While I'm not claiming that the US is currently close to totalitarianism, there are some comparisons that have become quite disturbing:
1. A regime that justifies itself by claiming to protect the populace from a vague but grave danger. The USSR had the specter of returning robber barons; Nazi Germany, the Jews; and current-day US, terrorists.
2. A secret police that collects everyone's metadata and uses it to investigate suspicious activity. (Stasi didn't record everything all the time; they kept files of who communicated with whom, and assigned surveillance assets to the most promising leads.)
3. A heavy-handed, militarized regular police that apprehends nonviolent suspects with overwhelming force.
I could go on, but the combination of these three is more than enough cause for worry.
Very interesting article. I would add one more, important, thing that is specific to current situation:
11 Always talk and demand for transparency and open society.
Ofc this is not true because they demand only civil sector to be open while at the same time they are closed and even secret (ffs secret laws???). You can't demand open society with one or more parts of that society closed. Let me rephrase this, when facebook/google calls for open society -> they should open their database first, not demanding people to give them more data and lock that data down.
Little bit radical idea, but don't demand something you are not willing to make yourself.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the neo-cons voluntary relinquished power; I had been convinced that Naomi Wolf was right, and that democracy was almost over. Turns out, Cheney was just one head of the hydra, and the march to tyranny never really stopped. :(
If history is any guide, the establishment of totalitarianism has so far required:
A) A government in possession of excessive repressive measures.
B) A general state of popular anxiety.
C) A highly symbolic crisis.
Historical examples include the infamous Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany [1], as well as the lesser known attempt on Lenin's life in Soviet Russia [2] and the duke of Brunswick's capture of Verdun in Revolutionary France [3]. Each of these crises enabled the respective governments to implement extraordinary measures that violently suppressed civil liberties and political opposition.
Thus I have little doubt that we've escaped a close call after 9/11. A follow-up attack, even of moderate proportions, may have enabled an honest-to-God police state by now. Judging by politicians' reactions to the Boston bombing, that danger is by no means behind us.
There are probably a lot of people who do think that the US is close to some kind of totalitarianism, but when speaking about it they might add a disclaimer because otherwise they're grilled by others saying "you have no idea what totalitarianism is, look at how life was in this other country. You're being naive and over-dramatic, etc".
The problem with that view is that such a state will never look exactly the same as it did in another country in another time. As long as we're using another country's situation and behavior as a strict metric for what totalitarianism/fascism/etc "actually" is, some serious problems will fly by with too little attention given.
Im not being clever here, I think that the US is getting like that, but really deep down it doesn't feel like a Nazi Germany (or the like), but it sure is displaying signs of it. So, I'm not even sure what I think, and what the tipping point is where you can say that the US is in that group.
One thing I wonder about is whether its simply presentation? Its is simply that the US has a veil of democracy? Which people can vote, will it ever be seen as a totalitarian state, or stasi like, etc?
One problem I have is that Americans voted for this and previous government and there for must approve of what the USG does. "USA, USA, USA", and all that. Then I wonder if Americans are basically brain washed with this "best country in the world" nonsense, and this "they hate our freedoms" line, which is a contradiction in its self.
Perhaps the US is something new? A democratic fascist state, or something? I mean, the US people have no problem with the likes of Bush threatening countries with bombing back to the stone age to get their own way. No problem with killer flying robots murdering suspects on foreign soil with out permission of that country. No problem with CIA kidnapping and torture for dirty worthless foreigners.
Only when Americans feel the USG is threatening them do they get upset. But frankly, screw non Americans, they are not human or equal. Seems to me Americans enjoy their world power, love licking every one else around, but suddenly, when its them.....
I think what the US is today is very much like bad countries in the past who had disproportionate power and use it to further their own ambition at the expense of every one else. But unlike previous states, the US does it with its own democratic vote that makes it all just fine.
What name you give that, I don't know.
The one single thing that does worry me though is this notion that Americans are some how more valuable, more human, more important that any other people. That different rights apply. To Americans, we are not all human first.
