Quote:

---

Something wicked this way comes.

Remember the history lessons on feudalism, how things were run in the Middle Ages by a handful of guys who owned everything and could do whatever, whenever, however? And how everybody else had no property, no rights, no say at all, and had to suck up to the local baron just to survive?

Sound like a good plan? Not when your odds of being a Big Dog are roughly zero.

A lot of us need to go over that chapter again. Because a bunch of really sordid fat cats are pushing hard to reconfigure us as the Feudal States of America.

They abhor a nation "of, for and by the people." The super-rich never did cotton to "the people" — which is to say, nearly all of us. People are trouble. They get in the way. Unless you own them, you can't shove them around when it suits you. Most of them are useless dead weight. Even worse, some actually have ideas, do stuff on their own initiative, without your say-so.

That'll mess up your agenda. And the needy are so needy. Young ones want to get educated, always a danger. The old believe they deserve to be cared for (what a notion). And they all want medical care. They actually imagine they have rights. Who do they think they are?

Exaggeration? Don't take my word. Look for yourself, and think. Please.

Check out the Ryan budget bill, a cornerstone of current Republican fiscal scheming. What does it want to ax? Basically every program or agency of benefit to the people. Who, on the other hand, would profit handsomely? The nation's richest and most powerful, many of whom are the exact same thieves who tanked the economy. Did they suffer from their shenanigans? No. Did they care that we took a licking? Laughable. What do they want now? Everything that they couldn't finagle then. They're not finished. And they won't be until one of two things happens. Either we wake up and push back, or they succeed, and we are all serfs. Again.

Their line is that government is the real enemy. Lots of people have swallowed this lie. Get real. Is the government jacking up gas prices? Keeping health care out of reach? Making education impossible? Evicting you? Denying unemployment? Chopping jobs? No, the government doesn't have the gas, own health care, run education, possess the housing, have all the jobs. That would be the rascals promoting "free enterprise." It's free for them. For us, not so much. While we slumbered, they plotted, manipulated and launched their assault.

For them, government is the enemy. Why? A government "of, for and by the people" is the only entity capable of blocking a return to feudalism — provided "we the people" remember that fact in time. Its weapons are powers no other entity has — and, no coincidence, precisely what the super-rich fear the most: regulation, oversight and yes, taxation.

It's way past time for us to forget the twits who just make stuff up, and look at reality. What's going on here is unvarnished class warfare. Either we reassert our right to the middle-class America that we thought we still had — or we slip back into what our forefathers rejected 235 years ago. Then it was called Absolutism. The name would be prettier tomorrow. But you and I still wouldn't be the Big Dogs.

Democracy, once achieved, is not a forever thing. Without watchful stewardship, it withers. Every so often, it must be revitalized. We'll always have those who hunger to be "masters of the universe." Hence, we can never forget that "we the people" are mere pawns in their games.

And these are enduring truths. http://www.kentucky.com/2011/06/04/1763275/american-returning-to-feuda
l-times.html a book out which apparently deals with this very well.

Quote:

---

“The sleekest revolutions,” notes Barry Lynn, “are won not at the barricades but in the dictionary.” To control the terms of a debate is to control the outcome. This is certainly true of the term “free market,” a term which has come to mean almost its opposite, and hence a system which is manifestly unfree. The claim that our markets are not free is a serious one, and should only be made on serious evidence, just the kind of evidence that Barry Lynn provides in Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

The surest sign that a market is free is that it is competitive; there should be a rich variety of products provided by a vast number of firms, a situation which affords entrepreneurs many opportunities to enter the market and workers many places to sell their labor. And when we waltz into our local Wal Mart, that is what we seem to see. Alas, it is an illusion of competition rather than the reality. For example, if you want eyeglasses, you can go to Pearl Vision, or Lenscrafters, Sears Optical, JC Penney, Target, Macy’s, Sunglass Hut, or buy frames from 25 different manufacturers. Surely choice and competition prevail in this market. But no. All of these are one company, the Italian conglomerate Luxottica. And as with glasses, so also with so many other products. Most of our beer—even some that try to pass themselves off as “craft” beer—is provided by just two companies, ImBev of Belgium or the South African Brewing Company. Proctor & Gamble provides 75% of razors, 60% of detergent, 50% of feminine pads, etc. Even what few companies remain in each market often engage in collusion rather than competition. Wal Mart, for example, appoints one company as a “category manager” to allocate shelf space for all the “competing” companies.

Another sign of a free market is the expansive space it provides for entrepreneurs. But from 1948-2003, self-employment in America dropped from 18.5% to 7.5%. Indeed, among developed nations only Luxembourg has a lower rate of self-employment than we do. There has been a new “enclosure” movement, as the spaces that used to be occupied by small retailers, farmers, and manufacturers have been colonized by the conglomerates.

