Thursday, May 1, 2008

Corporatism Reshapes the Cosmos

Dear George,

What a Snap, Crackle and Pop Disneyland world we live in, a whirly-gig of make believe piled upon make believe, all of it a garish Technicolor spectacle of brief flashes of light fading into darkness and leaving in their wake the pungent odor of sulfur.

Take the “Free Market” fairy tale, for example. Believing in its efficiency is like believing in the Tooth Fairy. A free market is all about competition and competition is anathema to the Corporatist State. All Corporatism cares about is building a protective wall of hegemony to protect itself from the bare-knuckled competition of the marketplace. Anything that threatens this hegemony must either be absorbed or destroyed. For the Corporatist, free enterprise is defined as being free to destroy free enterprise through an economy of scale, a scale not of production, but of bullying muscle.

Corporatism is simply Marxism with an attitude. Marx predicted the eventual withering away of the State brought about by the rise of the proletariat. Corporatism also sees the eventual withering away of the State, but through a process of merger and acquisition. Where Marxism would overthrow the State, Corporatism is content with buying it.

Corporatism is on the cutting edge of a new economic reality: The prosperity of indebtedness. When Bear Stearns was able to leverage $13 trillion worth of derivatives with a mere $80 billion in capital, the heavens rang. Rabid leveraging is a necessity when one is doing business with a worthless, fiat currency.

The drones have bought into this new reality as they leverage their paltry salaries into homes overflowing with useless commodities that eventually end up crowded into self-storage units or cluttering the folding tables of the nearest flea market where people sell their useless junk so they can make room to pack more useless junk into their homes.

I mention this because some progressives are under the false impression that their day will come because of our pending economic meltdown. They love to draw parallels with the populist movement that emerged from the depression of 1893, or the New Deal that arose from the ashes of the Great Depression.

They overlook the fact that both movements arose because there was a large pool of pissed off drones who made it happen. You had the Grange for farmers and the IWW for workers. You had writers who were shining a spotlight on the deplorable conditions under which the poor lived. And you had a mass media that was in its infancy, which the elite had not yet learned how to manipulate.

No such pissed off pool of drones exists today. That is the upside of the “me” generation that was that was the ultimate product of the Sixties. The Summer of Love morphed into the Age of Consumption. Solidarity is not part of the consumptive vocabulary.

So, all is well in Disneyland. God is in his heaven preaching absolution through leveraged indebtedness, and our elite have discovered that the War Crimes generate one hell of a revenue stream.

America can sleep well, tonight knowing you are at the helm.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

..and I shall likely sleep well, having discovered Belacqua. Thank you CW/BJ for your output - I will read on, for you are right on.
carvermon

Case Wagenvoord said...

Thank you for your kind words.

mark hoback said...

Sheer poetry.

Mark Prime (tpm/Confession Zero) said...

War crimes flow in the black and in the red, eh?

Case Wagenvoord said...

But the profit they generate is denominated in increasingly worthless dollars.

Mark Prime (tpm/Confession Zero) said...

You got that right.