Response to comments, part deux

I tried to respond anonymously to the last round of comments. Didn't work. Well, it worked once when I just pressed down on a key and hit return. So, I finally made a comment and the comment was "fffffff." Whee! So, another entry as a response.

Nancy, I understand what you're saying about beating your head against the wall of the system. The issue is that the system will bang your head against the wall if you don't do so voluntarily.

Now, you may ask how that happens and I will answer, "through force." If you follow the rules of society as a means to avoid becoming a victim of state/corporate force then you are voluntarily banging your head against the wall (unless of course you are freely embracing being what the system wants you to be--a laborer and a consumer--in the way the system wants you to be a laborer and a consumer).

If you choose to veer from those boundaries, it will become apparent soon enough. If you start chopping down trees at the nearest woods you can find (because you want to build a house on a nice expanse of mowed grass you saw that was adjacent to another house) then you'll get attention very, very fast.

As angry people come to you to stop you--police as well as neighbors and homeowners--you'll realize that you are not free to use the resources you can see with your own eyes. Someone else "owns" the trees you see. Someone else "owns" the land and the grass growing from it on the spot you wanted to build your house.

So, whether you realize it or not, the system is banging your head against the wall. You've internalized what you are not "allowed" to do. You grew up being taught the rules by those in positions of authority and just like Pavlov's dogs you were either punished or rewarded based on whether or not your words and your actions matched the script written by the most powerful individuals driving institutions around the country and world.

So, what do you do with this information? Well, unlike the powerful, I'm not going to force you or anyone else to follow MY script. I'm detaching myself from the rules of the game so that I can THINK for myself. It's an ongoing struggle and there was just so much bullshit injected into my brain, creating all kinds of ridiculous wiring problems that affected my thinking in completely unhealthy ways (but also completely in tune with the system's structure--the system is designed to make each person unthinking and unhealthy) that it's a never-ending process.

So, for you, you create what you want organically as you see fit. That's what I offer that the system doesn't. I offer freedom. I don't inhibit you or anyone else. I simply express myself and I do so as much as a means to wrap my head around the lies I've been told so that I can better understand them, untangle them, and all of the sudden I have malleable neural synapses again. The difference now, though, is that I'm in control of creating new synaptic pathways. Decision making determines how they'll form and the identity that accompanies those decisions is ... still unknown to me. Which is, from my perspective, the beauty of open-ended self-creation. I'm not predetermining an outcome for my own identity or for my understanding of the world.

In other words, wonder-fueled discovery followed by wonder-fueled discovery. If you want a "way" to be in the world, that's it. And there certainly isn't a need for a system of ANY sort for anyone who is actively engaged in their moments. Not that I or anyone else doesn't LONG for the system at times. Even much of the time. It's familiar, it's easy, it does all the heavy lifting and thinking for you.

But it also means remaining perpetually a child, a follower embracing the opportunity to give up all responsibility for thought and action. A pet even more than a child, really. Which is what I wrote in an earlier post. As soon as life is reduced to merely comfort and survival, well, those conditions can be met by the system. If that's a satisfying life for you or anyone else then it will be embraced.

I embraced that life for quite awhile. I figured there was nothing that could be done, the system was entrenched so what was there to do but follow or be destroyed? So I got in line and numbed myself to reality, following the drudgery of days just like the rest of the unhappy. And if you don't think Americans are unhappy, I can show you places in the world where people are. It's NOTICEABLE! Very easily perceived.

Which brings me to PQ's point about the world being better. I think the percentages of those suffering to those not is about the same as it always has been, frankly. There are still places in the world with high infant mortality rates and all that. And for every case like that I'll go ahead and show that for the child born that would have died at birth, the child's is now being born into a Dickensian slum in China, India, Mexico, Ecuadaor, Brazil, Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Mozambique, Vietnam, and on an on. Most of Asia, Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, and South and Central America are poor. Extremely poor. Technology has just improved the means of exploitation and control.

