An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

Four presidential elections ago Democratic political-carnivore James Carville coined the phrase, “it’s the economy, stupid,” to denote Papa Bush’s failure to properly address the 1992 recession. The senior Bush was the idiot then… but all of us, Americans, may be jointly the idiot now. And maybe we shouldn’t be talking about a recession, but a true depression. You know, like back in the 30’s, with our McMansions but without apples.

It’s a natural human instinct: to narrow things down, to simplify things. And even people with extensive education and high professional stature succumb to any facile answers to the most difficult and intricate questions. Right now in this United States we seem to have major trouble accepting the “R” word when it is really the “D” word that should be worrying us. No, the economy is not just simply slowing down; it is tanking!

In the past year I’ve attended more than half dozen banks-sponsored presentations for their business customers (my clients) about the state of the economy – international, national and regional/local. A long time ago I reached the conclusion that most bank economists are but meaningless window dressing with no other value; after my latter experiences, I am now totally convinced.

At these state-of-the-economy breakfasts, during the closing “questions and answers” set aside period, I have been posing for all of three years the same questions dealing with the out-of-control real estate “fake market” and the parallel “bubblicious” stock market based on a totally unsustainable consumption-through-credit rate of growth. Questions to which I have been receiving the same idiotic stock answers; answers that you get to hear monotonously and often from the blokes and broads at CNBC: “Heck, our real estate prices aren’t really that high, only 4 or 5 times the annual household income; and that’s really comparable or even lower than the ratios in most European nations, where they can get as high as 7 times.” Also, they dismiss an overvaluation in world stock markets, perhaps of 5 to 10 trillion dollars, by saying that it isn’t much when measured against a combined world markets’ valuation of around 60 trillion dollars.

Aren’t we able to see that grotesque rationalization by our cadre of not very bright economists, Wall Street bulls-on-steroids, and don’t-give-a-damn politicians? Our socio-political system, unlike that of Canada, Europe or Japan, does not cater to the well-being of people – or at least not as much, as we see other nations with free higher education, universal healthcare, great public transportation systems and many other perks we don’t have – so a housing ratio comparison is totally out of place, absurd. If the Europeans are putting 40 percent of their income into housing, we probably should be aiming at nothing higher than 25 to 30 percent.

And it isn’t the crookedness of the sub-prime fiasco that got us here, but a runaway upsurge in values that had less to do with the workings of a free economy – the forces of supply and demand – and much more to do with greed… in great part selfishly promoted by the real estate industry itself. So here we are 2 or 3 trillion dollars in overvalued housing, some of it already spent in past consumption (equity loans), the rest in the pockets of crooks, house-flippers and agents who benefited from unnecessary, unwarranted commissions. A properly structured capital gains tax on short term real estate profits would have prevented this second onerous tulip festival.

As for that present valuation of 60 trillion dollars for the world stock markets… what would that value be if earnings decline by 25, 50 or 75 percent (something which a depression would bring about in short order); 45, 30, 15 trillion dollars (using same price/earnings ratio)… what then? Haven’t we in the US come to the end of the road as we consume more than we produce? Our grandkids can no longer collateralize our borrowing, and China is not likely to go along banking our diminishing-value dollars.

Americans have taken Norman Vincent Peal’s power of positive thinking several degrees beyond rationality. The made in America “something for nothing” syndrome, which has given us multi-level marketing and other get-rich-quick schemes have seen their day… even with the spiritual backing of those Christian mega churches that promote the Gospel of Greed instead of espousing a Love Thy Neighbor doctrine.

Uncontrolled predatory corporate practices, untaxed individual greed, and unrestrained consumer gluttony, together, are bringing this economy to its knees. Now, after the fact, the partner-in-crime government wants to bring about the establishment of some market controls… overhaul the system, they say; that after lower- and middle-class America have been fleeced – although the final realization of “poverty” is a few months away.

Well, we could all ask Dick Cheney to summarize the state of this predatory economy. Of course, we should expect another of his customary in-your-face responses: “so”?

Tags: Ben Tanosborn, corporations, corporatism, economics, economy, government
Categories: Commentary, Economics, government, Corporations, Ben Tanosborn
No Comments »

I had never imagined that such a thing as Super-delegates could exist in the Democratic Party, until the media finally illuminated for the public this vile aspect of the Party structure; a component to the Democrat’s primary process that is exemplary all of the worse values and qualities that have defined the ethos possessed by the privileged factions in this country, who have endeavored – since this Nation’s inception – to monopolize its political institutions as much as possible while, nevertheless, maintaining a façade of democracy.