YES I know not ALL Americans think like that. But the democratic results and opinion poles suggest that in the main, most Americans do. I have to say there does seem to be a huge difference between Americans who travel abroad and those who don't. I also include those who spend a lot of time professionally interacting with the rest of the planet too.
The internet has expanded that, just like here, on this site. I see hope here. I see Americans with a far better world view. HN, IMHO, has really helped me with that.
Nazi Germany never felt like Nazi Germany at the time, either. Besides having first-hand accounts of what the lead-up to WWII felt like (my grandfather wrote extensively about it, and his experiences during the war), if it felt like it, Jews would've left.
The really amazing thing about it is that everyone in Germany (Jewish or not) just thought it was a lot of hot air, and would blow over.
It's really worth reading some history books.
The part that scares me most is that while things look benign enough (as they do now), anyone in power can manufacture evidence, present it to a secret court and thus efficiently side-line and silence an adversary. For no other reason than not liking your face, for saying the wrong thing, being too good at something, sleeping with the wrong person...
You just disappear. No court, no recourse. Life destroyed.
"In February 1933 while on a visit to the United States, Einstein decided not to return to Germany due to the rise to power of the Nazis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Many ordinary Jews wanted to leave including my great grandparents and their relatives. The US put up a quota to keep most of them out and none of their visas were ever granted. Other than my great uncle who went to the US in early 1930 and my grandmother who survived a camp (my mom stayed hidden for two years). The remainder all died in camps. My mother told me my great grandfather continued to believe he was as good a german citizen as anyone right until they took him away in 1943.
Well known Jews could get out at least until the war.
I think the correct assertion would have been that more Jews would have left. Even the information you linked to suggests that, at least as of 1938, many Jews weren't convinced they had to leave yet.
Emmigration is difficult, especially if you're in the middle class.
What would need to happen for you to abandon your job/business, home, extended family and friends and home to move to another country? I don't know what the answer is, but I think in a similar circumstance my first instinct would be to hunker down and wait for things to blow over.
If you're poor and striving, I think these decisions are a bit easier. My grandparents all immigrated to the US from Ireland between 1929-1946. For them, the complete lack of opportunity made it the only decision that made sense.
Spooky23 is probably also right - it seems easier to move if you're at the top (internationally known and/or could walk into a good new job) or at the bottom (nothing much to lose), but harder at the middle class.
For example, I really liked "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace" about Vietnam war (and since I'm from ex-Soviet country lot of the stuff there really resonates with me) but I'm not sure where to start about WW2.
The US did elect Obama, who prior to being president was crystal clear that he'd put the aggressive policies of the bush administration (both foreign and domestic) behind us. I think we did vote for a change of policy. Too bad obama either lied or has been coopted by "the system"
I was agree with your analysis of the political system, but not so much with your analysis of the people. You give them both too much credit and not enough.
First, no one really cares that citizens can be targeted or tortured with no trial (in fact, many call for it as in the case of the Boston bomber). This is tragic, but true.
Second, as much as the rest of the world wants to pretend this isn't the case, the same attitudes are equally present in most of the rest of the western world, from the ethnocentrism (which is a much bigger problem pretty much everywhere else) to the militarism and acceptance of big brother (don't even get me started on the Brits who accept a government which literally puts cameras in their homes).
There's the idea that democracy was created to solve revolts and revolutions. People are a whole lot less likely to do either if they feel they have some 'power' in the process of voting people in or out. "It's only a few more years..."
I think it's worth distinguishing between the iron-fisted totalitarianism of the 20th century, colonialism of the 19th century, and military based hegemony going into the 21st. The iron-fisted path to empire didn't work out too well. But I think "total" control is the goal in all cases.
I find it really sad when people REFUSE to believe this guy, but he said himself people would not believe him anyway :(
Here in Brazil, this plan was also implemented, part of it for example was the creation of our no-fault divorce laws with help of TV Soap Operas.
Later, the author of the soap opera that pushed for no-fault divorce (and indeed, it worked, no-fault divorce was made law in the same year as his soap opera) made even a book writing on how he is a communist and how he uses TV to manipulate society toward communist objectives, and even if you point Yuri interview and this guy book, people refuse to believe it, they think that society changed because it was 100% their choice and that the changes were 100% good and whoever say the opposite is crazy.
