Divine Law is the Defense Over Addictive Power

Is there a truly evil power that afflicts the world, is there a dark side as is portrayed in science fiction, is there universal force of evil that attempts to feed men? We suggest that capitalism is the economic system that balances this dark force for the good of nations but if such a dark force exists can it truly be contained? Consider this thought from the sci-fi writer Adam Turquine…

“Evil is not just a theory of paradox, but an actual entity that exists only for itself. From its ether of manifestation that is garlanded in perpetual darkness, it not only influences and seeks the ruination and destruction of everything that resides in our universe, but rushes to embrace its own oblivion as well.

To accomplish this, however, it must hide within the shroud of lies and deceit it spins to manipulate the weak-minded as well as those who choose to ally themselves with it for their own personal gain. For evil must rely on the self-serving interests of the arrogant, the lustful, the power-hungry, the hateful, and the greedy to feed and proliferate. This then becomes the condition of evil’s existence: the baneful ideologies of those who wantonly chose to ignore the needs and rights of others, inducing oppression, fear, pain, and even death throughout the cosmos. And by these means, evil seeks to supplant the balance of the universe with its perverse nature.

And once all that was good has been extinguished by corruption or annihilation, evil will then turn upon and consume what remains: particularly its immoral servants who have assisted its purpose so well … along with itself. And within that terrible instant of unimaginable exploding quantum fury, it will burn brighter than a trillion galaxies to herald its moment of ultimate triumph. But a moment is all that it shall be. And a micro-second later when the last amber burns and flickers out to the demise of dissolving ash, evil will leave its legacy of a totally devoid universe as its everlasting monument to eternal death.”

How does one that is not driven by the intoxication of evil power nonetheless gain an understanding of it. If it is power that skews men’s wages to the detriment of a nation, should we then not try to gain more than a vague understanding of it:

“The fairy tale belongs to the poor…I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.”
― Erik Christian Haugaard

“Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”
― Leo Tolstoy

Perhaps we are lucky to have escaped a grasp of understanding for it seems there is no escape once one falls prey to its lure:

“In the beginning, the taste of power is sweet, savored on the tongue, like fine wine. It whispers promises in your ear and pretends to be your friend. It is easy to become addicted to this feeling.”
― Rahma Krambo

“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For the masses of us who have not been tormented by the temptations of power, we are nonetheless victims of this obscure stranger:

“Power lacks moral or principles. It only has interests.”
― Horacio Castellanos Moya

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?…Power is not a means; it is an end.”
― George Orwell

“Station is the paradox of the world of my people, the limitation of our power within the hunger for power. It is gained through treachery and invites treachery against those who gain it. Those most powerful in Menzoberranzan spend their days watching over their shoulders, defending against the daggers that would find their backs. Their deaths usually come from the front.” -Drizzt Do’Urden”

“People with power always take advantage of those without power.”
― Christopher Pike

“It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

We Americans go about our quiet lives depending on our institutions of fairness and justice to govern the affairs of others over us yet it is power that directs our lives when we turn over our institutions to others:

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.”
― Henry A. Wallace

“What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.”
― Frank Herbert

So then we must choose whether power will be our master:

“In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will’s somewhat — somewhat, too, the power —
And thus we half-men struggle.”
― Robert Browning

“History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.”
― Carter G. Woodson

Unless we are so far removed from power, it is hard for us to see it influence over us:

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”
― Frederick Douglass

“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Yet as a nation, we collectively have righteous power to correct imbalance:

“To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn’t want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse

The powerful may be less powerful in the end for they are inhibited by their station:

“The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.”
― Leo Tolstoy

Yet the masses are not so constrained:

“You have a power that most high noblemen envy. It is a power that, had you been born an aristocrat, would have made you one of the most deadly and influential people in all of the final empire…’But, you weren’t born an aristocrat. You’re not noble. You don’t have to play by their rules–and that makes you even more powerful.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.”
― Leymah Gbowee

Ultimately the rule of law is no defense against power:

“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny,” Paul said. “They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.”
― Frank Herbert

Yet divine law if it exists, is a subtle, everlasting defense:

“God has chosen to save the world through the cross, through the shameful and
powerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is the
revelation of the deepest truth about the character of God, then our whole way
of seeing the world is turned upside down… all values are transformed… God
refuses to play games of power and prestige on human terms.”
― Richard Hays

“The great question…What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought?