These anti-democratic patterns of political behavior – which spawn from ideological convictions that are so deeply entrenched that they qualify as genetic coding: the building blocks of American sociality – are embraced by a status that regards itself as uber-citizens: Those who possess self-alleged prowess and mental fitness enabling them not only to politically advocate their own interests, but to represent others in the process, despite the absence of any consent on the part of those for whom the elitist camp of surrogates will speak.

The core of elitist collaborators, who ultimately control, to a large measure, the American system of government, relish the opportunity to insert complexities into the political operations of this country. This amounts to a hierarchical inter-grouping of political decision-making bodies that distance – through the unnecessary multiplication of entities – the lowest common denominator of the American citizenry from the institutional spaces in which the final determinations, deciding the posture of American governance, are ultimately worked out.

Take for instance, the use of proportionate voting on the part of the Democratic Party. When analyzed in isolation from a detached perspective, this appears to be a relatively simple and straight forward reform that is designed to increase the influence of those who are not members of electoral majorities; providing an alternative to the more conventional American electoral practice in which the winner takes all. However, when purveyed within a scope that includes other provisions, such as the practice of valuating the votes of particular districts in some States higher than the votes cast in other districts in the same State: a device used to reward geographically defined populations that have demonstrated higher levels of electoral support for past Democratic Presidential Candidates – we are quick to fine that no concise and generally intellectually accessible description of the primary processes can possibly be constructed.

To cite another example of these excessively complicated processes, the State of Texas affords citizens the opportunity to vote twice in the Democratic Primary: once through a type of caucusing; the other instance by means of a primary ballot. I would endeavor to go on in further detail describing the primary selection practices, however, in order for me to do so, I would be pressed into conducting extensive investigations; a less than inspiring research project that would involve reading state party bylaws and state statutes as well as the National Democratic Party’s Bylaws, so that I could eventually interrelate all of the various stipulations, emanating from different bodies, when arriving at some sense of the applicable procedures that ultimately dictate how this ridiculous carnival is performed.

Because of this condition – what we can call political scholasticism – an inquiring layman, who is struggling to come to terms with the Primary selection process, will soon find himself lost in the convoluted mesh mash of procedures belonging to this social construct that is awash in a sea of obfuscation. In fact, I would venture to suggest that an accurate and precise conception of these complexities can only be rendered by the Party-hack-scholastics; some of whom were, in part, responsible for crafting this monstrosity. By extension, it surely is not spurious to suggest that there is a circuitous motivation inducing these insider-hacks into concocting what amounts to some kind of esoteric electoral alchemy: If one can monopolize the production of gold by virtue of a mastery of an arcane knowledge, then he would surely want his practices to remain opaque; or else, the precious metal could be produced by most anybody and it would fail to retain its special value.

It would be partially reassuring if the Democratic Primaries were an anomaly when understood comparatively within the full scope of institutions and practices comprising American politics and governance. Unfortunately, however, ranging back to the very inception of the United States, we can trace the same sort of Byzantine procedures, creating the same types of obscure and sometimes convoluted governing practices. To cite an obvious exemplar, consider the Electoral Delegates: super-voters entrusted with the capacity of choosing the President. Collectively, this body – which qualifies as an appendix in the sense that it is utterly extraneous to a democratic polity – counts as a democratically superfluous sub-aggregate, whose political Prerogative procedurally preempt the Popular Will of the Citizenry: The common denominator that could, otherwise, in a more authentic democratic environment, select the President independently and directly; whereby a majority or, even, a plurality of votes cast would act as the final adjudicator when selecting a candidate for the High Office.

The institution of the Electoral College, concocted by our Constitutional Founders, marks a latency in our sociopolitical history: a subtext that follows a pattern in which the uber-citizenry – those feigning the embrace of democracy while, concurrently, enacting political obstructions serving to compromise the Popular Will – has persistently committed to praxis a political philosophy that essentially boils down to a doctrinaire attachment to a Tory exceptionalness. Taking into consideration this pattern of elitist, anti-democratic conduct on the part of the privileged few in our Country’s history, one might ponder why there appears to be no resistance to this muffled, semi-tyrannical hegemony in our society.