Your comment appears to half 'attack' the commenter above and half 'attack' Bezmenov, while not saying much. If the use of 'crack-pot' was in reference to Bezmenov, I reccommend first watching his longer (hour-plus) classroom talk from the early 80s, also on Youtube. The main message and content is clear enough, and saying the current empire will fall is far from saying 'the moon is made of cheese'.
1) I wasn't intending to attack Bezmenov. I haven't heard his message, so I can't pass any kind of judgement/opinion on it.
2) My intent was to lodge my dislike of statements such as:
People don't believe X, but it's ok because X said
that no one would believe him/her.
I viewed it (possibly falsely) as using lack of belief as validation of the message itself. [ This can be done even if the messenger didn't intend for the audience to use his/her statements this way, so it's not necessarily an attack against him/her. ]
3) It (to me) has similarities to statements like:
<statement 1> is true! <opposing group> might try
to distract you by saying <statement 2>, but don't
believe them because it's all lies!
[ Note: I'm not saying that Bezmenov made any such statements, or that such statements are in his character. ]
This is not totalitarianism, its creeping authoritarianism:
>Authoritarianism is a form of government. Juan Linz, whose 1964 description of authoritarianism is influential,[1] characterized authoritarianism regimes as political systems characterized by four qualities: (1) "limited, not responsible, political pluralism"; that is, constraints on political institutions and groups (such as legislatures, political parties, and interest groups), (2) a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency; (3) neither "intensive nor extensive political mobilization" and constraints on the mass public (such as repressive tactics against opponents and a prohibition of antiregime activity) and (4) "formally ill-defined" executive power, often shifting or vague.[2]
A thought that is worth possibly spreading: despite protests to the contrary, terrorism does not pose an existential threat. Governments use terrorism to justify almost anything, on the basis that if they don't then the terrorists will destroy everything.
This is ridiculous. They're criminals, and should be treated as such. This modern security state is ridiculous.
I've never been a fan of John Kerry, but it really bugged me that no one took him seriously during the 2004 election, when he said that terrorism is a police matter, not a military one. Terrorism is murder, plain and simple.
You declare war on a country, not a tactic, and you have to fight against an enemy who is capable of eventually saying "I surrender".
Didn't take too long after the fall of the Berlin Wall to get to that state did it?
To me it is fairly simple. The Soviet threat went away, and the big intelligence agencies were left with not a lot to do. So a new enemy was born: Arabs, Muslims and Terror. Perfect scary enemies for pliable populations. I think the "war on drugs" also fills the Soviet void too.
My big worry with all this is that the US and West in general go too far and it genuinely becomes a religious world war. Hard for me, as some one who doesn't do religion, not to see this as christians vs muslims. Bush called it a "crusade" and claimed his god told him what to do, after all. Interesting too that Blair, the UK PM who backed Bush, immediately turned to the cathoilics once he left office, presumably for the forgiveness of his conscience.
Lastly, terrorists are no real threat at all, numbers and money wise. We in the UK had the IRA for decades, and frankly the damage they did, while devastating to individuals, was very low. Interestingly we always resisted the notion that it was a war. We felt that legitimised the IRA.
Note to Amerians: the IRA terror ended by NEGOTIATION. Not a military victory. We could still be fighting them today. Note also that AMERICANS were instrumental and vital in that negotiated peace. So you chaps do know other ways, peaceful ways, intelligent ways.
Yes, it's funny how badly perspectives have been skewed. The USSR was a much more serious threat. Either they could've participated in a nuclear war leading to billions of deaths, or precipitated a land war in Europe that would have led to mere tens of millions of deaths the old-fashioned way.
Terrorists simply don't have that kind of destructive capacity. It requires a modern industrial state; they don't have that. And once a modern industrial state is acquired, governing elites are curiously reluctant to sacrifice it on the altar of pure ideology.
So why more money is spent on terrorists than communists is a bit of a mystery to me.
That, and because terrorism works: it causes terror, and people want to be protected from this terrifying threat, even if in reality it's not a very big threat.
