The Problem of American Corporate Fascism

The state of affairs, at present….

I live on the left coast of the American empire, in the small city of Cypress, California, located behind the “Orange Curtain” (Orange County), six miles west of “The Magic Kingdom,” and twenty-five miles east of Los Angeles.

This mecca state for money and wealth is currently broke. Where did the money go? How does so much commerce and development occur within such a rich state, with an 8.25 percent state tax rate, and end up broke? It is a mystery, a riddle, shrouded in an enigma, and probably beneath scandals of pilfered funds and diverted monies. At any rate we are in a deep state tax deficit, with food programs for the poor, medical insurance for poor children, special programs for children with developmental disorders and other diseases, and programs to care for the sick and elderly are being slashed…by the “Governator” himself, Arnold Schwarzenneger. And this he did by using a line-item veto power, AFTER the state Republican and Democrats had severely trimmed the state budget presented to him. Arnold’s cold heart will freeze up his chances of ever being re-elected governor of this state. This I would almost guarantee, but masses of short-sighted people still watch FOX NEWS and believe that they are actually watching “news,” so all bets are off.

Our empire, the U.S. Of A., is also broke, deeply into debt, and the robbers are not only walking the streets without criminal culpability, but they have been richly rewarded for their crimes, even put in charge of mending the financial damage thwarted upon the American public by these same dastardly folk. These “white collar” criminals fall into a different category, because the criminals belong to corporations deemed “too big to fail.” And, fail they did not.

The dastardly folk who run these sure-to-fail-without-any-federal-bailout-money institutions gave themselves money—lots of money, two trillion dollars–from American taxpayers and quickly upped the bonuses for themselves and their fellow thieves. “Mission accomplished.”

We either must believe this to be the truth, that these are thieves of the highest order without a shred of social conscience, or we have to believe that market strategists and economic experts are just as successful as calculating risks and futures from market and financial stats as they would be reading tea leaves or chicken entrails. So, its either malice or stupidity, perhaps some concert of the two, which have created the disaster at hand, which has stretched out through the financial and corporate tentacles of Wall Street and American high finance to banks and financial institutions across the globe.

America is a corporate fascist state with a thin facade of a democratic republic. Perhaps I am being too harsh? America is a system of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. The precedent was set in a U. S. federal court in the latter part of the 19^th century, giving a corporation the same constitutional rights and privileges of an individual American citizen. Keep in mind that humans develop moral values. Corporations are AMORAL. Their only goal is to proliferate profits through the exploitation of any and all people and resources. The legal precedent was laid down, and has been unchallenged by legal writ or legislation to undo it, allowing corporate behemoths—systemic monsters comprised of people, machines and computers–to gain nearly complete power over the electoral, legislative and administrative functions of our government. And, this occurs at all levels—local, state and federal.

Our illusion of democracy is advanced by the act of going into a voting booth each election and thinking we make a difference. Have you noticed any yet?!!! Yes, the rhetoric is different, the faces change, but as to changes or improvements to your own personal plight, I repeat. Have you noticed any yet?!!!

Corporate lobbyists line the halls and pockets of congressional and senatorial offices, contributing vast sums of money to campaign funds, with many strings attached. Laws governing corporate activity are usually written by lawyers representing the same corporations being regulated. Nearly every regulatory agency and cabinet post that has been created to oversee and regulate corporate activity to preserve the health, safety and well-being of American citizens and their environment is filled with people who sit on the executive boards of the very same corporations which they are to supposedly scrutinize, criticize and hold their executives’ feet to the fire for enforcement.

Finance, defense and energy corporations dictate our foreign policy, often to the detriment of the American people and the people of foreign lands. War has been regularly and perpetually conducted in nations around the world by our military and intelligence forces to ensure a constant turnover of military hardware since the end of WWII. For more on this read William Blum’s KILLING HOPE: U.S. MILITARY AND CIA INTERVENTIONS SINCE WWII. Most of these interventions and incursions had nothing to do with defending America, our way of life, nor defending the good of the invaded or intervened nation or its people. Almost always, such incursions are conducted to advance the interests of an America corporation or cartel of corporations, and usually energy corporations and their affiliated corporate associates.

Pharmaceutical corporations lobbied successfully, and commandeered the Medicare reform bill of Bush’s last year to prevent Medicare from negotiating prices of pharmaceuticals with the pharmaceutical companies.  Pharmaceutical, health insurance and medical corporate interests, conflicting with the interests of the American public, are actually sitting on the committees that will decide what health care reform, if any, we may look forward to.  Conflict of interest takes on a new dimension in this severe breech of ethics.

During the Bush administration, dozens of scientific health, safety and environmental reports were hidden, trashed or omitted in allowing corporate interests to develop or practice industrial activities that would cause harm to people and the environment.