First off, it should be mentioned that there have been popular insurrections against the American elites and the conditions they have endeavored to impose by virtue of the networked coordination of their economic and sociopolitical influences. The most salient instance of rebellion among American Plebes consisted of the formation of various Farmer Alliances and the People’s Party they would come to conjointly form.

However, despite the poignancy of the first Populist Movement during the final decades of the Nineteenth Century, this episode in American sociopolitical relations has been predictably left relatively untreated by our educational institutions. This lack of attention to an extraordinary event in American history is understandable, due to the fact that the Agrarian Revolt does not fit into the preemptive interpretive pattern organizing how we are supposed to conceptualize the course of American history. A thorough study and understanding of the People’s Party would expose contradictions to the Whiggish orthodoxy that enforces a dogmatic interpretation of American history in which democracy is in a state of perpetual improvement.

Therefore, the aforementioned question – why no rebellion to sociopolitical elitism? – is in need of reformulation: There have been a few, sparse uprisings to the old guard of American sociopolitical relations. However, why do we fail to treat these instances of American history hermeneutically? We neglect to come to an understanding of these instances according to their own terms and their own political self-understandings, along with the related complaints that they leveled against sociopolitical institutions that they regarded as oppressive; exploitative; unfair; or unfitting for a democracy to instantiate.

Rather, such incidents of insurrection find themselves excluded from the historical alacrity that is directed upon what are conventionally conceived as American sociopolitical accomplishments. In other words, historical events that are contrariwise to the established ideological order are treated as transient deviations; inconsequential digressions, diverting consciousness away from the core thesis embodied by the American Experience: An overall process that tells of advancement and ongoing maturation of American Society and of the American State, as they evolve into a more democratic condition. I would venture to assert that it is almost an Aristotelian metaphysics of political history: The American nation-state possesses an essence that is tantamount to its potentiality that it strives to actualize, which translates into a course of events where the essence of America protrudes and emerges; a process that parallels the advancement of perfecting democratic polity.

The Whiggish character of American historical orthodoxy, however, cannot be attributed with the function of the sole antecedent precipitating the compliant and obedient dispositions that have been all too pervasively exhibited by American Plebes. In order to understand the submissiveness among American Plebes, we need to direct our attention upon another factor; one whose presence is nearly ubiquitously represented by the portraits of our governing elites offered to us by mass media.  We are incited to a state of awe in relation to our institutions of political power by virtue of the fact that our media representations - due to the competition for ratings - are dramatizations of events; not objective reports of the events that have transpired that are of social significance.  From the epic framework in which corporate journalism is packaged, we are induced into believing that our politicos are heroes in the sense attribute to the term by the Ancient Greeks:  Apart from their mortality, they are godlike.  Consequently, we see the elites who govern us not only as competent, but as transcendent, as well.

This necessity is reinforced by the arcane procedures and practices that have come to litter – and, in fact, dilute – American systems of democratic participatory polity. By creating a situation whereby the elites are the limited few who actually possess an operational understanding of the processes through which political decisions are made – whether in the party primaries; or, to cite another example, the parliamentary conventions of Congress – they incite participatory reticence on the part of outsiders – who have neglected to pass through the socializing institutions through which the Power Elite transmits its esoteric knowledge and reproduces itself. Thus, we arrive in our analysis at the concept, wonkish: a self-congratulatory expression chattered in self-reference by the governing elite. This terminology’s meaning essentially boils down to the following definition: a state of public policy expertise.

The professionalization – (a concept that is most always predicated with the notion of expertise) – of politics resembles the historically recent trends in the rest of our society. Especially in the decades following the Information Revolution – which happened to transpire in a time span that overlapped with a movement in the American Academe toward the hyper-specialization of its professionalized disciplinarity – American governance has evolved into a condition that is sometimes referred to as technocracy. This political state can be characterized as one were the ability to formulate and administer public policy has become the province of technocrats in society; a form of plutocracy in which the common masses of citizenry no longer possess the knowledge and ability to fully participate in their political and governmental affairs. The task of governance has become highly compartmentalized, technical, and esoteric; whereas, seemingly, the only members of society who possess the necessary skills to govern are those trained in the specialized knowledge pursuits that are related to public policy concerns.

