Part 2; Obama's America Becomes a Corporation

There is lot in the American free market system that has recently failed. In the first part of this series, I talked about the possible advantages of fascism, why some might except the trade offs of personal liberty for economic security, and how such a change might happen. Before we go any farther I want reiterate that I am no fan of fascism, but it is my fear that if one does not understand how benevolent fascism appears on the surface, it will not be recognized as it creeps into the American society. Under Presidents Bush (43) and Obama, we are already seeing the seeds of fascism being planted. After the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Washington feared that credit that is the life blood of today's industry would dry up. There original plan for the $700 billion TARP fund (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was to buy up all the toxic assets that resulted from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown (hence the name), giving the banks back assets of known value and allowing them sufficient reserves to continue lending money. This was the same solution used during the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s. Interestingly enough, Washington actually made money when they later sold the these assets when a more favorable market returned. This plan however was shelved, apparently because Washington believed it did not give them enough control of the banking industry. As a result the banks were simply loaned the money, but the strings attached that has resulted in the Nationalization of the banks, and as the Banks started paying off the loans, Washington has refused to release their control. The Obama Administration followed this up by Nationalizing GM and Chrysler after their bankruptcy. In a twist right out of the fascism playbook, the Auto Worker Union, UAW was given majority ownership in Chrysler and 17.5% ownership in GM, therefore guaranteeing the UAW would not interfere with production. The next fight will be for Nationalized Health Care.

America as a corporation does not compete against itself. GM and Chrysler are no longer competitors, they are now different products made by the same company. As with most corporations, America will be highly compartmentalized. In Italian fascism these were referred to as Syndicates. One thing I have yet mention is Isolationism. A corporation can not control all facets of production if it has to constantly contend with outside influences. For that sake, America as a Corporation will close down it's borders and become less of an international player. On the other hand, the US would extend it's hegemony in a more direct fashion over those areas that contain the resources it needs. In these areas, the governments that control these resources will understand they control these resources in name only and if necessary, America as a Corporation will have no compunction to extend it's borders if necessary for it's security. Right now, illegal immigration is used as a form of slave labor for US industry and agriculture; that will have to stop. In it's place will be a change in the Criminal Justice system where prisons and jails will become Rehabilitation Institutions. It is estimated there are 11 million illegal aliens in the US; half are unemployed; this includes mothers, children and criminals. Of the 5.5 working illegal aliens, only about a third work in agriculture, the balance work in construction jobs such as roofing and insulation. There are also about 2.5 million incarcerated Americans with an additional 3.5 million on probation and parole. It would not take that much to assign parole and probationers one years of paid service in agriculture as a condition of their release. Further, low level prisoners could also be used as labor. In regards to the hard core criminals that remain, one could imagine a more Draconian solution in the vain of a hydraulic system. The state would determine it could incarcerate so many dangerous criminal. Once that number had been achieved, the criminals that have been in the system the longest, would be executed. With this system rehabilitation would take on a new sense of urgency.

The life of the average citizen would not change much with America as a corporation. As a matter of fact, the average Joe will see a steady paycheck, very affordable health care, 3 weeks paid vacations a week and 12 paid sick days a year. It will be management's job to keep production humming along; to reward hard work and give the slackers a kick in the pants when needed. Private ownership and even the control of small business is allowed under fascism. This of course will be in the good times. In fascism, the government is an objective determinate between workers and industry. However, since the governments decisions are always looking toward increased production, wages and benefits tend to be tied to the preceived health of industry. The free market as we know it would disappear. A small amount of competition is allowed to encourage innovation, but not to the point that it would effect the health and growth of the controlled economy. Unlike Communism, fascism usually does not take direct control of a company; Nationalization is accomplished by oversight and regulations. What this accomplishes is accountability to the state. What has come to the attention to the American people is a total lack of accountability by the corporations; especially in the Investment Bankers. The cause of the sub prime meltdown was not so much as a lack of regulations, but a total lack of accountability. CEO's of companies that have lost millions of it's investors money are still getting bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. Now that the Obama Administration has bailed out these investment banks, they have started to pull the strings to cap salaries in these institutions. This is another page from the fascist playbook. You have a compartmentalized government pay Czar, that now has the power to determine how much the employee of a private company can make.

