“In a world that worships work but has nothing to do for people, … the modern state could be interpreted as an employment agency with a gun to protect the fuel pump.” Ivan Illich
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” Thomas L. Friedman
“In many cases, the economy grows through human sufferings and environmental disaster.” Francesco Laruffa
In December 2011, The Economist dangles how “the modern world began on a freezing New Year’s Eve, in 1600, when Elizabeth I granted a company of 218 merchants a monopoly of trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope.”
“In 1600, however, the role of the commercial corporation was to grow drastically, and play a central part in Queen Elizabeth’s decision to turn Britain into a naval power and challenge Spain for global economic dominance. The result was global warfare, as the Spanish, and then the Dutch and French, jumped into the mercantile game and built huge navies to fight each other for control of colonies and trade routes. And at the center of these fights were three commercial corporations, the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, and the Hudson Bay Company.” Lenny Jr. Flank
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith — viewing corporations as working to evade the laws of the market, trying to interfere with prices and controlling trade etc. — describes the pin factory in 1776:
“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands …”
In 1906, Irving Fisher publishes The Nature of Capital and Income, since hailed as “the first economic theory of accounting” because it was the first move toward the colonization of accounting by economics.
The late Yale economist could unwittingly be behind the resulting mechanical conception of our toxic behaviors today.
A 1910 New York Times article titled “What the baby is worth as a national asset: Last year’s crop reached a value estimated at $6,960,000,000” declares:
“An eight-pound baby is worth, at birth, $362 a pound. That is a child’s value as a potential wealth-producer. If he lives out the normal term of years, he can produce $2,900 more wealth than it costs to rear him and maintain him as an adult.”
In How Money Became the Measure of Everything, Eli Cook observes this was because Irving Fisher who “rarely met a social problem he did not put a price on” was “arguing for why people needed to be treated as “money-making machines” at the turn of the last century.
Accounting for War authors Michele Chwastiak and Glen Lehman investigate how Accounting has actually helped to rationalize and normalize violence by not accounting for human costs. This numerically guided “thought system” provides decision-makers with a way to think about death and destruction without actually having to think about death and destruction.
What Accounting does not say is what makes the difference as it “reduces people, places and things to quantities and lends itself to an abstract, cold and calculating way of reasoning.”
Was the institutionalization of war and our being standardized as “money-making machines” gradually evolved over the centuries? Particularly in the last century (to be explored in the next article — your input is welcome for that to become an ebook for the context of our lives today).
According to Lenny Flank, author of World, Incorporated: The History of the Supra-National Corporation and Its Global Stranglehold on Freedom and Democracy:
“We no longer live in a world made up of ‘nation-states’. Today, power and control has passed to huge multi-national mega-corporations who have no country, owe loyalty or obedience to no government, and who answer to no nation. There is no longer any such thing as an ‘American’ corporation, or a ‘Japanese’ corporation, or a ‘Chinese’, or ‘German’, or ‘British’. A tiny handful of mega-conglomerates now have global reach and global power. They all own big chunks of each other, and have become so intertwined and interlocking that it is no longer possible to differentiate them. They are larger, richer, and more powerful than ‘nations’. National sovereignty and national borders are irrelevant to them; national governments, even the largest, are unable to challenge or control them.
They have become supra-national.
The supra-national corporations exercise economic control through a global network of international agreements and enforcement bodies, like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, which are unelected, undemocratic, and have more power than any national government.”
The direction of corporate persons raiding us has not changed since at least 1600 as that very likely kickstarted how humanity has co-created a world that’s legally more pro “corporate raiders” than real people to live: the water we swim in.
Let’s explore how over time, this Business-as-usual (BAU) system of control through scarcity hones us on our self-interests so we inevitably build and grow a psychopathic system of corporate middlemen. Also, how a world divided “peer-to-peer” has institutionalized our living a “cradle to grave” business plan.
The world wars never really ended. Today, isn’t that just Business-as-usual?
“Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort.” Ivan Illich
Can the world we co-create today have its roots in how the Bretton Woods institutions have been institutionalizing a world at war — with numbers transforming us into “money-making machines” — as our way of life since the Second World War?
