The Corporate State, Plutocracy, and the Privatization of America:
From “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Owning Everything”
Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private [Virtue], and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a possitive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest Connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.
— -From John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 16 April 1776
Fifty years of pandering to the basest of human instincts. It began with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, continued and expanded with Ronald Reagan/George H.W. Bush and their despicable strategist Lee Atwater (AKA the “Boogie Man”), and “blossomed” into the truly craven excuse for a human being Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s tactician. There was Newt Gingrich, “the man who destroyed politics”. To which I would add the complicity of Bill Clinton with Dick Morris’s “Triangulation Strategy” in the 90s. Trump, and his own boogie men Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, is the logical progression of a malignant, moribund GOP strategy that has finally run its course and begun to consume itself — and everything else along with it.
It should be clear by now that this is all a part of a decades old strategy of careful, patient, incremental, erosion… drip by drip, trickle by trickle, to the final deluge that is taking place all around us. It has been the wholesale dismantling of everything achieved by the Progressive Era in the early 20th century and the New Deal Era in the 30s and 40s and the Fair Deal and Great Society of the 50s and 60s. The evisceration of the unions, the gutting of regulations, the exsanguination of the social safety net, the butchering of representative government, the privatization of every last piece of the public trust, from schools, to the postal system, to the military, to prisons, to police and emergency services, to roads, to the media, to water and power, to lands, to the airways, to all available natural resources, and finally to the very core of our culture and humanity. [Even libraries!] Everything must have a price, and everything must be capable of being bought and sold, and most importantly OWNED.
A new corporate “utopia” will come to fully occupy and control all facets of American life, even more than it already does. The goal of which will be to monetize everything, to “liberate” everything for the personal property of a tiny, chosen few. This is the agenda that must always remain hidden from us. This is why a divide and conquer strategy works so well in conjunction with a culture of diversion, distraction and the eternal now.
It did not take long after Trump’s inauguration for the twisted, labyrinthine subterfuge finally unfolding to reveal its inner mechanisms and treacherous intentions. I wrote then:
Watch closely as the final phases of the complete privatization of America occurs over the next decade. Without a highly energetic and well organized opposition, we will over the next decade see the erosion of all things public, those that remain anyway. Public lands will be sold off (Zinke). Public resources-from timber, minerals and energy to water-will be opened to extraction and privatization (Perdue/Zinke). The public airwaves, including a free and open internet (Pai), will be lost. Public education will become a marketplace for profit and religious indoctrination (DeVos). We will increasingly have less and less access to public transportation and roadways (Chao), less and less public or low-income housing (Carson), lower and lower home-ownership, and certainly ever-decreasing public welfare (Perdue), retirement, or healthcare (Mulvaney). There will be ever more limited public protections for our environment (Pruitt) or food and drugs (O’Neill?). A new corporate utopia will come to fully occupy and control all aspects of American life, even more than it already does. The goal of which will be to monetize everything, to make everything personal property. This is the agenda that must always remain hidden from us. This is why a divide and conquer strategy works so well in conjunction with a culture of diversion, distraction and the eternal now. Watch closely…
A key part of the long term strategy here is to control EVERY part of public life. To do this, they must eradicate ALL government services and oversight that are not exclusively military, intelligence, and border control (these will be controlled through rigged elections, voter suppression, voter apathy, and mind-fucking). The STATE will be nothing more than an extension of corporate and private interest. This is the sole intention of KLEPTOCRACY/ PLUTOCRACY/OLIGARCHY.
We have witnessed the covert and stealthy rise of a quasi-fascist, “right-wing” political machine that obfuscates its true intentions, masquerades as the champion of individual liberty, proliferates mendacious propaganda, foments surgically exacted divisions in the American body-politic, seeks full semiotic control over public (and private) discourse, perverts the very meaning and precision of language, actively engages in the suppression of independent, critical thinking, and pursues complete power in all aspects of society and culture.
Ideological think tanks, trade organizations, pseudo-grassroots interest/ advocacy groups, and self-serving, public relations philanthropies and “cause marketing” have been propagated and nurtured under the auspices of the ultra-wealthy elites and corporations of the nation.
One point of origin is the now infamous Powell Memorandum, which postulated that there existed a “broad attack” on the American “free enterprise” and economic system by what Lewis Powell called the New Leftists, Communists and “other revolutionaries”. It was the singular rallying cry for American “business” to fight back with a collective might that has utterly consumed our social, political, and economic environments.
There should be little remaining doubt that this is precisely the long-term plan. It has been the plan since at least the Reagan era. Remember “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” This single phrase has become a virtue for many in the GOP. It has been manipulated into an ideology, one that is now found manifest in Steve Bannon’s mission to “dismantle the administrative state”. It has worked as a covert strategy over many decades to convince enough people to support policies that are clearly not in their own best interest or the best interest of our nation. It has indeed convinced enough people to blindly accept a mantra of “government is bad”, “regulation is bad”, “politics is bad”, “expertise is bad”, “intelligence is bad”, “unions are bad”, “universal healthcare is bad”, these things offer nothing but threats to your personal “freedom” and individual “liberty”. It has decimated American faith and trust in the very democratic institutions that are the foundation, the bedrock of all we purport to hold dear: truth, justice, liberty, equality, fairness, opportunity… It has all but destroyed the notion of the public good as a guiding principle of the Republic.
Defunding anemic federal programs for the arts is another means to enforce public dependency on private interests. Art has the power to critique and foster dissent. It has the power to give expression to a diverse set of experiences (i.e. race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.). This is a way to tame the arts and artists, to domesticate them, to “purify” them, to enlist them in the service of a cultural and financial elite.