If the USA was really interested in saving the most lives possible, it would use War on Terror funds to do cancer research instead. Instead, it likes having the excuse to issue legislation such as the Patriot Act.
As the US is the only country to actually use a nuclear weapon against another, the long-view of the empire's historical narrative would be interesting to see.
PJ O'Rourke once observed that "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys".
No matter how noble the intentions, no matter how vociferously the teenage boys swear, swear that their motives are and shall remain unimpeachably pure ... it eventually goes wrong.
I'm what you might think of as an ex-libertarian, not quite so rule-bound as I used to be. But on the topic of continuously fighting the granting of powers and capabilities I think they're right: the historical examples just pile on top of each other. Governments can't resist mission creep. You need to prevent the rot before it starts.
True, but it's not like people or corporations are that much better at resisting it, is it? Show me a big organization, and I will show you a whole lot of fingers in a whole lot of unrelated pies.
However, government is a special case: it reserves to itself a monopoly on violence and the ability to set the rules. Special cases deserve special treatment.
edit: it's a small world, I recognise your username from LP.
It's not as if private companies or entrepreneurial off-books pharmaceutically-oriented import-export fraternal organizations haven't resorted to violence. And they're hardly the only ones.
Standard Oil literally blew up the competition. Homestead Steel hired the Pinkertons to bash heads (and kill a few). Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Aetna kill indirectly by denying shelter, access to finances, or healthcare coverage.
The Libertardian arguments are getting more than a little tired, and we've heard them repeated a few too many times.
Is this a relevant line of argument? Yes, historically, companies have acted violently and even taken on state-like roles (I listed the EIC as an example elsewhere in this thread).
But these case are remarkable because they are rare, not common. And because in all such cases they predate the settlement of an uncontested government monopoly on violence in some geographical area.
I suppose you are mistaking me for a Rothtard, an anarcho-capitalist who believes in a free market in violence. Not so; it's been pretty well shown by now that centralising the social violence function is, on the whole, a better strategy.
But it comes with the downside that you've centralised a lot of power and it needs particular supervision and constraint.
"However, government is a special case: it reserves to itself a monopoly on violence and the ability to set the rules."
Now, either you're tautalogically defining any organization which sets rules and exacts violence in pursuit of its ends as a government (which is a meaningless distinction), or you're making a nonsense argument. Actually, both are nonsense arguments. Note too that I've included a number of other organizations other than state-registered corporations, though I include those.
Ongoing corporate war through the 2000s carried out by the Gulf Cartel subsidiary Los Zetas in Neuvo Lardo, Mexico, with death tolls running to the 100s annually:
http://www.pro8news.com/news/96625619.html
All of these are cases in which violence was used by companies directly or through conscious and deliberate disregard for human safety and consequences in the aim of profit. The use of force to secure control or direct gains.
Or perhaps you'd like to address companies such as Blackwater (now Xe), armed affiliates of oil, gas, mineral, and diamond operations, forestry operators, and others, who transact directly in death and force?
The distinction you're drawing simply doesn't exist.
Yes, but governmental violence is also used in the furthuring of private profit, and I'm not sure private profit off government policy is just a side effect and not also a symbiotic relationship. Bombs are expensive, rebuilding is expensive, terahertz scanners may do nothing for "security" but do wonders for bank accounts; and many of the costs to tax payers ultimately end up in private hands. Historically, governments have a lot more horrible things under their belt, but I'm still worried we now simply have an additional problem. I don't see much of a difference between power for the sake of power and profit for the sake of profit, and they make a great couple, too.
(That must be someone else, since I never used this nick before this account and don't even know what LP is. The Libertarian Party?)
Corporations don't make War and enlist people to fight for them. The comparison does not make sense. And corporations can die and go bankrupt. Governments will make everyone else die or go poor before they do.
Uh, you should read about what the fruit companies and now Coke are doing in Latin America, or Shell in Africa. Or the East Indian Company back in the day. Corporations will do all of those things in the abscence of a bigger bully to keep them in check. The monopoly of violence is a power vacuum. When its not filled by government, its filled by an even less accountable entity.