The whole of the Iraq war was conceived around a cartel of profiteering private corporate interests who would stand to richly benefit from the horror and death of such an enterprise, many with “no-bid” contracts, such as Halliburton, and the war itself was entered into through lies, deceptions and misinformation, and without relevance to any international effort to stem extremist terrorist activity.

We can be thankful, but not to ourselves, that corporations need consumers and labor. How long such corporations will need American consumers and labor remains to be seen. Our industrial manufacturing base has been gutted by international corporations, many of which were once American corporations, but expanded their interests globally, and moved their manufacturing operations to the low-cost labor of developing countries.  Wars, such as the Iraq War, and many more before it, have benefitted military and energy corporations and affiliated technical corporations as well at the high human cost of massive deaths and horror to a population, and a severe drain on American taxpayer funds.  If our nation’s economy and infrastructure is gutted by the amoral profiteering activities of massive corporations, and they cannot find their pools of labor and consumers here, they will seek elsewhere.  An amoral animal that eats money is a predator that will go wherever there is prey.  Only a government that reflects the human values of its citizens can control such a beast.

So, now we are a service-based economy, but any service which does not require a live and able technician to be physically present, are being out-sourced to India and other countries by once-American corporations, i. e., IBM, Microsoft, Compaq and HP, Dell computers, among a long list of others.

Our national debt is beyond belief, about twelve trillion dollars. Our budget deficit is currently dipping down to two trillion dollars.

Does it make any difference that nothing of real value backs the paper money being printed into American circulation? I think so. I say, turn the figures in the Federal Reserve Bank software totals back to “0” and let’s just print all the paper we can. Let’s just mail a million dollars in cash to each household in America and start over. Consumers and workers will have chance to actually realize a bit of the American Dream. Now that’s a stimulating stimulus package! And wouldn’t it be fun to just sit back and watch what happens?

Don’t think that this is such a radical idea. We just did it for bank execs a few months ago.

Notice, I wrote all of the above without any specific mention to the worth of any political party or particular political official. It’s about the system, boys and girls. The changing names, faces and party affiliations mean nothing if all politically elected officials are subject to the same systemic problems affecting all of them…and all of us.

It’s about the corporations, the money and the laws. Solution: legislate that corporations cease enjoying the rights and privileges of individual U.S. Citizens, that all elections be publicly financed, that corporate lobbying be illegal, and that any and all regulatory chair and cabinet positions MUST be held by people not directly associated, employed, nor receiving any financial compensation from, corporations that such regulatory agencies and cabinet offices are created to regulate.

This would be a start for REAL change, and not just “chump” change.

Amen.

MH

The Incredible Intoxication of Hope

I’m drunk, after an entire week, still reeling from the moment. I have no desire to sober up too soon, for I may have only until a week in January to enjoy this rollicking euphoric high. We elected the young senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, to be our next president, ushering in the the hope for a new age of reason, compassion and a desire for peace within our nation and with others. This hope is like a mad light in the midst of a very, very New American Dark Age. This New Dark Age began long before many others would suggest, at least in my own personal estimation. It probably sowed its seed in the arrogance of a Post World War II American empire, a bloated nation that believed it could wield its military might and economic power whenever and wherever it desired. Eisenhower openly and clearly warned us of the massive money-making military industrial complex, with revolving doors between Pentagon officers and executives who sat on the corporate boards of an industry that thrived on the blood and death of masses of people. Perpetual war for perpetual profit. This was not a conspiracy of intent, but a conspiracy of systemic corporate goals, the main one being to proliferate ever-expanding profits through the exploitation of any and all resources, human and material, and to manipulate governments across the globe to cater to the will of this mad machine. Those that refused would simply be eliminated. For an in depth look at US military and CIA incursions into other lands since the end of World War II, read William Blum’s book, KILLING HOPE. For an in depth analysis of the economic and ideological mythologies that propelled these endeavors, read Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE.

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A Light in the Darkness — The Solstice is Here

December 23rd…

The day after my youngest daughter, Lauren’s, 27th birthday which she celebrated by jumping out of an airplane and free-falling for a minute, then parachuting back down to earth. Now there is a light in the darkness of winter.

We eliptically fade from the warmth of the sun this time of year, the northern hemisphere of the earth receding from the light to the darkness of winter. So, we make our own light, as is fitting for a truly enlightened species to do. We light the darkness of winter with love and celebration of family and friends, creating festivals where we deck trees and homes with little points of light, light our fires inside, and light our souls with music, merriment, food and wine. Some of us worship a god, born as a human beneath the Star of the East, followed by three points of light called the Magi, which led them to the newborn son-god. Others of us celebrate directly to contrast the real darkness of winter, and its metaphors of life and death against the reality of light and dark. We reminisce fondly about the years gone by, missing those no longer with us, within our brief flash of conscious human finitude and cling fondly to our cherished family members and friends with us now. We share thoughts, feelings and stories of Christmases gone by, bid farewell to another year, and usher in the new year with more celebration, song and merriment.

