The Bailout War III: Corporatism and Finance

We are experiencing an attempted corporatist coup. It’s the same old disaster capitalist battle plan: trigger the disaster, in this case the financial crisis; shock, confuse, and frighten the people with Too Big To Fail and an unending litany of miserable economic news; use this chaotic environment to push through a plan which would never have any chance of success if the people could calmly understand and deliberate on it. The finance elite claim to be capitalists seeking a “free market”, but what they really want is a free-fire zone. They want to be free of all government oversight, free of all antitrust, consumer, of labor protection, free of any obstacle to the most predatory and anticompetitive practices, free of environmental regulations, free of any limit on socializing the costs of externalities, free of any regulation aimed at economic stability, free of all social responsibility, and of course free of taxes and anything else which in any way compromises feudal accumulation. At the same time they want the full cooperation and protection of the public bureaucracy, police, courts, prisons, and military, which are all to be deputized in the service of private profit even as they are paid for with public funds. Feudalism masquerades as capitalism, but it seeks rent rather than innovation (though Orwell-style this is called “innovation”, just as swindler “talent” is called talent as such). Banks, insurance companies, and the real estate industry , who together comprise what Michael Hudson calls the FIRE trust, use debt creation not for productive loans or to raise living standards but to inflate bubbles in real estate, stocks and bonds, luxury novelty markets and so on. They concentrate in a trust to enforce a de facto central economic planning power where all losses are socialized. The “free market” function of the FIRE trust is really a fake rentier function, enabled by the government, which shouldn’t exist at all. Corporatism is pure gangsterism. Corporatism as an ideology and an agenda seeks to topple democratic capitalism and replace it with a de facto unaccountable autocratic government which serves as a wealth conveyor from the public to a rentier elite. Elected representatives and public officials are first captured with bribes and threats and then selected for ideology and obedience. A complaisant media cooperates. The result is an industry/government/media cabal which wages a civil war from above, treating the public and the public domain as a mine and a dump. (learn more at )