Eliminating a minuscule budget for the humanities and public broadcasting, for example, seeks to place our historical and cultural narratives in the hands of a self-proclaimed tribunal of very powerful and obscenely wealthy individuals. They intend to serve as gatekeepers of our collective knowledge, dictating what will be worthy of investigation and acceptable to disseminate.
A merciless and sustained assault on public school funding potentiates a downward spiral of student achievement in concert with stagnant wages and ever-growing pressures on teachers to perform better become the “evidence” for failure. Thus necessitating the expansion of “vouchers” and charter schools, and for-profit education. Eroding public trust in science, regulatory structures, the judiciary, “intellectuals”, and one another, incessantly chips away at the very fabric of our society. The end goal of all of this, ultimately, is to fully direct public discourse, to control meaning and mold perception to a very narrow worldview of their own making.
Refuse to legislate the unfettered access to guns, and then blame “crazy” and “evil” people for mass slaughter, then promote more guns as the solution. Cut funding to public schools, and then blame teachers and public education for its inability to produce student success, then push for more public money to fund private, for-profit schools.
Eight years of obstruction under Obama becomes further “evidence” of Washington’s dysfunction. States refusing to expand Medicaid under the ACA is evidence that the ACA does not and cannot work. Sabotage key elements of Obamacare, then attack it as a failure. Pass a “tax cut” that results in a budget and debt crisis, and then blame entitlements for causing it.
It is no different than the “plantation culture” that existed in a world of hermetic, circular logic.^ Make an assertion: Africans are inferior, and thus can be enslaved. Create a system of denials*, a denial of literacy, a denial of identity, a denial of humanity, then point to the consequences of such denials as proof of the initial premise.
The Corporate faction of the GOP and the American Oligarchy have been undermining government institutions, unions, regulatory structures, the middle and working classes, the social safety net, voting rights, consumer protections, etc., for at least the last four decades. And many Democrats have been swallowed up by the neo-liberal ideology that is at the root of it all. We are slipping into a crisis of a magnitude not seen before, it is bigger and worse than the Gilded Age, than the Great Depression, even WWII in its existential threat. It is as Carl Bernstein has called it, a “cold” civil war. We will be asking ourselves in a year or five or ten: Were we up to the challenge? Did we do what we needed to do? Did we wake up in time?
Trump, his administration, and the entire sociopathic wing of the GOP are now fully and unabashedly invested in Disaster Capitalism. Ten years after Naomi Kline’s “The Shock Doctrine”, we are seeing her prophetic warnings unfold with terrifying regularity. Disaster Capitalism does not concern itself with the threats of environmental degradation/destruction (or war for that matter), indeed it seeks to manifest them on limited, manageable scales because they become new sources of profit and control. America is seen by these sociopaths as nothing more than a field of opportunity, despite any costs to the wider citizenry, the land, the air, the flora or fauna. Just like war, man-made and natural disasters are a financial boon for a tiny elite. Trump’s administration is paving the way for disaster capitalists to reap benefits for generations.
A GREAT deal of thought and business energy is being expended upon the problem of the production of wealth. The farmer, the manufacturer, and the business-man are constantly striving to find new and better methods to this end. A good part of the energy of the human race is devoted to this problem in its various phases. This is well. Yet the production of wealth is not an end in itself, but simply a means to an end. It must be plain that the object of human existence is not the production of wealth, but the realization of self; and in this self-realization the production of wealth is a means--an all-important one certainly--but not an end. It is true that the object of many a selfish and sordid existence is to produce wealth in the largest possible quantities. It is too often true also that the full and complete realization of the self and the consequent development and progress of the human race are lost to view in the scramble for material gain. I would not attempt to belittle the production of wealth in the least. It is a great economic blessing; but I would here emphasize the consumption of wealth as an important factor in economic and moral progress. If wealth is produced only to be consumed in an unproductive, wasteful, or harmful manner, evil rather than good must be the inevitable result. […]
It is quite generally admitted that the individual is under certain moral obligations to use his abilities for the general good — for the good of the state. That man does not attain unto our ideal of citizenship who is not ready to devote his best energies to the public good. It is pertinent to inquire, then, whether there is any such moral obligation incumbent upon the individual in the case of his material resources. Should the ethics of citizenship require him to make use of his wealth either in whole or in part for the public good? […]
It would seem, then, if our course of reasoning is correct, that the possession of wealth is not without its obligations; and also that the ethics of citizenship does not demand the abjuration of all luxuries, but rather the careful selection of those which are durable and unselfish, and elevating and refining in their nature.
Thomas Francis Moran, “The Ethics of Wealth”, 1901
We have to recognize that there is a cabal of corporate and supremely wealthy elites who will stop at nothing to dismantle every last vestige of the Republic as we have known it, to reshape it in their own Randian wet-dream fantasy of “Objectivist Utopia”, promoted by groups like the Atlas Network. We had better find a way to bridge the chasm dividing those of us of in the rapidly disappearing middle- and working-classes, if we have any hope of countering this corporate coup d-tat. We are in desperate need of a new revolution, a new era of reform, and a rediscovery of our strength not only as a nation, but as a people, as human beings who believe in and trust one another to do what is right, what is just, and what is good.
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Five Decades of Destructive Political Strategy:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ka2d6gp1zvzggxl/FINALKARLROVE(1).pdf?dl=0
The Rise of Think Tanks, Organizations and Philanthropies:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-met-flame-retardants-20120506-story.html
http://law2.wlu.edu/deptimages/Powell%20Archives/PowellMemorandumTypescript.pdf
A Corporate Cabal and Global Oligarchy:
On Public Lands and the Environment:
The Pursuit of Property and Privatization of Everything
