Corporatism.
I've realized in talking to my conservative friends over the last few weeks that not many people understand what I mean when I use this word. Liberals as a whole tend to express ire over what they see as unjust exemption of corporation from taxation while conservatives argue that taxing business ultimately slows economic growth and job creation. But neither of these stances has anything to do with corporatism.
Corporatism is the use of our political system to leverage business against us. It is a hostile takeover of our country that makes us believe we're working on something together while we effectively clear the path for the export of the country's resources and wealth.
Before I begin, I understand that what I'm about to say can be jarring. It sounds downright conspiratorial at first particularly if you are a party loyalist. We never really want to take a hard look at the possibility that we're being used, and to follow the rise of corporatism you have to do exactly that. For this article, you have to stop being a conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, and just see the political parties a social organizations that manage the process of placing people into leadership of the United States.
Now we go back in time.
Fifty years ago and beyond, International business meant exports. Multinational Corporations would build in their home country and then seek to broaden sales based on worldwide demand. Local demand always took priority because the shorter you had to ship your goods the less it cost and the more profit you made. But more many industries, growth depended on finding markets bigger than were locally available.
It is in this environment that the Republican approach to a libertarian view of business took root. The theory was that if business was allowed to flourish with minimal taxation and regulation, substantial profits made by that business would be used to expand operations – the facilities, the secondary markets attached to that business, and employment all of which pulled up the US standard of living and quality of life. The more business made, the more business would want to make, the more business would spend on making things in the US.
For a while, this was true.
Business, at least the parts we care about for this article, changed dramatically starting roughly in the late 1960's and 70's. Corporations figured out they could not only hunt down and sell to international markets as they had in the past, but could use investment in weak third world governments and poor countries to shape them into the ideal production grounds. By giving South American governments huge loans to build infrastructure useful to production and profits, they gained leverage politically as well. Using that leverage they removed laws that restricted the extraction of profits or limitations on environmental impact that might increase costs.
This process of economically dominating a weak countries by corporations didn't go unnoticed. Called 'Neo-Colonialism' by critics, writers all over the world decried what they saw was a new form of imperialism by the United States and Europe. Countries subjugated to corporate neo-colonialsim had no control of their own economy and were simply strip-mined of resources and cheap labor to produce revenue that was never spent in the country where they were acquired. In fact, the target countries ended up owing the corporations for the loans provided to them that built the infrastructure being used to pillage them. In effect, these countries were paying for their own destruction.
Appalled at the effects created by this kind of business on the people of these countries who often lived in extreme poverty, a movement called South American Liberation Theology arose from the Catholic church. This group was based around trying to stop what amounted to social genocide by these corporate controlled countries on their own people.
The average US voter was unaware of any of this unless they were an political science or religion academic. What they were aware of was growing unrest in South America and severe economic instability. The media portrayed a series of South American revolutions and uprisings in the 80's as the rise of communism and socialism on our doorstep. What was happening, however, was more complicated. These countries, impoverished and exploited by pure capitalist control, were turning to socialism in desperation to try to regain some say in their future. Iran/Contra, for instance, was far more about economics than it was political ideology.
Multinational corporations had evolved. They now understood that they could do more than just sell to international markets. They could, in fact, take control of specific international markets and shape them into ideal production sources free of constraining regulations and taxes. This model would result in a new kind of low cost production that would dominate retail in the United States: K-Marts and Sears which had been variety department stores that marketed to US customers by virtue of being one-stop shops were replaced by Target, Walmart, and Costco that could offer an impossible range of products and incredibly cheap prices – all built on the ability to produce those products in environments where labor cost 10% of what it did in the US and there were no regulations of consequence. This new breed of Multinational was the first generation of Corporatists – businesses that saw themselves as governments without a country. They literally saw their interests as independent of any one nation people.
To this ends, the corporatists began to levy a larger and lager hand in US politics. Using the Republican platform that was already friendly to a libertarian view of business, they sought to ease restrictions on taxation and regulation in the name of stimulating the economy.