The answer is very simple: God…. He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope and love. It is only because of our hardness of heart that we think this is too little. Yes indeed, God’s power works quietly in this world, but it is the true and the lasting power. Again and again, God’s cause seems to be in its death throes. Yet over and over again it proves to be the thing that truly endures and saves.”
― Pope Benedict XVI

Divine Law Suggests Technology Cannot Obsolete Labor, Only Direct It

Some say that the age of capital has arrived and that technology has made the labor of the high school drop out obsolete. It is this argument then that supports the idea that uneducated laborers should be paid a wage that does not sustain life. Yet the vast majority of the world does not exceed this poorly educated standard of learning. Are we saying then that the majority of the world should not exist? The creation of computers, while making the world vastly more productive, has not yet made mankind extinct.

The ability of a country to lift its people through education determines its ability to compete on the economic frontier of the world. The fact that only 4% of Detroit’s eighth graders can pass basic knowledge tests in math is an indicator of the abysmal condition of America’s system of preparation for competition on that economic frontier.

Yet, whether or not we are adequately preparing our nation for the leading edge of national production, we still are producing more humans. These humans have value, a value that is economically determined by our ability to educationally prepare them, but that has value nonetheless.

America continues to replace human capital with machinery and computers to compete with other parts of the world that still uses human capital at a much lower price. America has seen fit to add $15 per hour equivalent through regulation and set a minimum wage of $7.25. With our artificial barrier of $22.25 in a world with a median income of less than a dollar, technology must prevail.

Yet those are artificial barriers we set for ourselves that drive labor decisions in America. Therefore, we are content to give on top of those barriers an additional equivalent of $13 per hour to every citizen that we keep sidelined and unemployed. It is our artificial barriers that attempt to create obsolescence. However, even if we removed the barriers and reformed our abhorrent educational system as we should, America would still have a segment of our population unable to rise to the levels of knowledge required to compete for those jobs that are left with our $22.25 barrier.

Are we then divinely just in letting American labor sit idle while millions provide similarly educated labor in other countries to supply us our goods?

There is strength in Biblical verses about work. Several contain the context that men must work to eat. For instance:

1. Thessalonians 3:10

“For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”

Now if the Bible says if anyone is unwilling to work let him not eat, then if follows that if they are willing to work then they should eat. The laborer is not the owner of the work. The master of the work is the capitalist that has provided for the business owner.

1. Timothy 5:8 states:

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

How could God allow the servant of a master’s work to become an unbeliever and deny his faith because he cannot provide for his relatives simply because the master of the work does not provide a living wage? If God commands a man to work and to provide from that work for his family less he be deemed and unbeliever condemned to Hell, then God must want for this man to earn a living through honest work.

Ephesians 4:28 says:

“Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”

Yet, we turn our backs on our failing schools, condemning millions to a life unprepared for honest work. We then turn them to the streets where high school drop outs and failed students cannot earn a living wage, and we force them into making a poor choice between public handouts and lives of crime.

The idea that a man can condemn another to work for wages beneath his ability to sustain life has been tread out through the ages and always ends in fallen governments and revolution. The Arab Spring happened because the world’s economic implosion brought food prices beyond the reach of North Africans. Just because men can lower wages below livability does not mean that God supports their power.

For the scripture of 1 Timothy 5:18 says,

“You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves his wages.”

The Bible is replete with verses that support the concept of work equating to a living wage. It certainly does not state that the laborer will become wealthy from his toil. Yet, it does support the idea that man should be provided through his toil his needs so that he may come to God in solitude with good prayer.

If this is so, then our leaders are called to come together to determine how all can earn a living wage through a community’s toil.

Imagine There’s No Countries, What will Take Their Place?

