No Country For Old Men– Class-Based, Corporate-Capitalist Neoliberalism’s Privatization Of Chile’s Sea

"We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few."  -- James Madison

Okay, first of all, the quote above, like many others from history, may be attributed to someone who never really said it.  Who cares?  It is attributable to a speech made in 1900 when the capitalist Robber Barons had enslaved all of us as have today’s Robber Barons.  

The world of corporate capitalism has created a global No Country for Old Men.  Just as in the movie, where the glorification of the rugged U.S. west of times gone by was was peeled back to reveal its lawlessness and brutality, so is the case with corporate capitalism.   We live in a world that is no world for old men.  A degenerate world of illegitimate class-based power void of human decency.   The intent of this post is to help others appreciate the repeatable story of looting the public treasury through the class-based system of corporate capitalism and the force of the state.  That is happening or has happened in every capitalist country on earth since capitalism’s inception.  This story of selling off the seas to capitalist elites in Chile reminds me of Ron Paul, a good “free market” corporate capitalist, publicly trying to explain how if the Gulf of Mexico was under private ownership in some Orwellian Treaty of Tordesillas that the BP disaster never would have happened.  It was about that point in time when I just decided Ron was just a little too wrapped up in the king’s capitalism and his looting of international lands under the guise of property rights and power granted by God, the church and the state.  

Guess what?  600 years after that treaty, corporations, private for-profit capital and private for-profit bankers, our neofeudal kings and lords, are still using the force of the state to steal under the same guise of a class-based king’s God-given authority of property rights.   Steal everything from everyone.  Steal all of the world’s assets under the guise of free market capitalism and its enabler, the state.   Class-based trickle down economics and its resultant hyper-consumerism are the driving force behind the destruction of the natural world and the destruction of individual freedoms everywhere as has been the case since the beginning of human history.  A wholesale raping – the global violation of every sentient being’s dignity - perpetuated by the class-based structure of corporate capitalism.   It’s not people that are the virus poisoning our planet.  It’s the self-granted privilege of class.  Class-based European-style colonialism and mercantilism have enslaved us into a global financial and production system that would make the British king’s capitalist opium trade look mild by comparison.   This attempt at stealing the Chilean sea is one of the most overtly aggressive forms of state-sponsored terrorism we see today.  The literal stealing of lands (in this case the sea) that belong to the people of Chile and the people of the world who, as sentient stewards, should be protecting our ecosystems through sustainability rather than looting and stealing them as class-based corporate capitalism does.  This privatization of the sea is directly a result of the CIA-backed Pinochet’s reign of terror that led to the class-based enforcement of trickle-down economics. 

The mafioso-inspired control of Chilean fisheries by “the seven families” is right out of a dystopian novel.  It is typical of the history of looting that has defined Central and South America under U.S. corporate, CIA and IMF control.  As noted in the Real News video, these wealthy families gained control over public fisheries and fishing rights under generalissimo Augusto Pinochet, a CIA-backed, Milton Friedman-enabled murderer, terrorist and dictator, whose reign of terror against the peoples of Chile is well known.  While the CIA has been forced to admit through declassified documents that the thug Pinochet was on the payroll, we don’t know for certain if the Pinochet military overthrow of Chile’s government was funded by the CIA because of still classified documents.  We do know that the CIA has backed terrorist organizations throughout Central and South America including in democratic Chile before Pinochet’s junta. 

Naomi Klein’s documentary, Disaster Capitalism, highlighted neoliberal Milton Friedman’s involvement in Pinochet’s dismantling of democracy and institutionalization of trickle-down junk economics.  For those who haven’t seen her documentary, Friedman was dispatched to Chile to “assist” Pinochet in his dismantling of a functioning democratic economy to install a trickle-down system exactly like that installed under Ronald Reagan.  It should be no surprise that Friedman was Reagan’s chief economic advisor.  Or, maybe I should say, looter-in-chief.