The propagation of this class of public-policy-technocrats – which includes the politicians who are trained in the lawmaking rituals from which earmarks and other benefits are procured for constituencies – is justified by the following chimera: In order to administer government, one must possess the technocratic specializations associated with being a Wonk; or else, he would buckle under the enormity of the intellectual, technical challenges he would face, and he will be rendered impotent, incapable of effecting the desired outcomes from participation in the processes of polity and public administration.

To quickly dispel such an polemic that insists upon the necessity of a technocracy in our society, we can refer to recent history: The FBI, following the 9/11 Tragedy and the scrutiny it incited – which was directed upon the agencies of the Federal Government that were previously thought to be protecting us from such calamities – it was found that the FBI possessed an antiquated information technology infrastructure; a partial explanation of the nearly unbelievable inability for the FBI “to Connect the dots.” In short, the FBI’s organization of information had yet to embrace mechanisms and processes associated with the informational economy and its digitalization of documents, that can, subsequently, be manipulated through computational machineries in order to find and establish relational values between and among the various types of information, which, subsequently, can be used in order to adduce inferences regarding additional parameters. Although this seems nearly inconceivable, the FBI’s manipulation of information was actualized, for the most part, in the deployment of pre-digital technologies, involving FBI employees sorting various document types, whose embodiment took the form of ink on paper, into filing cabinets.

It should be mentioned, there was some sort of computerization extant within the FBI. However, the dumb terminals provided to agents where practically left in their state of dumbness, because one could not use them to retrieve – through some effective search engine algorithm – materials relevant to the subject, or topic, that was being addressed by an FBI agent. As a result, the nodes belonging to the FBI’s informational networking – a system, which had, in some extensively qualified capacity, crossed the digital divide; or, at least, had attempted to accomplish as much – was never endowed with the intelligence – or smartness – that is associated with terminals that constitute the nodes belonging to an advanced informational network. It is only through the role assumed by a machine, acquiring a position within many linkages through which information is transferred in and throughout a network, that it becomes a useful tool for an agent looking to increase or intensify his knowledge and understanding of a topic by relating relevant information types to other information types.

As one can anticipate, the FBI, following the revelations related to the antiquated condition of its information management, set out to create an information architecture that was in line with contemporary technologies and procedures. However, the problem with the subsequent efforts made by the FBI, when working to modernize itself, can be characterized through the following: It was the FBI that was left in charge of the project. Consequently, after spending millions upon millions and expending valuable time and man-hours when attempting to install an information management system, the FBI finally had to report to Congress that the entire project had failed; could not be salvaged; and, therefore, had to be scrapped entirely.

Despite their follies, they persist in their arrogance, and continue to adopt a paternalistic posture in their relationship to the common citizenry. The present Administration –impervious to any scrutiny or oversight – continues to treat us like fools, constantly informing us of the attacks upon the domestic United States that it has thwarted; all the while refusing to disclose any convincing evidence to justify such fear mongering. Making it all the more ironic, the Bush Administration has failed to competently perform is duty to protect the American Public, not once, but on three occasions: the 9/11 Tragedy; the hyper-actively and impetuously devised invasion of Iraq; and the national shame and humiliation that was Hurricane Katrina. Nevertheless, despite their ostensible incompetency, these instances of failure are simply submitted through the ordinary propaganda assembly lines – where they are reassembled, packaged up, and refurnished – only to be publicized within the same garbled mess as all of the rest of the fear mongering and baiting with which we are unceasingly bombarded.

This audacity on the part of those who claim to know better than others know for themselves is justified by what amounts to a plutocratic apologia: The popular will of the unrefined and vulgar American people constitutes a threat to the vested interests of those who are endowed with the prudence and sound judgment necessary to advance not only their own interests, but, additionally, the long term interests of the nation as a whole.

This is the type of thinking that spawns absurdities such as “Trickle-down economics:” a theory of convenience, which Naomi Klein has revealed in some of her weblog writings to be a device deployed to obfuscate unbridled greed on the part of corporatists and, more generally, the ownership class in society; economic elitists who were in need of an intellectual diversion so that the swelling of class antagonisms, fomenting among those suffering under supply-side tax reforms, could be assuaged.

Although it might seem unfair to lump together, under the rubric of uber-citizens, elitist factions such as the Clintonian Political Machinery with the neoconservatives who currently control the Executive Branch of Government, we need to remember that the differences between neocons and neoliberals are all too scarce. There remains a thematic congruency between the two uber-factions; a convergence comparable to the opposing sides of a coin: The antithetical representations – where one side is emblazon with the head; the other side, the tale – that, despite their surface distinctions, continue to be of the same ilk; formed within the same mold; and made out of the same alloy.

