Leaving aside the egregious war crimes Israel is committing right now, which the Bush Administration (and most Democrats ) are fully complicit in-----seeing how it refuses to support a cease-fire, unsurprisingly, the same position it took during the bombing of Lebanon two years ago, and delivers huge amounts of taxpayer-funded weaponry to Israel despite the mere fact that 71% of the American public feels the U.S. government should take neither side-----there are other "interesting" things afloat.
APN tells us that the corporation that received the most bailout money also has one of the largest offshore tax haven set ups. This dutiful contributor to the welfare of the American nation-state was previously nailed for helping Enron hide bad investments offshore, and settled to pay $120 million in 2003. Yep, that beneficiary of nanny-state corporatism is Citigroup.
Well, a couple weeks ago, I linked to an ANP story covering the fact that for all the talk of oversight, and the 100 pages ostensibly dedicated to it in the bill, Congress left out any mechanism for requiring recipients of federal bailout money to report back to the government on how it was being spent (Ooops). And so today, Larry Kudlow and the pro nanny-state corporatists at CNBC are contending that monitoring bailout money is equal to Soviet-style "central planning," and that the Treasury couldn't possibly track bailout spending.
While watching I Was Stalin's Bodyguard a few days ago and pondering the cause and effect relationship between ideology and practical reality, the Soviet nomenklatura and the disparity (hypocrisy) between its economic ideology and its leaders' own material existences (Surprise: they were all wealthy and got whatever they wanted from the bourgeois West) hardly figured into my views about the Treasury or Congress demanding even a modicum of accountability and oversight. So I have to thank CNBC for their hyper-defensiveness and knee-jerk apologetics for state-corporatism----not unlike those historic capitalist-cherished brands enjoyed under 20th Century fascist systems----because like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the Kudlow's of the world make obvious their advocacy for one set of rules or laws for "The Elect," and another for the proles. You could say their ideology doesn't really comport with reality. But is their lack of patriotism an anomaly?
No. It isn't unfair to say "capitalism," or really state-corporatist multinational capitalism, conflicts with the welfare of the nation-state. Orwell wrote of the conflict-of-interests held by Allied capitalists and why they were so reluctant to intercede with Hitler,* ultimately choosing appeasement over confrontation because of the gargantuan investments they'd made to the strongest economy on the continent, Fascist Germany (This was truly ironic because they justified it to their conscientious critics at the time by saying it was necessary for opposing Russian communism. Little did they know, that years later they'd be allied with Uncle Joe's** Red Menace in order to destroy their former financial partners, the Nazis.).
During Madison's presidency, John Q. Adams was pilloried by his own party, (at that time) the Federalists, because he patriotically stood with Jefferson's Republicans against the British, who were impressing (kidnapping) upwards of 9,000 American seamen so they could be forced to fight Napoleonic France. A few years later, during the War of 1812, the Federalists, at the Hartford Convention, ironically schemed for secession, which was the single event that led to their extinction as a party, and the rise of Democratic-Republican, single-party rule and "The Era of Good Feelings." The South didn't miss the irony of the treasonous convention when it threatened secession in 1831 during the "Nullification Crisis," and South Carolina led the way with actual secession upon Lincoln's election.
Why did the Hamiltonian Federalists become so strongly tied to their nation's primary enemy, much like Allied capitalists did with Nazi Germany? Because Britain's financiers were investing heavily in the nascent Northern manufacturing sector, and funding the debt of the privately-owned Bank of the United States. Northern interests weren't upset enough anymore to throw the products of corporate monopolies, like the East India Company, into Boston Harbor because they were too busy in Congress fighting for similar protectionist measures*** to those they fought against during the revolution, at the expense of anyone too poor to pay for tariffed, imported goods (like say...that broad Southern electorate of yeomen farmers), and instead desired to emulate, economically, their former "tyrannical" overlord, Great Britain. Heck, wanna build a future empire? Gotta tax and invest domestically in infrastructure to pay for it, yo!
"Capitalists" of the world unite, before "central planners" like the treasury oversight panel force you to become patriots!
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From Orwell's essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn":
After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes...The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler... What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism, that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit--DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods...The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism...the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with fascism---generally speaking [because] the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution... British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.
**From the above-linked conversation with political scientist, John Mearsheimer:
In the late 1930s, Stalin was viewed as a murderous thug, and the Soviet Union was widely considered to be a totalitarian state. But in December of 1941, when we went to war against Nazi Germany, we ended up as a close ally of the Soviet Union. So what we did was bring the spin doctors out, and Joseph Stalin became Uncle Joe, and the Soviet Union was described as an emerging democracy, and we made all the necessary rhetorical changes to make it look like we were aligning ourselves with a burgeoning democracy, because Americans would find it very difficult to tolerate a situation where we, in effect, jumped into bed with a totalitarian state that was run by a murderous leader like Joe Stalin. So we cleaned him up.***It is important to remember that it was those protectionist measures that built up American manufacturing, increasing the funding for internal improvements and infrastructure that raised the country from a semi-peripheral, agrarian nation, to a 20th Century economic and military hegemon, with a broadly enjoyed, high standard of living. Go figure that developing nations today fight to uphold their sovereign right to nationalistic economic policies and that the U.S. and IMF thwart them with mandatory structural readjustment programs and military intervention: One set of rules for us, the exceptionalists, "The Elect," and another for them; history and freedom be damned.
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