But, yes, I agree, it's always been this way. I'm definitely not arguing against that. That, in fact, is my point. There has been NO progression in history. There couldn't be, anyway. Each individual life may find a progression over time, but, guess what? Also a deterioration over time. That's the reason why civilization's are problematic. They have lifespans that exceed their generations. They shouldn't. I really believe that. Each individual in each generation, in order to even come close to reaching their potential, NEEDS the opportunity for self-direction. Anything short of that is ... we may as well not have sentience. In fact, we'd be better off without awareness if following the lead of others is all we're choosing to do, all we're ALLOWED to do.

I have more to add in relation to what can change. If you're assuming that an individual entry is telling a story independent of all of the other entries then you'd be mistaken. They should be taken as a whole and, if taken that way, it's quite obvious I'm still in the process telling the story. Start multiplying the first four posts I made in January by the number for March. Take that number, insert it into the third paragraph of the first entry for February. Use that context to create the basis for a collateralized debt obligation, sell it as a hedge fund betting on societal collapse, and then wait for Armageddon. Your returns will be lucrative, but your riches will be useless absent the civilization that valued them. That's the story for each one of us even now, though, stories of individuals wealthy with riches civilization does not value.

Next time I'll tell a story about the stories Wall Street tells itself and how those stories create the reality we all experience. Wealth, in a sense, is just the power to make your story the one everyone else has to follow ... OR ELSE!

Response to comments

Thanks for the comments, Nancy, Summer, and Professor Q.

I still haven't figured out to respond through the comments section ... on my own blog. Yes, that is how technologically inept I am. Or lazy. Or indifferent. Or ... something.

Anyway, you've made a lot of good comments, all, but I want to respond to the comments from my most recent journal entry. I'll start with your comments, Professor.

Yes, I did mean in a humanitarian sense. But I also mean technology in terms of the physical as well. You are imagining a particular person and extrapolating as if that's the norm for a person to fly on commercial airlines and have access to surgeries with anesthesia and other modern medical technology. But there is also the majority of the world's population that does not share in that prosperity and, in fact, suffers more because of technological advancements. The greater the technology, the greater the means of controlling their lives--their behavior.

Performing repetitive tasks for 12 hours a day six or seven days a week as a teenager and on into adulthood cripples the body, destroys any chance at developing a sense of autonomy or self-direction in life, psychologically grinds a person into an automaton (even the self-conception of "victim" would be a step up), and reduces the individual's purpose in being to subsistence through labor to make the shoes for your man on the jet flying off to India to receive a kidney "donated" from a desperately impoverished undesirable. As I've said, it's all a matter of one's position. For the world's wealthier classes advancements in technology and science are incredibly beneficial and truly can raise the quality of life exponentially. On the flip side, technological and scientific advancements have just made the world's poor and those enduring the worst of war more susceptible to the world's wealthy-- those owning and controlling the resources that have been developed through those scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs--who continue to manipulate, exploit, imprison, injure, kill, and destroy.

That's why I say ethics is dead. What I mean by that is that public consciousness, in the U.S., is awaking (again--and they'll fall asleep again) to the fact that there is no real-world evidence indicating that power is ever acting an ethical manner. Power may act legally, but never ethically. To hold any type of ethics at all would require a person to sacrifice self-interest at times for the good of the whole. Not to be compelled to sacrifice self-interest, but to willingly choose to act in a way that is for the benefit of others. Individuals do that, but institutions never do. Never. Ever.

Humans are somewhat limited by the structuralism of language, but there are means for some degree of liberation from linguistic thinking. Not so for institutions which are entirely rule-based in their activities. They cannot veer from the script in the way that humans can. The individuals in positions that "steer" institutions? Oh, yeah. But when have you ever witnessed an individual directing an institution toward the public interest while going against its own because of the rogue actions of a CEO or department head? No, the anti-institutional actions (sometimes illegal) are pursued for self-interested reasons. Theoretically, a company decision maker could act in the public's interest to satisfy his own self-interest in helping the public. I can't really think of a case of that happening off-hand, but I'm sure there are some isolated incidents. I'd be interested if anyone knows of any cases like that.