“The hope was to create a system to facilitate international trade while protecting the autonomous policy goals of individual nations.” Investopedia
Trade: “The action of buying and selling goods and services”; “The practice of making one’s living in business, as opposed to in a profession or from unearned income”; “a transfer”; “an exchange”; etc.
(The first prototype banks circa 2000 BCE had facilitated trade in Assyria, India, and Sumeria by giving grain loans to farmers and traders who carried goods between cities.)
Humans are complex beings, but what governs us seems pretty simple.
In the blunt words of Frederick Winslow Taylor a couple of years before he got traction for Henry Ford’s (now global) factory assembly line model:
“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” The Principles of Scientific Management (1911)
Especially since US President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods Agreement that officially crowned the US dollars as the world’s reserve currency backed by the world’s largest gold reserves.
The world’s greatest fiat currency experiment ever provided the system with universal equivalents — to harness what we each do to survive for ourselves — for trading. To this day, the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency of choice.
Despite the failed Bretton Woods agreement, two US-based corporations — BlackRock and Vanguard — own our world today through a massive network of transnational corporations:
“Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.” Rutger Bregman
Modeled on the original corporate raider, this network of “legal fictions” provides the fiat currencies we need to survive in this top-down system. PLUS they invest in each other and have no greater god than growth/impact (“Impact” is the latest label to work in the Impact economy).
But isn’t our energy — our blood, sweat, tears, labor, ideas, and talent — what gives fiat currency its value, even as we compete to grow “corporate raiders”?
Honed on scarcity, isn’t that why our relationship with money is so emotional?
BAU grows a distributed network of control — embedding what we do to survive for ourselves and who/what we care for — our energy — into this man-made system of “corporate raiders.”
As BAU hyper-normalizes wars by molding “I win, you lose” scarcity thinking and doing, doesn’t surviving largely mean you have to fight each other — peer-to-peer — doing business to be a ruthless “money-making machine” and, ultimately, to keep growing businesses with no greater god than growth?
Legal fiction dots to connect
“I mean not to throw any odious imputation upon the general character of the servants of the East India Company, it is the system of government, the situation in which they are placed, that I mean to censure.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
The Collins Dictionary of Law © W.J. Stewart, 2006 defines “legal fiction” as “something assumed to be true for the sake of convenience whether true or false.”
“But if you think it matters whether the law calls a chimpanzee, corporation, or even human zygote a ‘person,’ you are making a fundamental error about how the law works. From a legal standpoint, there is nothing remarkable about a chimpanzee claiming to be a person. Indeed, there are a number of cases that have been brought by animals — including a palila, a marbled murrelet, and a spotted owl. All of these animals sought to enforce their rights under the Endangered Species Act, under a provision that gives ‘persons’ the right to bring suit … The law also treats various nonhuman, nonsentient entities as ‘persons’ for certain legal purposes. Corporations, estates, trusts, partnerships, and government entities are often defined this way.” Eric Posner, professor at the University of Chicago Law School
Legal fiction: “An assertion accepted as true, though probably fictitious, to achieve a particular goal in a legal matter.”
Fictitious: “Not real or true, being imaginary or having been fabricated.”
Technically, corporations are a fiction. A “legal fiction”, but still a fiction. As in, not real.
According to The Economist:
“The East India Company foreshadowed the modern world in all sorts of striking ways. It was one of the first companies to offer limited liability to its shareholders. It laid the foundations of the British empire. It spawned Company Man. And — particularly relevant at the moment — it was the first state-backed company to make its mark on the world.
The Company lasted for far longer than most private companies precisely because it had two patrons to choose from — prospering from trade in good times and turning to the government for help in bad ones. It also showed that it is quite possible to rely on the government for support while at the same time remaining relatively lean and inventive.”
In the mid-1700s and early 1800s, this original corporate raider rose to account for half of the world’s trade, particularly in basic commodities. As the world’s first global corporate power, it also laid the corporate blueprint for today’s firms to operate unchecked.
The Bank of England was established in 1694. Its model as the central bank of the United Kingdom became the template for most of today’s central banks.
