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All Hail Our New Lord and Master, the Stock Market
All Hail Our New Lord and Master, the Stock Market
We’re all minions now of the stock market.
The all-powerful Federal Reserve is mere minion of the stock market, a kitten absurdly claiming in public to be a tiger. If the market threatens to drop, the Fed quickly prostrates itself and does the bidding of its Lord and Master: “No rate hikes, minons!”
By cowering in terror of a stock market tantrum, the Fed has surrendered everything: its vaunted (and completely phony) independence; its duty (yes, go ahead and laugh) to the nation and the real economy–everything.
The Fed is nothing but an abject slave of the market. It masks its servitude with Newspeak, but the reality it has only two choices: burn the market down with a series of rate hikes or surrender completely to the market, relinquishing any pretense of power or control.
The Fed is not alone; the entire financial-political system is now beholden to the stock market.
Want to impose real restrictions on the financial sector? Forget it, Congress–the market will rebel. And if the market sags–you’ll cave in like all the market’s servile minions because a significant chunk of your campaign contributions come from those profiteering off the market.
Corporate America–don’t dare miss your quarterly earnings number or you will suffer the wrath of a market that destroys all who don’t obey its demands for short-term profits at the expense of long-term profitability. Were the management of a public company bold enough to sacrifice short-term profits for long-term growth, they wouldn’t survive the market’s destruction of their stock price.
The stock market now dictates fiscal and monetary policy within the Empire because the American economy has been fully financialized. Profits flow not from innovation in products and services but from the financialization of every income stream.
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The Plague of American Authoritarianism
The Plague of American Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism in the American collective psyche and in what might be called traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political system, it is primarily understood as a mode of governance associated with the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and, of course, in its most vile extremes, with Hitler’s poisonous Nazi rule and Mussolini’s fascist state in the 1930s and 1940s. These were and are societies that idealized war, soldiers, nationalism, militarism, political certainty, fallen warriors, racial cleansing, and a dogmatic allegiance to the homeland.[i] Education and the media were the propaganda tools of authoritarianism, merging fascist and religious symbols with the language of God, family, and country, and were integral to promoting servility and conformity among the populace. This script is well known to the American public and it has been played out in films, popular culture, museums, the mainstream media, and other cultural apparatuses. Historical memory that posits the threat of the return of an updated authoritarianism turns the potential threat of the return of authoritarianism into dead memory. Hence, any totalitarian mode of governance is now treated as a relic of a sealed past that bears no relationship to the present. The need to retell the story of totalitarianism becomes a frozen lesson in history rather than a narrative necessary to understanding the present
Hannah Arendt, the great theorist of totalitarianism, believed that the protean elements of totalitarianism are still with us and that they would crystalize in different forms.[ii] Far from being a thing of the past, she believed that totalitarianism “heralds as a possible model for the future.”[iii]
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Peter Thiel Blasts: The American Political System Is “Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic”
Peter Thiel Blasts: The American Political System Is “Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic”
The obvious conclusion that the U.S. is neither a democracy nor a constitutional republic has been a key topic of conversation here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the past several years. One of the most powerful representations of this unfortunate fact came from an academic study highlighted last year: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy.
A couple of days ago, Peter Thiel sat down with Tyler Cower at George Mason University’s Mercatus center for a chat about all sorts of interesting things. The Washington Post picked up on some of his thoughts regarding the American political system, which I think deserve some additional commentary.
On the one hand, he accurately identifies the U.S. as nothing resembling either a democracy or a constitutional republic. He then goes on to point out that the system we have is one in which the power is increasingly concentrated in undemocratic, “technocratic” agencies. Where I think he falls way short is with a failure to ask what interests are driving the decisions of these undemocratic entities. Any unbiased observer can clearly see that it is oligarchs driving the oligarchy, as opposed to independent thinking bureaucratic technocrats driving a technocracy. I have published countless articles proving this to be the case. Naturally, a billionaire might have a harder time recognizing this.
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Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?
Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.
And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.
Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”
Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.
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