(I am going to digress here for a rather long remark on corporate capitalism before I finish this post.  I am doing so for context of the remainder of my remarks about Chile and around the globe.  I enjoyed Klein’s documentary but there is a distinction I would like to make.  Corporate capitalism as it has always been practiced is the disaster.   ie, Violence and wars do not create disaster capitalism.  Instead, it is corporate capitalism that creates wars and disasters.  After watching her documentary, I wasn’t sure which she believed came first, although her conclusions were surely accurate.  Our violent, predatory and exploitative society is a result of deregulated and unregulated corporate capitalism; a form of economic slavery that mints profits nearly as grand as the former U.S. south’s capitalist plantation slavery.  It is important to understand this greater reality.   It’s called fascism and I have clearly distinguished entrepreneur and worker capitalism from corporate capitalism countless times over the last eight years.  Class-based corporate capitalism is what has been practiced in Europe for the last 600 odd years and was essentially what was then exported to the U.S. southern plantations.  Even if Adam Smith didn’t write The Wealth of Nations until many years later, capitalism is the exploitative economic system that has always defined statist Europe. 

Entrepreneur and worker capitalism are what were practiced in the U.S. during those times when democracy rose up to stop the endless violence that is European-style corporate capitalism.   The world has been under endless conflict and wars since the European feudal, elite-king-lord-controlled states adopted private, for-profit capital 600 odd years ago.  And, they did so for their own benefit of looting and subjugating human rights and to maintain class-rank.  That is why feudal Europe was embroiled in endless wars to determine conquest and control of the looting.  That’s why we fought a Revolutionary War. To stop the British King’s corporate capitalism.  That’s why we fought a Civil War; because of free market capitalism’s exploitation and violent use of slavery and indentured servitude; a remnant of Old World corporate class-based capitalism driven by private for-profit capital comingling with the state.  That is why we fought both world wars that led to 100 million people dead or wounded.   That’s why we are engaged in countless undeclared wars today.    

War is as much a part of capitalism’s lexicon as is private, for-profit capital’s looting enabled and enforced by the state.  In fact, they are inextricably linked.  I could even argue quite forcefully and with substantial fact-based evidence, and the evidence is quite overwhelming by the way, that capitalism is an outgrowth of the class-based state’s invention of war.  That capitalism is a class-based social system of economic warfare created to enslave and loot the masses, as slaves, and, ultimately, the world.   Remember, corporate capitalism’s roots are a feudal, colonial, mercantilist, elitist-lord-king-controlled Europe that exploited its own impoverished citizens and the world. 

I have intimated many times over the last eight years that while there is no proof, there is ample anecdotal evidence the class-based U.S. political-corporate system created China’s economic bubble to loot and ultimately destroy what is potentially its largest economic and military competitor.  The hard proof may simply be hidden behind government secrecy.  It’s not implausible given the endless violence, force and exploitation used by the U.S. to control economic interests on every continent.  But, then maybe it’s much more simple than that.  Maybe its just the resultant outcome of class-based corporate capitalism’s endless globalized looting. 

Democracy is a classless (equality) society.  People came to this country to escape kings, lords, institutionalized religious hierarchy, class-based tyranny and corporate capitalism.  They came to escape self-appointed class-driven idiots telling them what to do, how to think and what to think and forcing them into working for their masters for whatever they are told their life is worth.  Corporate capitalism was created as a feudal, class-based form of economic exploitation when democracy didn’t even exist.  Capitalism, as it has always been practiced, and democracy aren’t compatible.  Well, unless you outsource your thinking to ignorance or ideologues like Ayn Rand or Ron Paul or Paul Ryan or Milton Friedman or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Wall Street or your corporate masters.  

We can still have a market economy based on true freedom and empowerment, dignity, merit, incentive, performance and personal responsibility that eschews class tyranny without the horrendous injustices and outcomes of communism or capitalism or any other dumbed-down, class-based or class-enforced ideological ism.  In order to accomplish this, we need merit-based, democratic (classless), development-focused, human-needs-focused, public capital.  We need public, democratic banking and democratic money to throw off the shackles of tyranny and injustice and finally rid ourselves of the looting class that has defined capitalism since its inception. 

Of course, the end of money would accomplish the same outcome.)