I am talking about wars from one country to another country. Not local wars. You know, the wars that kill vast amounts of people ? Those are not led by corporations. The Real Machine of War is governmental. Look at all the casualties of war around the world and separate the ones linked to private corporations ONLY and the ones linked to political actions. You will find out the later largely outweighs the first.
All of those are international conflicts. These are all Western companies killing people in the developing world.
As for the number of people killed, you're just arguing about quantity, not anything fundamentally different and less violent about the nature of corporations. Corporations are clearly willing to kill people. If they were bigger and had more resources, like governments, they'd kill more people.
The government of Togo also doesn't kill many people in foreign wars. Its not because they're instrinsically less violent.
All these things are tautologous and there's nothing special about governments that causes them:
I am talking about wars from one country to another country.
Only governments can start international wars by definition.
You know, the wars that kill vast amounts of people ?
International wars tend to be more bloody due to the increased stakes and military power involved.
You will find out the later largely outweighs the first.
Since more people die in international wars, the majority of people who die in wars die in international ones.
Of course, what you don't mention is that outside of wars, there is a relatively tiny amount of violence in most developed countries, as a result of the monopoly on military power.
> Since more people die in international wars, the majority of people who die in wars die in international ones.
It's all a matter of frequency. How many international wars have you had recently? What about regional conflicts, like Ethiopian troops fighting Islamists in Somalia? Fact is, you get a lot more small-scale conflict on average than large-scale conflicts.
Besides, I don't understand this argument of corporations being opposed to governments. Private interests in strategic areas have worked hand-in-hand with governments to further their agenda (British Petroleum, United Fruit, Shell) or are the armed hand of the government (Blackwater).
>Corporations don't make War and enlist people to fight for them.
Oh, they very much do. Either through friendly governments or directly, in less developed places.
The Krupps and several other business interests were financing Hitler, for example.
And multinational corporations push dictatorships, civil tension and even full blown wars all the time on smaller countries. There is a reason some are called "banana republics", and it's not because they produce bananas.
Corporations, making war? Like what, millions of people backing them up? Any source to share to back your argument up ? At most you can say that corporations have been influencing governments to go to War, but a single corporation has not enough leverage to hire hundred of thousands of soldiers to fight. Ultimately War needs State involvement.
Governments dying all the time? Like where? You mean in small countries? I'm talking about developed countries here, with big governments in place. They are very unlikely to die any time soon.
Wow, great, you could come up with a SINGLE example for a company with State-like powers, and that was 200 years ago. And they never waged war on large regions at a time. And let's not forget their expansion was blessed by their own government.
Do you have any recent example of super-powerful corporation waging war around the world by themselves? Any example of corporation launching WW1 or WW2, or even something remotely big as the Vietnam war, all by themselves ?
It's fairly obvious that no corporation nowadays has the financial means to wage war by themselves. It takes 100 billions to wage war in Iraq. Top tier companies make that much in REVENUE, not even profit. How would you expect them to spend so much? Your point does not make sense.
>Wow, great, you could come up with a SINGLE example for a company with State-like powers, and that was 200 years ago.
Read a little history. HE came with a single example, because you ASKED for an example. Read history books on the issue, and you'll find tons of other examples.
From Shell in Nigeria, to United Fruit Company in Latin America, to the big coprs in Hitler's Germany. E.g:
"""Big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Nazi government as it became increasingly organized. Business leaders supported the government's political and military goals, and in exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies. Nazi Germany transferred public ownership and public services into the private sector, while other Western capitalist countries strove for increased state ownership of industry."""
There are tons of other examples. Not to mention that the question is quite brain-damaged: corporations don't make war directly, hiring an army and such.
They make them by exercizing political and financial influence. And that is not usually done by a single company: it's done by multiple corporate interests, that pursue their goals in tandem. E.g the so-called "millitary-industrial complex".
>It takes 100 billions to wage war in Iraq. Top tier companies make that much in REVENUE, not even profit. How would you expect them to spend so much? Your point does not make sense.
LOL. They don't spend "so much". That's not how it works. It's like he's explaining that to a ten year old.