And I think that segues into what you said, Nancy, about the people you feel you can affect through personal caring to make your own life feel worthwhile. I'm not begrudging you that, but it's neither here nor there for the world. To effect global change institutional models have to change. In fact, institutional relations also need to change. I'm becoming more convinced that it cannot be done piecemeal but instead as a series of well-planned steps over generations. In some ways, that is happening organically at the regional/local/individual level, but the majority of the world's political and economic landscape is being transformed by the global corporate vision for civilization. It ain't pretty.

The sources of good news are events such as the awarding of the Nobel Prize for economics to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their work on resource management by community institutions. Those are the types of models that need to be explored. If we were a sensible people and we actually lived in a democracy we would consider alternatives to the status quo as much as anything to follow a path of continuous improvement (continuous learning providing the basis for that change). Of course, priorities would have to change. We would have to collectively hold humanitarianism in higher esteem than we do property rights. That isn't the case in the United States and it is codified in law that property rights trump human rights--think of how quickly you shift to "he's trespassing" instead of "I can't believe that guy is waving a gun around and yelling at that kid to get off his land, that he should be paying him for the air he's breathing while standing there." Well, you might think the latter, but the U.S. Constitution and state laws support the crazy guy on the verge of shooting the teenager walking around in some lemon groves.

That alone seems like something to be re-examined, but the "right" and "left" in the United States--as they act in positions of government power--are split by about a millimeter. So, you know, sigh, shrug your shoulders, wail, just say fuck it, try it, embrace it, make love to it, walk down the aisle with it, and then one day you wake up in the middle of the night to find yourself tied to the bed while U.S. corruption is raping you. You shout, "Hey, I thought you loved me! I hated you, you wore me down, I gave in to you, I submitted and became not just a servant but also a cheerleader. I've done your bidding even as you've committed atrocity after atrocity. And even after all of that you are still tying me down to rape me? Why?"

"Well ... because I can. And it feels good. Plus, I'm trading ass rapes as derivatives now. It's something I had inserted into a bankruptcy reform plan being proposed in Congress. I figured I'd get in some practice because it looks like we've got the votes. I'd apologize, but I'm enjoying myself to much."

Foucault

Foucault is, as we would expect, a very unconventional historian. He is a historian of discourse, and more precisely of the discursive practices of the human sciences. He is concerned with both the internal rules and norms, the rules of exclusion and hierarchy that dictate what can be said within these discourses, and with the institutions, the material sites of the social power that envelop, legitimize, normalize, and sustain scientific discourse. In his early books, Madness and Civilization (1961; English translation, 1965) and Birth of the Clinic (1963; English translation, 1973), Foucault investigates the discourses of psychiatry and medicine and the ways in which these discourses produce, perceive, and regulate their objects, "sanity" and "health."

Foucault seeks, provocatively, to demonstrate that distinctions basic to these discourses, distinctions between madness and sanity, sickness and health, are arbitrary distinctions related not to the progress of knowledge but to new or changing social relations of exclusion and integration embedded in institutional frameworks such as asylums and clinics, whose functions were social control—normalization and administration—and were neither scientific nor humanitarian. While Foucault refuses to posit any general statement regarding the relationship between discourse and society, he appears to be reducing discourse to those social institutions and non-discursive forces that provide its material conditions of existence.

The history of madness reveals no progress in the theoretical understanding of an illness. Rather, it indicates a consistent tendency to project general social preconceptions and anxieties into theoretical frameworks that justify the confinement of whatever social groups or personality types that appear to threaten society during a particular period. The poor, the dissident, the criminal, and the insane are separated or herded together, treated as humans or as animals, confined or liberated, according to considerations that are primarily political rather than scientific.