Over time, it became possible for multinational companies to pursue business in an entirely different fashion. Unlike the days of old where they invested heavily in their own country as a home base and then extended their reach, the new multinational had no home country at all. They shopped for the best legal forum and moved their capital to the place that was best for business: production in China, assembly in Nebraska, raw materials from Brazil, and profits in Switzerland all incorporated in Delaware. This kind of company had no reason to invest in any single market. It, was, in fact, cheaper to move capital to a good location, use that resources as long as they lasted, then extract the capital and allow the local government to handle the clean-up once it inevitably failed due to the fact that the company had invested nothing into it's longevity. Businesses thrived and profits soared, but the standard of living for Americans evened out.
Consider, for instance, a Toyota assembly plant in Nebraska. The plant is modular and, as factories go, extremely mobile. Automotive assembly is mostly robotic, and so the savings on cheap land and low property tax make employing a small number of US workers at the plant worthwhile. The cars produced are shipped all over the world and the plant gets all materials and services through pre-arranged contracts almost none of which are local. The plant will employ roughly 2000 people, no more, no less, and will never grow. There never be any secondary markets created nor will any of the profits made by it's operation be invested in Nebraska. Should things change or the costs of business rise, the plant will simply be removed and redeployed.
Welcome to new corportist business model. This model of business does not have any vested interest in the geographic locations or nations in which it operates. The only things of consequence to businesses like this are tax rates, labor costs, and regulation. Local investment is minimal. There is no central business location anymore – such as Detroit was for Chrysler. A tax cut to this kind of business is merely one more obstacle out of the way. It has no bearing on whether the company hires. It does nothing to encourage local investment. Republican tax policy designed to 'encourage' business simply adds to the bottom line and draws business only until someone else provides a better deal. In effect, this kind of company creates a governmental race to the bottom to see who will put up with the least amount of gain from having a company in their state. But conservatives are regularly being told that the original 1950's model of libertarian corporate business strategy is still in effect. It's a lie that keeps conservative voters voting again and again to line the pockets of billionaires believing they are going to create jobs or invest in their country. Neither is true. Tax cuts and deregulation have ceased to have this effect in a post-globalization corporate world.
This has been going on for nearly thirty years. But 2010 created a whole new set of changes that have defined what's happening in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and Ohio along with nearly half the states in the nation. Until 2010, campaign finance controls had forced corporatists to be careful about how they used the Republican party. In fact, they engaged in a methodical policy of distraction by turning conservatives on liberals in a way that was unprecedented in US politics. Whereas the argument over liberal social constructionist against conservative self determination had always been fiercely fought, the new effort by corportists was to turn these two philosophies into mortal enemies that referred to one another as monsters, terrorists, traitors, and worse. As conservatives and liberals attitudes towards one another shifted from disagreement to hatred, the corporatists used the Republican platform to quietly clear the way of obstacles left to take the next step.
The Supreme Court in Citizens United opened up corporate coffers to political causes. The result in the 2010 elections was staggering. Of the top 10 financial contributors to political campaigns, seven were directly associated with billionaire corportists. The three that remained were labor unions. With the midterm elections as a test case, it became clear that the new political norm in the US had finally opened up an opportunity that the corportists had been waiting for for nearly three decades – to use neocolonialist control tactics ON the United States itself and eliminate all political competition to that style of business exploitation.
Not a month after the elections, Republican leadership began a coordinated attack against labor unions – the last financial competition for the control of electoral information. Coupled with new restrictive voter registration requirements that disproportionately hit minorities, students, and first time voters friendly to the Democrats, the idea was to render the party NOT steered by the corporatists into irrelevancy. The policy goals were simple. Lock down democratic voters, control the media through financial domination, and shift massive amounts of money out of social services and programs to ensure the US labor force is desperate for stability. Stability the corporatists would provide by establishing a new lower normal of salary and benefits supported by even cheaper products now produced in the US – at lower wages proportionate to national wealth than anything ever seen before.
These are nearly the exact same neo colonial tactics used by multinationals in the 80's in South America. The simple goal is to create a worldwide two class system. A working class that gets paid essentially the same whether it's in China, the US, or South America and a wealthy class of billionaires that creates and funnels the wealth upwards from the efforts of that working class.
The results to the country? If you make billions, you will make billions more. If you don't, you will become a part of a repressed labor class living in the new global normal that slowly evens out markets and working conditions worldwide to the benefit of profit.
This is why Wisconsin is important. This is why stopping the new Republican governors is critical. These people are not perusing a conservative or liberal agenda. They are in the process of changing our country into something nobody who lives here would actually want. But that's okay to the corporatists.
