Gangs of America outlines
the deliberate undermining
of legislatures by corporations
Guardian columnist George Monbiot hardened his view on Corporate Feudalism on December 6th, writing that under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital McDonald’s exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and dies.
Monbiot joins the ranks of Ted Nace, Noam Chomsky and other thinkers who have recognised that corporate subversion of the democratic process is at the heart of our modern malaise.
Where as most commentators study events of the last decade or so in an attempt to identify the source of citizen dissatisfaction with democracy, Ted Nace, points to the deliberate campaigns waged by Corporations in the nineteenth century to harness the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution to grant themselves power to cross state boundaries without approval of state governments. As a result of this campaign the railway barons were born creating the financial institutions of the twentieth century and the underpinnings of the unsustainable financial system that drains the pockets of ordinary citizens and the state that should represent them.
None of this is news to socialists who have followed Marx’ analysis of capitalism over roughly the same period. Ironically, the mantra of neoliberalism, that capital should be free, is the very concept at the heart of the nineteenth century critiques of capital, Marx included.
French economist Thomas Picketty became the rock star of his industry with his book Capital, that irrefutably proved that wealth trickles upwards and the gap between rich and poor increases in the absence of intervention by governments.
An analysis of Picketty’s book and rise to fame is available from The Economist.
Monbiot’s piece can be found at the Guardian where he writes weekly.
Other articles on Corporate Feudalism from The Cage, The Generator and Monbiot are available at TheGenerator.News