The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union

.. even our police forces are for the most part not in place
to serve and protect people but rather to serve their
corporate fascist masters.

Corporate rule is exactly same like dicktatership.
All zeks serve Mission.
No peon get vote that counts.
Big Boss rules.
Little Bosses terrorize.
Serfs serve.
Big Time.

Sounds familiar, America?

No? Read words of man who once headed Supreme Corporate Presidium of the BFEE:

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." -- George W Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000

this is an unintended result of the Enlightenment.
I holler all the time, on my little blog, about the Universalism that the Enlightenment inherited from what came before.Without Reflection,and Vigilance, Reason can lead to Totalitarianism(Arendt).
The Soviets found that their version of Marx wasn't winning the Hearts and Minds, so Force was used.
We're doing the same, just stealthily.
I try mightily to avoid Walmart...but what if I need a new windw unit?
There's simply nowhere else to go, out here,on the perimeter.And I'd better get one before Labor Day, because the Machine has determined that the Herd doesn't purchase A/c's after that date, in sufficient numbers to warrant stocking them...no matter if it's in Alaska, or Texas(Heat until November)
This is Efficiency///which is the Reason for Being for Corps(e)...Reason run Rampant, Universalised, without much Thought given to Individuals or Regions.
This was, of course, forecast as far back a s Adam Smith. Which is a pretty wild thought.Riffing on Horkheimer/Adorno/Rosenstock-Huessy...lol.(Geek Alert)

The Cold War was not an object lesson of how we should run the US for crying out loud. Cheney's the worst--he'd fit right in with the Politburo.

But it'll be SO different from communism! lol

Your dollar speaks louder than your vote today.

corporations, by and large, only exists because we choose them. They depend utterly on the continual flow of cash that our behaviors and daily choices provide - which essentially makes them almost purely democratic constructs.

If people chose to vote away their freedom, that says more about people than anything else. If they chose to change, if they chose to live differently, they certainly can.

Today's corporations aren't anything close to what you describe.

especially if one looks at our financial choices as "voting with our wallets".

I'm not saying I like it - I won't set foot in a w-mart myself, for example, but the store is always busy, and other stores it competes with have gone out of business because more people vote for w-mart. W-mart exists on the scale it does because people chose it to be so. Other corporations exist in the same way, and there are very few that would survive long if people in general chose otherwise.

Reagan is another example of a "purely democratic construct". I couldn't stand him myself and couldn't imagine how anyone voted for him, but nevertheless people in general did choose him. Which says more about human nature, disappointing as it may be sometimes, than about how we might be powerless and helpless.

You cannot be serious.

Blackwater provides my mercenary squads, and any time I want to buy a billion in naked derivatives, I turn to Goldman Sachs.

And where do you think I'm going to place that $10 million ad buy tomorrow? FOX, of course!

Governments pay for mercenaries, but people chose governments. Fox would evaporate overnight if people didn't chose to watch it, and any bank that people stopped depositing money in would fold very soon.

I'd rather have people look at the many choices they make daily and how they affect the world we all live in, that convince them they are powerless and helpless. People can change their lives, they can make a difference, and enough people acting toward an ideal can change the world.

Other than that, I watch the daily stream of customers in and out of the w-mart, most of whom believe they amount to nothing and make no difference at all; and voting (or not) with similar lack of care.

but the Soviet Union didn't have the unemployment we have so the citizens were actually better off in that regard.

like bread and clothes.

and you are not talking to someone who is interested in your red-baiting.

One of them flew into Russia on Aeroflot and he said it was the worst flying experience he had ever had. Both he and the other professor confirmed that there were lines to buy basic daily items, and that was as late as 1987. The Soviet economy was not oriented toward consumer goods, it was geared toward "industrial production", which was essentially producing products for other industries.

since it wasn't even introduced until 1986

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev

and America had it's.

All the same, no way the Soviets would have allowed DU on there.

Good luck keeping your job.

Do you have any idea what the term means?

Joseph McCarthy engaged in red-baiting. That is, he accused numerous people of being members of the Communist Party, whether they were or not. All I have done is point out something that was a part of life in the old USSR.

and I'm not interested in your "facts".

and there were no gulags-- they were all Solzhenitsyn's imagination

Let it go Palmer.

They focused very heavily on the military, something the U.S. does as well. Also, Russia went from being a semi-feudal state to being a world superpower in less than 50 years. Central planning worked as far as industrialization goes. Had the USSR organized itself along Syndicalist lines, and actually placed power in the hands of the workers it could have avoided its other problems such as authoritarianism.

We wouldn't know what to do with our freedom if we still had it.
Mandates = Freedom

None.

However, it's a lot easier to emancipate yourself from corporations, not so much a state nationalized apparatus.

corporations are eating us alive ... as are the 1% who own most of the country. Anytime just a few people are running everything we seem to have problems. I'd love to see actual democracy in action.