Corporations bribe the right persons, create the right conditions, push and influence policy and such, and let the people of a country (or several) fight. That is, what corporations do is diverting governments and politicians, from serving the people, to doing their work for them.
I think the guy that coined the term fascism (Benito Mussolini) was pretty explicit that the government should be bound in the service of big business.
> Read a little history. HE came with a single example, because you ASKED for an example. Read history books on the issue, and you'll find tons of other examples.
You have WAY MORE examples of States leading wars than corporations. Even in recent history. Proves my point.
>You have WAY MORE examples of States leading wars than corporations. Even in recent history. Proves my point.
Not really. It proves it only against a bizarro argument that nobody made, that coporations lead wars directly.
Of course states lead wars. Corporations don't have armies and state like powers except in very few historical situations (namely, in the colonial era, like the East-India company example).
It's not about who "leads the war" or "who fights in it". That's not what we mean when we say corporations create wars.
What we mean is that corporate interests (often of more than one corporation), exert power at states to further their interests, including by war, but also by other kinds of malice (dictatorship, lackeys in government, favorable laws, igniting civil tension, etc).
I guess you never heard about WW1 and WW2 then. Surely this was the corporationgs pushing for Germany to invade France and the rest of Europe, and surely this has nothing to do with political ideologies. This was all the evil corporations at work.
> Corporations bribe the right persons, push and influence policy and such, and let the people of a country (or several) fight.
We are coming back to what I said. Governments wage wars, not corporations. Without government involvement corporations are helpless. Government, ultimately, are responsible for military actions and the usage of force.
People wage wars. Whether they use governments, corporations, churches, or other vehicles to do so is a matter of convenience and what is available -- all have been used. If you shift more power to governments, governments will more often be the choice. If you shift that power away from governments, other choices will take over.
"Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people." -- Jawaharial Nehru
Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company for five years. They made billions of dollars off of the Iraq war alone. A war that we started under fall pretenses. The public was lied to by the Bush administration in order to line the pocket books of major multi-national corporations. You are absolutely delusional if you don't think that corporations sway the government into starting wars.
You should watch the documentary Hubris : Selling the Iraq War. It's on YouTube for free.
If you look elsewhere, I've pointed out that companies take on state-like functions and character when a government monopoly on violence hasn't yet been firmly established. The EIC is one such case.
My problem is that I am arguing a centre line that two schools of thought are misunderstanding. The centralisation of violence in the state serves a useful social function that decentralisation does poorly; but that selfsame centralisation is dangerous and must be closely and jealously guarded.
The first clause of my argument angers certain strains of libertarian and the second clause confuses various kinds of leftists who mistake me for a libertarian.
The best techniques I'm aware of are either a benevolent monarch -- which is ostensibly great until the benevolent monarch dies or is killed -- or by dividing the state against itself in a structured way.
First of all, the name-calling is unnecessary. I don't like O'Rourke either, but it adds nothing to the discussion.
Secondly, as I'm sure you well know, the small-government party line of the Republicans hasn't really meant anything since at least the time of Goldwater. Reagan and Bush Jr. presided over massive expansions of government power and expense, only pulling out "small government" talk in very strategic ways (attacks on PBS, etc).
A rough 95% of our leaders are completely compromised, whether from within or due to outside pressures, in favor of more power both for the state, and the corporations who it really represents. All else is theater.
There is one real issue that we should be putting all our energy into, and that is electoral reform.
Care to elaborate why this is THE issue? I don't quite see how that follows from the above. OTOH My gut says you may be right but I'm not convinced. Want to try?
In brief: (a) We have an entrenched two-party system that makes a big show of conflict and gridlock, yet manages to collude on a surprising number of issues on behalf of the same donors and powerful lobbies; (b) Elections have become a marketing game, and no one can hope to run on a national level without massive amounts of capital, which means not rocking the boat of the corporate welfare state, or upsetting any other PAC donors who are playing "asynchronous quid pro quo".