Our children becoming adults are entering an uninviting world filled with intergenerational warfare. They are finding a wall of debt and a jungle of entitlement that they are now expected to maneuver through as they find their way in the world. They now clamor for relief and dream of a day when they will have their turn at creating a government that works for them perhaps at the expense of those that came before them. This intergenerational struggle is a mask for that struggle we all must now endure between corporatism and nationalism.

“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one”

John Lennon’s words of a dreamer hoping for a world in which man’s better nature overpowers his lesser one are but those of a hopeful dream unfettered by the realities of mankind. I used to dream this way as a school boy. Glancing at the chalkboard occasionally only to memorize the math tables in case by chance I might be called upon to recite them by my teacher, I would then stare off into the clouds outside my classroom window and think of such peaceful things.

And it is becoming easier for the children now becoming adults to dream this way, for their chances at success in the material world are becoming less and less a reality of the dreams they aspired to fulfilling. The dreams of a world yet to fulfill the promises of enlightenment seems a better goal to these young dreamers than the drudgery of cleaning up after the dreams turned nightmares of their baby boomer parents.

Yet, dream as we all must, the reality is that neither Lennon’s nor Lenin’s dreams of a world to come have any basis for they do not measure what man’s lesser nature is capable of achieving in practice. Our now adult children will aspire to dismantling the government entitlements that we built for ourselves at their expense and they will have their chance to meet their own aspirations. Yet what will take the place of our generation’s dreams that they dismantle?

We will not move toward a utopian world without borders that they dream about, but instead our future is hurdling toward a nationalistic dystopia where nationalism is replaced by corporatism, where national armies are usurped by corporate militaries, where geographic borders are porous, only signaling which populations will pay for the non-viable workers in their regions yet containing none of the more glorious privileges of citizenship.

Dreamers must allow themselves to dream the uglier side of life, driven by the lesser nature of mankind, and then they must put those dreams, nay nightmares, forward for the rest of humanity to witness. It is only in the sacrifice of a dreamer sharing his vulnerability that the rest of us have a moment to adjust our paths, if only to thwart those dreams before they become realties.

The Richest Man In the World Teaches His Son About Governance

Imagine you are the ten year old son of one of the ten wealthiest people in the world and he has you on his knee about to begin your lessons. Is he going to teach you the educations of the masses?

No, he is going to explain the pyramid of power above the masses that you will be required to learn how to control as you take over his reign. In this pyramid, at the bottom there are the tens of thousands of businesses and local governments, above which are the few thousands CEOs of corporations that the lesser companies feed and the few hundred heads of state and kings that control the local governments and the armies of the world. Of course alongside these are the heads of the international banks that control the lesser banks. Above all these are the lesser noblemen in the band of 1,500 that control all the heads of state and their parliaments, the international bankers and their underlings, the mega corporations and their feeder corporations.

“These lesser nobles are your direct reports my son, the lesser lords. With their assistance in managing the affairs of the world, your path is to manage the pacification of 7 billion people to work on your behalf. They will toil for their meager share of the world’s wealth and they will trade with each other using the world’s currency that you control. You will, by agreement with governments, banks and corporations, take a share of every transaction in the world using this currency. Now listen closely my son. You will convert it quickly into real assets. Remember this. Do not hold onto currency for too long, for we use its devaluation to accumulate wealth as well.

Through the balancing of trade using currency creation and securitization of real property through property and estate laws, you will keep economies growing at a pace commensurate with your ability to exponentially secure our portion of the world’s wealth.”

“But Papa, why not just turn on the spigots of wealth creation? Why do we keep the world in scarcity of supply?”

“Son, the rules of capitalism require that the world’s masses be obfuscated as to the reality of currency creation. They must be pacified by the idea of existing capital is needed as a source of future capital growth so that our capital can participate in every future endeavor by mankind. They must be tolerant of the idea of interest. In this way, we collect a portion of every transaction in interest as well as with return on capital.

But if we turned on the spigot of currency formation absent the need for interest and capital participation, then mankind could build its future while cutting us out of a share of its expansion.”

“But why are they allowing us to take a pinch of every financial transaction now?”

“Son, it has to do with the fallacy of gold being needed to support currency. They just haven’t caught on yet that gold stopped being a part of our transactions 40 years ago, at least everybody but those pesky Chinese. They might be the ruin of our scheme yet.