The nineteenth century was interesting, gearing humanity for what’s to come:
Adam Winkler, professor at the UCLA School of Law, argues that Corporations Are People’ is built on an Incredible 19th-Century lie: “in a feat of deceitful legal alchemy, Southern Pacific and its wily legal team had, with the help of an audacious Supreme Court justice, set up the Fourteenth Amendment to be more of a bulwark for the rights of businesses than the rights of minorities.”
In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen shows how pecuniary or money-related emulation in American society played a crucial role in consumer behavior. Instead of an economy built on science, he believes primal human behaviors prevail. For Veblen, institutions are social and to truly understand economic issues, the economy cannot be isolated from them.
In The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, cultural historian Christopher Lasch diagnoses how the bureaucratization of business, life, and the surrender of parental authority to “professionals” had normalized pathological narcissism and turned Americans into passive consumers:
“This hedonism is a fraud. The pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative… they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit.”
“Corporate bureaucracies put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”
Subsequently, on December 1, 1913, Henry Ford launched his factory assembly line system at his Highland Park plant to systemically start folding our lives into mechanically growing and supporting “legal fictions” around numbers and conformity.
By breaking the assembly of the Model T Ford into the simplest repeatable activities any unskilled immigrant could do (remember the pin factory?), Ford removed the need to think and turned work into a rote task. The less human the workers, the more they resembled machines, the better Ford’s system worked. Like cogs in the machine or gears in a clock, workers became interchangeable or replaceable.
In 1914, the year the First World War started, to get workers to do the same repetitive, specialized tasks hour after hour, day after day, Ford introduced the $5 workday. At the time that was over twice the average wage for automakers and he also reduced their workday by an hour.
To show he was the Boss, Ford’s workers first had to be “qualified” for the new wage. Their personal lives were investigated, with advisers conducting home visits, checking bank deposits and even monitoring the workers’ children’s school attendance.
By instilling psychological control and then using money to entice people, the Ford Motor Co. went on to double its profits in less than two years. Ford called that the best cost-cutting moves he had ever made.
That same month and year, the US Federal Reserve System — the most powerful single actor in the American economy — was established:
“This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress … The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government.” Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. (1859–1924) Congressman (R-MN)
“Central banks work for their clients the commercial banks. Until 1913 in the United States the Treasury did almost everything that the Federal Reserve is doing today. It moved money around the country. It had 12 districts. It intervened in markets. It did what a central bank did. But then JP Morgan and the bankers essentially anticipated Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and pressed for a privatized central bank run out of Wall Street, Boston and Philadelphia, not Washington. They excluded Washington from the Fed’s board so as not to let the Treasury have a voice on it.
Their logic was that banking should only be regulated by the private sector, because only in that way could they turn the government from a democracy into an oligarchy. So that they created a central bank that acted on behalf of bankers, not the economy as a Treasury is supposed to do. So basically, the development of central banks for the Western countries has been a disaster to the extent that they represent financial interests instead of representing the economy as a whole. Protecting financial interests means sustaining growth in their product, debt overhead, instead of protecting the economy from finance and its bad loans that create a burdensome overhead for families and business.” Michael Hudson
Money is a “fragile, socially and politically constructed, institution. Money is itself a social relation … money is a ‘claim’ or ‘credit’ that is constituted by social relations that exist independently of the production and exchange of commodities. Regardless of any form it might take, money is essentially a provisional ‘promise’ to pay, whose ‘moneyness’, as an institutional fact, is assigned by a description conferred by an abstract money of account.” Geoffrey Ingham
A corporation is a “social invention of the state.” Richard Robbins
“The chief business of the American people is business … They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life.” US President Calvin Coolidge
As “legal fictions” increasingly privatize profits and socialize losses, any surprise that our world is now legally more pro “corporate raiders” than real people?
Since those in power can maneuver anything and everything to their personal advantage, have they used fiat currencies to have you and I build an opaque and top-down operating system to measure and control us and the markets?
A macro picture vs surviving for self: The world’s tech giants, compared to the size of economies.