Because they don't.
I've realized in talking to my conservative friends over the last few weeks that not many people understand what I mean when I use this word. Liberals as a whole tend to express ire over what they see as unjust exemption of corporation from taxation while conservatives argue that taxing business ultimately slows economic growth and job creation. But neither of these stances has anything to do with corporatism.
Corporatism is the use of our political system to leverage business against us. It is a hostile takeover of our country that makes us believe we're working on something together while we effectively clear the path for the export of the country's resources and wealth.
Before I begin, I understand that what I'm about to say can be jarring. It sounds downright conspiratorial at first particularly if you are a party loyalist. We never really want to take a hard look at the possibility that we're being used, and to follow the rise of corporatism you have to do exactly that. For this article, you have to stop being a conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, and just see the political parties a social organizations that manage the process of placing people into leadership of the United States.
Now we go back in time.
Fifty years ago and beyond, International business meant exports. Multinational Corporations would build in their home country and then seek to broaden sales based on worldwide demand. Local demand always took priority because the shorter you had to ship your goods the less it cost and the more profit you made. But more many industries, growth depended on finding markets bigger than were locally available.
It is in this environment that the Republican approach to a libertarian view of business took root. The theory was that if business was allowed to flourish with minimal taxation and regulation, substantial profits made by that business would be used to expand operations – the facilities, the secondary markets attached to that business, and employment all of which pulled up the US standard of living and quality of life. The more business made, the more business would want to make, the more business would spend on making things in the US.
For a while, this was true.
Business, at least the parts we care about for this article, changed dramatically starting roughly in the late 1960's and 70's. Corporations figured out they could not only hunt down and sell to international markets as they had in the past, but could use investment in weak third world governments and poor countries to shape them into the ideal production grounds. By giving South American governments huge loans to build infrastructure useful to production and profits, they gained leverage politically as well. Using that leverage they removed laws that restricted the extraction of profits or limitations on environmental impact that might increase costs.
This process of economically dominating a weak countries by corporations didn't go unnoticed. Called 'Neo-Colonialism' by critics, writers all over the world decried what they saw was a new form of imperialism by the United States and Europe. Countries subjugated to corporate neo-colonialsim had no control of their own economy and were simply strip-mined of resources and cheap labor to produce revenue that was never spent in the country where they were acquired. In fact, the target countries ended up owing the corporations for the loans provided to them that built the infrastructure being used to pillage them. In effect, these countries were paying for their own destruction.
Appalled at the effects created by this kind of business on the people of these countries who often lived in extreme poverty, a movement called South American Liberation Theology arose from the Catholic church. This group was based around trying to stop what amounted to social genocide by these corporate controlled countries on their own people.
The average US voter was unaware of any of this unless they were an political science or religion academic. What they were aware of was growing unrest in South America and severe economic instability. The media portrayed a series of South American revolutions and uprisings in the 80's as the rise of communism and socialism on our doorstep. What was happening, however, was more complicated. These countries, impoverished and exploited by pure capitalist control, were turning to socialism in desperation to try to regain some say in their future. Iran/Contra, for instance, was far more about economics than it was political ideology.
Multinational corporations had evolved. They now understood that they could do more than just sell to international markets. They could, in fact, take control of specific international markets and shape them into ideal production sources free of constraining regulations and taxes. This model would result in a new kind of low cost production that would dominate retail in the United States: K-Marts and Sears which had been variety department stores that marketed to US customers by virtue of being one-stop shops were replaced by Target, Walmart, and Costco that could offer an impossible range of products and incredibly cheap prices – all built on the ability to produce those products in environments where labor cost 10% of what it did in the US and there were no regulations of consequence. This new breed of Multinational was the first generation of Corporatists – businesses that saw themselves as governments without a country. They literally saw their interests as independent of any one nation people.
To this ends, the corporatists began to levy a larger and lager hand in US politics. Using the Republican platform that was already friendly to a libertarian view of business, they sought to ease restrictions on taxation and regulation in the name of stimulating the economy.