In fact, both the Clintonian Third-way neoliberals – who feign empathy with the plight of American labor suffering from free-trade – and the neoconservatives – who do not even bother to express acknowledgement of such hardships – share in the same condescending rhetoric that is used to dismiss voices, emanating from the masses, that raise objection to American trade policies. The elitist corps have fashioned a rhetoric with pejoratives, such as neo-populism, that they use when disdainfully depicting the sociopolitical interpretations and reactions to socioeconomic conditions produced by the populace; which stand in contradiction to the uber-citizenry’s self-allegedly detached and rationally disposed estimates of current affairs and their overall significance within larger historical chains of events; narratives that are structured according to the Whiggish premise that American social conditions are always advancing toward a better state.

So, the final consideration that I shall make in this unwieldy chain of criticisms upon the conditions under which we, as Americans, suffer, can be put simply as follows: For how long are we to entertain this carnivalesque side-show hyper-real-democracy before we impose a realist aesthetic upon this charade and expose this chicanery for what it is?

Tags: clintons, corporations, corporatism, economics, government, neo conservatism, neoconservatism, politics, power, Russell Coles Blog, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Economics, government, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Power, Politics, Corporations, neoconservatism
No Comments »

An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

It must have been Harry S. Truman, the plainest amongst our plain presidents, who scared us all into having idiots running our government by saying: “Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.”  Of course, he failed to acknowledge the possibility that we could have the worst of both worlds: inefficient government and dictatorship.  And at this moment, we seem to be marching in step to get there soon. 

Are our nation’s best and brightest so repulsed by the bureaucracy in the public sector that decidedly prefer to take up arms running the predatory wing of the private sector?

Maybe some of the “brightest” are doing that, but they cannot also be called “best” while allowing themselves to be corrupted by a heartless capitalism equally ready to reward its bright leaders as it is to deny countless people from sharing the economic trough. 

It does look more and more as if both public and private sectors are being ran by the very same gang of thieves, all operating from a single “carnivalesque” den, where the larcenous elite pick the lazy, career-politicians as their lead carneys for deceit.

And these lead carneys are seldom the brightest, and definitely never the best! 

Americans have done it in the past… so why not again?  I mean… elect the village idiot to be mayor… well, president and CINC for this US-village we live in.  No disrespect intended, not for the sake of disrespect; certainly not by simply calling a dumb ass who aspires to be America’s supreme leader by a first, middle and last name, all in one.  And every village, we are told, is expected, certainly entitled, to have one.  An idiot, that is!

One would think that hitting on nine out of ten prognostications would make most of us who are humility-challenged, a bit giddy zigzagging in haughty satisfaction; almost as if invited to a seminar conducted, ex officio, by none other than Nostradamus – in spirit, of course.  But to me, this nine out of ten “good guesses” that I’ve attained during this past year lose any and all merit when the error, the incredible miss, involves the man of the hour, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the soon-to-be standard bearer for the GOP in the coming presidential election.  And that’s how I messed up, big time, when last May in one of my columns I prematurely called this politician a has-been, and laid to rest his presidential ambitions with an obituary that read R.I.W. (Rest in War) instead of R.I.P. 

Foolish me!  Of all the predictions I’ve made throughout the years, this one I thought to be a cinch, a sure thing… an “almost-certainty” with an infinitesimal margin of error.  I was almost embarrassed to even consider it a prediction instead of a factoid.  Pleassse! How can the Grand Old Party consent to be represented by anyone like John McCain… a person irrelevant in just about every aspect of the party’s conservative tradition; a true morbid warmonger just like the present occupant of the White House; a phony funny-racist; an inarticulate man… one lacking minimal brain power?  How, may I ask?

Could it be that Americans prefer not to have anyone smarter than their surrounding mediocrity leading them?  Or that after having been submerged at the bottom of iniquity with George W. Bush for eight years, we might fee the need for a decompression stop presidency before our nation resurfaces without suffering from the bends? Nonsense… a McCain presidency would be no different from a Bush’s third term… equal opportunity idiocy, and more thieveries of the filthy, or cleanly, rich.