While the Internet can directly connect us, all the key decisions that impact our lives are still made by people behind “corporate raiders” doing their jobs at the institutional/corporate/state/international levels:
“CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.
The expectations market is the world in which shares in companies are traded between investors — in other words, the stock market. In this market, investors assess the real market activities of a company today and, on the basis of that assessment, form expectations as to how the company is likely to perform in the future. The consensus view of all investors and potential investors as to expectations of future performance shapes the stock price of the company.” Steve Denning
With our survival/self-serving interests embedded into growing the BAU system, our collectively consciousness co-creates reality based on what our minds believe to be true and real so we voluntarily surrender our time, ideas, energy, skills, etc. to “corporate raiders” for fiat currencies.
In crowd consciousness, isn’t this process amplified so it’s even easier for the BAU machine to project what it wants, namely, to keep us feeding ourselves and each other to its insatiable appetite? Doesn’t fiat simplify this process, peer-to-peer:
“The object of warfare is to take over a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them. In the past, that used to be done militarily, by invading them. But today you can do it financially, simply by creating credit.” Michael Hudson
How 1971 reinforced fiat currencies, corporate persons, and nation-states as underlying social constructs
Among others, social constructs include money, corporate persons, the “cradle to grave” business plan we live, markets and nation-states:
Social construct: “A concept or perception of something based on the collective views developed and maintained within a society or social group; a social phenomenon or convention originating within and cultivated by society or a particular social group, as opposed to existing inherently or naturally.”
In September 1970, as American businesses grappled with the initial impact of globalization, Milton Friedman’s New York Times article clumsily rallied their key drivers to make profit their social responsibility.
Was 1971 pivotal to how we now live a “cradle to grave” business plan, competing to be the greater fools to keep feeding ourselves and all and sundry to the insatiable BAU system?
Fiat Currencies: The Nixon shock happened on August 15, 1971.
Corporate persons and nation-states: On August 23, 1971, some five months before his January 1972 elevation to the bench, the future US Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. drafted a confidential memorandum that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society:
“The memo, titled ‘Attack on American Free Enterprise System,’ was breathtaking in its scope and ambition … It was, as writer Steven Higgs noted in a 2012 article … , ‘A Call to Arms for Class War: From the Top Down’.” Bill Blum
Although circulated and discussed within the Chamber and in wider business consortia, the public only became aware of it in September 1972. That month, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson devotes two pieces to describe the memo as “a blueprint for an assault by big business on its critics” as it reflects a “militant political action program.”
In September, 1991, did the Club of Rome openly declare war on humanity?
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” The First Global Revolution
The following year, at the second Earth Summit (the UN Conference on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janeiro, the United Nations began advocating for a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”
Because post the Second World War, hasn’t humanity been at the core of the world’s greatest fiat experiment ever— generating fiat from trading our energy/assets for anything we need/desire to survive/get ahead?
The latest outcome of the 1910 NYT article about a baby’s worth as a national asset
“In 2021, opposition to freedom comes not from a foreign king and his aristocratic courtiers but from … the uber-rich of the New Gilded Era and the multi-national corporations that dominate our economy … our firms treat us as mere tools to their pursuit of profit — as if they were colonial occupiers and we their subjects. Seeking to extract as much as possible from employees and consumers alike, they campaign to keep wages low while dodging responsibility for pollution, safety or taxes.” Daniel JH Greenwood, Professor of Law at Hofstra University
Meanwhile, transnational corporations can take revenue from a country without paying taxes as “legal tender” fiat currencies can easily be funneled through multiple economic institutions and to keep pushing for deregulations to benefit the few. The gordian knot of economic entanglement also hides how the highest earners pay little or no taxes.
But as the tyranny of money scarcity drills you to keep feeding this insatiable man-made system, won’t you compete to become an uncaring “money-making machine?”
Initially, that may start from having debts to pay as the cost of living escalates northward, but eventually, won’t that become an addiction, particularly if you have status/illusions to upkeep?
Through fear and scarcity, doesn’t BAU self-organize you to equate fiat currencies with surviving and to fighting each other for that?