Medical practice, Foucault argues, is similarly grounded in social concerns, the clinic and the hospital being microcosms of those attitudes toward human nature prevailing among the dominant classes of society at a given time. Small wonder that Althusser approved of these works and saw them as recognizable offspring of his own ideas. However, in his next two works, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; English translation, 1973a) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; English translation, 1972), Foucault shifts his perspective to the internal structural constraints of discourse alone and to a new anti-materialist methodological strategy that he calls "archaeology." Institutional and social determinations of discourse disappear, replaced by what Foucault calls an "episteme," by which he understands "the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems . . . the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive regularities" (Foucault 1972, 191).

In The Order of Things , Foucault contrasts the four epistemic epochs of the so-called human sciences—discourses whose objects are life (biology), labor (society), and language (culture)—from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The first of these, the Renaissance, was characterized by similitude, the desire to find the same within the different, the extent to which objects resemble each other and the extent to which words truly signify things. The tortuous attempt to demonstrate the similarity of things, that everything to a significant extent resembles everything else, exhausted itself by the seventeenth century.

An "archaeological shift" occurred, bringing a new episteme that dominated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which Foucault calls the Classical Age. The classical episteme focused on differences revealed by the Renaissance and attempted to account for them by a discursive protocol involving comparison, ordering, and representation. According to this protocol, representation is certain and logical; the principle of comparison and ordering of differences moves from the simple to the complex in a carefully calibrated system based on contiguity and continuity. The role of consciousness is one of exteriority. Mind simply observes and classifies representations that are themselves independent and immediate. Representing the essential order of things, identity and difference, means the discovery of a system of control over them.

The belief of the Classical Age was that if the correct table of relationships could be discovered, one could manipulate "life," "wealth," and "language" by manipulating the signs that signify them. However, the classical principle of order and comparison is undermined by the perception of temporality, of the differential origin of things, a perception that destroys the timeless ground of continuity and contiguity, which made things measurable and comparable. At the end of the eighteenth century another "archaeological shift" occurred, inaugurating the Modern Age, dominated by an awareness of temporality and finitude. Knowledge was problematized as thought was increasingly absorbed with the historicity of species, modes of production, and language usages.

"Man," hitherto invisible, became a knowing subject among objects and, more significantly, the object of his own historical understanding. Epistemology came into being as an attempt to discover the grounds on which representations are possible or legitimate given the finitude and limitations of the human subject. "Man" is thus no more than an epistemic creation of the Modern Age, which began with the realization of human finitude and was characterized by its attempt to overcome or transcend these limitations within the epistemic framework of the human subject—to find a ground for meaning and knowledge within what Foucault calls the "analytic of finitude."

The modern episteme has exhausted itself attempting to overcome oppositions between the transcendental form of knowing and the historical content of knowledge, between the thinking cogito and the "unthought" background that is its condition of existence, and, finally, between the historical situation of man, how man is already in history and cut off from all origins, and the historical primacy of man, that man is the agent or maker of history. As a result, Foucault concludes, the Age of Man is currently being displaced by a new, fourth age that has abandoned the analytic of finitude and accepted the disappearance of the human subject, the opacity of language, and the absence of historical meaning. Significantly, Foucault credits Nietzsche with the initial insight into the coming "post-Modern" age:

• In our day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning-point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man. . . . Rather than the death of God—or, rather, in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it—what Nietzsche's thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man's face in laughter, and the return of masks; it is the scattering of the profound stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man. (Foucault 1973, 385)

escholarship.org

Here's a key point for me: "The history of madness reveals no progress in the theoretical understanding of an illness. Rather, it indicates a consistent tendency to project general social preconceptions and anxieties into theoretical frameworks that justify the confinement of whatever social groups or personality types that appear to threaten society during a particular period. The poor, the dissident, the criminal, and the insane are separated or herded together, treated as humans or as animals, confined or liberated, according to considerations that are primarily political rather than scientific. 

Medical practice, Foucault argues, is similarly grounded in social concerns, the clinic and the hospital being microcosms of those attitudes toward human nature prevailing among the dominant classes of society at a given time." I read Foucault for the first time well over a decade ago and I thought to myself, "This explains everything that has seemed completely absurd to me." The reason being is that I was raised as many Americans are raised: to believe in things as they are, that there is an inherentness to the way things are, a rightness or order in life and that things that are "bad" will be brought back into line in time to make the world balanced and good--for us (the "good" humans)--again.

The issue that I was having in "real life" was that these stories I absorbed through tellings and "showings" by parents, teachers, administrators, coaches, managers, owners, and other individuals in positions of greater social, economic, and legal power than I possessed were all being exposed as bullshit by reality. Now, it's a particular kind of hell to be a powerless child observing a world of comparatively powerful adults committing both formal and informal acts of madness and cruelty against one another and, especially, against "classes" of others (the poor, the drug addicts, the socially awkward, etc.). Life viewed through a lens in which the foundations justifying beliefs and behaviors are not only arbitrary but unexamined by "practitioners" leads to one conclusion: everyone and everything is completely absurd. 

 These memes about scientific breakthroughs and technological advancements making life better stand on no more solid ground than the idea that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow being watched over by a possessive leprechaun. It's the same with health care reform. As is true with all legislation and policy, the "science" of health care provision and delivery was never a factor in the process except as fuel for political momentum. The one interesting aspect of that is that it seems, for the first time in my lifetime, that the whole of American society is waking up to what I've understood since childhood: the world is absurd and the U.S. government, in its economics and politics, is abusive, cruel, and tyrannical when it isn't merely indifferent. Now, in a different age that may not have been the case. I have no idea. I've lived only in my own moments rather than as a historical entity. And I realize that even the stories I tell myself are arbitrary and temporary. If knowledge is power then the knowledge that my ideas of myself and the world are undoubtedly just means to an end that I don't even fully understand then I can never act responsibly because I know that I can never know enough to make a responsible decision. 

That being the case, ideas such as "criminal prostitution" or "illegal drugs" make no sense at all. Like Foucault, I understand the illegality of all things--even murder--as motivated by political pragmatics rather than ethics or morality. I recognize that my recoil against murder is based on my own personal pragmatics rather than a law of the universe. Gravity is a reality beyond human control; murder is either committed or isn't because of human choices. Actually, murder is committed because of political/legal creations. Killing is a non-legal, non-political act whereas murder is a legal/political act. Killing is only murder if certain legal conditions are met ... according to judges and juries.

In a sense, a trial is simply a theatrical dramatization of past events that are under dispute in some significant way to various actors with power and influence. The practice of the trial in the United States is familiar and, as such, seems like a given, as reliable and "real" as gravity. But it's a concoction, a discursive creation not made once and for all and set in stone hundreds of years ago but an ongoing dynamic, each event not only a replication of past events but a confirmation of the rightness of those past events. It is trusted on faith by those who have attached it to the American identity whereas it is accepted with resignation by those who recognize they have no more power to change the judicial system than they do to change the laws of gravity.

Now, the outlook on all forms of reality changes radically depending on the type of attitude or belief one develops in relation to any particular thing. In this case, the trial is the particular thing, but it could be anything. Having an attitude that is favorable toward the rules and procedures of U.S. trials is going to factor into other perspectives (or has been factored in because of other perspectives) on U.S. law and politics. Believing U.S. trials to be unjust will likely be related to other beliefs about U.S. law and politics. Take the dominant Middle Eastern view of the United States, that America is the Great Satan because of its lack of respect for the sovereignty of other nations. That colors perceptions about all things American. Conversely, an economic globalization ideologue looks at U.S. foreign policy and views the U.S. as an extremely good country because of its lack of respect for the sovereignty of countries that are hostile to foreign investment and control of resources. 