Over time, it became possible for multinational companies to pursue business in an entirely different fashion. Unlike the days of old where they invested heavily in their own country as a home base and then extended their reach, the new multinational had no home country at all. They shopped for the best legal forum and moved their capital to the place that was best for business: production in China, assembly in Nebraska, raw materials from Brazil, and profits in Switzerland all incorporated in Delaware. This kind of company had no reason to invest in any single market. It, was, in fact, cheaper to move capital to a good location, use that resources as long as they lasted, then extract the capital and allow the local government to handle the clean-up once it inevitably failed due to the fact that the company had invested nothing into it's longevity. Businesses thrived and profits soared, but the standard of living for Americans evened out.
Consider, for instance, a Toyota assembly plant in Nebraska. The plant is modular and, as factories go, extremely mobile. Automotive assembly is mostly robotic, and so the savings on cheap land and low property tax make employing a small number of US workers at the plant worthwhile. The cars produced are shipped all over the world and the plant gets all materials and services through pre-arranged contracts almost none of which are local. The plant will employ roughly 2000 people, no more, no less, and will never grow. There never be any secondary markets created nor will any of the profits made by it's operation be invested in Nebraska. Should things change or the costs of business rise, the plant will simply be removed and redeployed.
Welcome to new corportist business model. This model of business does not have any vested interest in the geographic locations or nations in which it operates. The only things of consequence to businesses like this are tax rates, labor costs, and regulation. Local investment is minimal. There is no central business location anymore – such as Detroit was for Chrysler. A tax cut to this kind of business is merely one more obstacle out of the way. It has no bearing on whether the company hires. It does nothing to encourage local investment. Republican tax policy designed to 'encourage' business simply adds to the bottom line and draws business only until someone else provides a better deal. In effect, this kind of company creates a governmental race to the bottom to see who will put up with the least amount of gain from having a company in their state. But conservatives are regularly being told that the original 1950's model of libertarian corporate business strategy is still in effect. It's a lie that keeps conservative voters voting again and again to line the pockets of billionaires believing they are going to create jobs or invest in their country. Neither is true. Tax cuts and deregulation have ceased to have this effect in a post-globalization corporate world.
This has been going on for nearly thirty years. But 2010 created a whole new set of changes that have defined what's happening in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and Ohio along with nearly half the states in the nation. Until 2010, campaign finance controls had forced corporatists to be careful about how they used the Republican party. In fact, they engaged in a methodical policy of distraction by turning conservatives on liberals in a way that was unprecedented in US politics. Whereas the argument over liberal social constructionist against conservative self determination had always been fiercely fought, the new effort by corportists was to turn these two philosophies into mortal enemies that referred to one another as monsters, terrorists, traitors, and worse. As conservatives and liberals attitudes towards one another shifted from disagreement to hatred, the corporatists used the Republican platform to quietly clear the way of obstacles left to take the next step.
The Supreme Court in Citizens United opened up corporate coffers to political causes. The result in the 2010 elections was staggering. Of the top 10 financial contributors to political campaigns, seven were directly associated with billionaire corportists. The three that remained were labor unions. With the midterm elections as a test case, it became clear that the new political norm in the US had finally opened up an opportunity that the corportists had been waiting for for nearly three decades – to use neocolonialist control tactics ON the United States itself and eliminate all political competition to that style of business exploitation.
Not a month after the elections, Republican leadership began a coordinated attack against labor unions – the last financial competition for the control of electoral information. Coupled with new restrictive voter registration requirements that disproportionately hit minorities, students, and first time voters friendly to the Democrats, the idea was to render the party NOT steered by the corporatists into irrelevancy. The policy goals were simple. Lock down democratic voters, control the media through financial domination, and shift massive amounts of money out of social services and programs to ensure the US labor force is desperate for stability. Stability the corporatists would provide by establishing a new lower normal of salary and benefits supported by even cheaper products now produced in the US – at lower wages proportionate to national wealth than anything ever seen before.
These are nearly the exact same neo colonial tactics used by multinationals in the 80's in South America. The simple goal is to create a worldwide two class system. A working class that gets paid essentially the same whether it's in China, the US, or South America and a wealthy class of billionaires that creates and funnels the wealth upwards from the efforts of that working class.
The results to the country? If you make billions, you will make billions more. If you don't, you will become a part of a repressed labor class living in the new global normal that slowly evens out markets and working conditions worldwide to the benefit of profit.
This is why Wisconsin is important. This is why stopping the new Republican governors is critical. These people are not perusing a conservative or liberal agenda. They are in the process of changing our country into something nobody who lives here would actually want. But that's okay to the corporatists.
Because they don't.
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