Link: The Skinny – That Austerity Business, March 2020
That Austerity Business
An Extremely Informal History of Corporation America
Quite frankly, “America should be run like a business” is some of the funniest sh*t people ever say to me – this is because America *is* a business; in fact, embedded in the structural bones and sinew of the United States is *the* archetypal modern business model. Even to this very day the entire concept of business as you know it, was and is exported at bayonet point to much of the globe, by America.
Of course, you may be tempted to think that I’m employing artistic license in saying that but an objective examination of both the historical facts and our present society make it absolutely clear that I am not. Indeed, America is simply not a “state” in the traditional sense of the word – the nation itself originated as a company, or rather thirteen chartered companies that formed a conglomerate in 1776. Naturally you may recognize these companies by their more common title “the Thirteen Colonies” but fewer people are aware that virtually every American colony began as a chartered public-private partnership with the British crown – in essence, each colony was objectively a commercial corporation.
What business were these corporations in? Primarily land speculation at first, which naturally required the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants already living on the land; a fact that was explicitly made clear in the contracts colonists had to sign promising to murder “savages” on behalf of the chartered company once they made landfall. Over time however, the colonies (which are again private entities, owned by rich speculators and employing surplus British labor at cut rate prices – aka, the colonists themselves) eventually shifted into mass agriculture production, which in turn was fueled by a second business: slavery.
So if the colonies were really chartered company businesses in a partnership with the British crown, why did they join forces in opposition to King George and thereby reorganize as a nation? Quite frankly, it was done to escape British business regulations being enacted in the colonies. Which British regulations were they seeking to evade? The ones that said the colonists were forbidden from doing more (highly profitable) genocide, land appropriation and slavery to people located in the coveted Ohio Valley.
Ok, so if British government was in a corporate partnership with the colonies and that partnership was explicitly for the purpose of massacring Natives and taking their land for profit, why did the British work to check the colonists’ murderous ambitions in the Ohio Valley? Did they have a change of heart? Of course not – the indigenous people in the Ohio Valley were vital British allies against the French in their ongoing battle for control of North America and the British didn’t want the colonies to jeopardize that relationship at that time. Perhaps the greatest clue of all that this was the real cause of the American revolution lies in asking what did President Washington do to get rich as soon as America had beaten the British and established itself as a country? Why he conquered and parceled out the Ohio Valley to make a killing for both himself and the leading authorities in the former colonies of course.
In other words, all that sh*t you heard about billeting soldiers, taxation without representation and the tyranny of King George is simply propaganda – an archetypal case of the eventual victors putting the cart before the horse to make America come off better in the historical record. The forced billeting of British soldiers and indeed even the massacre in Boston were in RESPONSE to a brewing uprising that was erupting across the colonies; these actions were not the real CAUSE of it. In short, the uprising we know today as the American revolution was about capitalism and its result gave birth to the model modern capitalist state – the United States of America.
Specifically of course, this was and for many decades continued to be the capitalism of “killing all the indigenous people and taking their land.” Eventually this business would transform into agricultural slavery and the sale of slaves themselves, before transitioning into colonialism, neo-colonialism and ultimately our modern imperial corporate state in which the might of the whole Pig Empire military is devoted to conquering and enslaving entire markets and the impoverished (typically nonwhite) people who live within them.
Ergo – America is not a state or a nation like other countries, it’s a conglomerate of businesses built on genocide who reorganized as a state to subvert the power of the only body who could regulate their capitalist depredations – specifically, the King of England. The soul and structure of business is built into the very fiber of the American system of government and that foundational devotion to capitalism which inspired the formation of the nation has in turn colored every aspect of the always-expanding American Empire. At the end of the day, the fact that America it itself a business with nuclear weapons and a powerful army, is frankly why we’re the heartbeat of global capitalism; the source & rulers of the almighty dollar – which is of course, an American dollar.
Why Fascist Propaganda Works in a Time of Naked Neoliberal Malfeasance
One of the enduring qualities common to all truly good liars and propagandists, be they from the field of marketing, public relations or politics, is the ability to construct elaborate falsehoods and draw forth misleading conclusions in the minds of their audience simply by wrapping their lies and distortions in a single grain of truth. The trick here of course is to use the verifiable facts to provide cover and legitimacy to the ambiguations, lies and propaganda.
Typically in its crudest manifestations among reactionary movements, this propaganda technique will reveal itself in the form of correctly identifying at least some of the problems plaguing society, and then pinning the blame for those problems on a given targeted group to unite the “Volk” in opposition against the hated other.