Neither perspective is "right" based on any independent criteria. That's just it: there are no independent criteria. There are only individual beliefs, attitudes, preferences, etc., that may or may not become law and policy depending on choices made (and much else) in particular circumstances. So where does that leave us? Right back to where we actually are and where we've always been. There has been no progression throughout "history." No, just new humans being born, living for awhile, and then dying. The stories they make up about themselves and the world? No more or less than anything else that a person thinks or doesn't think. Kind of Buddhist, yes, but it's not my fault. I don't really care. I haven't for a long time. Look, you just stop giving a shit about much of anything abstract when you realize that there's nothing more than personal preference involved with any belief structure (story structure). Would I like it to be different? Yes, but because it won't and can't be different, the desire for change is just a form of suffering. If I was a Buddhist I would just accept that everything changes in ways that are meaningless. Perhaps. But I can choose to suffer if I'd like and desire what cannot be. It's best to recognize the futility of caring even if I feel compelled to care.

Don't blame me. I didn't create this reality. I'm just doing time in the prison of my body within the prison of civilization within the prison of ... within the prison. Just like anyone else. I'm just refusing to pretend that I'm free when reality informs me that I am anything but. Why mention any of this? Why cut and paste so much of that writeup about Foucault and then rattle on in this way? I don't know for sure. It's really nothing more than releasing the scream echoing through my being ever since I realized that very, very few human beings are loving and caring. I hear lots of talk about love but I see very, very little evidence in public. Caring is something people do behind closed doors, apparently. Most people seem to care for others in much the way they watch porn: while in their rooms alone at night when no one else is around. In other words, the nature of care in the United States is masturbatory. The character of Americans (and the country as a whole) is taking. Giving that actually helps alleviate suffering and provides real opportunities for empowerment is about as common as meeting someone who won a Powerball jackpot.

If we wanted to see compassion in the world we'd change our politics and restructure our laws and economics. But that would really require trust and love of others. There's nothing there, though. Religion plays a role, for one: "I don't have to be good because if I just give my life over to Jesus some day I'll be saved and all the really horrible things I do to myself and others will be forgiven by the magic man in the sky after I die and all the suffering I'm enduring now is bearable because I know that I'll be receiving an eternal paycheck for all of the injustice I've endured when I walk up the Pearly Gates." That's why religion is the opiate of the masses. You take away the eternal paycheck from people and they go, "I'm enduring what?! For no reason at all?!!! Motherfucker!!! I am going to kill those motherfuckers for screwing me over!"

Yeah, that's why religion plays such a big role in politics. I mean, the only way to endure suffering is to create a story that justifies it or at least gives hope that the suffering will end and something better will come. But, taking that approach ultimately allows others who are NOT believing that some external other loves and cares about them and will make all the booboos go away to actively engage in life and perhaps even influence or control individual circumstances and perhaps human relations on a wider scale. The way the world looks to me is a relatively few people really REALLY engaged with life in internationl politics and business, controlling the flow of resources and humanity around the world, determining how the majority of humanity spends their lives (think mines in Latin America--come on, none of the indigenous people chose to work in mines except out of necessity, a necessity created by those who were actively engaged in taking and using and controlling in the ways they wanted).

That's why Thucydides is right about power and Socrates is a fucking idiot. And yet, Socrates would be right if 20th century academics had not divided and subdivided subjects into separate disciplines and then walled them off from all other modes of thought in order to preserve their "integrity" (as if doing so could possibly create a discourse that would be predictably useable and functional in the real-world). Well, that's bullshit. You can't separate ethical inquiry from social sciences and expect politics to be measured in any way other than in terms of materialistic measures. So, ethics is dead. Has been. It probably never existed except in the way Zeus exists (in the minds or hearts of humans). Ethics is in the realm of "ought" and the social sciences focus on the "is" without making value judgments (well, that's bullshit, but that's the meme). Eh, I'm done. Fuck it.

Off the top of my head

Just had an odd thought. An odd series of thoughts.

I was thinking about the economic crisis, about how so many more foreign companies are buying up American companies. For instance, a company in India bought out a company I have been contracting with for over a decade. My payment on certain projects has dropped by a significant percentage at the same time my overall workload has decreased. I'm in no position to bargain.