The most valuable and most important thing you have in your life
“Through the imputation of energy, nature was recast in the image of the newly constituted human as worker.” Ivan Illich
Whatever you give your time, energy, and attention to every day defines your existence. Such learned behavior becomes your life. When you realize this, you may understand why you tend to get upset when people, activities, and situations don’t resonate with what you give most of yourself to.
For instance: “Never expect someone to understand change when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
In The Social Construction of Energy, Illich explores how scarcity is inherently economistic and capitalistically constructed.
Is he explaining how our energy has been hijacked so we unwittingly work for capitalists as “money-making machines”:
“Once the universe itself is placed under the regime of scarcity, homo is no longer born under the stars but under the axioms of economics.”
“Something analogous happens when the capitalist taps labor power, which produces two things: surplus value for him and the income to the worker that goes up in untidy reproduction. Thus the population saw itself reduced to the matrix of a labor force, and nature was reduced to be the matrix of energy.”
“It has been overlooked that the word energy functions as a collage of meanings whose persuasiveness is based on the myth that what it expresses is natural.”
“By using energy amounts to measure the distance covered by medieval peasants and pilgrims; I inevitably conjured up the illusion that their milieu, like our environment, was under the regime of scarcity, that they engaged in energy-efficient self-transportation.”
“To enthrone the working machine as the symbol for nature and society, science had to be based on a new presupposition of thermodynamic laws.”
“The computer is pictured as the great economizer and economist who will sugarcoat work by rendering energy and employment more effective, more decentralized, more flexible and complex.”
“… the economy, run under assumptions of our need for commodities, which — no matter how abundant (as for instance, bits) — are by their very nature scarce.”
“Historically and psychologically, the rule that nature, like citizens of the nineteenth century, must live in the matrix of a zero-sum game was prior to the value at stake in this game. Only then did that value take the form of a function, namely ‘e,’ or a ‘goody.’ Progress in the social sciences went in the same direction. Social interactions were reduced to exchanges and subjects to role players between whom these exchanges take place.”
In Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, Butler Shaffer, Professor of Law at the Southwestern University School of Law, explores why:
“institutions are the principle means by which conflict is produced and managed in society.”
Regardless of race, gender, age, religion, ideologies and belief systems, nationality, economic interests, political parties, social/political causes, or other products of our learned thinking, Shaffer argues that we create institutions (“legal fictions”) through which we organize ourselves based on how we find our identities.
Money is a social construct but born into a world where we need fiat currencies to survive, that may be all that you see. Even if most of it is just digits on a screen/paper, it reinforces learned behaviors.
In What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire, Noam Yuran argues how money is an object of desire by exploring its ties with the consumer economy. He shows that money’s quality as endlessly exchangeable depends on every other commodity not being so and the importance of understanding how brand names, broadcast television, and celebrity culture work.
Because don’t they sell you on parting with your energy (money) to them based on your perception of what you desire as your identity?
On Ford’s factory assembly line — without context apart from yourself — corporate persons can easily harvest consent by focusing you on your self-serving interests through the scarcity of fiat currencies.
How the BAU system molds unnatural behaviors, top down?
“Take four categories: horse, planet, glove, and multiple personality. It would be preposterous to suggest that the only thing horses have in common is that we call them horses. We may draw boundaries to admit or to exclude Shetland ponies, but the similarities and differences are real enough … Gloves are something else: we manufacture them. That the concept ‘glove’ fits gloves so well is no surprise; we made them that way. My claim about making up people is that [categories of people] are more like gloves than like horses. The category and the people in it emerged hand in hand.” Ian Hacking
Social engineering: “The use of centralized planning in an attempt to manage social change and regulate the future development and behavior of a society”; “(in the context of information security) the use of deception to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential or personal information that may be used for fraudulent purposes.”
Artificial: “Made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural — (of a situation or concept) not existing naturally; contrived or false”; (of a person or their behavior) insincere or affected.”
Through “the engineering of consent,” Edward Bernays has provided leaders with the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”
Hired by corporations and governments to use emotions against humans, Sigmund Freud’s nephew believes:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of … It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”
With Bernays’ help, US President Calvin Coolidge even won the 1924 election:
“After all, the chief business of the American people is business ... They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life.”
