Monday, July 16, 2012

The yoke of Stalinism

Greetings good citizen,

Social obligations pressed yesterday, I apologize for the lapse. Seems many of you are on vacation if my traffic meter is any indication (although most of the time I can’t make heads nor tails of what it tells me with any degree of confidence.)

Um, looks like the foxes have turned in to dogs again, at least they are this morning as stock markets around the globe are mostly posting red ink.

I know it’s only funny the first time…yet the ‘fit’ is still so there!

Which is to state that the destruction of our civilization is indeed proceeding unabated.

The spectrum across which this destruction is taking place is breathtakingly wide as we can see from today’s offering

The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union

It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.

Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship

We see it most evidently when we go to the store. Back in the 1970s, the American retail landscape was still mostly dominated by mom-and-pop stores, which in turn carried merchandise also made by small manufacturers (many of them right here in the US). Not only did this complex economy sustain tens of millions of comfortable middle-class jobs; it also produced a dazzling variety of retail choices. Every store on Main Street carried somewhat different merchandise, bought from a different group of preferred suppliers. A shoe store might carry 20 different brands. The shoe store down the street might differentiate itself by carrying 10 of the same brands, and 10 different ones. The result was a very wide range of consumer choices -- though you did have to go from store to store to find it -- and a rich variety of stores that competed aggressively for their customers' attention. And if you visited a different part of the country, the selection might be very different from what you'd get back home.

Now, every Macy's in America carries the same dozen or so lines of bland, middle-of-the-road women's clothing. You'll find exactly the same stuff on the racks in Long Island as you do in Long Beach. If you're looking for something that hasn't been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, you probably won't find it at the mall.
Yes, good citizen, even the Great Marketplace is wearing the blinders and muzzle fashioned for it by the ‘monopolists’.

You don’t see it because our useless media has also been ‘monopolized’. It doesn’t point out the one note song because its part of that one note song.

Going to start your own business and show these deep-pocketed morons how to, er, ‘do it right’?

You’d better be able to set up shop in an area where your customers have plenty of free cash…because everyone else buys on price.

Welcome to [Libertarian] free market hell.

Where the average customer can’t afford ‘different,’ they buy what they buy so they can still eat without running around naked.

Nothing like ‘dominating’ the alleged ‘free markets’, is there?

Buy my mass produced dreck or go naked, those are your choices.

Same thing with food, if they don’t stop ‘value enhancing’ the product, we’re all gonna explode!

And like the article points out, this new ‘totalitarianism’ doesn’t stop at the limiting of choice in the marketplace, it limits where you can work which in turn limits where you can live.

That’s why this capitalism bullshit has to be abandoned, tomorrow!

And the crafty capitalist would agree (while snickering that ‘tomorrow never comes, it’s always today!)

So let me modify my plea and say we need to eliminate capitalism (and all of its structures) NOW!

Better a planned withdrawal than the chaotic collapse we’re headed for!

Let me briefly go off the reservation to share this observation with you.

The pundits are all worried sick that once the violence starts, it won’t stop until the losses become ‘catastrophic’.

They preach peace while we can all see that the other side is clearly girding itself for war.

Why are our leaders (such as they are) taking this pseudo-pacifist stand?

Are we supposed to be ‘reading between the lines’ here?

There are those who want change and those who want more of the same…

There’s your ‘thought to ponder’ for this hot, muggy Monday.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


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