In his book Democracy Incorporated, http://dialogic.blogspot.com/2008/05/chalmers-johnson-review-of-sheldon.html, Sheldon Wolin, who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and Princeton, uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our political system. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the constitution, while manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete.  If elected, they are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitols, who author the legislation and then get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. Under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true: Economics dominates politics. And with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.Â
The Obama brand offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained, we feel hopeful, we like our president, we believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.Â
What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama Brand given
us? His administration has spent, lent,
or guaranteed $12.8 Trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street and insolvent
banks in a doomed effort to re-inflate the bubble economy, a tactic that, at
best, forestalls a catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound
crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly
$1 Trillion in defense-related spending and a continuation of our doomed
imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000
troops will remain for the next 15-20 years.Â
Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of
drones sent on cross border bombing runs into Pakistan that have left 700
civilians dead since Obama took office.Â
Brand Obama has refused to ease the restrictions so workers can organize -- and because of pressure from the for-profit health care industry, refuses to consider single payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush Administration for war crimes including the uses of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than Brand George W. Bush. The Bush Brand collapsed, we became immune to its studied folksiness, we saw through its artifice, and now we have been given the new Obama brand with its exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Bennington and Calvin Cline were the precursors to the Obama Brand, using ads to associate themselves with risquà © style and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge, but the goal, as with all brands, was to fool passive consumers, suggesting to them that a brand was an experience.
The decline of the American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of historian Charles Mayer, from an empire of production to an empire of consumption. By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and domestic oil production began its steady and inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed, from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle and empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. And the bill is now due.Â
America's most dangerous enemies are not the Islamic radicals, but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free market capitalization and globalization, for they have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in government subsidies. These corporate forces will never permit real reform. It would mean their extinction. The oil and gas industry will never allow us to achieve energy independence -- that would devastate their profits. Real reform would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts. It would cripple the financial health of a host of private contractors, from Lockheed Martin to Boeing, to Grumman, Raytheon, Halliburton and the newly renamed Blackwater. It would render obsolete the existence of the US Central Command.Â
It was Bill Clinton that led the Democratic Party to the
corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the
party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a
political ally. Workers, he insisted,
would vote Democratic anyway they had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate
money and do corporate bidding. By the
1990s the Democratic Party under Clinton's
leadership had virtual fund raising parity with the Republicans;Â
today the Democrats get more. Â
But the legislation demanded by corporations, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, thrust a knife into the back of the American working class. NAFTA was peddled to the working class as "an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico." NAFTA, we were told, would also staunch Mexican immigration into the US. But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans grown by Mexican farmers, these farmers had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the US. Many Mexican farmers went bankrupt, which drove 2 million of them off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went.Â
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