The Deal (Originally posted January 24, 2006)

[arendt]

The Deal
by arendt

There is an unspoken deal by which two intolerant reactionary forces have made an alliance
to carve up something they both want: America. Its the same kind of alliance that Hitler
and Stalin made when they carved up Poland and Eastern Europe. The two forces are
corporate feudalism and fundamentalist theocracy, and the deal is as follows.

1. What the corporate fuedalists get

The corporations get to loot everything in America that isn't nailed down, and many things
that are. They get to loot our industrial infrastructure and ship it to East Asia. They get to
loot our government trust funds, by any excuse they can find: defunding the contributions
to the Pension Guarantee fund, privatizing Social Security. They get to exempt themselves
from paying any taxes at all for any reason. Only little people pay taxes, and corporations
are not little.

When the corporations get done, America will be a plantation economy. We will produce raw materials;
and we will do menial service jobs, like distribution and retailing for products produced in those Asian
sweatshops. All the intellectual property produced by generations of working professionals, all the genetic
inheritance of the world will be the private property of 500 or so obscenely wealthy corporations.
They will have monopoly control of all resources, locked behind walls of encryption, license keys, private
networks, patent lawyers, and government regulators. It will be "hydraulic despotism" with a vengeance.

In short, America is to be rendered into economic and political slavery to the multi-national
corporations. It is to be just another plantation economy to service the needs of the corporate overclass.
Those few ultra-talented individuals who are worth paying halfway decent wages will be offered
house-nigger status in some gated corporate community - the same way things are run in India
and China today. The same way things were run in the Roman Empire.

2. What the theocrats get

The theocrats get to be the plantation overseers of Plantation America. They get to
torment and punish any slave who gets uppity. They get to force ignorance, superstition,
and fear onto the slave class so that the next generation will have never heard anything
about democracy, education, or a genuine middle-class economy.

They get to be totally incompetent and corrupt, but supported financially by the corporations
whose bidding they do. Like Catholic priests in the dark ages, their job is to support the
authority of the state, not really to save souls. The Catholic church invented simony, and
lives with sodomy and pederasty to this very day. Religious hypocrites are very good
at keeping the focus on women and thinking as the agents of Satan. These guys will
laugh all the way to whatever sleazy motel they get caught in banging the faithful women
of their flock of sheep.

Of course, the corporations will play the good cop in this phony game. You see it today, as
Yahoo and Microsoft say "we were only obeying the laws of our host country". What's
ironic is that it really is a "host" country, because they are bloody parasites.

3. Why both sides accept this deal

This is a much better division of labor than Adolf and Uncle Joe could work out, because those
guys wanted the same thing: political and miliary power. But the alliance of feudalists and
theocrats is more asymmetrical. Corporations want your money; fundies want your soul.
Corporations want the people's regulators out of their accounting books. Fundamentalists want
their regulators in women's bedrooms. No conflict of interest there.

The corporations don't care what kind of medieval nonsense the fundamentalists impose on
the slave class, because the corporate elite has no intention of being controlled by the theocrats.
If the corpses don't demand complete extra-territoriality (i.e., diplomatic immunity) for all
their high-level apparatchiks; they will simply find ways to bribe the local authorities. I mean
that's what they have done in places like South America and Africa for decades. And, America
will just be another banana republic.

As soon as the theocrats wipe out the last vestiges of democracy, there will be one of those
"four legs good, two legs better" moments. Low and behold, they will decide that the Rapture
isn't coming soon. Instead, they will just start burning witches and gays and intellectuals. Just
like Taliban Afghanistan, the football stadiums will be turned into auto-de-fes, the Inquisition
will be re-established, and religious gulags will be opened in Montana, Alaska, New Mexico,
and West Texas.

The corporations will tolerate this nonsense because they will control theocrats of other denominations
and play them off against each other in endless wars, which will swell the profits of their arms
dealers and give all governments involved an excuse for not delivering any kind of social services
or economic progress. It will be a world full of warlords, all with god on their side. Of course,
women will be returned to their role as baby factories, to keep churning out the cannon fodder
for all those wars.

