REPROOF 2009 – 5 / Copyright Jason Pecci
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Jason Pecci
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21st Century Democracy Regression
We sit about one quarter century into the acceleration phase of trading our civic virtue for convenience and beating all the positive potential out of capitalist democracy. Most foreign perspective of the U.S. during this time appreciates the perverse result of this self-indulgent path and tries to address and resist the U.S. projection of those impending failures. Somehow we chronically ignore the unfolding lessons of avoiding democratic civil responsibility as robustly as responsible democracies defend against it. While many still perceive democracy as a sustainable government construct we have set more of a non-example over the past twenty five years and give cause, by bad behavior unchecked by we the people, for authoritarian regimes to persist. The cause for this conclusion is that the authoritarian regimes (e.g. obscenely decadent mid-east emirates) want to retain all the civil and financial control that the U. S. democracy has abdicated to the corporate construct.
Personal liberty, health, justice, incarceration, ecology preservation, scientific and cultural development, are all a cautionary example of how a negative result can arise from a system that, while not optimized for the best for all, was purported to self-correct against failure by deference to the people.
We let ourselves be upstaged and have failed. The current organizational chart for the U.S. Government shows corporations holding the top, policy setting position; with government acting as the financial and coercion intermediary between corporations and the people. By popular culture reference the mega-corporation portrayed in the 1986 movie "Robocop" illustrates the marquee concept we have allowed to enslave and diminish us. The government supplication to corporate structures was an adjunct to colonialism, which lived on through international banks - the engines for corporate enterprise and subjugation. Entire vulnerable governments became enslaved to large foreign capital flows under the misnomer "economic development" and set the paradigm for civil supplication to corporate structures (See "Confessions of An Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins). Robocop presented this weapon for domestic use as: paternal corporation that can provide better for the people than their government…given full faith and authority by the people. In that regard the movie acted only as conditioning propaganda because the people's consent was easily taken by lobbyist ownership of legislatures and exclusive influence over executive and judicial branches.
Now, to the near exclusion of liberty, we exercise laws for the near exclusive benefit of: energy, security, health care, incarceration, agriculture/food, financial, and military companies. The acceleration of this degenerate phenomenon arises from the descending position this self- aipplicating (chaotic) behavior perpetuates. A positive feedback system whereby interested corporations (see fn 1) set policy to best indulge their rapacity (See Reproof 2009-1 "Who Writes Our Laws"), then that "disturbance" away from equilibrium-disequilibrium, grows by public participation. The trend away from civil responsibility then grows unbounded. A reversal of our offending participation will suffice to stop the decay toward full corporacratic submission, for
each burglarizing industry, but still settles at an equilibrium favorable to the burglar. To get back to civil balance the burglar has to be kicked out of the house. Correction favorable to the people only comes from eradicating the privatization, not settling for a tolerable level. The tolerable level of privatization for critical civil responsibilities is zero. The accelerating deference to privatizer parasites is an effect of "disaster capitalism" (See book mention below: "The Shock Doctrine"), whereby any change in public psyche acts as a ratchet notch for more privatization/intervention/civil burglary. Yet, when conditions and psyche suggest reversal of the ratchet the parasites claim status quo through their ownership of our government.
Today's super-jumbo example is the private incarceration industry. Governor of notorious prison state California A. Schwarzenegger is expressing budget desperation with a threat to
cut in corporate incarcerators on the $9,000,000,000/year state DOC budget. After 25 years of implementing laws to create their market - 3 strikes, mandatory minimums, etc. - the corporate incarcerators are about to enter the promise land, with no question as to: why they exist, their negative result compared to civil incarcerators (executive branches of your government), invalidity, and negative social consequences of laws that create their existence, nor any inquiry into seminal causes of the manufactured "prison problem.”