Now run along and play. But don’t go play with the masses my child, for I don’t want you turning soft on you future responsibilities to direct your band of 1,500. Run along.”

IS THIS FACT OR FANTASY?

So the middle class guy, his income averages $43,000 and his net worth is about $65,000. 150 million Americans have less wealth than this.

Then we have the upper management folks making $120,000 with net worths of $250,000.

Senior executives earn $350,000 an have net worths of $1,000,000.

As we climb the pyramid, we enter the stratosphere of what the little guy can see or contemplate. Those that make it to the very top spot in the feeder corporations, they jump to an annual compensation of $3 million with net worths of $10 million.

Continuing the climb, our fortune 500 CEOs average $14 million annual income with net worths of $100 million. This income is staggering for most humans to imagine.

But the true CEO giants, as far as we can see in the corporate world earned an average of $100 million compensation per year with net worths in the billions.

But really in terms of management of the world, these so called giants are really like middle management, along with the CEOs of countries and armies, their governmental counterparts.

President Obama, the “leader of the free world”, for instance earns a mere $400 thousand (1 million with investments) and has a net worth of about $10 million. His ranks about the highest of elected officials although a few rank higher. For instance, Singapore’s leader earns about $1.7 million. Most of the World’s elected top officials, however, earn less than upper middle management in private US companies.

So we continue up the food chain. Mere department heads in investment banks earn about $2.5 million per year. The average of the top fund managers earned about $800 million each last year. Yet these are the middle managers in the banking arena. They report to the bankers who run the bankers. These colonels in the world army report in various ways to the band of 1,500, the owners of 50% of the world’s wealth.

While not followed, their wealth averages over $100 billion and directs the world stage. These are the overlords that manage the world’s affairs, directing the banker’s bankers, and top of the pyramid CEOs to direct their underling bank and industry CEOs, that direct their government leaders and corresponding armies, all in the enterprise of capital accumulation and power.

And they report to the very very top of the food chain, among them the man whose lap his ten year old boy sits upon learning the lessons of world affairs.

So the Sergeant Majors on both sides of the aisles in both chambers of Congress instruct their underlings to start the clamoring over the increase in the tax rate of 3%. Should it be $250,000 or $1,000,000? Should we have chicken soup on Monday or corn beef hash?

Keep up the theater and rustle the masses. Beat the drums of political war and pass out the opiates to the middle class as we sweep in behind and gather up their taxes and their 401Ks, and skim value off their devalued homes and their new debt. Sing the song of fair taxation oh ye ushers of the age old church of unfettered capital as ye pass the collection plates full and place them on the alter of accumulation.

This noise we hear and count as our reality is the incantation of the witch doctor. It is the song that pacifies us to our station amongst the masses counting in the billions. As far as we know, those powerful elites that live their daily lives perched above the sergeants in the world’s army that we know as Prime Ministers and Kings, well they must exist in the clouds, like the mythical 12 gods atop Mt. Olympus.

Gun Control Costs are Unsustainable

Someone in this world of 7 billion people has walked through the system costs of gun control in a much more detailed way than I am about to share using the back of the envelope. However, we all should view gun control from a cost benefit perspective. How much is the life of an individual worth? How much should society spend to save that life?

First of all, laws would need to be passed. My vote is to pass them at the state level, not federal because some states have much fewer homicides than others or are much more tied to hunting than others. No matter but lets say after deciding how to conduct this inquisition and conducting hearings, debates and votes at the state and federal levels, the cost of law passage is $500 million. Then of course regulations have to be passed which must included testing each individual for mental illness under some standard method.

Typical standardized testing takes about 12 hours so testing the population would cost about $1,000 x 200 million people or about $200 billion dollars. Plus of course there would be lost wages or $15 x 12 hours x 150 million people or about $27 billion. Plus there would be about ten times that cost in productivity lost during testing or about $300 billion. Then we would have to have some sort of gun collection cost to buy, collect and destroy guns. So let’s say we buy, collect, and destroy 50 million guns from those suspected of being unstable at a cost of $500 a piece for a total of $25 billion. So far the cost then is $552,500,000,000.

