the victims liberating themselves. And if they can successfully deny the crime in their own minds as well, it never happened. A hypocrite is a walking exemplar of the possibility of destroying truth. He’s willfully oblivious of the truth of his own action, denies this truth, and therefore destroys it in himself.

 

[T]he hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only the crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

 

Of course our “leaders” are both criminals and hypocrites, and hypocrites precisely in order to be able to commit their crimes and still live with themselves, since they’re moral cowards as well.

 

Here’s just one choice example, especially bizarre in light of the absolute hatred of Hillary Clinton and all the others for Wikileaks and by extension the Internet itself:

 

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.”

 

So this presents the possibility of a nation of hypocrites which commits hideous crimes whose truth is then lost forever. If a mass murderer convinces himself that he’s innocent, did the crime ever take place? Did the victims ever exist? Or were they in fact the criminals? The only existing witness says Yes, if hypocrisy is able to triumph. That’s obscene. That’s why humanity needs total transparency, not as the solution, but as a prerequisite, a basic tool. That’s why letting in the sun is part of our moral imperative. Wikileaks is helping with this mission. 

 

Therefore we have to publicize all elite secrets, nor is there any fear here of violating the persona of individual criminals, since the system criminal is not a citizen or an individual, but a piece of crime incarnate. The level of this crime is exemplified by the secrecy regime – done purely to cover up crime, and simply as an exercise in illegitimate power itself. This secrecy is in fact another assault on our sovereignty as a people. This sovereignty gives us the right, and by now the obligation (now that pseudo-democracy has been proven not to work), to rule ourselves directly. But the elites construct a system which allegedly requires secrecy, monopolize those secrets, and then turn around and claim this need for secrecy rules out direct democracy. But that’s simply a criminal lie, an act of classical usurpation, classical tyranny. The obvious response is to get rid of the artificial, illegitimate system which is claimed to require such secrecy in the first place.

 

We know our property has been stolen and our political heritage usurped. For us to continue to allow the secrets to be kept is to alienate our own sovereignty. We have a citizen imperative here. As citizens we have no choice but to demand total sunlight. We have the right to total transparency, the responsibility to demand it, and no right to shirk this responsibility.

 

Then there’s also the practical fact that the secrets all involve crimes against us, robberies and assaults on our freedom. So also in self-defense we must seek total transparency. We must reciprocate war on their secrets (our public property) as they declared war on our informational private property – surveillance, databases, consumer info compiling and selling, advertiser tracking, drug testing, DNA testing, TSA scanners, polygraphs. When we consider the monumental level of crime, the existential hypocrisy of the criminals, and the special insult of their absolute assault on our human privacy at the same time that they impose a blackout on our informational property as citizens, the French Revolution’s absolute rage for unmasking and its impetus to drag all hypocrisy into the light becomes comprehensible.

 

Wikileaks hasn’t done anything so expansive, but has simply engaged in some targeted restorations of public property. It is in fact trying to support and protect true American interests and values (as opposed to the interests of the criminal elites).

 

Here’s all my Wikileaks posts so far:

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/transparency-vs-kleptocracy-bp-oil-spills-wikileaks/
 
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/afghan-sunshine-wikileaks-and-transparency-vs-corporate-tyranny/
 
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/transparency-wikileaks-and-odious-secrecy/

Wikileaks, Secrecy, Federalism, and Globalization (1 of 2)

 

The question of what the American Revolution was primarily about – ideals or governmental forms, politics or economics – was temporarily settled by the framers themselves in 1788 when they imposed it as a fact that the revolution had been fought to establish a strong central government which embodied in many details the exact details the revolution had claimed to find odious, and flouted in many ideals the exact ideals the revolution had claimed to embody.

 

Here at least there’s no question – the emphasis was on a form of government, a republic. They called it (and themselves) “federalist”, but even then that was clearly just a successful Orwellian terminological inversion. It was actually the framers and adherents of the new Constitution who were anti-federalist in normal terms, according to the standard usage of the time, while their opponents whom they successfully smeared as “anti-federalist” were at least arguing on behalf of something closer to true federalism, power much closer to its true source in the people. (I won’t claim they were all sincere.)

 

I think it’s moot to ponder how sincere the “federalists” were as champions of this central government. If the rise of the fossil fuel age and the industrial revolution really necessitated strong central governments, then perhaps this Constitution was one of the better (I don’t say “good”) attempts to harmonize that need with protecting the people’s rights and freedoms. At the same time, Hamilton and others seemed ardent to maximize power for its own sake, and displayed the standard elitist contempt right from the start. It’s beyond dispute that a major purpose for this power concentration was to use it aggressively for continental imperialism. The Federalist repeatedly cites this goal as a reason to concentrate federal power. What later came to be called “Manifest Destiny” was already a core element of the Founders’ ideology.

 

So what’s the specific link between imperialism and the republic form of government? In On Revolution (chapter 2, section 4) Hannah Arendt emphasizes how Founders of various stripes agreed that a desired goal was to encourage faction among the people in domestic matters while seeking a united front where it comes to foreign policy. She quotes Jefferson as wanting “to make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in domestic ones”, and cites Madison’s Federalist #10, with its celebration of “the spirit of party and faction”, which of course was to be kept within the limits of representative government.

 

This formula would allegedly generate the maximum political freedom within the country compatible with a sufficiently strong projection in foreign policy. While this was already dubious in the 18th century, in modern times it appears in a sinister light. We see what it means today: The elites encourage and foment discord among the non-elites, while we must all submit to the astroturfed united front for whatever foreign policy our betters assure us is necessary, no matter how wasteful, deranged, and destructive to the very domestic freedom and prosperity for which the policy allegedly exists in the first place.

 

This puts in a different light Arendt’s contention, no doubt literally true, that ” the direction of the American Revolution remained committed to the foundation of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions.” The question is begged more starkly than ever, Freedom for whom? To do what?

 

But this question was already being begged when Madison wrote numbers 10 and 51. It’s here that he notoriously posited that the greatest threat to social stability would be the rancor of the people, who to him were inherently a kind of proto-mob ready to realize their full mob potential at any moment, against the elites. It was explicit in Madison’s concept that political elites need to exist at all (only they, as elected representatives, know how to organize power and run a government). Implicit were such propositions as that economic elites need to exist at all; that their wealth and property concentrations are justified; that their own aggressive actions, which from the outside and from the receiving end look like depredations, are the natural way of the world and can’t be held accountable in any way (therefore if the people react with anger it’s really they who are the aggressors); that a foreign policy designed and dictated by those elites is to the benefit of “the country” as a whole. All this, so viciously and tiresomely familiar to us today, adds up to compel the strong presumption that another implication of Madison’s scheme was that the very “faction” celebrated by Madison and Hamilton and even Jefferson was always intended to be a tool of divide and rule.

 

However it was with the original intent, we now know it represents the essence of misdirection. For America, the rule has long been (if it wasn’t always) aggression against others and hijacking of public resources, which is always for the benefit of the elites only, and could only ever accidentally coincide with the interests of the people. The misdirection is meant to distract from this and help trump up the tawdry “united front”.

 

It’s this fraudulent pretension to a unified America in its foreign policy which Wikileaks has directly attacked with this latest document delivery. The leaks demonstrate in the clearest detail how the specially designated foreign policy elites are the same petty, incompetent crooks we’re so familiar with everywhere else, and how their concerns are the exact same combination of crime and meanness as we see everywhere else. But most importantly in assaulting their pseudo-monarchical secrecy prerogative, a key trapping in their very claim to authority and power, Wikileaks has dealt a blow to their ability to pseudo-legitimately maintain this prerogative. Once the people understand once and for all what a sham “foreign policy” is, in the same way they’ve come to understand the central “federal” government as a fraud and a parasite in domestic policy, we’ll finally be ready to relinquish it completely, all at once or in stages.

 

Here’s just a few things the leaks have proven:

 

Each leak is something which should never have been classified in the first place. It proves how promiscuously they’ve abused the classification privilege, as a matter of normal practice. We citizens already knew under Bush that this privilege needed to be rescinded. (Of course, we now know that most of the liberals were lying when they said that at the time.)

 

Each leak is proof that there’s no real “national security” at stake. Each proves further that the only secrets regard the power and crimes of the elites.

 

Every document is further proof they have no valid secrets. Each act of secrecy is an affront to democracy and a violation of the social contract.

 

As has already been proven with previous deliveries, the leaks don’t endanger the American people or our interests. On the contrary, to whatever extent the leaks hinder the corporate agenda, they serve the American interest. The empire itself, and the stateless corporations themselves, are contrary to the American interest, as history has proven over and over, every time. Empire serves no one but imperial elites, and harms everyone else. In 2008 that became brazen here in America.

 

We saw the NYT and the WaPo suppress leaked information which lessens the case for war with Iran, at the request of the administration. (We got it through the Guardian.) So there we see the scurrying cockroaches exposed in broad daylight – your leaders, your elites, your government, and your media, suppressing evidence against war.

