Amerika

Conservatives find themselves wondering why American companies seem to enthusiastically support far-Left policies, since we all know that these will lead to Communism. In theory, capitalists — those who profit from the voluntary exchange of goods and services for money — would oppose Communism since it would end their earnings.

The internationalist nature of some of these companies provides a clue but not the whole story. Without a culture to guide them, multi-national corporations act solely in self-interest, which makes them viral and parasitic like anything with no allegiance to its host but enough agency to act for its own enrichment:

There is a difference between an ordinary corporation and a multinational corporation. Multinationals hate capitalism.

Multinationals want control, and capitalism does not allow them control; that is why multinationals do not want capitalism. Multinationals use lobbyists to generate regulations that stall competition.

Multinationals do not want competition; they are, by nature of their interest, anti-capitalists.

Consider why Facebook and Twitter want badly to be utilities. That way, they retain their monopoly role forever, and get protected by being part of government. Any little oopsies that happen on their watch get “fixed” with taxpayer dollars.

Even more, this gives them guaranteed entry to every aspect of society. People will be forced to use them because others use them, a phenomenon known as network effects. They can demand whatever they want, and the process of changing the rules will be buried under bureaucracy.

If you remember where AT&T was before federal courts broke it up, you can see the advantage. Long-distance calling was very expensive back then, and AT&T was able to expand its consumer business into other areas of research and sales. They just got bigger.

Multinationals see this as a simple tradeoff: they support Communism and then become part of government, at which point — because of the superpower status of the US, this will become World Communism — they gain a market of eight billion people who cannot refuse to sign up.

These companies recognize that Communism finally found a way to beat its way into dominance in the West through civil rights. Motivated by equality, a society will always favor the pitied group at the expense of those who do not need pity, and wreck the latter.

Since the 1990s, American media and government have promulgated a message of replacement: the future consists of new generations of Black, brown, yellow, and red people who will uphold our values — really ideology: Constitution, civil rights, free markets, exceptionalism — and carry our nation into a new bright future.

The subtle undertone of this message tells us that Whites are obsolete, and now even near-Whites (Southern, Irish, Eastern, and middle eastern White hybrids) are out of favor. Stand aside so that the new Americans can take over!

Companies need customers, and they took this propaganda seriously. If Whites were on the way out, it was time to market to the new customers, and not only that, to the international audience, of which Whites are maybe five percent.

In addition, these companies are creations not of capitalism, but of government. With legal protection for unions, massive lawsuits, high taxes, and numerous needlessly complex regulations and paperwork requirements, government has changed the market.

At this point, in most Western nations, corporations depend on the circular Ponzi scheme, in which government pays out benefits so that the masses spend it on corporate products, then taxes that income so that it can borrow more money.

This makes corporations dependent on government. This creates a type of corporate-government fusion that combines the worst elements of fascism, Communism, and unrestricted markets. Everyone has money and luxuries, but quality of life radically declines.

If you wanted that “bipartisan” or “third way” political alternative, they found it for you!

That horrible hybrid of Communism and Consumerism arose from neoliberalism, a compromise which essentially meant a return to classical liberalism (libertarianism, Austrian economics) after the postwar swing to the Left, since every war since the Napoleonic Wars has resulted in a Leftward drift no matter who wins:

Modern liberalism developed from the social-liberal tradition, which focused on impediments to individual freedom—including poverty and inequality, disease, discrimination, and ignorance—that had been created or exacerbated by unfettered capitalism and could be ameliorated only through direct state intervention. Such measures began in the late 19th century with workers’ compensation schemes, the public funding of schools and hospitals, and regulations on working hours and conditions and eventually, by the mid-20th century, encompassed the broad range of social services and benefits characteristic of the so-called welfare state.

By the 1970s, however, economic stagnation and increasing public debt prompted some economists to advocate a return to classical liberalism, which in its revived form came to be known as neoliberalism. The intellectual foundations of that revival were primarily the work of the Austrian-born British economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argued that interventionist measures aimed at the redistribution of wealth lead inevitably to totalitarianism, and of the American economist Milton Friedman, who rejected government fiscal policy as a means of influencing the business cycle (see also monetarism). Their views were enthusiastically embraced by the major conservative political parties in Britain and the United States, which achieved power with the lengthy administrations of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan (1981–89).

Neoliberal ideology and policies became increasingly influential, as illustrated by the British Labour Party’s official abandonment of its commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production” in 1995 and by the cautiously pragmatic policies of the Labour Party and the U.S. Democratic Party from the 1990s. As national economies became more interdependent in the new era of economic globalization, neoliberals also promoted free-trade policies and the free movement of international capital.

After this achieved great success in the 1980s, the voters fell back on the usual stupidity and decided that they wanted to revert to Leftism since the threat of Communism was gone and therefore no one needed the Reagan/Thatcher style leaders around anymore, and they instead got the Clinton-Rubin demand-based economy which formed the basis for our present system:

When we met with the president-elect on January 7, what we said was that if we have fiscal discipline, and we bring the deficit down, that is obviously contractionary. That’ll reduce the rate of growth.