Now it gets interesting. Every firearms dealer will be put in charge of administering this new law. There are 50,000 retail gun dealers in the U.S. each having to foot new admin costs of $10,000 each year for a cost of $500 million. Plus each state and the Feds would have admin costs of $10 million each for another $500 million.

Then it gets heated because we have now defined across 50 states what constitutes enough instability that one should not be allowed to buy or possess firearms. So for every illness or disorder we have drawn a fuzzy or bright line against which each individual must be tested. And we know that every disorder will have a spectrum of evaluation from very mild cases to very pronounced. It will be those that approach the bright line or that just cross it that will be the most difficult for they will challenge our new laws and regulations and will bring them to court. So lets say we have to incur about 10,000 trials per year at a cost of $400,000 per trial, we now have added $4 billion a year in adjudication costs. Some will win their cases and will be paid lets say a million for a small sum of $1 billion per year. And of course some will break our new laws and will have to be incarcerated for gun possession. Perhaps we hold 10,000 new prisoners at $40,000 each per year for another $400 million.

Have I got the basics? Let’s add it up so far, $558,900,000,000. But statistically, will we then have more murders not less? We have after all limited gun access to those statistically more likely to commit murders and to those that happen to fall within the mental disorders we deemed in the same camp whether controlled by medication and therapy or not. But we have also removed guns from homes that could have been used to protect individuals from would be assailants. We have potentially limited murders that occur from those that might have been affected by momentary acts of unstable aggression. But we have made it easier for the thousands of sane, rational predators to do their work.

My bet is that murders go, up not down, by about 1,000 per year and that injuries from assaults go up about 10,000 per year. Yet, there are system costs that go well beyond the simple cost of collecting guns as I have shown in this simple example. Interestingly, when Australia outlawed gun possession and collected millions of guns their gun murder rate went up by 21%. Actions have unintended consequences. Home invasion rates went up because assailants knew the risk of being shot went way down. Murders are not caused by guns but by the root cause of societal disorder. Guns are the instruments of choice to carry out that disorder.

So now we have funeral costs. The cost of a funeral plus the lost wages, cost of attendance, room and board for a funeral times 1,000 funerals per year is $20,000,000. Then we have 10,000 hospital issues at $10,000 each or $100 million. And now the police must investigate 10,000 more assault cases at $10,000 each for another $100 million. Add to that the cost of prosecuting these cases at $40,000 each and incarcerating 2,000 assailants at $40,000 each and we have another $1.2 billion.

Total: $565,120,000,000.00

While a touchy subject, this financial look at the cost of gun control approaches the subject of the financial value of a human life. If we save 500 lives a year, it costs a billion per life. If we were to eliminate every murder in the U.S. by this one initiative, (of course completely impossible) it still costs $30 million per life. This value far exceeds the value placed on lives by our courts today. It begins to add to our social savior schematics another unsustainable cost of engineering morality.

Of course this blog is about GDP and jobs so to add that to the mix….Most likely a few gun dealers might prove insane and we would lose a few jobs there…but on the whole, the jobs to administrate and implement the ban, collection of guns, burying of additional victims etc. would be a boon in traditional GDP calculations. Therefore, this ban by restriction of mental incompetence could conceivably be Congress doing the number one job it was elected in 2012 to do and that was to create jobs.

Unfortunately, this back of the envelope calculation points to the law of entropy that states we simply cannot engineer ways to eradicate all evil from the planet. The cost of doing so could not be sustained by the economic output of humans. This is why we have not accomplished the task thus far. We are, as an example, attempting such a fate with American healthcare, spending twice that of other nations. We have not begun to spend what it would cost to eliminate death. We have, however, extended life by approximately three months at a cost that is bankrupting the country.

Changing the Current Corporate Paradigm Will Help America Thrive

The corporation is an artificial construct originated centuries ago to give investors and workers legal protections that balanced risk taking with entrepreneurial rewards. This construct propelled national economies to new heights, which would not otherwise have been achieved. Corporations and derivatives such as LLCs to this day provide America with the best balance for entrepreneurial growth. Yet, with the creation of the corporation, a new life form began that has now evolved to test the very nations that gave it life. Like Frankenstein, the corporation has loosened its legal bindings at the economic frontier and now has the potential to become the corporate-state master of its nation-state creator.