 

Wikileaks has proven that elite secrecy has no right or reason to exist at all, and that transparency is a citizen right and imperative. With the evidence of the leaks, no one can any longer argue for secrecy other than as a brazen celebrant of domination for its own sake. No one can any longer cite “reasons of state”, or that the elites know pertinent facts at all, let alone pertinent facts which can’t safely be shared with the public. No one can any longer argue with a straight face that foreign policy has anything to do with “American interests”, or anything other than the same ugly, paltry elite interests.

 

We’ve now seen it all, and we know there’s no there there. From here on, we know secrecy is nothing but an anti-democratic ritual. We must be all the more relentless in asserting sunlight as a democratic ritual. No one can see the American flag when its hidden away in the dank and dark. Only the sun shining upon it renders it visible at all. So there’s the real essence of the symbol. Not the mere dyed fabric, but the light upon it. Darkness, secrecy, is the true mortal insult to the symbol, and to the essence.

 

We should also recognize how this bogus “foreign policy” astroturf, which we can trace to the original framing of the system, is by now completely entwined and indistinguishable from globalization. The slow but steady progress of over two hundred years has been for these elites, and their government, to extract the wealth of the land they did nothing to work for, abscond upward in power and “law” with it, and eventually detach government and law themselves from the land. The anti-sovereign globalization entities and agreements represent the full logic of the entire process. The WTO is a kind of one world super-constitution. All of this is rule by pure administrative decree, intended to extract all wealth and power from the land but leave behind the dead husk of government, law, and civil society. This husk is now meant to be just a weapon against the people, but nothing in itself. It’s a world-historical secession of the elites.

 

The neoliberal franchise is a sick joke. It’s the symbol and ritual of nothingness. And then this stateless, anti-sovereign body is to rule the disenfranchised people by direct bureaucratic tyranny, as the direct private agent of the corporations. That’s the goal of globalization.

 

When “federalism” was redefined and centralized upward in 1888, and organized to be focused on a false unified foreign policy, this secession process was set in motion. From there it’s been the same vector and the same logic which have advanced through every trial. Since the end of the Cold War, in the face of imminent Peak Oil, this false federalism is attempting its final upward redefinition. But this depends upon keeping the people gazing spellbound up into the fog, instead of seeing clearly how every truth is right there in front of us, easy to understand, and always at our own level, except where it’s actually below us.

 

There’s no reason at all for wealth and power to concentrate upward. The people are understanding this intuitively. We’ve always known to be suspicious of globalization, and now we know to reject it completely. This means we must also reject the globalizing elites. We should see their “foreignness” for what it is and reject it. They chose to abstract themselves from our land and wage war upon it and us. So while we reject their foreign policy front, we can accept that framing against themselves.

 

A good place to start is to actually see them for what they are, and insist upon this clarity at all times. We know they mean us nothing but harm. If we didn’t know before that every secret is kept not on our behalf but against us, we know it for a fact now. We can thank Wikileaks for the documentary proof of the illegitimacy of the elites’ foreign policy pretensions and alleged prerogatives.

 

And since the false federalism which has led us so far astray was already based upon this false foreign policy emphasis in its inception, we must take our hard-won knowledge and apply it back as we reconceive our democracy. This has been a case study in the falseness of representative pseudo-democracy itself, and proof of the need for and unique legitimacy of positive democracy.

The Corporatism of MERS

 

Taken in itself, MERS is just a lesser moving part of the big mechanism of the Foreclosuregate Land Scandal. It’s a malfunctioning gear, not the ghost in the machine. The most important features are the break in the chain of ownership, leaving the liens homeless and vagrant, and the vagrancy of the securities in the MBS trusts. In both cases we seem to be left with nothing but unsecured paper. The MBS themselves are worthless, and neither kind of paper directly touches the house. All of this has been propped up in the eyes of the law by massive, systematic forgery and perjury. The culpable conspiracy to commit fraud must encompass all officers of every entity involved, right up to the CEOs of BofA, Wells, Citi, and JPM. (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as well, since they knew how the MBS scam worked.)

 

MERS is just an electronic registry set up to secretively toss around ”ownership” in the form of virtual ones and zeroes but not in the form of the physical paper required for it to have any force of law. This was intended to render the conveyor belt from originator to trust and servicer to investor more “efficient”, meaning cheaper in labor and tax evasion. It was also helpful in tranche fraud, since rather than the mortgages actually being sliced and diced ahead of time, the computer waited until one went bad and then assigned it to the proper tranche so the favored gamblers wouldn’t take the hit. The system was like a million Schrodinger’s cat boxes where people bet on how many cats were dead, except that the connected players were tipped off whenever a cat died and always got to avoid those boxes.

 

Nearly a year ago I wrote about this, and I think my description and assessment hold up pretty well:

 

But at the very center of the financial system, out of its own logic and procedure, it has grown a tumor. This is the system’s failure to maintain its own registry, its own paper trail, its own legal basis. It’s as if they already burned many of the deeds for us.

The people are already outraged at the crimes of the banks. We can join to this moral and political outrage an understanding of the structural anarchy and illegality of the system in itself. According to its own premise it has no legal basis, even a phony one, because the land ownership premise is that whoever holds the note has the right, so if there’s no note, there’s no right.

This philosophical and moral combination could provide the basis for a real reform movement. The goal is not just to take back the country from the banksters, but to restore the rule of law and order itself.

So let’s be clear: To be a revolutionary today is to be the advocate of law, while to defend the status quo is to be a lawless rioter.

Property ownership, duly recorded and registered, is the foundation of this legal system. Anarchy at this point equals anarchy throughout. You sell a property, you transfer the written deed. The legal owner, the piece of paper in hand. This has allowed for the orderly ranking and disposal of any claims on the property. Adjudication is not supposed to get hopelessly entangled right at the outset, in even figuring out who holds the note.

But the housing bubble’s fuel was a vast supply of mortgage loans passed along a conveyor belt of entities – lender, sponsor, depositor, trust – while being sliced and diced into tranche layers to then be securitized. Apparently the paperwork and fees and taxes payable at each transfer were too much for the banks to deal with so they simply set up their own extralegal system where any of the shell firms along the way could at any time be what the bank’s computer would call the “owner” (meanwhile the piece of paper often simply disappeared).

The banks (Citi, BofA, JPM, Wells), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), Fannie and Freddie, the street-level sleazy lenders and servicers and others set up the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) as a front to carry out foreclosures and serve as the respondent in any court case. MERS simply claims to own the mortgage if anyone asks. It doesn’t really even “exist” in the sense of having many employees, etc. Where action is necessary an employee of the underlying bank, servicer or whatnot doubles as the MERS cadre.

For convenience sake, and to cheat on fees and taxes, they simply blew off centuries of property law, the rule of law as such. The result of all this is a system of accounting fraud and avoidance of legal responsibility in general. Anyone who has to deal with them, especially who tries to fight back, has to play Whack-A-Mole with this crazy bureaucracy where no one in particular has any responsibility, authority, or ability to do anything. It takes faceless, bloodless limited liability, the zero responsibility-total rights ideology, to the extreme.

Most ridiculous, the note itself often disappears. Demands to produce it lead to MERS or some similar shell simply vouching for itself, “I own it”, with zero proof.

 

While MERS is not the essence but a tool, it is symbolic of the corporate phenomenon – the disembodied claim to total rights, the relinquishing of all responsibility, shifting of all costs, the assumption of all prerogative, the essence of might makes right.

 

In a sense MERS is a totem of corporatism, and a taboo for humanity. Even for ardent propertarians like Hernando de Soto, MERS is a monster to be feared and loathed. MERS flouts, assaults, or subverts several of the criteria de Soto listed for stability of property rights – that registries be accessible to the public, that they take all externalities into account, that deals be “firmly tethered to the real value of the asset from which it originated” (MERS systematically orphaned the lien), and that opacity and obfuscation be purged from the system.

 

The anti-MERS ruling of the Kansas supreme court made a joke about it:

 

“The relationship that MERS has to Sovereign [Bank] is more akin to that of a straw man than to a party possessing all the rights given a buyer… What meaning is this court to attach to MERS’s designation as nominee for Millennia [Mortgage Corp.]? The parties appear to have defined the word in much the same way that the blind men of Indian legend described an elephant — their description depended on which part they were touching at any given time. Counsel for Sovereign stated to the trial court that MERS holds the mortgage ‘in street name, if you will, and our client the bank and other banks transfer these mortgages and rely on MERS to provide them with notice of foreclosures and what not.’ ” (Landmark National Bank v. Boyd A. Kesler)

 

It was oddly appropriate that in 1997 the MERS CEO proclaimed, “Yes, there is life on MERS.” This was false, but it does capture the sense of the MERS corporation itself as a sterile rock floating through a dead void.

 

There’s something horrible about this:

 

On April 7, 2010, in the Superior Court of New Jersey, MERS Treasurer and Secretary William C. Hultman gave an oral sworn video/telephone deposition in the case of Bank Of New York v. Ukpe.:

Q Do the assistant secretaries — first off, are
you a salaried employee of MERS?
A No.

Q Are you a salaried employee of MERS Corp,
Inc.?
A Yes.

Q Are any of the employees of MERS, Inc.
salaried employees?
A I don’t understand your question.