On the other hand, if interest rates go down as a result, then that will stimulate growth, and we thought that the beneficial effect of lower interest rates would outweigh the contractionary impact of the deficit reduction.

However, Rubinomics showed us a return to a high-tax, fiat currency based economy that was remarkably similar to — Carter’s!

Rubin proposed the government concentrate on reducing the federal budget deficit instead of spending money on infrastructure, technology, and education. This displeased liberal economic advisers who favored higher government spending, as well as supply-side economists who predicted the tax increases needed to balance the budget would negatively impact the economy. However, Rubin argued that lower long-term rates would spur greater private sector investment in key industries and the development of high-value, long-term projects that would grow jobs regardless of tax increases.

In other words, he created the postmodern growth-based economy where instead of expansion of business, government would use spending — even on balancing the budget! — to stimulate the economy in the Keynesian style. He took us back into the 1930s.

Following the FDR school of logic, much of what Clinton did was to raise taxes to fund this plan, taking money out of the economy and making government the central distributor of wealth:

• Raised the top income tax rate from 28% to 36% for those earning more than $115,000, and 39.6% for income above $250,000
• Increased the corporate income tax from 34% to 36% for corporations with incomes over $10 million
• Ended some corporate subsidies,
• Taxed Social Security benefits for high-income earners
• Created the earned income tax credit for incomes under $30,000
• Raised the gas tax by 4.3 cents per gallon
• Limited the ability of corporations to claim entertainment tax deductions

Interestingly enough, Biden is pursuing the Clinton plan without the balanced budget:

The neoliberal model suited an era when the U.S. economy reaped vast benefits from globalization—or at least seemed to. That is no longer seen to be the case: Globalization is now blamed for widening inequality and hollowing out the middle class. What’s more, at a time when China, an unabashed geoeconomics power, is wielding trade and economic relations as a diplomatic weapon, the United States cannot simply repeat shibboleths about the free movement of capital and goods.

This completes the transition to a Communist-Consumerism hybrid: government spends big at home, then watches its citizens spend like crazed idiots, and declares that this is “growth” so that it can tax the new higher national income.

History sounds a warning for those who like these Roosevelt, Carter, Clinton, and Obama style programs:

The coming recession, which I addressed in my recent article, “Fall of the Dot Coms,” is an especially bitter legacy for Clinton, who managed to bamboozle much of the country into thinking his administration was responsible for good economic times. In fact, what was believed to be a permanent plateau of prosperity (the “New Economy” at work) was nothing more than the classic boom of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Easy money from the Federal Reserve System created massive malinvestments, especially in the high technology sector, which are in the process of being liquidated.

This massive investment strategy leads to economic collapses, but those always occur shortly before or right after a Republican is elected anyway. The malaise of the early Bush years was so bad that America pretty much had to go to war to wake up its slumbering economy.

Corporations — especially international ones — hire very smart people who remember all of this stuff even when the voters do not. They can see the writing on the wall, which is that there will be a huge boom followed by a prolonged economic sickness.

For them, it makes sense then to reap the benefits of the recipients of government money right now. They want those dollars from minorities who benefit from welfare, affirmative action, jobs programs, and the like. They want them to spend big, and then to haul the money out of the economy.

In particular, we have to remember that corporations are comprised of people, and each of these is interested only in his own career, so will do everything he can to drive up the value of his stock in the company, achieve a victory on paper, and then sell out and get out so that he can invest in something that will ride out the coming decline.

On top of that, corporations by the nature of being run by savvy people tend to desire direct power. They think that if the economy is sliding toward Communism, but not going all the way, it will be best to have direct power, since the money will be worthless anyway.

If you have control, you can always make money by forcing people to do what you want. You can even have something better than money, which is control of resources, and therefore, the ability not only to regulate them and sell them, but to in fact control an entire monetary system.

Control provides — this is in the eyes of the careerists, since you and I realize that this is vanity that collapses over time — the ability to force people to do what you want on a regular basis, which eliminates risk. You no longer worry about the company going belly-up; as a utility, monopoly, or Communist state bureau, you are now 100% market-proof.

Consider how many companies, once they get big enough, seek merely to control their users because that way, they protect their business model by eliminating the risk of being discarded in favor of something new, better, or old and better:

Control is how companies protect their business models by limiting what people can do with their computers. These same technologies can easily be co-opted by governments that want to ensure that only certain computer programs are run inside their countries or that their citizens never see particular news programs.

They know that with control they can achieve wealth without having to use the money to generate it, and that after the crash, as happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, they can use that power to buy back their assets for pennies on the dollar.

The Swiss bank accounts — or these days, the Caymans — where they stash their cash will wait for them until that time.

Tags: clintonomics, control, corporations, keynesianism, rubinomics