Can America Abandon the Corporatist Grip?
James Hall
What is all the excitement around the Bernie Sanders diatribes that have the Occupy Democrats drooling? According to 170 Top Economists Pen Letter Backing Bernie Sanders’ Plan To Break Up The Biggest Banks, the argument made references the “hyperbolic imagery that invokes the bread lines of the Soviet Union and massive famines in China, entirely ignorant of the vast differences between democratic socialism and totalitarian communism – like their refusal to distinguish between “free market capitalism” and “unrestricted plutocracy.”
Implied in this contrast is that the former is desirable, while the later is harmful. Missing in this assessment is that degrees of a toxicant economic model will just kill you more slowly.
The example used in Big Bank Breakups: Who Needs Bernie Sanders When You’ve Got Dodd-Frank?, cited that:
“Both JPMorgan and Bank of America have batted away shareholder proposals filed by advocacy group Public Citizen to study breaking up. In a rebuttal to the proposal, Bank of America wrote that it had "significantly streamlined and simplified its organization," in part by shedding assets not central to its core banking operations. The $73 billion in assets the bank sold off amounts to 3.4 percent of its current net assets.”
Remember all those fond promises after the 2008 collapse about reform legislation? “The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act subjected banks holding more than $50 billion in assets to costly additional capital cushion requirements, among other regulatory hassles.” The net result is that the plutocrat banksters keep growing in size, while watching smaller competitors fall by the wayside.
The Sanders message that government can be trusted to break up the money monopoly may play well to the uninitiated and utopian gazers, but in the real world of power and mind control; establishment institutions and elite cabals work hand in hand to prevent any revamping of substance and realignment in the system.
When the social democrats “pols” psych up their urban dependency masses to demand higher, (up to 90%) taxes on the 1%, the consequences from such a campaign would only lead to even bigger government. And as history proves, all big governments lead to Totalitarian Collectivism, whether run by Communists or Social Democrats.
Don’t look for a reprieve from establishment conservatives either.
David Stockman starts out in his essay, The Warmongers’ Brawl——How The GOP Is Deserting Free Markets, Sound Money And Fiscal Rectitude. “According to Dante’s Divine Comedy the inscription on the gates to hell says, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”.
“Ronald Reagan’s real sin was that he swallowed hook, line and sinker what was always a phony threat because he was a statist when it came to the military and the machinery of national security. He believed everything they told him and ignored all that he knew about bureaucratic lies, exaggerations and mission creep in the domestic realm.
Stated differently, Washington has no valid mission to seek full employment and egalitarian redistribution of income at home and no legitimate purpose in acting like the world’s policeman and imperial hegemon abroad. Those untoward missions flow from the self-serving machinery of the state because invention of expansionary remits is mostly what state agencies do.”
A central government administered by an FDR or LBJ based upon their war economy, ballooned up the national debt and enlarged both corporatist control of the economy and governmental agency expansion. Nixon and Reagan GOP administrations kept this trend alive with only a minor respite of relief.
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The Corporatist grip that has strangled the body politik for well over a century and a half has only grown in magnitude in America. This conclusion cannot be challenged by any honest historian or political scientist. Most politicians may attempt to spin their way around the adverse damage done to the Republic, but rarely ever provide a detailed constructive plan that encourages economic prosperity.
Why such silence? It is not because of a lack in suspect alternatives.
From that bastion of UK democratic socialism, the Guardian examines sustainable business and rethinking prosperity. Their article mentions, John Fullerton’s regenerative capitalism, New Economics Foundation and World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nation to David Ricardo’s labor theory of value, our modern day economists seem to be mostly clones of John Maynard Keynes.
The East India Company is certainly one of the primary originators of the corporatist mentality. This mindset has been so indoctrinated into the sub-consciousness of the spoon fed media addicts that few people have even a basic understanding of what it takes to build and maintain a viable economy.
A principal reason why inhabitants are so economically illiterate is that their meager existence, both financial and social, has become intermingled with Corporatist dependency that they are unable to learn the practices and skills needed to secure an independent living.
As long as the state ignores the sentiments and petitions from the masses, the cozy buddy relationship between big business and big government will continue. So Bernie’s boys and girls can shout loud and often, all day long, but nothing they do is going to alter the corporatist grip on the seat of power.
Recalling the mass demonstrations during Viet Nam, real pressure put on the establishment to end an unpopular war, was instrumental. However, when the next imperialism campaign erupts as a distraction from the continued economic unraveling, the corporatist plan to deploy their ultimate scheme on the domestic front will be revealed.
Banking holidays are coming, which in turn will raise fears and calls for more government intervention. Bernie’s pals will eagerly shout for the nationalization of the banks. That will be their way of breaking up the JPMorgan’s and Bank of America’s. Nonetheless, do not be deceived. The bankster cartel will survive by morphing into a new and different appearance.
In order to break the grip of the Corporatocracy, the entire debt created money system must be replaced with the issuance of debt free currency. Going to a Weekend at Bernie’s party will do little to revive the stiff. Hell offers no hope, in this divine comedy.
James Hall – January 20, 2016
- See more at: http://www.batr.org/corporatocracy/012016.html#sthash.PHPS2AdO.dpuf