Q Does anyone get a paycheck, if they are an
employee of MERS, Inc., do they get a paycheck from
Mercer, Inc.?
A There is no MERS, Inc.

Q I thought, sir, there’s a company that was
formed January 1, 1999, Mortgage Electronic Registration
Systems, Inc. Does it have paid employees?
A No, it does not.

Q Does it have employees?
A No.

Q Does MERS have any employees?
A Did they ever have any? I couldn’t hear you.

Q Does MERS have any employees currently?
A No.

Q In the last five years has MERS had any
employees?
A No.

Q How many assistant secretaries have you
appointed pursuant to the April 9, 1998 resolution; how
many assistant secretaries of MERS have you appointed?
A I don’t know that number.

Q Approximately?
A I wouldn’t even begin to be able to tell you
right now.

Q Is it in the thousands?
A Yes.

Q Have you been doing this all around the
country in every state in the country?
A Yes.

Q And all these officers I understand are unpaid
officers of MERS?
A Yes.

Q And there’s no live person who is an employee
of MERS that they report to, is that correct, who is an employee?
A There are no employees of MERS.

 

It’s not just run-of-the-mill crookedness (let alone “sloppiness”.) There’s something horrible about how they strive to make this corporation a truly humanless entity. Their concept was that whenever they wanted, MERS was to have “standing” in court, stand as “owner” of the land. Yet not only is it a “corporate person”, but it claims to have no human persons as employees. Whenever they needed an actual person to stand in for the corporate entity they’d deputize someone from one of the other entities such as the servicer.

 

This is the trend of all corporations. Wherever possible, as per the Rule of Rackets (the capitalist-to-oligopolist imperative and prerogative), the goal is to become a “brand” and delegate all the actual work, if any, to subcontractors. This is also intended to “legally” put buffers between the corporation and its responsibility for anything at all, for example using something close to slave labor. (See Naomi Klein, No Logo.) Or, as in our mortgage conveyor belt example, to buffer the originator, i.e. a big bank or subsidiary thereof, from legal liability for the bogus quality of its mortgage loans when that same bank later stands as trustee for the MBS derived from them. The bank’s liability is supposed to have been laundered in both directions through the conveyor process. MERS facilitated this.

 

MERS is also used to illegally assign mortgages after an originator had gone bankrupt, when only the bankruptcy trustee could have such authority. But this crime would regularly be committed, whenever the trust belatedly needed such an assignment. The system’s opacity was intended to cover this up. 

 

It would stand to ”own” the land wherever a foreclosure was to take place. This is the logic of separating useful work on the land (the original kernel of the ultimately fraudulent labor theory of property itself) from legal ownership. Todau we reach the point where temporarily unwanted land can be consigned to humanless corporate “ownership”. This is the better to relinquish responsibility for maintaining the foreclosed land and paying property taxes on it until the next buyer is found. Beleaguered towns and cities, facing fiscal disaster and whole neighborhoods falling into neglected semi-vacancy and the squalor that follows, have had great trouble trying to find out who really ”owns” these vacant, unmaintained houses. (The same trouble the individual foreclosee often has.)

 

These phenomena describe the full logic of corporate personhood. The goal is for none of us human beings to have any legal rights vs. the corporation, but for it to have total rights vs. us. The goal is for none of us to be “employees” of the corporate entity, but just deputized laborers. Have you seen the impoverished day laborers who stand in a parking lot waiting for some guy to come around in a pickup truck? The goal is for all workplaces to become like that in essence, just piling into the pickup truck. (That is, for the diminishing number of us who’ll have a job at all.) You’ll get your meager pay, but beyond that you won’t exist, in the eyes of either the corporation or the law, as a human being. You’ll be a deputized cog at work, and outside work you simply won’t exist at all, other than as a criminal.

 

It’s chillingly redolent of the phenomenon described in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, where the stateless person had no legal existence unless he committed a crime. The only difference is that in the mass refugee situations Arendt was describing she claimed that the stateless unperson could actually improve his condition by committing a crime and in that way becoming a legal person. I doubt that’s likely to be true under corporatism where the system aggressively criminalizes poverty itself.

 

Today the whole mortgage conveyor system totters, calling into profound question both the legal and market validity of securitization as well as the legal disposition of the residential land itself. The system will try to retroactively legalize the mess, but the hurdles it faces are daunting. If it’s possible to hold the line vs. MERS and this system of fraud, could the rest be rolled back from there? Many commenters are saying this threatens to bring us back to September 2008. We should be saying, is that a threat or a promise? Could this actually give us a second chance to do what we should have done two years ago? Could this derail the Bailout and bring about the destruction of Wall Street itself?

 

And from there, could we find ways to invigorate other battlefronts with the same primal sense of outrage people are now feeling where it comes to their very own homes? In this case, as I said in my Jubilation post, “the political street entered the house”. But how do we find other such avenues, to the point that we can get Americans out of the houses and into the streets?

How Kleptocracy Congealed (The New Feudal War 1 of 4)

 

Beyond the simplest town hall and tribal communities, all governments are to some extent corrupt, and all economies contain legalized racketeering. But this doesn’t mean every system is a kleptocracy. We can’t be so profligate with superlatives without rendering concepts useless, although that too is a common modern disease. I’d wager it’s part of the indoctrination plan to have the perception spread that “everything has always been like this”. It fits in with the Status Quo Lie, that today’s status quo is really the normal baseline, a law of the universe. If people believe the situation is not just superficially similar to e.g. the Gilded Age, but exactly the same, then they can believe the solution is the same - time and “reform”. But this is not in fact the case.

 

The fundamental difference between today’s situation and that of past corruptions is its basis in the physical limits of Peak Oil. To describe the process one way, throughout the ascent of the oil age, the overall economic pie was getting bigger, and the goal of the elite gangsters was to steal from this growing pie. Although the goal of capitalism is always to either exacerbate existing scarcities or artificially generate scarcity where the natural state is abundance, cheap oil afforded such a surplus that it was actually difficult enough to generate artificial scarcity that it was politically easier for the elites to let the workers keep a relatively high proportion. This people’s piece of the pie wasn’t remotely proportional to their rightful share (that would be 100%), but it was still high by historic standards. This was the basis of the West’s mid-20th century temporary mass middle class.The gangsters temporarily had greater leeway to both satiate their avarice (within the political limits they temporarily acknowledged, which were also imposed by the Cold War, as I’ll get to below) and allow a broad wealth distribution.

 

That’s one way to look at the effect of the oil surplus. A parallel process was how all economic sectors were temporarily able to use cheap oil to undergo exponential “growth”. This temporarily generated what we call capitalist profits. (The classical economists like Smith and Ricardo and the critics like Marx never understood how they were really discussing an economic system based on investment and distribution of surplus from the fossil fuel drawdown. A “special case” economics indeed.)

 

The first thing to give was this economic growth process. Even if the oil surplus had been infinite, the sectors of the economy do have limits to entrepreneurial innovation. At some point the major innovations are complete, what’s left is more or less pointless tinkering, and the sector is mature.

 

In a previous post I summarized what happens next, and rather than reinvent the wheel I’ll just present it again here, if it pleases the court.

 

1. As capitalism matured it should, according to reality and to its own textbooks, have seen profits fall to marginal levels. There should be very little profit left in the economy by now. Instead, the entire economy should have long since been functioning smoothly and efficiently, with sufficient goods and services in every sector, while government largely shrunk as it would have little role to play as economic arbiter. There would be rough equality of wealth and power distribution, little wealth and power concentration. Democracy would become steadily more healthy and strong.

This is how capitalism was supposed to function. This is what its promoters always promised. This is what would have happened, if every word hadn’t always been a lie.

2. In the reality of greed fundamentalism, elites were never textbook capitalists but always gangsters. No one ever wanted to be a capitalist. No one ever wanted to compete and innovate. They wanted to concentrate wealth and power, period.

As capitalism reached its terminal profit crisis in the latter 20th century, the power elites resolved to deploy an ever more aggressive command economy. They’d use the power of government to substitute extorted and stolen rents for their diminishing “capitalist” profits.

 

This was happening in tandem with other political processes. Even during the time of the expanding pie, America was completing the sellout of its revolutionary birthright. As Hannah Arendt discusses in On Revolution, at the end of WWII it was clear that the colonial empires of Europe would be challenged everywhere by revolutionary movements. These would all necessarily be nationalist in part, but the rest of their ideological content was up for grabs. That many like the Vietminh would become communist was not a foregone conclusion. Among many anti-colonial insurgents, the American Revolutionary tradition was held in high esteem. America had total freedom to choose the path of encouraging these national revolutions along the lines of its own heritage.

 

Instead the US government chose the opposite path. It chose to trash its own revolutionary heritage, go rogue against its own best angels, and become the ultimate counter-revolutionary power. It chose everywhere to try to help sclerotic, decrepit Europe prop up its vapid imperialism. Although the propaganda lie was that this had to be done to counteract communist aggression, in fact communism instead was the beneficiary of America’s abandoning the field. Given the anti-colonial movements of the Global South, looking to the competing revolutionary heritage powers for assistance and inspiration, America simply punted and betrayed itself, and communism entered the vacuum left behind.