But hidden in plain sight are “legal fictions” that pay you for your efforts. As long as you obey and fight everyone to be the best at feeding the insatiable system, you could even be rewarded with fame and fortune:
“The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.” H. L. Mencken
Celebrities speak out on fame and materialism.
As figments of our collective imagination, have your learned behaviors enabled false ideas to go mainstream — institutionalized and accepted, discussed, worried about, even fought over with nary a pause to wonder at their origins and development?
Because systemically embedded into growing “corporate raiders,” your self-survival is at stake?
Debt slavery, institutionalized
“Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants – but debt is the money of slaves.” Norm Franz
In The Money Masters: The Rise of the Bankers documentary, Bill Still reminds us:
“Since 1864, we’ve had a debt-based banking system. All our money is based on government debt.”
Created largely as interest-bearing debt, as fiat currencies spur the need for perpetual economic growth, isn’t there always more debt in the system than the ability to repay it?
Because when banks create loans, they do not create the interest. For example, a US$100 dollar loan at 10% interest means the borrower has to repay US$110. But the bank creates only US$100. Since the difference has to be obtained elsewhere, isn’t that the key trigger for the need for perpetual economic growth and the increasing commodification and monetization of nature?
In Debt as Power, authors Tim Di Muzio and Richard H. Robbins argue that debt under capitalism is a technology of power, intimately tied up with the requirement for perpetual growth and the differential capitalization that benefits “the 1%.”
They recognize that the histories of human communities and their natural environment are interconnected in complex spatial and hierarchical relations of power. To understand their development, they believe we need to understand the interconnected, interdependent, and international relations.
Since debt under capitalism is increasingly ubiquitous across society and economic growth is now the sole mantra of dominant political parties around the world, they argue that tracing the evolution and transformation of debt as a technology of power is crucial for understanding the “present as history” and possible alternatives to our current trajectory.
In Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, Professor Michael Hudson exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the FIRE sector) have gained control of the global economy at the expense of industrial capitalism and governments.
The FIRE sector is responsible for today’s economic polarization (the 1% vs the 99%) via favored tax status that inflates real estate prices while deflating the “real” economy of labor and production. He describes how the phenomenon of debt deflation imposes austerity on the US and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the financial sector while impoverishing the middle class.
Since the BAU paradigm dictates that our survival depends on fiat currencies, isn’t debt the key system of control used to enslave us through enforced scarcity of anything and everything that we need/desire?
Living a DIY “Cradle to Grave” business plan
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” W. Edwards Deming
“Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.” David Korten
Very broadly, doesn’t this BAU system work in the same way that you deposit fiat currencies into financial institutions? Except instead of fiat currency, you deposit your energy — blood, sweat, tears, labor, ideas, and talent.
Because our self-survival is embedded into feeding ourselves and everyone to this insatiable BAU beast, “corporate raiders” grow exponentially. To survive, they legally have to have no greater god than growth.
Essentially, isn’t that rent-seeking?
“The real estate, financial system, monopolies, and other rent-extracting ‘tollbooth’ privileges are not valued in terms of their contribution to production or living standards, but by how much they can extract from the economy. By classical definition, these rentier payments are not technologically necessary for production, distribution, and consumption. They are not investments in the economy’s productive capacity, but extraction from the surplus it produces.” Michael Hudson
Meanwhile, humanity keeps getting blamed and/or punished for systemic problems while the most outstanding “money-making machines” are individually rewarded.
Is that a paradox or a “divide to conquer” strategy, systemically embedded?
Because as demand exceeds supply, won’t you feel pressured to overcome and beat out everyone else?
In this paradigm of control, corporations are like top-down dictatorships where major shareholders and board of directors make all of the important decisions that their employees then implement.
The fundamental question is always who gets to make the key decisions
“Wherever you find money, prestige and power you will find them. The most important thing is to be aware you are working with a psychopath. Then you are in better position to deal with them.” Dr. Robert D. Hare
In Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are Seizing Power, Susan George shares that the links between big business and government have become stronger and more far-reaching than ever:
“Global corporations now demand control over decisions affecting labour laws, finance, public health, food and agriculture, safety regulations, taxes and international trade and investment. They even claim the right to private tribunals where they can sue governments for passing laws that could harm their present or future profits.