Thus in Hitler’s rise to power we see men like Goebbels effectively marshaling “the masses” against the center-right establishment by pointing to the staggering economic problems, social disintegration and degraded infrastructure of the post WWI German State without telling a single lie about *what* was occurring. Indeed, when the Nazi party accused the German government of betraying its people they were correct about that, but the real reasons why bore no resemblance to Goebbels rhetoric.
Where the lies fit in is when that very same Nazi propaganda machine chose to blame (and then attempt to exterminate) the Jewish people, rather than German industrialists and bankers who passed on one hundred percent of the cost incurred by the Kaiser’s war to the labor class, while crying poor because of “reparations” and rolling back workers rights. Of course what this primarily proves is that healthy, informed societies don’t give power to fascists – which brings us to the modern Pig Empire.
I have made little secret about the fact that I think Donald Trump is a fascist (albeit a fairly incompetent one) and the Trump administration is an openly white nationalist endeavor – although once again, this nativist-fundamentalist cultural alliance within the administration will often be forced to take a back seat to Trump’s own enrichment; nobody gets a second scoop of ice cream until Herr Donald has had his fill after all.
Ultimately however, the fact that (at least in his first term) Trump has turned out to be more Berlusconi than Mussolini doesn’t change much about my assessment, nor does it significantly alter the intentions of men like Stephen Miller, Mike Pompeo and William Barr. Things certainly could be worse, but the Pork Reich has unquestionably already entrenched openly fascist ideology in mainstream American political thought and if Trump wins re-election, all bets are off.
Ok so how does the Trump presidency fit together with the situation in Wiemar Germany that lead to Hitler’s rise to power, besides the obvious note that in both cases the right had clearly embraced at least some form of fascism? Because the Pork Reich, and in particular Downmarket Mussolini himself are also adept at attacking and eroding faith in the *American* center-right establishment using propaganda supporting by undeniable, but uncomfortable (at least for the establishment) truths.
Let’s take for just a single example, Trump’s relentless attacks on the American corporate media and in particular his charges that the media publishes “fake news” and represents an “enemy of the American people.” Furthermore, let’s just admit to ourselves right up front that Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about the media’s purported role as truth-tellers and defenders of American democracy; the swine emperor’s self-serving motivations in this situation could not possibly be any clearer.
When Trump calls the media “fake news” he’s accusing them of political bias against him while simultaneously preconditioning his base to believe all bad stories about Herr Donald are lies. When Trump calls the press the enemy of the people, he’s trying to use the office of president and his whackjob revanchist base to intimidate the media into writing more favorable stories about him. This stuff is all very obvious to all but the most partisan observer.
The problem is that Trump’s blatant self interest isn’t the end of the story because the media does in fact lie, especially about politics, and the very nature of corporate media ensures that they are in fact “fake news.” Would it shock anyone who remembers either the selling of the Iraq war or the scorched earth campaign corporate media just ran against Bernie Sanders to learn that in 2016 (before Trump was elected) only six percent of polled Americans said they completely trusted the media?
Whether it’s a question of demonizing the labor class on behalf of elite capital, stoking hatred and fear about “official enemies” in the lead up to imperial crusades or simply uncritically accepting and reprinting obvious lies told by public officials, only a truly naive person would argue that especially corporate media in the Pig Empire doesn’t lie quite frequently.
Check out these three expanded essays for more information on this subject: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23271379 & https://www.patreon.com/posts/27191696 & https://www.patreon.com/posts/35322227
This then leaves us with the admittedly more subjective term “fake news” and for the purposes of this discussion I’m choosing to define fake news as any content presented as if it were legitimate news, that isn’t a genuine attempt to inform the public of the unvarnished truth about issues that actually matter to the population at large; copaganda videos of pigs playing with neighborhood dogs ain’t it chief.
Between listicles, autowriting programs and national newsrooms that now consist of five interns cut and pasting AP stories off the wire, I think it’s safe to say that much of modern corporate media is no longer in the business of producing “real” news. Is native advertising disguised as normal content real news? Is moronic horse race election punditry real news? Is Brett Stephens’ personal gripe about a Twitter account with nine followers, real news?
Furthermore the for-profit nature of corporate media, the demands of advertisers and the fact that it’s owned by, staffed by and created to be pleasing primarily to the affluent all work to ensure that the ideas and “facts” presented in corporate media bear little resemblance to “real news” of any kind. For more about this subject please consider reading the excellent and still extremely relevant Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomski and Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti.