This imposition by corporate-states upon nation-states is appalling. Our government institutions have been rotted from the inside to their skin and their innards have been replaced with government zombies that dutifully perform functions set upon them by their corporate masters. It is a ghastly phenomenon centuries in the making, visible to the naked eye for at least a hundred years, formed from the initial character of corporations. Yet, we humans are caught in our original paradigm of corporations as servants of the nation and are unable to see a new corporate threat evolving.

We call the newest corporate form transnational or multinational. Yet these terms merely define the world’s current paradigm of the frontier edge of corporatism. They name this static moment in the development of the corporation, and not what it is becoming. “Anational” refers to the transforming paradigm of the corporation that has loosened its host nation’s bindings and that is no longer attracted to any nation except in terms of what it might gain from that nation, similarly to how the term “asexual” refers to a human that is not attracted to any gender sexually except for how that contact might produce its offspring.

We mistakenly attempt to label anationals’ evolving perverse power as having a human form, AKA Citizens United. Yet the only way we can continue to call corporations people having citizen power is to also label their behavior humanly perverse, almost psychopathic. Our problem is that we attempt to give human characteristics to all life forms. We would rather call a great white shark a man-eating monster than to swim in its skin, defining its repeatable patterns meant to enhance its sustainability on this planet. If instead of calling corporations people, we could understand how corporate-states consistently act to sustain their lives, we would not have to denigrate corporate existence with human behavioral terms but rather celebrate corporate life form, as we should any other on this planet.

Celebrating a life form does not mean approaching it cavalierly. At their evolving frontier boundary, corporations are gaining enormous capacity to bend nations to their will, in ways that do not help our citizens. In an effort to stave off the inevitable, scholars like Michael Porter write of co-opting corporations toward patriotism, citizenship, or perhaps more precisely corporate responsibility to host nations, or at least including nation states in the list of corporate stakeholders. Yet these attempts to persuade corporations to take on human characteristics are only stop gaps to the evolving threat.

Just as the U.S. can coax China to participate as partners at this stage of our empire’s shifting power sharing, the U.S. can still coerce corporations to participate as national citizens to some extent, even those as powerful as corporate-states. Yet, just as the power struggle between China and the U.S. will ultimately intensify, our ability to co-opt the growing power of corporate states is also waning.

The time will come when corporate states gain a plurality of world power and work together for the betterment of the metropolis of corporate states. By then, nation states by necessity will also have evolved to retain our maximum power. We will then no longer see corporations as people with the rights of citizens. Instead they will finally be correctly defined from the nation-state perspective as a means to an end and will be measured and rewarded for what they can add to the nation-state.

The idea that corporations are people with citizens’ rights will be replaced by the idea that corporations are self-sustaining life forms that live amongst us just as bacteria and bears do. We will acknowledge that corporations perform vital functions in the advancement of humanity but that they can kill us if we do not respect their limitations. Nations will pursue the harnessing of anationals’ positive aspects and will intensify efforts to corral their negative ones. We will understand that corporations are not wild horses that can be contained in national regulatory pens and ridden rodeo style.

Most nations today are nowhere near large enough to contain anationals’ eventual strengths with only national regulatory and legal tools. Nations will by necessity have to cooperatively combine efforts. Unfortunately, the world will also destabilize as smaller nations attempt to consume one another to find scale large enough to survive the next millennium. The very existence of corporate-states will cause tribes to devalue regional differences that have defined current national boundaries formed to combat external threats. China is not a single tribe nor is India or the United States. Others will follow.

Some might label my corporate musings as conspiratorial paranoia. Yet conspiracy is simply another human trait that would attempt to contain the evolution of anationals within our human boundaries. Conspiracy by definition suggests that anationals are somehow more aware of the global shift taking place than nation-states and thus are light years ahead in their planning and efforts. Along the bell curve, some nations such as China are able by their historical circumstances to have a much longer planning horizon than others. Similarly, some anationals are much more aware of their future posterity than others and are acutely acting on their global economic advantages. As a whole however, nation-states and corporate-states are adrift in this sea of evolution, making short-term sustenance moves, as they are able.