One cannot fathom McCain as the next president of the United States… the new scorn of the gooks and their new replacements, the terrorist Islamo-fascists! Not this burnt scrap from the bottom of Annapolis’ kettle.  But then again, Americans more often than not seem to side with the perceived underdog, particularly when seen as a hero-patriot, and it would be hard to find a greater underdog than the village idiot.

Don’t count McCain out… at least for now!  It’s an indisputable fact that in America, money is total power, and at the end of the day power always grabs the reins.

Tags: Ben Tanosborn, congress, corporations, corporatism, democracy, economics, government, homeland security, imperialism, politics, power, social responsibility
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, Power, Politics, Congress, Corporations, Homeland Security, Imperialism, social responsibility, Ben Tanosborn
No Comments »

An Article by:

Russell Cole

The purpose of this essay is to bring scrutiny to an alarming trend in American governance. This growing practice is propounded by differing groups in our society, ranging from the neoconservatives to the quasi-academicians occupying fellowships at the politically moderate Brookings Institute.

In a publication produced by members of the Brookings’ Institute, the emerging practice has been labeled with the following expression, “Governing by Network.” This philosophy of governance looks to institutions and organizations outside of government in order to outsource the work of government; thus, privatizing many of the functions that would, otherwise, be implemented by governmental agencies and the civil professionals who work under their auspices.

The purpose of this brief essay is to refocus this governing philosophy through the lens of an entirely different interpretative framework, in order to bring to the fore some of the alarming outcomes that might result from this practice of outsourcing government. I will make the case that governing by network is tantamount to corporatism, and, therefore, poses a threat to the already compromised democracy that we, as Americans, have historically struggled to enact and, presently, continue to enjoy; although in recent years our democratic system of polity has suffered a flurry of incursions made by the current Imperial Presidency.

At first glance, this might appear to be a sound policy. Looking toward corporations in the economy and NGOs in civil society might provide a means by which to rely upon organizations in society that are already specialized in particular types of operations, making them more efficient and effective agents for carrying out the missions underlying government initiatives. In the language of neoconservatism, privatizing the military, for instance, will make America’s war machinery subservient to the pressures of the market; subsequently, ensuring that America’s mechanisms for carrying out its foreign policies that rely upon militarism are the most fit for that purpose.

This whole arcade of mercenary contractors waging war in Iraq is by no means an ad hoc appendage to the military proper, whose idea and implementation were incited solely from the contingencies of the Iraqi campaign. Rather, the privatization of the military had been, from inception of the Bush Presidency, a guiding-principle for Rumsfield and his efforts to reform the American military complex. From the beginning of his tenure as the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfield had been working with his favored contacts in the private sector in order to facilitate the outsourcing of many of the functions of the military and the Pentagon; thus, increasing the role of private contractors in America’s military affairs. This protracted endeavor to outsource as many military operations as possible was part of a metaphorical war being waged against the military bureaucracy; a complex – according to Rumsfield, and in accord with neoconservative thought patterns – of obsolescent bureaucratic institutions, which burdened the American state with inefficiency, resulting in governmental waste.

There are, of course, manifold examples to cite when it comes to illuminating the concrete manifestations of the emergent doctrine, governing by network. To cite a more seemingly benign example, Bush’s policy of funding faith-based organizations for the purposes of providing social welfare services to the dependent and needy constitutes an instance of governing by network, because it involves integrating organizations that exist in civil society into the operations and functions of government; relieving the state from the encumbrance of constructing the institutional architecture required for it to perform these tasks on its own.

Although, prima facie, these uses of the private sector to facilitate the execution of public policies might appear innocuous and, even, pragmatic. Nevertheless, there is a more sinister dimension to these practices, which reflects a motivation possessed by the adherents of this public policy philosophy that needs to be rendered transparent, so that the full scope of consequences brought about by governing by network is apparent to the American citizen.

In the initial paragraph of this essay, I pointed out that the privatization of governance can alternatively be referenced under the term, corporatism. By this, I am indicating that the privatization of government will have the entailment of creating a political system in which the distinctions between polity and the economy are effectively blurred; resulting of the integration of the economy, along with the elites who control it, with the institutions and decision-making mechanisms of government. I say this because private entities in the economy can just as well affect the policy making processes belonging to the politic sphere of society - and will have a much greater incentive to do so if government is outsourced – through interventions such as their corporate lobbying and the campaign donations extended to politicos by corporate elites – as can the body politic impact upon the firms in the economy through the adoption of government policy.