These business elites don’t want to govern directly. They operate behind the scenes — directing planning, setting standards and fashioning government to maximise their own profits. Thanks to the UN Global Compact they have extended their influence to the highest levels of multilateral decision-making and now, via the Davos-inspired Global Redesign Initiative, they are setting their sights on managing world-wide public policy.
Elected by and accountable to no one, secretive and highly organized, these shadow sovereigns are destroying the very notion of the common good and making a mockery of democracy.“
Since BAU has you bowing to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, isn’t democracy moot?
“A tendency for large organizations to be run by a small number of people committed to maintaining their leadership.”
Power: “The ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way”; “The capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events”; etc.
Addiction: “The fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance or activity.”
Learned behavior: “Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings. Such morally incomprehensible behaviour, exhibited by a seemingly normal person, leaves us feeling bewildered and helpless.” Dr. Robert D. Hare
The UN’s “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society”
In 2015, the World Economic Forum website shares 5 simple ways to turn human power into energy. Four years later, a quiet global corporate and government marriage took place in the absence of governments and citizens.
In case you’re not aware, humans have always been the fuel — the human energy — that powers this insatiable and psychopathic system.
Now viewed as the future of the greatest renewal resource, explore whether this paper summarizes how as BAU addicts many to learned behaviors, the tendency is to blame humans instead of seeing how the “corporate raider” driven system, evolved over centuries, exploits us:
“ … everyone considers the human is the main reason for many problems especially which related to energy and environment. In the following paragraph, I’ll point out the importance of Life Energy as a solution of energy problems. In streets, malls, buildings, clubs, gym, also at homes. Only by considering the human isn’t a reason of wasting energy but is a resource of generating power, from his movement, heat, playing, breathe, from his life as a clean, sustainable and renewable energy resource. The denial that the energy generated from human body in power plants seems to me to constitute a fundamental misunderstanding about the real human role in the life and society. Human generating power, Start using the thermal and kinetic energy of people in a lot of buildings. To recapitulate, what we have here is an exposition of how we can deal with crowded farms in Egypt as a human power plant to generate life energy. The intriguing ideas expressed here open the door to questions about how we can use the population in solving our problems, can we consider life energy a new renewable source of energy, what is the efficiency of energy generated from human.”
In 2012, a BBC article even dangles: Can electricity from the human body replace batteries?
Click to find out how the human body generates electricity.
Will the Fourth Industrial Revolution harvest our life force as data to keep sustaining this insatiable “rent-seeking” system?
As the Great Reset (aka the latest BAU Gold Rush) shoves us from the world’s dumbest idea (with fiat currencies) into the world’s most dangerous idea (with our energy/data), Shoshana Zuboff warns:
“You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.”
Just as fiat currencies have enabled a systemic transfer of our energy (value) to “corporate raiders,” isn’t that direction intact for them to continue to be able to legally raid humans as batteries?
Can we really solve our systemic problems with the learned BAU patterns of behaviors used to create them?
In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin articulates how machine men with machine minds and machine hearts make us “victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people”:
“More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men — cries out for universal brotherhood — for the unity of us all.”
For our shared future to be legally more pro real people than “corporate raiders,” will you share this to explore with all and sundry why we first need to unlearn what is Success so the change of direction can go from control to empowerment?
Thank you.
References
Adam Smith On the Social Construction of Scarcity
Gustav Peebles: Reclaiming Adam Smith, the Zen Priest
Irving Fisher and the Mechanistic Character of Twentieth Century Accounting Thought
Socialism, accounting, and the creation of ‘consensus capitalism’ in America, circa.1935–1955
An Anthropology of Money: A Critical Introduction
Wealth and Poverty: On the Social Creation of Scarcity
Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s Attack on American Free Enterprise System
The Corbett Report — Century of Enslavement The History of The Federal Reserve
Keiser Report | Debt Slavery & the Great Reset
The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation
