This era of corporate anarchy is wrecking the world—literally, if you’ve been tuning in to images of the oil billowing out a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico.
I think we are at the fork in the road: One path leads to revolutionary change, if not outright revolution. The other, appeasement and stasis, as the corporations grind the country down.
My own sense is, there will be no revolutionary change. The corporations won. They won when they convinced the best and brightest—of which I used to be—that the only path to success was through a corporate career. No necessarily through for-profit corporations—Lefties never seem to quite get how pernicious and corporatist the non-profits really are; or perhaps they do know, but are clever enough not to criticize them, since those non-profits and NGO’s pay for their meals.
Obama is a corporatist—he’s one of Them. So there’ll be more bullshit talk about “clean energy” and “energy independence”, while the root cause—corporate anarchy—is left undisturbed.
Once again: Thank God I no longer live in America. It’s too sad a thing, to watch while a great nation slowly goes down the tubes.
The author, Gonzalo Lira, is an American expat living in Chile, where the banks are quite solvent because they “are regulated up the wazoo.”
You might think this comes from a left wing. It doesn’t. It’s from Zero Hedge, a hard hitting financial blog populated mostly by libertarians. By contrast, the left has been mostly comatose during these ongoing financial and environmental crises. Why is that?
From the comments
The reason that people are looking to “big government” to save them is the rapacious nature of “big corporations.” That “safety” is an illusion.
Maybe this is one reason why the socialist left is ineffective nowadays. They cling to believing that strong central governments will somehow be the answer to our problems when it’s clear to most that central governments are part of the problem, not the solution. Plus, we live in an era where, due to the rise of powerful corporations, that governments are hollowing out and are not able to provide the services they used to, the opposite of the socialist ideal.
Dude, those of us who read Cyberpunk are not that startled by corporate hegemony. In fact everyone probably underestimates the sheer power wielded.
It feels to me that we are living through a stage that resembles the era that brought Teddy Roosevelt and his “Trust-Buster” slogan into power. Nothing is more hilarious, and more sad, than to hear that the idiot Obama is actually reading Roosevelt’s biography as a matter of inspiration. One may as well give an iPad to a gnat.
However, the darkest hour is always just before dawn. And that dawn may well bring our new version of the Trust-Busters. Hey, Teddy Roosevelt prevailed. So did his distant cousin FDR, who whacked the upper classes hard and said “I welcome their hatred” even though he was one of them.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Teddy Roosevelt and FDR enjoyed strong support from the populace, which helped them do what they did. Someone, probably quite soon, will harness the growing surge of populism and anger here in the US. It could veer towards nativism and blaming outsiders or it could be a force that will break up overly powerful corporations. It is the task of the left to insure it is the latter not the former.