4. The end result: stagnation

....It is customary for people living in developed economies to treat constant economic progress
....as natural and self-evident. Yet, if one looks at the human record since, say, the neolithic
....revolution, growth is the exception and economic stagnation is the rule. Indeed, for thousands of
....years prior to the industrial revolution, all regions of the earth experienced virtually no discernible
....change in the everyday life of their people. Empires came and went, and so did the prosperity
....of merchants and aristocrats in Venice, Vijayanagar, Beijing, and Timbuctu, but the livelihood of
....the mass of the population remained essentially the same...

........"Engines of Growth and Africa’s Economic Performance" by Marcel Fafchamps
.........Department of Economics, University of Oxford, UK (1998)

A school of honest economists holds that successful economies are an exception to a dismal rule
of stagnant, dead-end economies. They claim that modern, mass consumption, middle-class economies
are as rare of an emergent phenomenon as the rise of multi-cellular life on earth. As some wag put it:
if all there were to economics was buying cheap and selling dear, the ancient Romans would have been
modern capitalists. (The Roman emperors actively rejected labor-saving machinery in order to keep the
slave class employed, and therefore controlled. Today's economic statistics show that cheap labor
America uses more minimum wage labor and less labor saving machinery than it did in its supposedly
less technical past.)

According to this school of emergence, it is the political leadership that creates the conditions necessary
for economic "takeoff". If that is true, our current leadership is creating an economic "crash landing".
Of course, the claim that democracy fuels economic progress is vehemently opposed by corporate propaganda
that tries to insist that economic well-being creates democracy. But, even with that theory, we end up with
stagnation and authoritarianism.

Suppose that the state of government follows the state of the economy? Then, to institute dictatorship, all
you have to do is wreck the middle class economy. And that is exactly what the GOP and their corporate
sponsors have been doing to the USA. With a wrecked economy, we can't afford education. With theocrats
in charge, we can't run sophisticated programs to support the middle class. We will stagnate.

5. Political Blitzkrieg

America today is about as screwed as Poland was in 1939. The devastation resulting from the second
consecutive theft of a national election will be to the first as the Polish blitzkrieg was to the Austrian anschluss
or the peaceful, if shameful, partition of Czechoslovakia. The pitiful defenses of the hapless Democratic Party -
about as ineffective as Polish Cavalry officers attacking tanks with swords - are hopelessly outmatched,
regardless of the patriotism of their rank and file.

The corporate media leads the attack, wailing like Stuka bombers to spread panic and fear of terrorists amidst
civilians. The GOP armored phalanxes of rubber-stamp legislators switch from easy penetration to encirclement
and elimination of the quaintly-named "loyal opposition", impervious to any flesh-and-blood political arguments. Bush
arrogantly places himself above the law. Hanging Judge Elito demonstrates his open contempt for the Constitution
with his "unary executive" and "signing statements". The Congress pulverizes middle class entitlements while increasing
tax breaks for the rich. Any investigation against the ever-increasing scandals and crimes of the GOP is smothered
in its crib, while the Justice Department investigates Quakers and other "terrorists". The run-up to the aggression
against Iran gathers steam. Total victory for The Deal is within sight, and there is nothing left to stop them.

If you are a member of the middle class, you had better cash out and get out while before they tatoo a number on
your wrist and put a yellow armband on your sleeve. Kristalnacht 2 is coming. But, the beauty of religious dictatorship
as opposed to racial destiny is that you can always just convert. You can find Jesus, burn all those science books, get
a slave-wage job at WalMart, put your wife in a burkha, and send your kids to that religious feeder school for US Army
cannon fodder. You always have a choice in the new theocratic America: martyr or slave. Love it, or we'll kill you -
slowly and painfully. Because our god is a sadist.

The Christo-fascist zombie death cult is victorious, and we let it happen on our watch. I have no remedy to propose.
I can only hang my head in shame at my ineffectiveness and the gullibility and cravenness of the American people.

[OneBlueSky]

1. great post then, great post now . . . recommended . . . n/t

.

[AX10]

2. K&R for the truth.