In the wake of the Civil War and the reign of the Robber Barons the predatory behavior that took place appalled and disgusted decent people. The philosophy of Natural Rights was questioned because if a tool does not work rational people discard it and find something that will work.
If you couldn't trust individuals to do the right thing, then what about entrusting those decisions to lofty minded, intelligent people who could ensure a real justice?
Progressivism was a movement among the well educated and those who had been struggling for justice for those abused by the system. The bible of Progressivism, written by Herbert Croly in 1909 was, “The Promise of American Life.” Teddy Roosevelt read it on a trip to Africa and was persuaded. The scene had been set to deemphasize the study of America's Founding documents and so acceptance of the philosophy of Natural Rights and instead let government do the thinking by the campaign for the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 by the Progressive-Socialists, the Bellamy cousins. Cultural waves of change to not happen over night.
Liberals today are still buoyed up with the sense they are idealists with right and justice on their side. They were idealists and this is still the case for many of them – but they were using the wrong tool to achieve the outcome. Centralized control of a system fails to allow individuals to exercise the autonomy and control of their own lives that makes it possible for the system to deliver. If the wheel is square you will never reach your destination.
Enter the PetroElite and their political operatives.
America was experimenting with new technologies with the excitement of a kid who has discovered fireworks in the decades that cap the end of the Nineteenths and Twentieth Centuries. Progressivism, its core philosophy based in the idea that individuals were just too damned dumb and venal to make decisions for themselves, did not see for a moment the logic of where the use of a centralized planning model would take them. Economics was a known discipline but Austrian Economics, the set of ideas that demonstrates that each individual must be free to assert their full weight of choice in the market, was still in its infancy. That the matrix essential to the existence of a free market, universal acceptance of Natural Rights Theory, had never taken place was invisible; a significant percentage of the proponents of NRT had ignored the need to affirm women, more than half the population, in those rights. They had cooperated passively though inaction, and so enabled the view that NR were equivalent to privileges granted by statute. In so doing they ignored the power of the marketplace to allow questions to be determined by human action.
The first corporations that came up with the clever theory of 'natural monopolies' were utility companies and oil companies. Over a period of three generations they came to view government as a natural extension of their corporate policies. The military should protect them – at no cost to themselves, naturally. The courts and legislatures should enable their interests because without them all were freeze and starve. And God forbid anyone would throw a monkey wrench into a their pipelines of profit. To prevent that, and maintain the stability they had come to see as entirely 'natural' corporations began to use the CIA in the wake of WWII and also to field political operatives to handle movements that they saw would threaten their control.
In the 1950s and 60s they identified two such threats. The United Nations and the Environmental Movement, fielding three main operatives to suborn and redirect these. The operatives are all still with us. They are George H. W. Bush, OR Anderson, an oil man, and Maurice Strong, still active and using the Peace University to train paramilitary and launder funds.
Bush, Senior liaisoned with the new hires, Irving and William Kristol, in their intellectual reformatting of what was once the Conservative wing of the Republican Party. He recruited Karl Rove, who assembled the team who with Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Jack Abramoff, and others, converted the Republican Party into a series of carefully managed voting blocks that includes the Religious Right. That was built out of apolitical churches with congregations made up of the most uneducated elements of the population, mostly from poor Southern backgrounds. In this way the lingering hostility towards women and blacks could be reversed and returned to the mainstream.
This is where we are today, or where we were just before 9/11. Now, the present Public Relations and management firm retained for 30 years by the PetroElite has been axed. The self elected elite will tolerate many things, incompetence is not one of them, however. So as their former employees, NeoCons, continue a melt down that would do honor to the Wicked Witch of the West, the PetroElite are looking over resumes and considering their options. We will know who made the first cut because those will be the best funded front runners seeking to occupy the White House in 2009.
Let's fool them by getting off the grids and turning off their stream of income.
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