I see three possible solutions, any of which would help, but all of which I'd like to see:
- Campaign Finance Reform: there are many potential ways to do this, the most straight-forward being publicly financed elections. This seems expensive, except when you compare it to the "media-electoral complex" we have now. Congress should not have to spend as much time as it does on fundraising, and should not be so motivated to accept kickbacks to PACs.
- Instant Runoff Voting: This would give third parties a chance to actually win by removing the "spoiler effect". It's a richer way to measure what the voters actually want, instead of continually forcing a choice of lesser evils. Anyone who still wants to cast their vote for a single party still can. Meanwhile, the mainstream parties would take third parties as a more serious threat, and focus more on the desires of their base, rather than taking them for granted and spending all their energy on a handful of politically inactive undecideds.
- None of the Above: Allow voters to choose none of the candidates as an option, forcing a new election. This would bring the protest non-voters back to the polls, the people who are so jaded that they believe (with cause) that voting is pointless, and whose opinions are going uncounted.
There are also other ideas like Proportional Representation, but that would represent a massive shift in our political structure, and so is probably not realistic. The above three options could be bolted on to our existing framework on a state-by-state level, or (theoretically) by Constitutional Amendment.
The problem is, both major parties and their donors benefit massively from the current system, and so it would take a huge upswell of public support to force a change. (Media companies would also fight tooth and nail; political advertising is a major source of revenue.) On the other hand, those members of Congress who are not blatantly corrupt don't like having to spend so much time fundraising, so it's not a completely uphill battle once critical mass is reached.
Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.
There is a necessity for someone to have the men, guns and dogs -- even if they only figurative. But men with guns and dogs are dangerous and so whoever has them needs to be strictly controlled and supervised. The ability to acquire more such men, guns and dogs needs to be resisted as much as possible, because it is very hard to claw back.
> Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.
Well, sure, because we have a government to stop them.
>Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.
No, they can just buy media to influence public opinion or buy politicians and influence policy, and have them send the men with guns.
But I think we mostly agree with that.
Only I don't think the solution is less government (a smaller government is even easier for big corporations to have power on), but more vigilant citizens participating in politics.
I personally suspect that there are no strategies that are stable over multiple generations. Otherwise one would have emerged. Basically that there is a kind of political thermodynamics that destroys all nations, no matter how great.
Peter Turchin has developed an interesting family of theories about the rise and fall of great powers. He wrote a popular account, War and Peace and War, which I reviewed here:
Hacking government and hacking software are different things. You can't offer TCP/IP $100M to leak you some private keys from the server.
The smaller the government, the more value you could get per bribe (more power located in individuals) and the easier it would be to do it (smaller governments presumably lack layers of security measures against bribery). In case of extremely small government a big corporation could buy it out entirely.
In smaller government there is one and only one person you come to. If this person does not accept your bribe (or "lobbying") then you have to play by the rules.
In larger government there are a lot of competing bodies with vague job descriptions. You can honey them all with varying results. You can oil "layers of security" as well so those rarely help.
Don't confuse big/small government with big/small country. Surely there are banana republics, but I can't imagine you can buy out government of Iceland that easily.
The most minimal government possible is reduced to just the scary parts. That's the thing. A smaller government is no less scary in a police/military sense, unless you actually make the military and police smaller.
The irony is that everyone who goes on about a marginal tax increase, social security or some land-use regulations being tyranny, all of those same exact people are the biggest cheerleaders for a less restrained military.
You can downsize military as well. It's easier with smaller government because there is one person responsible, if they say we downsize military, we downsize it.
Compare it with having a dozen of committees with everyone in it being mediocre and fearing change, fearing initiative, fearing that something will happen after the downsize.
Committees are good at reacting (one loud incident -> wham you've got new regulations) and bad at acting (runaway project will run forever with nobody having balls to shut it down).
Well, it is not very common for them to do that anymore, anyway. There are plenty of counterexamples if we allow historical examples. The East India Company being the biggest and most obvious example.
The majority of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were not US Military - predominantly PMCs - so I don't think it's correct to say that corporations do not have the capability to wage real, physical war.