You never have the option not to shop at the nationalized food dispensaries.

Corporations are ripe for cronyism, nepotism, and outright corruption.

Nationalized state assets are not immune from that, either.

Indeed, I argue that all centralized capital formations encourage it and make it more viable.

The corporations are irrelevant from my vantage point.

He argued that having a company assemble their products in Mexico and ship them to L.A. for distribution and sell them in New York is really no different than what the USSR did. He said you are still operating within a massive command economy. I don't necessary agree that you can emancipate yourself from corporations. You can choose not to shop at Wal-Mart, but you will have to shop somewhere. Perhaps if you are lucky you can avoid corporations, but you are stuck with capitalism.

His anarchist views tend to be cut from interviews, unfortunately, so a lot of people don't see the end result of his arguments.

I think that emancipating yourself from corporations is still possible, and I believe that corporations are going to be marginalized in due course as open source, open hardware in particularly, starts to encroach upon their space. It's only a matter of time and yes there will be a push back against it because some people would prefer their hands be held by corporations just as some would prefer their hands be held by the state.

I told that to a state appointed board one time. That the whole process we were enmeshed in reminded me of Soviet Russian Communism. That no matter what the people thought and no matter what the science said, there were just a few people whom, behind closed doors, were making all the decisions that affected millions of people in the region.

My side ended up winning. Or rather, we influenced the decision makers to change their minds, get out of the rut and make progress.

Reflecting on that and other more recent campaigns, it is reality that major decisions are made day in and day out by the 1%. It isn't communism in its purist sense, but Soviet style of government. Like Bush said, it would be great if this were a dictatorship, as long as he, Bush was the dictator.

America, i love you for what you could be and might have been!

too powerful -- whether because it's too big, or controls too much weaponry relative to the rest of the world, or too much wealth, or too much information.

Doesn't matter if it's a capitalist or a communist government, or a corporation, or a foundation, or a church, or a union, or the owners of the media, or anything else. Once it reaches a certain scale in power relative to everyone else, it's no longer accountable to everyone else, and becomes an irresistible target for hijacking by sociopaths.

Saying corporations aren't people might or might not be helpful, but isn't going to fix this basic problem. There will still be those who seek to amass disproportionate power via other means.

I am NOT saying it's hopeless. What I hope for is more discussion about new ways of thinking about systemic solutions, new kinds of checks and balances.

"the iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties.[1] It claims that rule by an elite - or "oligarchy" is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.[2] Michels particularly addressed the application of this law to democracy, and stated: "It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy."[3] He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."[4] Michels stated that the official goal of democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, that he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Like your signature quote, too.

now into my notes for dystpia it goes

I make and sell reasonably priced jewelry that is carefully made, unique, and unlike anything available at a big box or the mall. The stuff I do cannot be mass produced at the same level of quality for the price. It can only be done by hand and takes too much time for factory production.

Jewelry in a similar range of materials and price is mass produced in India and the far east, but the quality of the workmanship and materials is very poor and it shows. The range of materials they use is limited to mass market sensibilities and the cut stones and designs are standardized to speed production.

No two pieces I make are the same, except for earring pairs, and then no two pairs are the same. People seem to like what I do, they know they are getting something affordable, but unique and from the hand of an artist. It has taken some time and effort to develop work that can keep affordable and artistic and still make a buck at it. It can be done.

This model works. I expect it works in many different places.

When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, my dad was in the Air Force and he was transferred all over the place. We traveled a great deal on America's highways. There were noticeable regional differences from town to town and state to state in architecture, foods, even the accents of Americans when they spoke. Now if you were dropped in to several widely separated mid-sized town at random, you'd see the same handful of stores selling tires, fast food, clothes, and other things with the same store fronts surrounded by similar-looking suburban enclaves. You might have trouble telling the places apart. America has become very homogenized and the local color that privately-owned business brought to the downtown area is almost gone. I love certain things about modern America including the progress made in human rights, medicine, and science. But there are things about the older America I wish we could bring back. I know some of it has to do with the taste you acquire from growing up in a certain environment. I personally despise the look of modern architecture and the fact that most American cities now all look the same, with their steel and glass cubes that have zero personality. When I was a kid and my father was transferred to Colorado Springs in the 60s, they tore down the beautiful Antler's Hotel, the main downtown feature of charm so that a developer could put up a rectangular steel and glass monstrosity. As a lawyer, I always hated working in these buildings as you could not open a window to get fresh air. They were like crypts and I was much happier working in old buildings made of brick or stone remaining in older parts of town where you could open a window and listen to the life on the street outside. Somehow, that seemed more human. I know that part of my discontent is just the fact I'm an old-timer and hate a lot of modern things. But I think this article is very true and that America is losing its organically-grown character and is becoming an extension of corporate culture, centrally planned, based on how to spend the least and make the most profit. Culture and charm have no place in that world.