Great white sharks instinctively know that they must sometimes migrate throughout the entirety of the ocean, but like humans they give their greatest weight of thought to their next meal rather than where they will be during mating season. Yet, somehow the world aligns to bring them home again, and it will also align to reposition the power of anationals higher in the hierarchy of states. Thought to how nation-states must react to this realignment is warranted.

What this realignment means for humanity is unclear. The role of the nation-state to serve its people, economically and otherwise, providing a balance along the life wheel of work and play, protection and freedom, stability and exploration, sustenance and opportunity is becoming increasingly threatened. People’s allegiances to corporate-states will strengthen as realignment intensifies, threatening national allegiances and humanity’s balance further unless we learn to coexist. Shifting our current paradigm of the corporation will serve us well in that effort.

Are Corporate States Alien Life Forms Here to Destroy or to Help the Human Race

For forty years, lobbyists have multiplied, as has their power to write and financially support changing laws of our country for their benefit. Sensing lobbyists growing power, politicians have enacted laws to limit corporate impact, but at every turn, other laws are passed that pat corporations on their backs for their ardent support of political clients.

For forty years, corporations have been nurtured in the womb of America’s heartland as inhuman zygotes preparing for eventual world competition. Yet, even as these multinational corporations grew stronger suckling on our country’s teat, their MBA mantra of short-term gains began to separate these new life forms from their motherland.

Citizens United was a celebration of the birth of the anational corporate state, corporations large enough to exist on their own outside of the reach of any one nation. Yet having broken free of inconvenient national bindings, corporate states could not just remain stagnant babies in our world. They must now evolve and commune together for their species’ survival.

Just as mankind grew from hunters and gatherers to city-states and finally nation states; just as nation states developed from mercantilist competitors to a league of earth’s cohabitants; corporate states must also now evolve. It is natural for these corporate states to want their own legislative bodies to form compromises in the shaping of bills that minimize intercorporate conflicts and that allow each to flourish like weeds in the gardens of their host nation-states.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is one such advance in their evolution. It continues their path of lobbyist democracy that has defined America for the past 40 years, yet it takes corporations to their next stage of evolution of feasting on nation state’s legislative bodies for corporate gains. Unless citizens of nation states learn that their conduit of representation has been usurped, and unless we finally agree to co-opt our corporate citizens into recognizing human citizens as stakeholders in corporate successes, America will ultimately become fodder in the new world order.

As a pragmatic nationalist, I favor learning to live amongst this new life form, the anational corporate state, and to harness it, even to domesticate it as we would a farm animal if possible for the betterment of mankind.

Humans evolved from living in caves to the nation states we see today. Along the way, we formed governments. Then these governments formed alliances and finally several world bodies. It was an evolution interspersed with several revolutions.

Corporations are another life form, incorrectly identified by our supreme court as people. That is why our supreme court is a legal entity, not one paid to do biological work. But as any life form, corporations too will evolve and, similarly to people, will most likely be involved in revolutions as well along the way.

They first appeared hundreds of years ago, well before the founding of America. At first, nation states thought they could be domesticated, even house broken, like little pot-bellied pigs. Over the years, America nurtured our cute little corporations and we wrote rules for their existence, which they seemed to follow for the most part. Sure, during the big wars, they exhibited wild like tendencies, often seeming to harm their nation state keepers in the process but we thought we had a handle on how to keep them tame.

But in reality, they were learning how to tame us. They were aliens, living in our world, like little terrorists cells do today, learning our ways. Somehow, they grew big enough to control the nerve centers of nation states, our political structures. They grew powerful enough to send nation states to wars on their behalf and to enforce and install puppet governments in other nation states. And when they became too large to exist within one nation state under its monopoly regulations, they finally learned how to split cells and to pass from one body to the next just as parasites leave their hosts.

