Is it corporate fascism yet?
The financial crisis that washed across
the globe in 2008 is just the latest economic disaster to hit the
American people. The fall of too-big-to-fail banks and companies marked
the latest chapter of a tragedy that has been unfolding for years.
Franklin D. Roosevelt once warned that
democracy will never be safe if the people tolerate the growth of
private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic
state itself. If such a scenario arose, Roosevelt said, that would be
the very definition of fascism.
With the rise of the lawless
transnational corporations, an increasing number of Americans are
becoming mere spectators to this winner-take-all economy. At the same
time, workers are simply too afraid of risking their positions by
demanding democratic representation in their myriad workplaces.
Corporations play on the fear factor while enforcing the most egregious
labor practices.
Combine this with the vast political powers that corporations have acquired and you have a recipe for a national disaster.
As Francis Fukuyama pointed out, “An American chief executive exercises authoritarian powers of which a politician could only dream,” and is held accountable in his actions only to a board of directors, which enables him to “hire, fire, make mergers or divest divisions at will.”
Indeed, the captains of big business are able to act with total
impunity, and this has created a veritable reign of fear throughout
every sector of the economy.
For the American people, out-of-control
corporate power – corporate fascism, if you will – has eroded their
standard of living, to say nothing about the standard of democracy.
No matter how the spin doctors twist US
labor data over the past forty years, it is nearly impossible to find a
silver lining. As the Financial Times summed up the grim reality: “The
annual incomes of the bottom 90 percent of US families have been
essentially flat since 1973—having risen only by 10 percent in real
terms over the past 37 years”—despite the rise in two-income homes.
Over the same period, however, the incomes of the top 1 percent have
smashed through the roof.
Consider the fantastic growth of
billionaires in the United States over a very short time. When Forbes
magazine launched its ranking of the nation’s ultra wealthy in 1982, the
“price of admission” into this prestigious club was just $75 million of
net worth. Today, as Forbes reported, even after adjusting for
inflation, “this year’s entry fee ($1.1 billion) is roughly six times what it was 30 years ago.
Here is a look at the residents of the Forbes 400 penthouse, otherwise known as the 1 percent: “The
combined net worth of the 2012 class of the 400 richest Americans is
$1.7 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion a year ago. The average net worth
of a Forbes 400 member is a staggering $4.2 billion, up from $3.8
billion, and the highest ever, as two-thirds of the individuals added to
their fortunes in the past year.”
Now compare those figures to 1982, when
there were just 13 billionaires while the total worth of the 400 club
was just $93 billion. Despite what the super rich wish to believe, this
massive hoarding of wealth is working against the American people.
For those who have forgotten what the
economic climate inside of the United States was like before the 2008
economic tsunami made landfall, consider the following. The Economist,
quoting Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institute, reported that “between 1974 and 2004 median wages for men in their 30s, adjusted for inflation, fell by 12% from $40,000 to $35,000.”
The Wall Street Journal, calling this middle-class bloodletting “the lost decade,” reported: “The
inflation-adjusted income of the median household—smack in the middle
of the populace—fell 4.8% between 2000 and 2009, even worse than the
1970s, when median income rose 1.9% despite high unemployment and
inflation. Between 2007 and 2009, incomes fell 4.2%.”
The article provided a candid comment by
Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the right leaning American
Enterprise Institute: “It’s going to be a long, hard slog back to what most Americans think of as normalcy or prosperous times.”
That dire prognosis may eventually prove to be overly optimistic since
many economists believe the best days of the American economy are gone
forever.
The hardest thing to accept about this
fantastic reversal of fortune for so many American people is that much
of the present pain and suffering was largely avoidable. It would have
required self-restraint, political will, and very little sacrifice, but
the bleeding of the American middle class was nothing less than a
deliberate, premeditated crime.
As the Financial Times revealed, “the
share of the US income that goes to workers as wages rather than to
investors as profits…has fallen to its lowest level since records began
after the Second World War.” The world’s most reputable business newspaper was forced to admit that “something strange and unprecedented is going on” inside the US economy.
Here comes the bloody kicker: “If
wages were at their postwar average share of 63 percent, workers would
earn an extra $740bn this year, about $5,000 per worker,” the FT
article reveals. Labor’s slice of the income pie has decreased to 58
percent, a historic low that still has not hit bottom. This
unprecedented disparity in wage distribution explains why the US economy
is furiously spinning its wheels, while only the corporations seem to
be advancing.
Meanwhile, labor is always one precarious step away from becoming road kill. “The
decline in the US labor share, along with a shift of labor income
towards higher earners, may be an important part of why the US economic
recovery is so sluggish,” the article concludes. “Instead of hoarding
labor and cutting prices to grab market share, companies are sacking
workers, holding prices and choosing to buy back their own equity rather
than make new investments.”
Clearly, the American corporate elite –
now fully blessed with the political representation originally designed
for We the People – is indulging itself to an all-you-can-eat
smorgasbord at the salary trough, and with a void of democratic
procedure inside the workplace, nobody is forcing them away from the
table.
What the American worker desperately
needs today is a separation of business from politics, similar to the
way the world of politics was separated from the world of religion. He
also needs democratic representation inside of the workplace.
“The mission of democratic statecraft…,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “is
to give society a chance of controlling the energies let loose by
science and technology. Democratic leadership is the art of fostering
and managing innovation in the service of a free community.”
A person need not be a Marxist to
understand a very simple universal truth: Without vibrant representation
both in the workplace and at home, the individuals at the top of the
corporate pyramid will exploit the people in the eternal quest for
greater profit. At that point, with the corporate overlords in bed with
our political representatives, and democratic procedure totally absent
inside of the corporate fortress, fascist is the only way to define such
a brutal system.
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And the LibLabCon, Unions, UAF etc are where?
In the pockets of the FASCIST CORPORATIONS that's where.
Nationalists at Wigan Patriot have been warning you for years that we are now living a TRUE FASCIST STATE.
Yet the Donkeys who are called the "ELECTORATE" keep voting for the FASCIST DICTATORS, too dumbed down or ignorant to care.
Thatcher (spit, spit pthwww) was the one who gave greed its reign and destroyed a homogenous society in the process of giving the British Silverware away away to Foreign Fascist Corporations (If you see Sid tell him).
If you want to end this and distribute wealth from those who have more than anyone could ever need or dream of then you have to vote for NATIONALIST PARTIES.
The BNP I'm sad to say isn't willing to work with other Nationalist Parties for the good of the Indigenous Population of Britain which means you should ignore them.
You have other choices, the main one being the new Nationalist Party that we have long been waiting for THE BRITISH DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
If your not willing to take a chance on them now then you might aswell wave goodbye to Britain and prepare for worse to come for you and your families in the FASCIST FUTURE being planned and implemented as we speak.
YOU are just another slave, when are you going to break the bonds that bind you ?
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