 

So to sum up, post-WWII, with the advent of the Cold War and the inevitable liquidation of the anachronistic colonial empires, America chose the path of counter-revolution rather than to compete as a revolutionary power. Meanwhile domestically it sought to co-opt the workers.

 

Vietnam was a milestone toward greater aggression and unsustainability for this reactionary agenda. It was an exercise in consolidating the military-industrial complex and in driving fiscal recklessness, which would culminate in Nixon closing the gold window in 1971. So the Vietnam-driven deficits were already unsustainable while the dollar could still be redeemed for gold, such that the system had to retrench even before the oil shocks set in starting in 1973, although this was foreshadowed by the American production Peak in 1970. (To get a little ahead of myself, we can compare this to the financial collapse of 2007-08 and say that in both cases the unsustainability of the finance structure in itself brought on the crisis before the energy fundamentals forced it. So in both cases the reckless financial “choice” preceded the structural change, but only as a preview.)    

 

As I said, this was bound to happen even without the looming end of the oil age. But in fact the US oil Peak was an alarm bell. Not that the system widely consciously registered it, but everyone sensed that oil supplies would be getting tighter in the future. Combining this with the end of “legitimate capitalist profits”, the system was clear in its mind that the temporary middle class would now have to be liquidated.

 

Here’s how I described how this was planned out, and how it’s been done:

 

Globalization and financialization comprised the campaign of oligopoly capitalism to prop itself up while stringing along the Western middle classes. They substituted debt for production while obscuring the assault on all public amenities and power. Real wages have steadily eroded since the 70s while wealth concentration has exponentially risen. (That juxtaposition right there is a basic metric of robbery.) The system attacked unions on every political and “legal” level. Social Security has been steadily undermined via ploys like the rigging of inflation metrics (to fraudulently depress COLA increases). Other entitlements have been similarly eroded. Globalization’s open border for unskilled labor provides the basic force of gravitation for all wages, while outsourcing and offshoring destroyed many mid-level jobs completely, forcing and ever greater number of workers into the undifferentiated unskilled mass. (The system did somewhat protect most kinds of professionals for a long time, but now that’s been eroding for many as well.) Walmartization provides a kind of linchpin, the direct conduit for addicting ex-citizens to cheap consumerism while directly destroying self-proprietors and middle class jobs in general, along with the communities anchored by the people who held such jobs.

In this way the temporary “middle class”, fueled by debt and cheap oil, had the carpet slowly pulled out from under it. Meanwhile the basic unproductivity of the Western system was covered up by bubbles, culminating in the housing bubble (itself fueled propagandistically by the Big Lie that you should rely on your house to provide for your retirement, not any other pension; this nicely provided cover while public entitlements and private pensions were gradually being subverted).

 

So we had the basic structural change. Peak Oil meant an expanding pie would first stop expanding and then start shrinking. This would radically exacerbate the dropping of the profit rate. This was structurally challenging a system whose “normal” aggression and greed had already been stepped up in the post-war era.

 

Combining these three determinants, two structural and one political, the gangsters saw that the only way they could continue large-scale extractions at all would be to radically intensify them. Since stealing each dollar would get harder and harder, it followed that you no longer had the luxury of conceding any wealth to the people who actually produce it. Allowing the existence of a middle class in principle was a luxury of the mid-century. The gangster elite no longer saw itself as having that luxury. You now had to try to steal every cent, and you had to be as systematic and ruthless as possible in doing it.

 

History since the 1970s has been primarily the playing out of this endgame. I’ll just describe the strategy and tactics as they were conceived and played, though they’re mostly epiphenomena of the structural forces of Peak Oil and the transformation from alleged capitalism to confirmed corporatism.

 

The ideology and strategy for all this was neoliberalism.  This was accompanied by such strands as economic “libertarianism”, AKA anarcho-capitalism as its more honest adherents called it, and neoclassical economics, AKA monetarism (with its “liberal” variant, the “neoclassical synthesis”). Buckley conservatism gave it a culturally respectable sheen, while Goldwater and later Reagan added a nimbus of pseudo-heroism. At the more scurrilous level, the Big Lies included the “ownership society”, “trickle-down” supply-side economics, the Laffer curve, and later ”third way” politics and “compassionate conservatism”. We were allegedly going to move from a manufacturing economy to a “service economy”, and later to an “information economy”.

 

Maybe the most concise expression of the battle plan written up in one place was Lewis Powell’s 1971 corporatist strategy memo. This is a classical example of totalitarian reversal – for every word of its accusations against the enemies of American business, it’s meant to be read, “this is what we should be doing”. (He stays in character throughout.) 

 

All of this was enlisted to justify the replacement of a human society with the exponential debt treadmill. The now targeted middle class was supposed to go into debt and look to its “investments”, while quietly social spending was diverted to gangster plunder, regulation of the corporate gangs was gutted, public property was everywhere given away to private looters at pennies on the dollar, public spaces everywhere were privatized, and democracy itself was completely pimped out.

 

Everything was wrapped up in a propaganda package which justified intensifying wealth concentration, skyrocketing executive extractions, a war of extermination against unions, and the offshoring/outsourcing/downsizing of all decent American jobs. Globalization shills like Mankiw and Krugman promised all of these were temporary growing pains on the road to paradise, but like all totalitarian flacks they were simply lying about this.

 

All of this was worked out in principle in the 70s. The oil shocks gave the project new urgency, as the global rape wouldn’t work without ready cheap oil. The Nixon administration worked out the deal with OPEC whereby its oil would be priced and purchased with dollars. This gave the now fiat reserve currency a de facto “real” basis to replace the gold-based Bretton Woods basis Nixon had just abrogated. In return the US promised to prop up the undemocratic plutocracies of the Middle East against all democratic pressures. This was formally enshrined in the Carter Doctrine, which declared that anything which could interfere with the flow of Mideast oil was aggression against the US. Although advertised against foreign troublemakers, the real target was clearly people’s activists among the Arabs. There was probably also an implied military threat if OPEC producers didn’t deal.

 

Meanwhile under the scheme of petrodollar recycling, the dollars the West paid for oil would be put right back in the Western banks, who would lend it at predatory rates to developing countries for their own oil purchases. Every time OPEC received the dollars they’d extract some and send the rest back to the banks, who would extract some and lend the rest to third world elites, who would extract some and send the rest back to OPEC while saddling their own hapless peoples, who received none of the benefits, with the debt.

 

The goal was for the banks and OPEC to profit, for the West and corrupt regimes around the undeveloped world to get their oil, while the poor of the world would be forced to pay for all of it. Since they could never actually pay these odious debts, neoliberalism in the guise of its thug organizations the IMF and World Bank would stand ready to swoop in with a “structural adjustment”, which basically meant the complete looting of the helpless country. All its natural resources, and what little public property the people may have managed to accumulate, and what little social safety net they may have managed to stitch together, would all be confiscated to pay the debts these people never incurred, but which were criminally inflicted upon them.

 

(In part 3 of this series I’ll describe how, under the new name “austerity”, this same structural adjustment is being brought home to the Western countries themselves.)

 

Another detail was the transformation of the finance sector. It was of course always a gang of thieves, but it didn’t fully rationalize itself until the 70s and 80s. This was the period of the switch from partnerships as the common organizational model to limited liability corporations, and later to public corporations. The trend here is clear – enabling first the owners, and eventually the officers, to unshoulder all responsibility and risk, first on society, and later on the ”owners” themselves (shareholders).

 

At the behest of Wall Street this drive to send every corporation public added the feature that stock price became the most important measure of a firm’s “health”. Productivity, real innovation and profitability, meant nothing next to short-run goosing of the stock price. Needless to say the welfare of the workers meant nothing. The goal here was to transform the entire economy into a casino for the benefit of the gamblers of the finance sector. They figured, with the end of the oil age the real economy as we’ve known it is doomed anyway, so we might as well run the risk of blowing it up prematurely for the sake of our personal profit.

 

The also had the benefit of setting up the stock market as a combination of dictator and terrorist. Even politicians who might have wanted to act in the public interest against the banks were prone to be intimidated by the market’s threats and tantrums. Most pols, of course, were happy to use the market’s “expected” reactions as a pretext for the crimes they already wanted to commit. This is taking on especially chilling significance today in the runup to “austerity”, as I’ll describe in part 3. The stock market terrorist also holds hostage the middle class in the form of its promised pensions, which have all been inextricably linked with the fortunes of the market. The message has long been clear – don’t get uppity, worker bee, or your 401(k) gets it.

 

This was all part of financialization, whose structural basis was the previously mentioned impossibility of keeping “real” profits up. Turning the flow of capital itself, previously a mechanism of capitalism, into the very core and purpose of the machine, was a way to temporarily garner fabulous rents. Again, since the real economy was doomed anyway, there was no reason not to take the finance sector, previously a periodically troublesome epiphenomenon of capitalism’s normal boom-bust cycle, and turn it into a pure extortion racket and con ring to maximize profiteering off the ultimate bubble and the ultimate bust, both of which would be engineered by this very racket.

 

(The exponential surge of “innovation” in financial “products” was part of this as well, a primary mechanism of its functioning.)  