Therefore, by privatizing governmental services, we run the risk of having corporations influencing what policies will be implemented by affecting political decision-making outcomes in an attempt to ensure revenue through governmental contracts. This networking of polity with the economy and civil society will precipitate working relationships among the agencies in all three of the affected social spheres:  polity, civil society, and economics.  Resultantly, the policies taken up by government might reflect the economic interests that stand to benefit from particular policies; rather than having government policy address the needs and desires of the populace; members of society who do not necessarily possess the wealth and influence to countervail the corporate interests that stand to profiteer through particular types of policy implementations. In short, the government and the economy will merge into a union whereby policy and the motivations that underly it will be identical with interests emanating from the economic sector and from the advocacies associated with NGOs in civil society; a collection of non-governmental agencies that stand to benefit by virtue of the contracts that will ensue from the networked administration of public policies.

There is an even more alarming aspect to the consequences engendered by governing by network: The constitutional protections that restrict governmental interference in the private and civic affairs of citizens can effectively be circumvented by implementing the policies of government through the employment of private institutions that are not beholden to the same limitations imposed upon government by the Constitution. This is what makes the discussion among neoconservatives so disconcerting, in which they are presently entertaining the prospect of outsourcing domestic intelligence gathering to private firms who will then be entrusted with spying upon American citizens.

This plan that is being advanced by the in-member ideologues of the current Administration in conjunction with their sympathizers and consultants occupying positions in various neoconservative think-tanks, if allowed to materialize, will result in more than the “soft fascism,” described by Ron Paul in his warnings about corporatism; it presents the possibility of effectively imposing a rather profound and extensive form of authoritarianism upon the American public. We will be subjected to the unfettered intrusions and spying eyes of private entities outside the constraining parameters that have been, heretofore, erected by Constitutional Rights. We will have to fear with whom we associate and with whom we transact communications – let alone indulgences in vice; or contributions to radicalized political advocacies – because we will have no expectation that we can maintain any seclusion of these activities in the sense that we will not be able to conceal information and curtail knowledge about our engagements, as private citizens, from institutions who might react punitively if presented with such renderings of our social activities. When in the hands of private firms conducting domestic intelligence gathering, what is to stop our employers from purchasing such information in order to assess our interactions outside of the workplace, so the firm can successfully impose a lifestyle – through the threat of occupational termination upon those who deviate – that they deem appropriate for those assuming positions in the ranks of their employment.

Consider, even, the current push to centralize and digitize our health records. Of course, they attempt to assuage our concerns by emphasizing the improvements to the administration of health care that will be actualized through the availability to health care professionals of an archive containing our complete medical histories that can be instantaneously retrieved via information technologies. However, what other possibilities will be enacted through the creation of such a repository of personalized information regarding matters of our biographies that we consider to be, oftentimes, sensitive and highly private? Might we be obliged by potential employers to permit their human resource agents to investigate for what we have received treatment by physicians and when that treatment was administered?  For some us, we risk even having to disclose out relationships with psychiatrists and other practitioners of mental health care. Additionally, through the nexus between the economy and polity that will be formed under the conditions depicted in the not so distant futurism that I am detailing, what recourse could we possibly have to prevent government agencies from obtaining the health records that will already be in the hands of corporations with whom government will have working relations? The rights to privacy that were referenced by the attorneys entrusted with the criminal defense of Rush Limbaugh will not be violated, they will simply be circumvented, bypassed, through the creation of cooperative enterprises involving both law enforcement and private entities in the economy or, perhaps, civil society, which might have access to personal medical records.

It is important to stress that the argument that I am making is not a polemic advancing a position in support of expanded government. However, I am quite explicitly warning against solutions to “Big Government,” that advance an agenda of privatizing government operations by outsourcing their functions to corporations and NGOs. The best remedy for inflated bureaucracy is the diminution of government and the services that it provides. The very worse trajectory in our social development would be pursuing the path followed by the ideologues in the Bush Administration, who are quite actively working to expand the powers of the Presidency; an expansion of authority that is leveled at the peril of civil liberties.

Tags: bill of rights, constitution, corporations, corporatism, democracy, economics, fascism, governing, government, homeland security, liberty, neoconservatism, politics, power, privatization, Russell Coles Blog, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Democracy, liberty, constitution, bill of rights, government, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Power, Politics, Corporations, Homeland Security, neoconservatism
No Comments »