Corporate Feudalism

We like to think of things in the USA as a giant football game between two parties.  

There is a comfort in the familiar back-and-forth between small-state Regressives who hate women and minorities and want to create a White Man's Theocracy and the central Progressives who want an open society where everybody has a fair shot at the American Dream.  The sense of the familiar rivalry in a sports arena gives the average citizen comfort.  It's easy to see this by how incessantly it's promoted by our media machines.  

GOP vs Democrats, Fox vs MSNBC, Christians vs Muslims, Capitalism vs Socialism, Yankees vs Red Sox.  It's all very familiar and very comforting at the most basic level to the American Psyche.

And it's all a lie.

From the beginning of Western Civilization, we've always had a hierarchy of citizens, usually with a small number at the top of the proverbial food chain who had all the rights and a very large number on bottom who had none.  We know it today as Feudalism, but the same system can be seen in every major organization from the basest street gang to the largest multinational.  The Class System of society is evident to this day.

Since the creation of the United States and the French Revolution, this official class-trend of Aristocrats and the rest of us has been under attack as new ideas of individual self-determination took root around the world.  The idea that those on the bottom have the same natural rights and abilities as those born into the upper strata is nothing short of revolutionary and has spawned a myriad of social and economic systems that have attempted to level the playing field.  Democracy, Socialism, Egalitarianism, Consensus Anarchy, have all to varying degrees tried to deal with this issue.  

Other systems, such as Totalitarianism and Fascism have attempted to re-cement the old class systems by force.  It's a good thing that such systems have been kept in check, at least in the public eye.  But that is changing.

It's happening slowly in the USA, but for the past 30 years, if not for the past 80, it's been quite steadily heading back to the solidified class system of the middle ages.  Corporate power over our government, legitimized by Citizens United, has allowed the wealthy unfettered power to literally buy governmental policy to their advantage and to the average person's detriment.  Every President has gotten into power with the backing of Wall Street, no matter what their social positions.  Why?  Because every President since Reagan has done their utmost to promote Corporate expansion of power.  Just look at the Affordable Care Act.  In essence, it guarantees that the Private Insurance Industry by law has the entire population of the USA as customers.  

Even when that power runs our nation into the ground, those powerful interests are left untouched.  And whenever corporate power is really challenged, that challenge is squashed with brutal force.  Just look at Kent State.  Or Occupy Wall Street's failed protests.  New laws are being passed in state houses every day to tighten the restrictions on how, when, where and under what circumstances citizens can protest for a redress of grievances -- a right supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution.  

But that's just the obvious part.  As the disparity between rich and poor continuously widens, the average person loses the ability to focus on their own larger destinies as they're forced to focus more and more on putting food on the table.  The minimum wage argument is about this.  The more chance people have to move above subsistence level, the greater their ability to have a say in the government.  This is something the owners, shareholders and managers of the Corporate State fear.  That's why -- that, and the relentless pursuit of new ways to squeeze out a profit -- the inundation of Corporate attempts to control our lives is endless.  Our computers are tapped.  Our phones are tapped.  Our movements are monitored endlessly.  And it's not Big Government doing it.  It's Google and Verizon and Facebook.  

The fact is that increasingly, the average person is cut off from having a say in their lives by economics.  Without financial independence, people simply cannot afford to move up the social ladder -- the hallmark of the American Dream.  This trend is quite deliberately set up to keep the status quo.  The richest among us gain the privileges of Aristocracy, while the rest of us scrape by with fewer means, fewer rights and fewer paths towards a better life.  The only weapon the People are left with is the vote -- the ability to choose who they employ in government.  

It's very telling that the average person thinks of Congress members as "leaders" rather than "public employees".  We defer to them because we see them in sharp suits on TV, because they can afford to have good PR teams and stylists and handlers who train and rehearse them, like actors, to put on a show.  And we, poor uneducated hopeless sods that we are, buy into it again and again each election cycle.  

We're already all-but serfs in our own land -- and unless we take back the reigns of our government, unless we, the average citizens on bottom use our meager power of the vote to replace the Corporate-owned government that threatens to strand us in place for the rest of our lives with representative employees truly accountable to the average person, it is this reality that we'll be forced to endure.