Finally of course there’s the issues of open media partisanship and concealed influence trading. When Sean Hannity spends an hour telling his audience that Trump walks on water like Jesus, is that real news? When leaked emails revealed the Clinton campaign was using in-pocket reporters to secretly release articles written by the campaign itself, were those articles real news? When a PR firm buys a reporter to rehabilitate a disgraced masher ex-Senator in the New Yorker, is that *real* news?
Of course absolutely none of these truths mean sweet fuck all to Trump when he rails against the media, he’s simply employing the politics of (mostly) white grievance for personal advantage. Still it is impossible to escape the fact that despite all the media’s sputtering about authoritarianism, Trump is objectively correct about media lies and their specialization in “fake news.” He’s also correct that ideologically, the corporate media is the enemy of the people; or at least the labor class.
And how does the liberal establishment and its corporate media arm respond to these very real accusations and indictments whether they come from Trump or not? By sneering “conspiracy theorist”, accusing anyone who doesn’t buy what their selling of being secret Trumpian fascists and trotting out “fact checkers” who don’t deal in actual facts. Is it any wonder the fascists in America won the ideological battle in 2016 and have been winning almost every day since?
Frankly this is a much larger problem than Trump because the elite liberal establishment’s refusal to acknowledge the grievances of the labor class, its open trade in falsehoods and sophistry, as well as its sneering dismissal of all outrage expressed when they get caught lying to us, have created the ideal recruiting grounds for fascism in America – just as these same tactics did in Weimar Germany.
History has shown us that when everyone in society knows that everything is a lie, he who tells the more compelling story tends to win. Whether liberals and lanyards want to admit it or not we do not live in a society of technocrats, professionals and elites; we live in a white supremacist nation that encompasses a massive population loaded to the gills with reactionary ideas, even among educated liberals.
As unpleasant as they may be the implications of these two facts are obvious – “yeah it’s bad, and the brown people are responsible” is simply going to sell better than “shut up and eat your gruel; you don’t have a problem, you’re just racist” every single time. In other words, informed populations don’t choose fantasy over reality and healthy societies don’t elect fascists – the existence of Trumpism itself stands as a stunning indictment of our entire establishment and its media minions.
Or maybe I’m just lying to you on behalf of Vladimir Putin and everything is fine; who can say which is “true” in a society where were buy the version of unreality we each find most comfortable every time we open the newspaper or turn on the television? I guess you’ll have to figure that one out for yourself after all.
Takeover
I’m often asked by younger readers whose political awakening as a (often nominal) leftist occurred after the 2008 Financial Crisis, “how exactly it is that Americans could stand by and do nothing while banks, corporations and venture capitalists hoovered up all the relief money and left our grandmothers to starve in the streets after losing their homes?”
It is to be sure a difficult question, primarily because the truth is rarely considered an acceptable answer; that truth is of course that we were in shock, we were focused on our own precarious financial situations as individuals and finally, they rarely told us about the bailouts, takeovers and free corporate goodies included in the relief bills until they were already passed.
I mention this now of course because the entire Pig Empire today finds itself in the grip of the coronavirus and the resulting economic “pause” is already in the process of plunging the entire global economy into a tailspin that’s going to make 2008 look like a picnic when this is all said and done; the reasons for this are numerous, but just for a point of reference neither the 2008 financial crisis, nor the great market crash of 1928 resulted in *everyone* staying home for work and not collecting a paycheck for weeks or perhaps months on end.
If a twenty-five to thirty percent unemployment rate lead to people selling their children and roving gangs of unemployed hobos traveling the country by boxcar to find work as handymen and day laborers, do you even want to imagine what’s going to happen in a country like the United States or Canada when that number spikes towards fifty percent, or more?
As the labor class dutifully practices self isolation and tries to distinguish between inadequate relief offerings from the Democratic and Republican parties in power, it is the witching hour for the gangs of lobbyists and corporate titans of industry who have long since bought both sides of the political establishment and are now clearly treating the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity for a complete takeover of American capitalism. For a short (and undoubtedly incomplete) list of the goodies our leaders are quietly baking up for corporate America while we debate the merits of five hundred dollar a month assistance packages and paid sick leave for the tiny minority of workers who’ve lost their jobs because they’re actually sick, check out this Twitter thread by author and economics analyst Matt Stoller:
https://twitter.com/matthewstoll…/status/1241446035190358018
If you find yourself asking “what the fuck does government oversight of payments to military industrial contractors and expediting visas for workers in the meat packing industry have to do with coronavirus” please understand that you’re not alone. As detailed extensively in Naomi Klein’s truly magnificent book “The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” it has now become standard operating procedure for corporate and financial power to seize on moments of crisis to consolidate their control over both markets and our society at large; you just happen to have a front row seat to the carrion feast this time and perhaps enough political awareness to glean at least a tiny fraction of what’s going on here.