 

All of this was already progressing through the 1980s. But the Cold War still imposed some restraints upon it, both because of the direct threat of the Soviet bloc and also because as long as the USSR existed it offered a political alternative to Western neoliberalism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War this last restraint was removed. Now Western corporate aggression could rage forth in its full fury. In spite of the Big Lie, no ”peace dividend” ever materialized, nor was it ever intended to. Irving Kristol wrote a manifesto openly declaring that with the Soviet Union gone, the West must greatly increase its military spending and aggression. This is exactly what was done, as planned. Thus every allegation throughout the Cold War about the West’s fundamental aggression was fully confirmed. It was a textbook example of what Arendt called a core trait of totalitarianism, that it steps up its aggression and its terror after the war has been won. So it was with neoliberalism.

 

From here on there was no restraint on plundering expeditions, especially in the former Soviet bloc countries; on terrorism and war as the response to any resistance or dissent; on disaster capitalism as the response to any opportunity anywhere which left people damaged and weakened. There is never a moment where any consideration enters the minds of Western leaders other than power and plunder. Everything is gauged at every moment according to those vicious imperatives.

 

And so today we have the full-blown kleptocracy. It rose out of, first, the imperative of gangsterism to survive as long as possible in the face of Peak Oil and the stagnation of the capitalist profit rate, and second to profiteer as much as possible off the final big binge and bubble which oil and debt were going to afford before burning out. The goal for the elites was simply to loot as much as possible, amass as much power as possible, impoverish and disempower the people as much as possible, undermine or destroy democracy; and to position themselves to prevent any democratic adaptation to the post-oil world, but instead to reimpose feudalism, constituting themselves as a new version of the medieval elite.

 

In parts 2-4 I’ll describe how this is meant to play out. Part 2 will recap the Bailout and describe its status today.

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/bailout-world-2nd-stage-of-kleptocracy-new-feudal-war-2-of-4/

 

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/new-feudal-war-part-3-austerity/

 

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/part-4-the-full-fury-of-the-new-feudal-war-the-intended-end-state/

“Parasites Upon Patriotism”

 

This sounds familiar:

 

The curious weakness of popular opposition to imperialism, the numerous inconsistencies and outright broken promises of liberal statesmen, frequently ascribed to opportunism or outright bribery, have other and deeper causes. Half consciously and hardly articulately, these men shared with the people the conviction that the national body itself was so deeply split in to classes, that class struggle was so universal a characteristic of modern political life, that the very cohesion of the nation was jeopardized. Expansion again appeared as a lifesaver, if and insofar as it could provide a common interest for the nation as a whole, and it is mainly for this reason that imperialists were allowed to become “parasites upon patriotism.” (Hobson)

 

That’s from Arendt’s analysis of the delusions of imperialism and infinite growth in The Origins of Totalitarianism. These delusions are invoked and followed today as ardently as they were in the 19th century Europe she writes about, and today with even greater urgency and desperation.

 

As bottlenecked socially and economically as Europe was in the 1800s, they still had physical frontiers to push, and fossil fuel production was only beginning its great surge. As nasty as it was for the non-European peoples, Europe could in theory have conserved itself. The resources and energy were there. Yet even with such favorable conditions, in the end they destroyed themselves with their greed and selfishness and lust for violence.

 

Today the entire world is in the same bottleneck. The colonized peoples are mostly still colonized, either still by the West (now through such administrators of domination as multinational corporations or globalist enforcers like the IMF) or by their own oligarchies, as in China. Meanwhile the colonization process is entering its final stage as it returns to the Western countries themselves. The illusionary “middle classes” of the cheap oil-soaked mid 20th century are now being liquidated. Serfdom is planned for all of us.

 

As we move beyond the oil age and return to something closer to history’s normal level of energy consumption and economic output, so the power elites plan to restore something similar to feudal socioeconomic and political organization. While it’s too early to know whether they’ll try to reinstate formal serfdom (and whether Russia, having been the last to free its serfs, or America, even more belated in freeing its slaves, will be the first to reshackle peasants to the land), or just stick with the de facto indenture already being imposed on more and more millions of the economically dispossessed. But either way, we’re on a medieval mission.

 

The new foreign imperialism, redolent of what Arendt described, is branded and sold as the Global War on Terror, and is in fact a private corporate war being waged with hijacked public resources for private profit. But just like Arendt wrote of the 19th century adventure, its political significance is to redirect the generalized tension, fear, and dread the age invokes in a people who deep down senses its social and economic doom.

 

If terrorism didn’t exist, the government would have to invent it. (The 9/11 truthers believe it did.) There’s no good objective correlative between the magnitude of the fear and the reality of the threat, which is really more of a nuisance than a real danger. Instead, terrorism has provided a focal point for every kind of generalized dread, from the very real economic tension which has built for years, to forbidden social topics like the racial tensions which are bound to grow as vast numbers of middle class whites are economically wiped out.

 

The monstrous silhouettes of big corporations, militarized police forces, and sinister technology loom on a darkening horizon. No one wants to look at them, and they don’t want to be seen as they are. And of course their age old game has been to play off the non-rich, non-entitled, liquidated peoples against one another. The anti-terrorist hysteria and its concomitant war represent a way to objectify and misdirect fear and hate. It also provides ways to launder the hate against the usual suspects of right-wing demonology, but who are really the enemies of corporatism – activists, unions, environmentalists and others. And the anti-Muslim obsessive focus of the terror war provides a way to launder racial strife without looking overtly racist. (See here for an MSM clinic in how the word “terrorist” is only to be used for non-whites.)

 

But it wouldn’t be enough for corporatism to provide only a strictly negative outlet for the great dread. The people need something to exalt them, even if it’s the feverish euphoria of a cokehead. That’s where the growth ideology comes in. No matter how bad things get in reality, a new surge of “growth”, magically powered by the innovative magic of bankers and engineers, will suddenly descend from on high to save us. In the end consumer prosperity and the American Dream shall triumph if everyone simply stays in his proper place and obeys the leadership. The dream of infinite growth and mythical prosperity is the real religion of America. Its cults have been debt consumerism, the dotcom bubble (even arch-corporatist Greenspan called it “irrational exuberance”), and the mortgage hysteria.

 

The Permanent War, and the hundreds of bases splayed around the earth, in some perverse way seem a guarantor of this expansionist magic. We physically girdle the globe; this is existential proof of our permanent economic dominance. And if America is still the one and only superpower, which our alleged ability to wage war at will everywhere, forever, seems to prove every day, then surely our economic dominance will rain its bounty down upon the people any day now.

 

And so American patriotism, once a real ideal spurring us to sacrifice today’s comfort and today’s easy dreams toward the real prosperity which could be achieved tomorrow if and only if we worked hard for it, the patriotism which amended pride with wisdom, the patriotism which rose to FDR’s call to renounce “fear itself, nameless, unreasoning terror”, has been reduced to the prostitute of this same fear itself, and the pimp of this same unreasoning terror. It has been reduced from pride and wisdom to loutish arrogance and defiant stupidity. It has been reduced from the spirit of work and sacrifice to the petty sentiments of greed and hate. It’s gone from the calls of Washington and Lincoln, which have echoed down through history, to the snivellings of George Bush telling people the answer to 9/11 was to “go shopping”, and Barack Obama telling the children of America they should look to Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon as heroes to emulate. It’s gone from an ideal to a scam.

 

That’s patriotism in the hands of the parasites of patriotism, the corporatist slavers and purveyors of war. That’s the lie they tell to try to steal this too, another of the finest elements of our heritage. They’ll never stop until everything has been engulfed and destroyed forever.

 

It’s no accident that our times have seen the rise of the imperial presidency, as practice and today as ideology. There’s a historical precedent for this as well, from the old prelude to totalitarianism:

 

The contemptuous indifference of imperialist politicians to domestic issues was marked everywhere, however, and especially in England…[I]mperialism was the chief cause of the degeneration of the two-party system into the Front Bench system, which led to a “diminution of the power of opposition” in Parliament and to a growth of “power of the cabinet as against the House of Commons.” (Hobson) Of course this was also carried through as a policy beyond the strife of parties and particular interests, and by men who claimed to speak for the nation as a whole…The cry for unity resembled exactly the battle cries which had always led peoples to war; and yet, nobody detected in the universal and permanent instrument of unity the germ of universal and permanent war.

 

It’s the president who wages the imperial war, just as he presides over globalization, the Bailout, and the government contract state as well. These are all things which only call for Congressional rubber-stamping at most, and often not even that (thus the Obama adminstration’s moves to achieve complete executive independence of the legislature in pushing forward with the Bailout). Meanwhile the contempt for domestic issues speaks for itself when every issue is openly regarded as nothing but another opportunity to fleece the people.

 

In the corporate state there’s no real function for the legislature or the courts. These will be more or less maintained in a cosmetic role, as window dressing for inverted totalitarianism, for however long that model of tyranny is sustainable.

 

And so the president, as the chief parasite upon patriotism, will preside over the permanent war and the Bailout state for as long as he can.

 

His success will depend upon his ability to keep false patriotism pumped up and prevent the resurgence of the true patriotism which would seek to take back the country.

