Saving this here for posterity:
Emperor_Cartagia’s Comments on Justice Ginsburg’s Ominous Warning About Creeping Corporate Power
There is a (wink wink nudge nudge) long term conspiracy between the upper echelons of the Political Right and a cadre of rich billionaires (and very possibly a few of the richer multimillionaires) to gradually make the US Government so dysfunctional, to degrade or discontinue so many Government services, that the citizenry will be intensely skeptical of any solution requiring Government, and openly hostile to the idea of being involved with the Government for any purpose.
This of course, is the means. I’ll give an example. During the Bush Jr. years (2006, specifically), Congress pushed through a bill requiring the Post Office to fully pre-fund their Retiree Health Benefits out to a ridiculous date, some 75 years. Not incrementally from that point on as employees joined, or any other reasonable way of doing it, but, 100 Billion dollar payments a year kind of unreasonable.
The major proponents of that bill were Republican Politicians whose major funding sources came from billionaires with major interests in FedEx, UPS, & DHL.
The purpose being, obviously, to degrade the quality of USPS services, force them to raise prices.. And thus make it more likely that the public will more often choose a private company over a public utility. They’re pushing on all fronts for private for-profit companies to usurp the role of Government, even to the point of sabotaging Government to make it possible.
They do this for three reasons:
- It’s enormously profitable. Government currently holds monopolies on certain products and services, and basically charges almost nothing for them. Seriously, if you look at everything the government actually accomplishes vs how much it takes in in tax revenues and compare it to how much it would cost us to pay private companies for the same level of services, Government comes out ridiculously cheap. The benefits of economies of scale and not having to profit stockholders. Even the Governments debt leads to the creation of private wealth elsewhere. The people colluding to stop this are looking forward to stepping in and taking the governments place. We’ve already seen it happen in many states with prisons. They’ll come in, say they’ll run the prison the exact same way but for less money, then they run the prisons profoundly worse by cutting every corner they can and they’ll pocket the extra. They’re going to run the same racket with any other Government function you can think of.
- They have a profound philosophical opposition to the very nature of government. Everybody pooling resources to accomplish tasks that benefit everyone is antithetical to their nature, they feel that everyone should be left to fend for themselves and if they can’t manage, that they should just do without. From water to healthcare to retirement or food safety, they do not feel it is ever justified that they should be asked to kick in their earnings to help anyone else, regardless of the wider consequences to society or whether through a domino effect it actually hurts them in the wider perspective. They’re not thinking of the wider perspective, all they see is someone else profiting from their labor (which is intensely ironic considering they also virtually rely on wage slavery, that is, profiting off of underpaying others for their labor).
- The Power. Once they’ve shrunk Government to the point they can “drown it in a bathtub”. They’ll have the power. So much of daily life today already rests in the hands of a handful of global conglomerates.. Imagine one day waking up in a world where every product and service you use comes from companies controlled by a group of like minded men.. And they’ve drowned the only method of recourse if they wrong you. You have no way of voting with your wallet because everything you buy benefits one or more of them. You cannot sue because they’ve engineered trade deals and laws leaving you no legal recourse, only “arbitration”, only, they get to choose the date, place, time, and arbiter, meaning they could force you to fly cross country, on your own dime, at the drop off a hat, with no time to arrange a leave or a sitter or anything, to be met with an arbiter who happens to be on their payroll. They will have eliminated any rights you have simply by making it contractually unfeasible to insist upon them. They will have effectively brought round the Aristocratic System in all but name, with themselves as the nobility, immune to any criticisms or recourse of the serfs but violence, but having preserved only a militarized police force trained and psychologically manipulated to think of any civilian as a criminal by default, simply lacking evidence as of yet, even *violent revolution will be an extremely unlikely event. Peasants with rifles and Molotov cocktails have not, historically, stood up well to APCs and fully automatic .50 machine guns.
For more information on the beginnings of this conspiracy, look up the history of the Business Plot (and/or the Wall Street Putsch) from the 1930’s, not Wikipedia, that article is very bare bones because Wikipedia generally needs sources and most of the records of the investigations and hearings on the Business Plot were intentionally destroyedafterwards so as to not undermine the public trust of prominent businessmen and politicians. Here’s a bit about it from NPR.
* People tend to misinterpret this part.
I know full well that an open civil war or revolution won’t happen, in such a case the military would divide and the tyrannical government thrown down. But there won’t be a civil war or revolution.
What’ll happen is that anytime things in one place get too bad, anytime one part of the population flares up and tries to force the private enterprises that will have taken over the roles of government to capitulate, they’ll be stomped on by a highly militarized police force.
Injustice by private enterprise will simply be the way things work. You can’t revolt against a private business, you can only vote with your wallet, but in the case I’ve outlined, that won’t matter, because the “competitor” you flock to will be owned by the same people, they won’t care and won’t change how they do business.
If you sue, they’ll cite the contract or waiver you signed when you came to them.
If you do a sit-in, you’re trespassing.
If you march, you’re disturbing the peace.
If you get a permit to march, they’ll put you in a Free Speech Zone where nobody will see your protest.
If you get violent, they call the one service of government they’ve preserved and supported, the police, who will promptly arrest you for it. A police force which already had a confrontational relationship with the public, who are already conditioned by every safety briefing to believe that every civilian is a threat.
Then, if it was big enough to make the news, everyone will be told a bunch of lawless looters and rioters, made up of lazy unemployed takers got their just desserts from the police.
The suppression of rebellion won’t happen on a large scale because any spark of revolution will be snuffed out before anyone else can hear about, agree with it, and join in. Revolutions don’t spring up spontaneously nationwide, they are ignited, an incident happens which the population gets so enraged at that they rise up.
In the corporate plutocratic aristocracy, the spark will be snuffed, and you’ll only ever hear what they want you to hear.