As Stoller points out however, lost in the debate about assistance to workers and bailouts for industry is any discussion whatsoever about the fate of small businesses and single proprietorships as the economy crashes in a way that may truly be unprecedented in the history of globalized capitalism. While large corporations are lining up to feast on public handouts and corporate welfare, there has been no talk whatsoever of financial relief even for the traditional “medium-sized” business that employs somewhere between twenty and fifty people.
Furthermore, apart from perhaps France, virtually no government in the West has even discussed suspending rents while the economy is paused; workers may be able to scrape by on government assistance, but you’re out of your fucking mind if you honestly believe your average sole proprietorship can pay the rent on its storefront for two to six months without being able to conduct any business because the state or country is on lockdown. However you may feel about the bourgeoisie small business owner and his (questionable) contributions to American society, this is quite literally the final death of the very same Main Street our politicians and leaders have spent the past hundred years mythologizing.
Now, perhaps you don’t care about any of this and for that I cannot judge you. After all, the small business owner has spent much of the past fifty years actively allying him or herself with elite capital and the very same systems of oppression the left fights daily. Indeed, for many of you reading this the concept of “corporate power” is largely a theoretical one, as your direct experience with expressions of that power pretty much come down to purchases you make on Amazon and the periodic visit to a big box store somewhere just outside your local metro area. By contrast your experience with the small business owner who openly flouts labor laws and survives only by wringing every ounce of value from every single one of his employees on an ongoing basis, (because without slave driving his underpaid staff, he’d have already been crushed by economies of scale long ago) is quite direct and immediate – he’s your boss.
Finally, some of you may find that you just aren’t all that worried about a world where every coffee shop is a Starbucks, every restaurant is a TGI Fridays and your local grocery story has finally been replaced by a Walmart selling three day old produce five pennies cheaper on the pound; although I’d hazard a guess that folks who actually *work* for Amazon, Burger King and Costco might disagree with you on that point.
Setting class antagonisms and (righteous) indignation aside for a moment however, it’s hard to avoid wondering whether or not our new Demolition Man future might not have drastic consequences for the labor class as a whole. After all, if after having our teeth kicked in during back to back rigged primary contests against a liberal establishment has demonstrated anything to the burgeoning American left, it should be that we’re not going anywhere without organizing along class-based lines and for our side of the war that means the labor class and it means doing so in our work places.
All of the large corporations that are about to get billions and even trillions of dollars in public money are adamantly opposed to unions and organized labor; does not eliminating the small and medium-sized business run by bourgeoisie power endanger our negotiating position against capitalist industry and its in-pocket public servants? This isn’t just a question of available jobs and comparable pay rates either; the utter destruction of organized labor in the West has put the left on the back foot and even as I write this to you, we’re having a lot more success organizing unions in the small shop and medium-sized, single location business than we are in the openly hostile corporate environment.
While the bourgeoisie business owner has admittedly been no ally to the labor class, is this state of affairs truly reflective of material realities? Obviously in light of the theft-disguised as bailout proposals being exposed today on Twitter by Bernie Sanders himself,(https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1241728432599379970) the answer is no.
If we are to retain some sort of “humane” capitalism as all the soft leftists continue to insist is vital to the success of a “progressive” movement, aren’t most of you folks hoping to either be sole proprietors or exist in an economy full of them?
No, the small business owner has done the left no favors and may indeed deserve your scorn such as he or she stands today – but are you really prepared to doom all of your children to a life of wage slavery to soulless corporate rule because utter ruination might finally teach the obtuse bourgeoisie businessman a lesson about who his class allies really are and have always been?
What about your favorite coffee shop, or local democratically-run bookstore? What about, and this is a real example from my own life, the tiny studio your yoga teacher scratches a living out of while providing much needed and decent paying jobs to women who’ve recently left abusive homes? What about the anarcho-syndicalist grocery co-op you and your mates were hoping to open some day?
I don’t know about you, but to me, that seems too high a price to pay for a little schadenfreude and the joy of watching pompous “upper-middle class” entrepreneurs suffer a little ruin and humiliation while our corporate overlords run off into the sunset with the whole fucking ballgame.
Of course, it’s a little hard to do anything about it when we can’t congregate in groups larger than nine people because the whole hep half-world is on plague watch; probably just a coincidence right?
- nina illingworth