This dynamic in Chile regarding the privatization of fishing rights and the sea is the same dynamic of Obama’s cap and trade system.  The exact same.  Rather than a bottoms-up or democratic solution to carbon emissions that encourages meritorious innovation, new markets, democratic economics and living wage jobs, it is a neofeudal class-based, trickle-down, force-fed, economic system of control, tyranny and injustice that destroys democracy, economic vibrancy,  economic opportunity, jobs and innovation for democracy but enriches the ruling class of looters and tightens their grip of class-based economic slavery.   It should be no surprise that the liberal feudal lords Gore, Clinton and Obama support cap and trade and that it appears to be a cornerstone of this presidency’s second term.  Human-caused global warming is a myth meant to enslave us to corporate-political rule.  Although the faux-intellectual, anti-science liberal elites surely believe their own ignorance that humanity is causing global climate change.  But the real science of global climate volatility actually supports a greater truth as is now finally leaking out.

Most people have yet to realize neoliberalism and class-based, trickle down economics can only sustain itself through the dynamic of greater and greater force. That is how trickle down economics works.  This is how private, for-profit capital works.   This is neoliberalism or neofeudalism.  This is class-based corporate capitalism.  It’s a like an opium addict.  It must be fed by an endless source of looting to keep the fix going.  Otherwise, “growth” or the endless rampant class-based pillaging of the natural world and democratic societies can no longer sustain itself and we are left only with its effects of mountains of debt and devastation.  As I have noted before, that gig is up.  There’s nothing left to loot.  Debt is not the problem.  It is the outcome of the massive corporate capitalist class-based looting of democracy and the public treasury.  That was the U.S. housing bubble and every other bubble.  Bernie Madoff should be nominated for sainthood in comparison to the greater truths of institutionalized evil and criminality that exists today.  Bernie Madoff is a pimple on an elephant’s ass. 

The force of the state is the only way 1% can defeat the liberty, economic determinism and democracy for 99%.  It is the only way class can survive and even thrive.  Force is the only way a small minority has ever controlled all of humanity.  That is how corporatism and elitism and their endless looting works.  They use the public treasury and the force of the state to loot democracy.  To enslave us.  That force is being exerted on the world and on American citizens through a global system of looting.  It is the only way this system survives.  The poster boys and girls for this force are the politician regardless of political party or country.

This story of the privatization of the sea is a perfect example of that force.  It is so blatantly obvious in its intents there can be no other interpretation or explanation.  It is class-based looting and enslavement using the force of the state.  Corporate capitalism and the force of the state allows people who literally have no meaningful skills other than control (psychopathy, narcissism, megalomania, etc)  to become the most powerful people on earth.  If we were all dropped on an island and forced to survive and recreate a new society, they would either be the first to die or the relegated to menial tasks.   They have no skills or craft other than manipulation and control.  Without the force of the state and the class-based structure of corporate capitalism, they literally offer nothing.  They would be store managers at a local Taco Bell.  (Not to denigrate a store manager at Taco Bell by comparing them to predators.)   That they now control society all across the world is why we see endless insanity.  Our society’s literally are dumbed-down by the control of people who create nothing other than economic slavery.  The solutions to this crisis are easy - end economic slavery and create democratic economics.  The solutions aren’t hard.  Breaking the tyranny and control of the looters are the fundamentals issue of our time.

Mark my word.  We are going to see a massive wealth redistribution in this country because our public lands, public properties, national income, all private assets and the public treasury have been stolen using the force of the state.  Democracy has been completely destroyed.  That may occur by collapse or by taxation or by force or all of the above.  No one knows.  But, I guarantee you it is coming.  And, it is likely coming to more many places than the United States as the capitalist corporate states around the world collapse under the weight of their evil, injustices, illegitimacy and corruption.  Volatility is compressing or contracting everywhere.   The pigs are again feeding at the trough without a worry in the world.  It’s about time for some volatility expansion.  Some range expansion.  Stretch your legs and get ready.  At some point we are going to see the biggest spectacle in our nation’s history.

Change you can believe in.  It is coming.