It is fitting for us, for we are a self-referential species, beings with the remarkable ability to stand back from ourselves and look back at our selves and our universe through the mirrors of our minds. This strange cosmic loop of self-reflective consciousness emerging from an evolving fourteen-plus-billion-year-0ld universe on this tiny, insignificant blue dot somewhere on the fringes of the Milky Way. As Carl Sagan marvelously put it, “We may be one of millions of self-reflective conscious intelligent species in the universe or, possibly, the only intelligent self-reflective species. We haven’t heard from others yet, so we don’t yet know which is true. Whether a single intelligent species or one of many, we are mirrors of the universe, we are the way for the Cosmos to know itself.”

We may not be THE beacon for learning in the universe, but we are certainly one beacon of enlightenment, for as long as we continue as a species. This, I think, is our greatest legacy and the only TRUE religious journey we can make, through a self-checking process called the Scientific Method.  It is a mean, a tool, by which we may observe nature, study, hypothesize, test our assumptions.  We can retest them, over and over again, through ourselves and others, until we can be reasonably sure of the reliability and validity, or lack thereof, of our hypotheses formed about what we sense.  We can quantify our information and take precise measurements to calculate our results.  We change course as necessary, according to our results reflected against the collective information base of scientists who have gone before us and the value of our own studies and calculations.   in a devoted, yet skeptical, journey toward understanding our selves and the universe in which we live.   It’s a pathway to truth, branching roads of discovery built upon the works of millions of researchers, thinkers and scientists throughout human history.

If we are sensible enough not to allow the use of the terrible destructive force of nuclear weapons that we have built, if we are reasonable enough to suspend our irrational religious and ideological dogmas that divide us to extreme anger and violence, then we have a chance to persist for a while in this universe. I hope that the light of knowledge and understanding can overwhelm the dark threat that we have created for ourselves.

We have the technological means to connect each other on a global scale. We have the technology, also, to feed and educate the planet of humanity, and to to educate each other about a reasonable population growth that does not consume all of our available resources and make such enlightenment, or even survival, of exploding human populations very probable. We still have much to learn and we must do so before we make a fatal nuclear mistake.

May this fleeting flash of human conscious finitude find the light of learning, compassion, and the desire for peace to do the right thing in the face of our own destructive power, perhaps to even disarm all of our nuclear weapons in the near future.

My wish for peace to all humanity.

Amen.
MH Pathfinder.

Vote on this Historic Presidential Election Day

Happy historical election day!  Vote!

For accurate accounts and figures from election tallies, election polls, etc.
go to the following link:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/pollster%20ratings

To stay informed on the many ways in which our votes can, and have been, stolen and or manipulated (from members of both political parties)
go to these links:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
http://www.gregpalast.org

Also, I strongly recommend a documentary on the easy method of hacking into electronic voting machines:
“Hacking Democracy”.  As a computer and software technical afficiendo, I recommend voting with paper ballots whenever and wherever possible.

Here it is…  This will be one of the most sensational days in U.S. history, a beginning step into the New Age of American Enlightenment, and out of the New American Dark Age, through which we have endured these past dreadful eight years.  Remnants of the Dark Age will remain, not the least of which will be the fascist corporate hold on American politics through unchecked lobbyist efforts.  The seeds of which began back in the Reagan Era, when average Americans had most of their tax write-offs destroyed, then the Savings and Loan scandal was paid for with our newly inflated taxes, letting the culprits who caused it off Scott-free, and we ended up the Reagan years with the largest national budget deficits in our history up to that point.  My how history repeats itself.  We, and Obama, will have much to do in order to raise working class American citizens from their current plight of stagnant or diminishing wages, diminishing employment opportunities, and being a severe illness away from bankruptcy, and rectifying the unjust and unfair tax burdens that have been redistributed over the past fifty years through fascist corporate alliances between business and government.  On the international scale, Obama will have to act quickly to dismantle Guantanemo Bay, undo the Bush torture policies and rendition practices, and establish intelligent diplomacy among our fellow nations to establish a moral leadership role in the world.

Obama and his new cabinet will have to work fast and furiously, with courage and determination, in order to establish bluntly that this new government is here for the good of the commons and the vast majority of citizens, and a mutual respect for nations of the world, and that the stagnant status quo of the past thirty-eight years since Reagan is over.  I am hoping that Obama will create a new and progressive national program to develop sustainable and renewable energy supplies, to restore the nation’s crumbling infrastructures, with an emphatic address to the solutions to deal with effects of global warming.  These are the keys that will open the doors to energy independence, environmental stability, and in the process, restore both our domestic economy and our international integrity.  To do this they must have the weight of public pressure behind them, they will need us to be active and vocal in every which way we can be.  Obama and his cabinet will have to work against the tide of greedy corporate interests invested in maintaining their power bases at the expense of citizens both here and abroad.