So how did we get to a situation where the “freedom of markets” has come to mean “servility” and corporate control? In our colonial history, open markets were the means to escape the network of feudal dependencies that governed European systems. In the open market, small landowners and laborers could freely trade their produce and gain independence. Hence, the early Republic kept a watchful eye on the corporate and financial powers. But that care began to break down with the Civil War, as the government directed millions to industry, and the corporations were able to free themselves from control of the states and gain new privileges, even becoming, in a bit of Supreme Court legislation, “legal persons.” For the rest of the century, the “Robber Barons” consolidated their hold on industry after industry to become the dominant force in society and government.

The New Deal evolved a system that was actually a continuation of Herbert Hoover’s associationalism,which placed the management of the economy in “super-cartels” and was related to the system used in Italy under Mussolini. But the Hoover/Roosevelt vision at least provided for a variety of quasi-owners of the cartels: workers, engineers, managers, the government, and small shareholders were all protected by institutional arrangements. And the corporations themselves were to be the guardians of our industrial base and a tool in foreign policy.

At this point, you have a quasi-feudal system with a series of mutual rights and obligations between varies interests and classes. There would be a relative abundance for all, wealth for a few, all directed by a combination of benevolent government and corporations with a broad social mandate, and subject to the influence of a variety of “owners.” But one by one, the “owners” were stripped off. It began in the Carter administration with deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, the prototype for further deregulation. It was continued under Reagan, who offered few institutional changes but made it clear that his administration would not enforce the anti-trust laws, and he made open war on the unions. But the so-called “Reagan Revolution” was actually consolidated under Bill Clinton with NAFTA and the deregulation of the financial industry. With the “democratization” of the stock market, the general public came to believe that equities were better than savings, and they began to view themselves as little moguls, their interests identified with the large investors. The senior managers saw more and more of their pay tied to stock options, which meant their interests were now also more aligned with the large investors. Outsourcing did for both the unions and the engineers. Only the large investors and their financial backers remained in effective control of the corporate structures, and only their interests would count.

What were these interests? Under the guidance of Milton Friedman, the corporation was converted from a system of governance charged with a broad social mandate into a private property whose “one and only one social responsibility” is to “increase profits.” But profits can be increased by strip-mining a company as much as by investing in it. And that is what has happened, as manufacturing firms converted themselves into trading conglomerates, outsourcing production to third-world countries but maintaining control at the center. Hence, it is no surprise that “American” cars are merely American shells slapped over a collection of foreign-made parts. Even an “American” product like the Boeing 787 is 90% foreign made. Recognizing only one of the many necessary goods of a firm, the corporation is converted from a protector of our industrial base into its destroyer, so that today we are a nation that makes far less than we consume, and will soon be forced to adjust our consumption to our means.

Friedman also redefined “free market” to mean “unregulated.” But this is nonsense, since markets are social institutions which are made by rules. For example, when Jay Gould decided to monopolize the building materials market in New York, he forbade his railroads to carry products from any competing company. As the “owner” of the railroads, he was “free” to do so, but did this make a free market? Clearly not. Only the imposition of the Common Carrier rule on the railroads freed the market from Gould’s personal control. Without proper rules, the “invisible hand” becomes an invisible fist, crushing all opponents. All social interactions are rule-bound. The only interesting question is whether the rules will be written by force or by reason.

Lynn also documents how the new feudalism makes the economy more vulnerable and fragile, as concentrated production introduces multiple choke-points, and small failures shut down whole industries. Indeed, a failure at one or a few factories can poison a whole nation. We are seeing an example of this in the 380-million egg recall. But the real destruction is political and social. As corporate “persons” gain more rights, real persons are effectively disenfranchised. Our politics degenerate into debates over trivialities, with passion over an issue inversely proportional to its importance.

Calling it “neo-feudalism” is unfair, to feudalism. At its best, that was a system of mutual rights and obligations which ensured a decent standard for all. The quasi-feudalism of the New Deal demanded a certain degree of servility, but also some fixed rights. The neo-feudalism is more like serfdom with declining opportunities and increasing debts for all, but especially for the young. The neo-feudalists are willing to promise better opportunities, but only to the degree it would not interfere with their wealth and their control. But they can no longer deliver what they promise, because they have been beaten at their own game by the Chinese and the Russians, and have become subordinated to foreign masters. And the rest of us along with them. The Chinese have set up a parallel trading system, and there is little anybody in the WTO or the West can do about it. After all, there is a limit to the quarrels we can pick with the people who hold the mortgage on our house and who lend us $2 billion/day to keep they whole thing going, at least for a little while longer.

It is nothing less than the mechanics of Belloc’s Servile State. But Belloc thought such a state would at least be stable; it is not. We will soon, and very soon, be required to rebuild the social order. It will be of great use to understand how we get here, and Lynn goes a long way toward sorting that out. http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/08/neo-feudalism-and-the-invisi
ble-fist/

---

Sounds to me like the America of today...this review was written back in 2010; we've come dramatically further down that road since then, so how long do we have before we tip into the "chasm" mentioned in another thread?

Yup, going "back" sure is a good thing, isn't it? You betcha!