So I was thinking from there how all of these corporations are changing hands from American ownership to foreign ownership. And I was also thinking about the Citizens United case, the relatively recent Supreme Court ruling granting corporations greater citizenship rights. One of the most disturbing elements of the ruling is that it recognizes corporate campaign contributions as political free speech protected by the First Amendment. Money is speech.

Uh, no. Money buys the delivery mechanism for speech, meaning money is more privileged than speech. In other words, given a choice between having the right to vote or the right to contribute money to political parties and candidates, the smart money is on money. Now, given that corporations have the most money and do spend it for political influence, allowing unrestricted campaign spending by corporations is all but a formal giveaway of the U.S. government from the people to business institutions.

Including foreign corporations. Even foreign corporations owned and operated by foreign governments. Like China. So, China already owns massive amounts of U.S. debt and may soon find itself able to buy U.S. elections.

I was just reading an article called "The Organ Dealer" in the April 2010 edition of Discovery magazine. The article starts off detailing the happenings of the bust of a Delhi black-market organ trading ring and, in the process of providing the global context of the trade, mentions that in China "kidney harvesting from executed prisoners has supported a lucrative transplant industry." Wonderful.

Yup. Imagine China crafting future health care legislation in the U.S., the same China that may someday own much more substantial stakes in corporations doing business in the United States. China is a national robber baron, more than okay with indentured servitude and even slavery. Human rights are a foreign concept. With a billion-plus people and growing, China would probably prefer to simply create Nazi-like concentration camps, both to control population and to harvest organs. "Growing" humans for organ harvests for the purpose of profit. Heck, sex trade then organ trade.

I'd like to see that filmed, personally. I'm thinking Terry Gilliam. An aerial of an industrial organ harvesting factory "town," slowly zooming onto a particular plant, and through the roof of a hangar-sized warehouse to see lines of humans chained to cots, row after row after row, IVs hooked up to them, "surgeons" and "nurses" operating on numerous patients, delivery men and women rushing the organs off in coolers to another huge warehouse nearby where there is exactly the same layout, but in this one the cots are occupied by paying customers receiving kidney, heart, liver, and other transplants and medical procedures. Factory harvesting, factory surgery. Maybe machines performing both harvests and transplants.

If there were no restraints I have absolutely no doubt that the world would be that way as a whole, a seemingly unimaginable dystopia, but only unimaginable for late 20th-century Americans. Anyone from anywhere in the world now should know better and most of the rest of the world knew just how bad "civilization" was and is. Americans are getting a much richer taste of the results of the democracy-destroying legislation and policies that began in earnest during the deregulation years of the "Reagan Revolution."

But what I was thinking about when I began writing was that if this is the "new world order" (so to speak) then it would actually behoove the citizens of the United States to compel the U.S. government to purchase stakes in stocks, bonds, futures, etc., etc., etc. In other words, if we, the people, want a say in politics and the benefits of capitalism then ownership of the global corporate pie is only really accessible through the government purchase of corporations.

Now, I just laid out the most likely doomsday scenario. But how about this as just one of many possible alternatives. The U.S. government purchases huge stakes in business institutions through the financial markets. By doing so, the government can control the behavior of corporations through majority ownership. In that case, corporations would be vulnerable to corrections through the electoral system in much the same way elected candidates are now. In other words, piss off the public and expect to be punished by shareholders through the actions of the U.S. government due to public pressure on a possible government "investment agency" to correct the behavior (think Toyota and the acceleration fiasco).

Imagine a team of Warren Buffets or whatnot making investment decisions for the U.S. government and, as citizens, being shareholders. The entire structure of economics would change radically. Taxation would have to be completely reconsidered. If dividends and capital gains through trading generated enough income, taxes could feasibly be eliminated. At least reduced and possibly dramatically ... for individuals. Even while valuable government services are created and expanded. Bottom line is that quality of life goes up both materially and in terms of greater control of corporate behavior.

Then there are all the foreign policy issues and yada yada yada. Of course, power is power and if corporations are citizens then through their monied speech rights they would own the government that owns them. Chicken or egg. This isn't a dissertation, folks. This is just off the top of my head.