I believe this can be done.  As the financial institutions have totally disregarded the trillions of dollars in debt created through our monetary system to continue their massive profiteering schemes, Obama and his cabinet will have to do the same.  Currency  valuations have been arbitrary and substantially meaningless since the end of the gold standard.  We are all playing with computers and promissary notes in a monetary system that produces nothing but interest and debt for all.  It’s a game of rising promissary note values that have become legal tender for markets of monies and commodities.  The markets trade digits on a computer screen.  Nothing real ever changes hands.  Nothing of legal value is tendered through our currency notes, only loans given arbitrary value are backing the paper that is printed and distributed into the system.  Only three percent of the monies in our monetary system is actual paper currency.  Ninety-seven percent of the monies exchanged in markets and trade are only digits in a computer program, seen as electronic digits on a monitor screen.  Therefore, in order to restore the integrity of an economic system, the same disregard for the illusions of value must be utilized in order to redistribute the wealth of nations into the hands of their citizens.

FDR created the New Deal programs in the thirties in much this same way.  No real money is created by the Federal Reserve System or through the banks to which currency and its arbitrary values, interest and debt, are distributed.  It’s all a game of illusions, but FDR simply changed the rules of the game to favor the working classes instead of the corporate executives and wealthy classes.  It worked, and eventually even the corporate executives and shareholders benefitted.  Why?  Because it is true that the real value of an economy begins at the lowest levels through workers and consumers.  Reaganomic “trickle-down” mythology is only that.  Nothing ever trickles down from the coffers of the wealthy into the hands of poor, without socialized interventions to ensure that such social supports and benefits are put into place.  FDR understood this in the aftermath of the Great Depression.  I believe that Barrack Obama has a firm grasp on these concepts, as well.  It remains to be seen how much he can put into play without interference from corporate lobbyists and the pressure that they are sure to apply..

Even with all of the above, with quick and determined efforts, it will be a long process to undo the damage.

We will have our first black president, and one of the most intelligent and benevolent souls ever to hold the office of the presidency of the United States.   There are so many who are voting in this election who have not voted before–young and old, black, brown, yellow and white.  Many people, young and old–are energized by Obama’s presence and emotional rhetoric.  I am one of those.  There is a sincerity and resolve to do good that I have not seen in a presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter, the last truly great president, in my own humble estimation, and my favorite ex-president.  But Obama has much more.  He has a charisma that has energized an active an youthful progressive base in America like no other candidate has done before him.  He has energized the citizens of the world, as well.

Forgive me for wanting to be this hopeful at this point in time in our history.  I do have a cynical side that has witnessed American politics for the past half century with a keen sense of the money and power ties that can undo the most hopeful of humanitarian agendas, ever since I picked up my first copies of The Nation, The Progressive, and the New Republic magazines at the library as teenager.  I’ve had my illusions of American and world politics abused very early, so I know what can undo Obama, and even the questionable promises he has put forth during his campaign with which I take great exception.  I also know that the moment can make the man.  There has never been a moment like this in American history, and I think that the man might well rise to this momentous occasion and be a lightning rod for Americans to do outstanding things that might have seemed impossible with the kinds of current financial, environmental and political crises facing us now.  My hope is turned on for now.  History is being made.

Amen

M H Pathfinder

Cyberia…an Information Age

Welcome to Cyberia.  Let me show you around.  I’m M.H. Pathfinder, a veteran of this transcendent maze of changing humanity and our transitional forms.  We have extended our synthetic abilities far beyond the imaginings of an object or idea, from which we can then produce from natural and or synthetic resources a utilitarian and/or aesthetic shape, expression or form.  We have harnessed, and unharnessed energies and forces, created new elements, and found the means to externalize our thoughts and mental functions into solid state circuitry, metal and plastic.  We have found the means to create contraptions that lift us into the stratosphere in pressurized compartments and fly around the globe, or even…to the moon.  We have robotized our eyes, ears, and other senses into interplanetary probes, and probes that explore the depths of the deepest seas.  We have delved into the subatomic realms of matter and envision a time when we may find the essence of all things.

We have much to learn.  We still rely too much on limited and non-renewable fossil fuels to energize our societies.  We cannot expend any more energy on the heightened competition for oil.  In fact, we cannot afford for a moment to continue to rely upon oil and gasoline as the means to fuel our transportion and energy needs.  Many believe we have reached our peak oil production.  If we do not act with urgency to develoop renewable fuel and energy technologies, human society will perish, probably within less than a couple of centuries, if we are even lucky to last that long.

If we do learn and do act to salvage our great and wondrous reflective human existence, we can propel our adventures of discovery and learning into wider realms, supported through a global communications network of satellites, computers and a host of many, many other communications devices.