Those aren't facts. That is all speculation from 2 years ago. There is one fact in that article, the fact that there are now 19,000 armed security contractors. This number is much, much lower than the amount of troops in the country. There are a lot of contractors, but those are contract workers, not PMC employees. This is a huge difference than the point you're trying to make. Laundry workers and cooks don't wage war for the government.
Let's not get too ahistorical here, a lot of what we have today was implemented (if not established) in the freaked-out aftermath of 9-11. Yes, I know, Clinton rendered/tortured, etc. but it wasn't institutionalized through the PATRIOT act and associated mechanisms yet. There were certain people who used, intentionally, the hair-on-fire emotions of the times to expand government powers to the insane degree we are dealing with now.
Common turns of phrase wouldn't be so troublesome if they were simply avoided in favor of direct language and makings of actual points. "We have to fight these things when they come up, but we tend not to," or whatever, instead of defensive profundity. Language is a lossy codec for thought, metaphor doubly so.
The problem is every little thing is now being escalated on purpose.
Even small local crime, many times police try to escalate it on purpose as much as possible to get more funding.
This is why the TSA and the NSA will never be defunded, they claim they are stopping all the invisible elephants from attacking us and politicians are afraid to say no.
Meanwhile the "security" industry grows to the point where it's too big to fail and the taxpayers have to fund it forever.
The reason of ever-growing state enterprise is the absence of real market feedback. Any private enterprise (business or charity) has only its own money to burn and gets new money from volunteers. In case of government, new money is guaranteed to flow in because it is extracted from people by force. So there is no way any government agency can ever "feel" they are spending resources on something which people don't like.
Any laws like this should always have a sunset clause, otherwise they are open to abuse. For instance in the UK local councils have used terrorist powers to see if people are trying to game the school catchment system to get into a better school [1]. And also used to spy on Fisherman [2].
I hope USG does not take cue from their Russian colleagues; they routinely prosecute all kinds of political activists as "extremists". While not the same, that word does sound as sinister as "terrorists" does in Russian.
The US government already considers certain groups that challenge the status quo to be terrorists. For example, animal rights activists. There is a lot of money in the livestock/meat business, in addition to all of the large corporations that rely on animal testing (not just medical, but cosmetics, etc). I've heard of lawyers that specialize in defending animal rights activists get harassed incessantly by the police (e.g. getting pulled over, forced to sit there for 30 minutes as more police cars show up, then told they can go; no explanation as to why).
Also, look at all of the cases of police sending agent provocateurs into protest groups to encourage radical and/or violent behaviour.
"Challenge the status quo" does include "try to get their way politically by resorting to tactics which target civilians in order to cause terror". The animal rights movement certainly has been involved in that kind of "challenge" on a number of occassions. It's not merely a matter of declaring people criminals for having a political goal, but also when they are indeed committing crimes in the name of animal rights or the rights of the unborn or whatever.
Committing a crime does not make one a terrorist. Bombing an abortion clinic should probably qualify you as a terrorist, but theft/vandalism/etc in the furtherance of a political goal is not terrorism. If we do want to redefine terrorism to be this broad, then we really need to reign in all of the extra powers that the government has to go after 'terrorists' because those powers are predicated on the idea that terrorists are using killing people to further their goals.
So, if there are some people who try to "challenge the status quo" by unlawful means, it gives the government the right to harass, spy on, etc. other activists who stay strictly in the bounds of the law? That's exactly the oldest trick in the book - you define the "enemy" so vaguely that soon everyone who doesn't agree with you is a "suspected terrorist" and subject to random harassment or worse.
Hey, if it frightens "our" government's corporate clients, then it's terrorism. Can't have corporate persons messing their corporate shorts now, can we?
1. A regime that justifies itself by claiming to protect the populace from a vague but grave danger. The USSR had the specter of returning robber barons; Nazi Germany, the Jews; and current-day US, terrorists.
2. A secret police that collects everyone's metadata and uses it to investigate suspicious activity. (Stasi didn't record everything all the time; they kept files of who communicated with whom, and assigned surveillance assets to the most promising leads.)
3. A heavy-handed, militarized regular police that apprehends nonviolent suspects with overwhelming force.
I could go on, but the combination of these three is more than enough cause for worry.