Proper inquiry with social welfare, instead of industry welfare, in mind would indicate:
no negative consequences to deporting early all deportable inmates with less than say five years remaining; no negative consequence to readjusting sentences down 10% or offering more earned time (denied for bad behavior); that the raison d' etre for, and most arrestable behavior is, drug profit, (possession and killing for inflated profit potential), and their existence is eliminated by de-scheduling all recreational drugs.
Boom! Prison population down from 180,000 to less gratuitous and civilly manageable 100, 000 by addressing social concerns over corporate carte blanch, for just one of our many bankrupt states.
In economic terms our offense has been to invest our individual self-interests into government officials as an average/composite self-interest that was subsequently bundled and sold to corp-orations, by machinations/interference of lobbyists, with predictable disastrous results. Thus the U.S. republic does not enjoy the optimal capitalist supported democracy for the populous, that the corporations have so successfully marketed, but a democratically supported corporatocracy optimized for corporate profits. It is likely that a future post-mortem will show the U. S. to have been a democracy subverted by capitalist hubris. How soon will that finding be conclusive?
See heading “Uninterest v. Disinterest” regarding this and the missing footnote from last issue on that topic.
Other Recent Examples:
• Supreme Court ruling for condemnation of private property in Stamford Ct. for an investment bank (Citicorp?) to take ownership and develop; which Citicorp declined after the city ousted the civilian owners, thereby implying that condemnation (as embodied in U.S. Constitution) can be used for corporate by-proxy revanchism (political term meaning vengeful taking/reclamation) in behalf of a corporation.
• Colorado's 2nd super-max built with "certificate of participation" financing in which interested corporated investors pay for construction and receive bond type payments from the state and get full ownership upon any default. NYC mayor Bloomberg engineered similar investor financing of new Yankee stadium.
• All negative social consequence for corporate welfare. One must ask: Qui bonum? (Who benefits?), and unmask our victimizer's!
Uninterest v. Disinterest (missing footnote from Reproof 09/4)
Interest has two shades of meaning: 1) State of wanting to gain knowledge of something; 2) A stake, share or involvement in an undertaking. These meanings are distinguished in the negative by the two terms: uninterested-not having a desire to gain knowledge of something; and disin-terested-not having a stake, share or involvement in an undertaking.
Too many citizens are uninterested in their government. No citizen in disinterested in their government.
Subversive Activities: Special Services Branch (SSB)
The Nation magazine has reported on Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld's political career actualization with the secret establishment and operation of the SSB. Their first joint operation, as the “Jagger and Richards” of occult government, was to bury the people's tiger team report on Viet-Nam (post-op inspector general's cause and assessment report) in the Ford white house. In their first year running the Bush regime they funneled huge amounts of DOD money to Blackwater and Halliburton to operate as a wrecking crew under their exclusive control and no constraints of responsibility to the U.S. public. To effect CIA capabilities un-retractable CIA intel was forwarded to this rogue civilian operation - critical intelligence pissed into a pool of unvetted unknowns not responsible for its containment.
(See Reproof 09/4 "Continuing Inferior Subcont¬racting for Civil Services")
Imagine the extension of this mercenary paradigm to law enforcement, a la RoboCop (See lead article); cops, SWAT, investigators, negotiators, prison guards; all with no civil oath, duty or obligation. Recall that King Fahaad was prohibited by then Secretary of Defense Cheney, under President G. Bush I, from paying desert storm military participants $10,000/each, to avoid condoning mercenary behavior. Yet in 2002 VP Cheney and Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld, under President G. Bush 11, instituted exactly that; an international mercenary corps. It is antithetical to civil order and discipline to create a corporate subversion, whether for international I spy operations, domestic law enforcement or corrections/prisons.
BOOKS:
Nemesis: The Last Days Of The American Republic by Chalmers Johnson,
a re-mention from 09-1 issue, because Bill Moyer noted this as the most relevant book of 2009.
See Also prequel, Blowback
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein - full analysis of the corporate subjugation
“ratchet” discussed in the lead article.
Copyright REPROOF Pamphlet 2010 / Copy and distribute freely. / Issue 2009-5
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