While there will be a stock market with America as a Corporation, it will look nothing like what it looks like today. It will a slimmed down version designed to invest in companies to help then grow. There will be no derivatives, commodities or unregulated markets, since these markets are impossible to control with little or no accountability. The Federal reserve will be abolished and the Dept of the treasury will have unfettered control of the money supply. Oh, and the trillions of dollars invested in America by countries like China and Saudi Arabia; sorry, in the name of National Security, there will be no foreign ownership of any US Property.

Fascism is also known as being non-intellectual. While this might sound counter to the Obama Administration, there is many areas where sudo-science is presented as fact. Nothing could be truer than climate change and the current Cap and Trade Bill. Without arguing the merits of want is now being called Climate Change, lets just look at what happened to the original studies done in the phenomena called “The Greenhouse Effect”. The term was actually coined in the late 1800's. It is the study of why the climate of earth is stable enough to sustain life. Without the Greenhouse Effect, our planet could not sustain life. Atmospheric scientist have studied the Greenhouse effect to explore what forces cause changes in climates on our planet. At the time forest fires and volcanoes were believed to have the greatest affect. In the 1960s , with the aid of increasingly more powerful computers, Meterologists began experimenting with computer models, in attempt to predict the weather. The result was a rift in scientific thought, that shook the world of Newtonian Physics. From "Chaos, Making A New Science" by James Gleck.

“Scientists marching under Newton's banner actually waved another flag that said something like this: Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate approximate behaviour of the system.” In other words, when figuring the nature of systems, “Very small influences can be neglected”. Newton believed that if you you had enough information about the past, that information could be reduced to a mathematical equation and reproduced; and if you can reproduce the past you can forecast the future. Edward Lorenz was a weather scientist working with computers at MIT in the 1960's. “One day in the winter of 1961”, Lorenz was running a simple weather model through his computer; ”wanting to examine one sequence at greater length, Lorenz took a shortcut. Instead of starting the whole thing over, he started midway through. To give the machine it's initial conditions, he typed the numbers straight from the earlier printout. Then he walked down the hall to get away from the noise and get a cup of coffee. When he returned an hour later, he saw something unexpected, something that planted a seed for a new science.”

The new science Gleck was eluding to was Chaos Theory. What had happened was the computer model returned with a completely different forecast as before. It turns out the reason was Gleck had rounded off his numbers from six decimal places to three; .506127 had been typed in as .506; according to the current Newtonian thought, this small difference should have been inconsequential. Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome. Gleck explained this by comparing predicting tides to predicting the weather. “The average person, seeing that we can predict tides pretty well a few months ahead would say, why can't we do the same thing with the atmosphere, it's just a fluid system , the laws are about as complicated. But I realized that any physical system that behave non-periodically would be unpredictable”. In other words the reason we can predict tides is because they are periodical; like a newspaper being delivered to your house every day. Even though we no nothing about the complicated life of the human being that delivers the paper, the fact that it shows up every morning between 5-6 AM, allows us to predict the same will happen tomorrow. However, if you subscribe to a “zine”, or internet blog that shows up only when the writer has something to say, there is no way to predict when you will see the next issue. This may sound like common sense, but before Chaos Theory scientist believed there was some inherent pattern to the world that would allow you to make such a prediction.

Okay, why have I spent all this time on Chaos Theory. The reason is simple. The study of understanding and predicting the weather is very difficult; so difficult in fact that it gave us a new understanding of the true complexity of the universe we live in. When Lorenz went searching for a way to predict the weather, he was as if in a boat made by Newton; much like Rory Shiver looking for the shark in Jaws. What he discovered, when he saw the scope of the problem, was he was going to need a bigger boat. Science is a process, it is not supposed to be a tool to control the citizenry of a country; but it is another page from the fascist playbook.