Corporatist Party “Politics”: An Antecedent

 

What’s the clearest link between today’s corporatist parties and the 19th century antisemitic parties? Each aspires to rule as a one-party state. Arendt identified this aspiration to one-party rule as an “origin of totalitarianism.”

 

Historically, the political parties in a nation-state frankly represented the interests of their voters. The antisemitic parties were the first to declare themselves parties “above all parties.” Today in America we’re so used to bromides like “post-partisan” and “bipartisan” and “beyond parties” that we forget (or never knew) the sinister history behind this pretension, and how the implications are just as sinister today.

 

Previously only governments had claimed to stand above parties and to rule with the goal of a balance of interests. When the antisemitic parties called themselves above all parties, they signaled their aspiration to complete power over the state, but to exercise that power as a special interest party. So in the same words they expressed their contempt for the very idea of the nation-state, which implied different interest parties together comprising a balance. The old antisemitic parties of Europe, like today’s corporatist parties, want no balance.

 

The party-above-parties rhetoric was similar to the equally bogus imperialist propaganda of the imperial interest being “truly” national and therefore above all parties. The antisemite parties also contradicted the nationalist trend of the age and instead established international cooperation among their parties, convening congresses which tried to coordinate national policies in the interest of the shared international party goal. We can compare this to the shared neoliberal ideology of corporatists everywhere, whether they call themselves Republicans in America or Communists in China or anything in between. Globalization is the true ideology and policy of every corporatist, and every national society, economy, and government are intended to be nothing but mines, tools, weapons toward the goal of the elite neoliberal plot.  

 

Contrary to today’s media mythology, it’s not “bipartisanship” or “post-partisanship” which would represent real compromise, real give and take; on the contrary it’s moderate, reasonable partisanship which leads to real coexistence.

 

But the worshipped terms of today mean no such thing. On the contrary bipartisanship is code for the “two” parties agreeing on how to plunder the people on behalf of the corporations, while the people have no representation at all. No one is partisan on the public’s behalf. That’s what’s really behind the media’s demonization of “partisanship.” The political sound of phony democracy, of the phony “partisan” clash among a truly nonpartisan because completely captured polity, of the inverted totalitarianism (Wolin) of the corporatist system, is the sound of one hand clapping.

 

Just as with the old antisemites, the corporatists want to liquidate the body politic of the country as a whole. They want to take over the state and use it for the party, which in this case really means the corporate, interest.

 

Today, post-partisanship is just boilerplate. Both parties consistently sell out their “base” (although the Republicans do a better job of pretending to deliver something; it helps that their voters are more easily misdirected by culture war “issues”). Neither governs on behalf of those who are allegedly its special interests - for the Reps, non-rich whites, small business, the religiously-motivated (and the only reason gun rights activists get what they want is because they fight for it as a bottom-up bloc, and not because the Reps would otherwise deliver for them); for the Dems, minorities, women, environmentalists, union members, gays, identity-politics activists, and others. In either case none of these are ever satisfied except once in awhile by accident.

 

The main reason for this isn’t gridlock, as if two conscientious interest parties were constantly fighting one another to a draw. The gridlock is largely a sham. What’s really happening is an identity of corporate-interest looting. Any jockeying is on account of how each party wants to get credit for the more politically salable corporate pandering while foisting the more disreputable stuff onto the opposite party. (Although in 2009 Obama and the Dems have shown a bizarre willingness to take the complete opprobrium of disgusting piracy like the Bailout and the health racketeering bill completely upon themselves while letting the Reps off scot-free with their obstructionism and refusal to provide any cover and share the political risk. And we’re seeing how the corporate elites repay them – Wall St is already shifting resources to the Reps. Exactly what we’d expect when we’re dealing with such a combination of malevolence, fecklessness, and incompetence as the Democratic party. On some days it’s almost enough to make me wish I were a Republican. Oh, the fun I’d be having these days, the whole past year, really.)

 

The Republicans have in fact declared their goal of achieving a de facto one-party dictatorship with their “permanent majority” slogan. If it weren’t for their cowardice and myopia I suppose the Dems would seek the same thing. One thing both fervently seek is a monopoly on corporate bribes. They’re hoping the “supreme court” decision on Citizens United will really open the floodgates.

 

By now the Reps and the Dems are nothing but two big Astroturfs, and their non-rich voters are all teabaggers in the sense of voting against their own interests.

Imperialism vs. the Law

 

The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to a full awakening of the conquered people’s national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

 

So says Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

 

That’s our theme – how conquest which seeks nothing but economic exploitation must in the end rule tyrannically, and how this in turn must bring tyranny back to the imperial country itself. Those who have fought imperialism on behalf of the exploited and conquered have always also been fighting for their own liberty which was under implicit, and increasingly explicit, assault. Over the past decade that’s been proven true with great ferocity, as the long economic assault on America’s non-rich, and on our politics and press, has been joined by the vicious assault on civil liberties, the freedoms of speech and assembly, the rise of the imperial presidency, the militarized police, and the prison-industrial complex.

 

Today we have to look at everything in the sense of dissolving the rule of law. The law of the home country is no longer indigenous, “national” law, but the imperialist state “law” which is really nothing but process for the sake of maximized corporatist outcome (to put it in terms of jurisprudential philosophy, the corporatists are consequentialists all the way, they care about means only toward an end, while those who would ever stand fanatically on some myopic means, like the ACLU and other process fanatics where it came to the Citizens United case, are once again playing by rules the enemy will never pay by; I’ll revisit this in an upcoming post). ”Law” as would be fit only for the extralegal, anti-political business competition becomes the “law” of the country. Corporatized capitalism becomes the ruling social ideology.

 

A core part of the process of imperialism coming home is the breakdown of the rule of law. In that connection I found this article by Claude Salhani interesting. He broaches the possibility of Israel joining the European Union. The implications he discusses seem so far-fetched that reading it, I thought it was tongue-in-cheek. “They’ll just get a waiver for that”, I kept saying. But I think he was serious.

 

But meanwhile maybe we should read it in reverse. In that case its a fascinating piece, almost Swiftian. For everything he says would have to change in Israel, I think we need to make the experiment of reading it as, “This is how the EU has to change to become more like Israel.” (And the US too.)

 

Salhani starts out deploring the “deadlock” in the Middle east peace talks and its ruinous effect on imperial investment in the Mideast. He goes on:

 

And whenever trouble brews in the Middle East it tends to spill over into other parts of the world. The risk that Mideast violence could spread to nearby Europe might have been one of the reasons that pushed Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to say that Israel should be admitted into the European Union earlier this week. Berlusconi made the statement during an official state visit to Israel. Berlusconi, of course, is one of Israel’s strongest supporters.

 

But what is Israel? It’s not just any country. It has a very well-defined role as ground zero for the totalitarian security-industrial complex, all of whose aspects have radiated out from that core.

 

Naomi Klein describes this in Shock Doctrine:

 

What makes Israel interesting as a guns-and-caviar model is not only that its economy is resilient in the face of major political shocks such as the 2006 war with Lebanon or Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza, but also that Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence. The reasons for Israeli industry’s comfort level with disaster are not mysterious. Years before US and European companies grasped the potential of the global security boom, Israeli technology firms were busily pioneering the homeland security industry, and they continue to dominate the sector today…From a corporate perspective, this development has made Israel a model to be emulated in the post-9/11 market. From a social and political perspective, however, Israel should serve as something else – a stark warning. The fact that Israel continues to enjoy booming prosperity, even as it wages war against its neighbors and escalates its brutality in the conquered territories, demonstrates just how perilous it is to build an economy based on the premise of continual war and deepening disasters.

 

It’s the frontier outpost and proving ground for all imperial assaults:

 

Israel’s case is extreme, but the kind of society it is creating may not be unique. The disaster capitalism complex thrives in conditions of low-intensity grinding conflict. That seems to be the end point in all the disaster zones, from New Orleans to Iraq. In April 2007, US soldiers began implementing a plan to turn several volatile Baghdad neighborhoods into “gated communities”, surrounded by checkpoints and concrete walls, where residents would be tracked using biometric technology. “We’ll be like the Palestinians”, predicted one resident, watching his neighborhood being sealed in by the barrier. After it becomes clear that Baghdad is never going to be Dubai, and New Orleans won’t be Disneyland, Plan B is to settle into another Colombia or Nigeria – never-ending war, fought in large measure by private soldiers and paramilitaries, damped down just enough to get the natural resources out of the ground, helped along by mercenaries guarding the pipelines, platforms, and water reserves.

 

Salhani referred to the “spill over” of “trouble” from the Middle East. Nowhere is this more true than the toxic mindset and practices of Israeli crypto-totalitarianism. That’s what imperialism wants, to bring all its trouble home.

 

With that in mind let’s delve into the Salhani piece (he’s talking about Europe, while I’ll mostly talk about America, but I see these same processes playing out everywhere, and therefore examples specific to one place are usually generally applicable):

 

First of all, no prospective partner of the Brussels club can be allowed to join the European Union while it occupies territory that is not legally recognized as part of its own. Israel’s adhesion into the European Union would have to be preceded by a complete withdrawal of Israeli military and civilian forces from all Palestinian territory. That would mean that before such a withdrawal can happen a peace deal will have to be reached between the Palestinians and the Jewish State.

 

Or alternatively, they’d have to “legalize” this occupation, just like how the patently illegal war in Iraq was legalized. That’s the first “waiver” I thought he was hinting at.

 

Israel’s admission into the European Union would mean that the highways and security roads that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on would have to disappear. It would be inadmissible to have segregated roads in the European Union. Imagine if Italy, France or Germany, for example, banned certain ethnic groups from traveling on its national highways.

 

America already had the terrorist color code system where, under a red alert, highways and such may be arbitrarily shut down. They may have gotten rid of the colors, but the looming policy is still the same.

 

Of course, the movement to privatize American roads, to ration their use according to wealth, is already well underway.  Rendering non-luxuries artificially expensive and then rationing them by ability to pay the extortion price is just the same tyranny by another name.

 

And we don’t really have to imagine ”certain ethnic groups” having a hard time on America’s highways. Racial profiling already accomplishes that.

 

The Separation Barrier (official United Nations designation) which Israel calls a “fence,” and Palestinians refer to as an “Apartheid Wall;” in reality a series of segments of a wall resembling the Berlin Wall, ditches and moats, erected between Israel proper and the West Bank to keep potential terrorists out, would have to come down. It would be unimaginable for a member of the EU to maintain such a symbol of segregation.

 

Of course our Mexico wall is well known.

 

Similarly the situation regarding Gaza would have to be resolved. Again, it is unimaginable for a European country to lay siege to a neighboring territory.

 

Lay siege to a neighborhood? LAPD, anyone? Speaking more generally, America is full of physical walls as well as less tangible boundaries aggressively patrolled by various kinds of goons. The siege itself may not yet be as coordinated as the mindset, but the mindset is every bit as aggressive as that in Israel. So it’s no wonder anyone who wants to build a physical wall looks to their example, and often to their contractors.

 

But that is not all. The whole concept of the European Union, the world’s largest economic and political zone, which saw the day shortly after the end of World War II, was to tie the economies of Europe’s countries in such a way that war would simply become unimaginable. Nations that spent centuries fighting each other – England and France, France and Germany, Germany and its neighbors to the east, and so on and so forth – began building the foundation to make those wars a thing of the past and inconceivable in the future. And it worked. Today war between once former foes in Europe is just not possible. To be sure, there may well be disagreements between members of the EU, but the disputes are settled in the European Parliament or at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Not on the battlefield any longer. This is an example from which the Middle East could greatly benefit.

 

The rhetoric here is reminiscent of Norman Angell’s sadly misguided utopia. But more truthfully, whether Salhani intends this reading or not, the coded message is clear: totalitarian repression prevents the Palestinians from fighting back against Israel. So we Western elites can all learn the lesson in our war upon our own people.

 

Salhani wraps it up:

 

Is any of this possible? Yes, would say the optimist in me, but with a caveat. Unilateral withdrawal from Arab lands is unrealistic and dangerous for the security of Israel. And Israel’s domestic and foreign policy is driven by its security needs. So the bottom line is this: If Israel wants to become a member of the European Union, even with all the backing of the Italian prime minister, and others, it would first have to negotiate peace with its Arab neighbors. And that is a good thing.

 

The realist in me says that paragraph proves that the whole idea’s a joke. He may be an Angell-style “optimist”, but the idea can have application only through its inversion. We don’t export peace to troubled regions, but import tyrannical methods of dealing with the trouble. We bring it home as our new, alien law.

 

Nietzsche knew the true nature of this alien anti-law, in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

 

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too, and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”

Where there is still a people, it does not understand the state and hates it as the evil eye and the sin against customs and rights.
Every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights. But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil, and whatever it says, it lies, and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. Confusion of tongues of good and evil: this sign I give you as the sign of the state. This sign signifies the will to death.

Behold, how it lures them, and how it devours them, chews them, and ruminates!
“On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordering finger of God am I” – thus roars the monster.

 

That’s the corporatist state. There’s nothing organic about it, nothing national, nothing rooted in history, rooted in the soil, evolved out of ancient culture, there’s nothing human about it, and since it partakes of nothing human, it is not a Law for human beings, but an anti-law to destroy humanity and freedom. It is indeed a monster.

 

This is the false bureaucratic “law” of globalization. It’s the secretive pseudo-law of the WTO, the SPP, what the FTAA would have been and still will be if the neoliberals get their way. (Just yesterday I wrote about the pending “free” trade deal Obama’s pushing.) ”Law” – directly administrative, administered by a bureaucratic machine and secret tribunals.

 

Dani Rodrik has posited the existence of a policy trilemma:

I have an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full…

To see why this makes sense, note that deep economic integration requires that we eliminate all transaction costs traders and financiers face in their cross-border dealings. Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs. They generate sovereign risk, create regulatory discontinuities at the border, prevent global regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, and render a global lender of last resort a hopeless dream. The malfunctioning of the global financial system is intimately linked with these specific transaction costs.

So what do we do?

One option is to go for global federalism, where we align the scope of (democratic) politics with the scope of global markets. Realistically, though, this is something that cannot be done at a global scale. It is pretty difficult to achieve even among a relatively like-minded and similar countries, as the experience of the EU demonstrates.

Another option is maintain the nation state, but to make it responsive only to the needs of the international economy. This would be a state that would pursue global economic integration at the expense of other domestic objectives…. The collapse of the Argentine convertibility experiment of the 1990s provides a contemporary illustration of its inherent incompatibility with democracy.

Finally, we can downgrade our ambitions with respect to how much international economic integration we can (or should) achieve. So we go for a limited version of globalization, which is what the post-war Bretton Woods regime was about (with its capital controls and limited trade liberalization). It has unfortunately become a victim of its own success. We have forgotten the compromise embedded in that system, and which was the source of its success.

So I maintain that any reform of the international economic system must face up to this trilemma. If we want more globalization, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty. Pretending that we can have all three simultaneously leaves us in an unstable no-man’s land.

 

Thus Dani Rodrik, an ardent globalizer himself, laid out the ”trilemma”. How you can’t have democracy, national institutions, and free trade. At least one has to go.

 

But even this is in fact a distortion of the truth. The record proves that globalization cannot coexist with either sovereignty (except perhaps for the richest countries) or democracy (at all). By definition free trade is at war with democracy, and is either the aggressive weapon of or the assault upon any particular country, depending upon how wealthy it is.

 

When we look at Gitmo, at the secret CIA dungeon system; when we look at how in Iraq they established a lawless administrative zone similar to the Nazis’ General Government of Poland; when we look at the lawless ”free trade zones” Klein writes about in No Logo and Shock Doctrine; when we look at the ”supreme” court’s recent enemy combatant case laying the groundwork for gutting habeas corpus for all citizens, once and for all, forever (and what a contrast – within weeks of one another we have decisions declaring corporations to have total personal rights while actual flesh-and-blood people are to be legally declared unpersons; that juxtaposition proves we no longer have a legitimate judicial branch of government, but an abdicated rogue, but “still out in the field commanding troops“ ["Apocalypse Now"]); when we look at how vicious bankruptcy law became in 2005, how we inch ever closer to the restoration of debtors’ prisons (is that the real reason they’re so harsh with deadbeat dads? To set a precedent? Given the way the system acts in most other cases, gutting all social services, reducing contraception access etc., it’s hard to believe the sincere purpose is to be mother-friendly); when we look at these and far too many other examples, we see the net being cast around us.

 

I’ll finish with a consideration. Arendt, in discussing the British method of colonial rule, considers how oppression can either concentrate resistance or atomize it.

 

The British tried to escape the dangerous inconsistency inherent in the nation’s attempt at empire building by leaving the conquered peoples to their own devices as far as culture, religion, and law were concerned, by staying aloof and refraining from spreading British law and culture. This did not prevent the natives from developing national consciousness and from clamoring for sovereignty and independence – though it may have retarded the process somewhat. But it has strengthened tremendously the new imperialist consciousness of a fundamental, and not just a temporary, superiority of man over man, of the “higher” over the “lower” breeds….

 

They are in fact leaving to us pop culture, TV, sports, all that crap. And we still have our “religion” which clearly means nothing to anyone any longer. Indeed the churches shill for the system. For most it’s far more like Brave New World than 1984, though this will change as we sink back into serfdom.

 

In The True Believer Eric Hoffer compares resistance where there still exist social and cultural institutions, to circumstances where all such institutions have been liquidated, leaving behind only atomized individuals.

 

The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual’s identification with a group. The people who stood up best in the Nazi concentration camps were those who felt themselves members of a compact party (the Communists) of a church (priests and ministers), or of a close-knit national group. The individuals, whatever their nationality, caved in. The Western European Jew proved to be the most defenseless. Without vital ties with a Jewish community, he faced his tormentors alone. One realizes now that the ghetto of the Middle Ages was for the Jews more a fortress than a prison. Without the sense of utmost unity and distinctness which the ghetto imposed upon them, they could not have endured with unbroken spirit the violence and abuse of those dark centuries. When the Middle Ages returned for a brief decade in our day, they caught the Jew without his ancient defenses and crushed him.

The conclusion seems to be that when the individual faces torture or annihilation, he cannot rely on the resources of his own individuality. His only source of strength is in not being himself but part of something mighty, glorious, and indestructible. Faith here is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal. Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one’s religion, nation, race, party, or family – what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?

 

Do we now seek new institutions? Nietzsche asks in Twilight of the Idols:

 

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward to the horizons….

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom”. That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery them moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. This is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

 

I add, today ”the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats) for money and corporate power, while all “politicians” and “parties” who could and should have fought for the people have become traitors. All our institutions have been corrupted.

 

Today we must choose: human community or atomization? We have the socioeconomic atomization of the corporate system, and increasingly the physical and media barriers with the individual atomized inside. We must contrast this with real communities. Where these exist, even physical barriers may not be prisons, as Hoffer wrote.

 

I look back to the opening quote about Napoleon’s conquests. It presents the same decision - community consciousness or tyranny? Now that tyranny is coming home, and America faces the need for a second national awakening in the face of this tyranny, can this be done?

 

Do we still have a civic identity to rally round as at a banner? Can we raise this banner, and raise a call to it? Or are we washed up?

Imperialism vs. Politics

 

The White House recently announced its intent to pursue further “free trade” pacts. The pending pacts are with Columbia, Panama, and South Korea. It’s supposed to be part of a plan to double American exports within five years, though how on earth America can do this (other than through further dumping) remains a mystery.

 

The NYT reports that free trade cadres are hailing “the first time that the Obama administration had embraced trade liberalization vigorously.” It’s difficult to see how free trade, which is already a Hobbesian free fire zone, can become more “liberal”, but god bless ‘em they’re trying.

 

(Of course the MSM and the hacks want us to forget one of the times the Obama campaign was caught in a lie, when the shiny candidate promised to rethink NAFTA, while on the secret hotline his flunkies were assuring their Canadian counterparts that it was just a lie for the peasants.)

 

Obama’s point man before Congress is, who else, Timmy Geithner.

 

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told a House budget hearing on Wednesday that the administration “absolutely” planned to make passage of the three trade pacts part of the new export strategy this year. “It’s not just that,” Mr. Geithner said. “We want to be in the game in Asia as they move to negotiate new agreements there.”

 

Here’s a quote from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism which gets more to the essence of the matter:

 

Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the more lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action. The reason for this surprising originality is simply that this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the 19th century.

 

Geithner has a long, interesting record in this lawless respect. A few days ago Joshua Rosner reminded us of some of his pre-Fed handiwork, back in the Clintonian glory days of globalization, internet branding bubbles, and deregulation.

 

In truth, Geithner’s ineffectiveness in his role at NY Fed President and his current political posturing — without any policy substance to directly address too-big-to-fail or the Fed’s flawed powers to bailout firms — seems to have resulted from design rather than accident. After all, in a previous “public service” role, Geithner was the lead negotiator for the WTO’s General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade for financial services. In this role, Geithner reported to Larry Summers, who in turn reported to Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin. In 1998, this team won the banks EVERYTHING they requested from that treaty. From open access to new markets to unrestricted growth in equity and credit derivatives, they opened the door to rapid and deregulated growth of the large multinational banks, allowing them to become “too big to fail”. Moreover, the terms of the agreement has made it almost impossible to put the “too big to fail” genie back in the bottle without running afoul of rules of this international agreement. That was the work of Geithner as “public servant”.

 

Back then the gangsters looked like vigorous young hunting dogs, chasing the hapless panicked rabbits in the morning sun. Time magazine could actually put some of the ugliest men in the world on their cover (and in an intentionally uglified light) and seriously want you to look at them as if they were movie stars. Tom Friedman published a book dedicated to the image of a straitjacket to whose bondage we must all submit, so we might as well lie back and enjoy it. (He called it the “golden” straitjacket.) Seattle and the dotcom crash had not happened and were physically impossible. Those must have been intoxicating days for Geithner.

 

In fact this round of imperialism is not different in kind from the first round in the 19th century. The same bottleneck of finance capitalism was forcing the same irrationality and violence upon a system which has no productive path available to it. The only way out was expansion for expansion’s sake. Expansion for the sake of the system’s appetite trying to feed itself, expansion for the sake of tyranny to render possible the escalating violence which will be required to maintain ”growth”.

 

Imperialism rose out of and is a part of the growth ideology. Where growth runs up against the limits of a nation, imperialism is born. Although this new kind of growth-driven imperialism was and is usually seen as the same as old-style empire building or mercantile colonialism, this is really a sham. This is not nation-driven, state-driven, law-driven, culture-driven. It’s driven by the growth imperative of a particular mode of organizing economic activity, growth capitalism. It’s structural, inherent. It’s nothing but racketeering. 

 

Classical empire-building could only ever expand and enhance the body politic at home where it was based on expanding rather than escaping the law’s purview, integrating new areas into the law rather than setting up free fire zones. But modern imperialism, as it occurred first in the 19th century colonial heyday and now for the second time with modern globalization, is simply business speculation, gangsterism, transposed into the realm of political and foreign policy. It engages in more or less violent and extractive racketeering overseas, consolidates this as the government’s policy baseline through corruption and capture, and then brings the racketeering ideology home.

 

Financialization is one especially modern version of this non-productive, larcenous imperialism. We speak today of the Bailout which began in 2008, but really all of financialization was always this same Bailout. It was always hijacked government legalizing gang activity and where necessary directly funneling taxpayer money to the rackets. This was just stepped up to a higher level of intensity in 08.

 

Perhaps the first big step was the anti-federalist overriding of the many state bucket laws in the 80s. These laws criminalized many of today’s standard speculator practices of betting on the rise and fall of stocks and other underlying. Such gambling was not a legal contract and was relegated to the slimy dives and back alleys where it belongs. (In researching this I learned a new term. They used to call these crooks “bucketeers”, back when we still had the rule of law and these rackets were still illegal, before the law’s hijacking began in earnest in the 1980s.)

 

That this gutter casino was federally legalized, brought into the contractual open, burnished and spit-shined by academia, rolled out to a media chorus of oohs and aahs, was simply the nadir of imperial gangsterism now dignified as the pinnacle of American ingenuity, the apotheosis of the American Dream.

 

Growth is not a political concept, but an ideological dogma. It is anti-political. Its only basis in reality was the way fossil fuels could temporarily fuel it, but now facing the end of this easy fuel source it has lost its place in physical reality and become the province of ivory tower dogma, pseudo-religious fundamentalism, and the gun. Since it cannot be engaged politically, where rationality and humanity would refute it, it becomes aggressively anti-political. The “growth” cadres seek to kill all thought, all discourse, all politics. Just look at the modern media. Today’s MSM preaches a sham “happy balance”, but Arendt expounds the real nature of this balance:

 

This happy balance, however, had hardly been the inevitable outcome of mysterious economic laws, but had relied heavily on political, and even more on police institutions that prevented competitors from using revolvers. How a competition between fully armed business concerns – “empires” – could end in anything but victory for one and death for the others is difficult to understand. In other words, competition is no more a principle of politics than expansion, and need political power just as badly for control and restraint.

 

So just like expansion itself, competition is not political, but on the contrary needs politics to control it. (Arendt’s quote is ambiguous, and seems to mean the empires used politics to control themselves, sort of like how in theory the Mafia’s “commission” was supposed to regulate among the different families. Today Basel, the G20, etc. represent the same theory. But today the globalized gang wants to cast off all controls upon its own actions.) Seeking to cast off such control, the gangs have sought to dissolve politics.

 

Imperialism wants to evade politics. Having had its basis in foreign policy, it tries to bring home this characteristic combination of elitism, secrecy, and debate-killing slogans (like “growth” or “national security” or “terrorism”) to domestic politics, to foreignize it. It seeks to treat the people of the home country as a conquered colonial people.

 

So, for an example, just as Paul Bremer set up a space in Iraq devoid of all law for the mercenaries of globalism, so the system is now bringing home this lawlessness, as the federal court system seeks to absolve Blackwater of all responsibility before any law, anywhere.

 

Those are just a few examples of the lawless, anti-political core of globalization and the growth ideology. What’s considered the debate-killer? What’s our characteristic anti-intellectualism, flat-earthism? And what musters all corrupt political power against anything that’s in the public interest? Anything whose utility for growth isn’t obvious. That’s the black hole, the dead zone, the hypoxia, the doldrums, the horse latitudes, of politics. It’s the repository for all notions and expressions which are stupid, arrogant, bullying.

 

Corporatism is the tyrannical process seeking to liquidate all politics and all freedom.

 

(I add here one optimistic thought. Can the “war on terror” slogan indefinitely terrorize the people into conformity, docility, and where necessary fascist lynch mobs, all on behalf of the military-industrial ans security-industrial complexes, the same way the Cold War mindset and propaganda was able to do? The Cold War actually did threaten annihilation, whereas any sane person has to eventually realize that terrorism is a nuisance at worst, and cannot possibly justify a trillion dollar rathole, the gutting of the constitution, and incipient totalitarianism.

 

Is it likely the liars of the system, who are after all the real terrorists, can really keep this bogus terror going?)