As these new life forms continued to evolve, they mutated, each learning to live as one being with cells in multiple nation state bodies, hearts in one nation state, brains in another, still more organs and muscles in others. And they thrived and grew into corporate states, not tied to any nation, anational if you will. Yet at this stage, their existence was similar to the human stage of evolution perhaps in the feudal period.
It was merely another stage of their evolution however to want to commune together eventually. Certainly, corporate states have fought each other as well as worked together complementary. Yet they have had to find their ways individually and to seek each other out as they grew and developed needs. Communing together in associations helped to identify one to another more easily. And ALEC was a natural step in their evolution. With ALEC, they could form a modest “Governmental Function” of working together to identify how nation-state laws could best be constructed to mutually help this burgeoning society of corporate states.

Now if corporate states coexisted symbiotically with humans, say as trees providing us oxygen and wood without too much harm, they would be no cause for concern. But they do not. They have learned to mutate and grow within our systems and to cause harm. One needs to merely draw a timeline out into the future a few decades to understand that the trajectory does not bode well for nation states. Therefore, obviously something must be done for the human race to coexist harmoniously with the corporate state.

Anationals are amorphous beings and that even as laws are passed to contain them, they simply shapeshift to skirt the flimflam. Of course, I do not support the silliness of such flimsy cover for obvious lobbying that creates loopholes as large as trucks to drive home democracy splintering corporatism. This needs to be uncovered and bureaucratically defended even as they shapeshift to a new attack on our Republic.

Yet they are a life form that will not be snuffed out and they will grow as a cancer to consume the lifeblood of America unless we can co-opt them in some symbiotic fashion. So rather than beat my head against the wall that has been built between anational corporate states and our access to our own politicians, my intellectual effort will be to understand how we might harness their emerging strengths for the good of America.

It’s Time to Corral Our Adversaries and to Yoke them to America’s Future

America will endeavor no matter the cost. It is our genetics, our stubborn stand. Yet, the world’s history is full of predecessors that failed to turn around their nation’s demise when faced with such odds. America must rise to our calling or stack our dead in the plague wagons trying. Now is the time for heavy lifting if we are to keep with our destiny.

The path worn by America to reach the barren fields of our modern crisis has been strewn with rogue American villains. We now know the characters that will hold America hostage if we do not act as one to yoke them to our collective future. No solutions will be enacted for the Vast Middle America if we do not corral our adversaries and tame their aggression to plow furrows for America’s benefit.

China will be our economic adversary for the remainder of the century, competing economically, politically and yes militarily for the world’s dwindling resources. Multinational corporations will continue to grow unchecked by the modern defenses of nation-states, instituting monopolistic practices and pricing by American historic standards to grow wealth and world power. International bankers will seek to arbitrage America’s capital and emerging countries untapped potential at the expense of America’s purchasing power. The Federal Reserve will continue to dilute the dollar to protect its member bank’s international investments and to socialize the costs of exploitation. The United States Congress will support globalist policies that drain America of capital and jobs for the benefit of continued party power and individual wealth and prestige. And the United States Supreme Court will continue to confuse conservatism with globalism allowing the international transfer of wealth and national security as it supports corporations over the American people.

This is America’s future unless we act now as one to corral these rogue actors. They can attack America as a pack of wolves singling out the weak and infirmed or we can rally to tame the beasts for the betterment of the great American herd. Our insistence must walk softly but carry a big stick.

China’s style of modern mercantilism must be countered with a cogent American counter strategy that continues our dominance of hegemony. Yet even the young can see that our old stodgy hegemony of arrogant American military dominated, World Bank enforced neo-colonial subservience is losing out to China’s shared success hegemonic policies. Without direct strategic intervention of our historical approach, America will lose significant ground to our undoing. We must create a new direction that seeks to engender the egalitarian growth of supplier nations.

China’s chokehold on American manufacturing must be loosened through policies that give American domestic business an equal footing. While it is too late to reverse the flood of businesses, factories and jobs that have already left our shores, we can rebuild our industrial base to support hegemonic sustenance. No American should be left jobless while we support “free trade” policies to feed the China juggernaut. 100% employment is a national security objective that must be vigorously pursued.

Multinational corporations will dominate nation-states if left unchecked. A coordinated multinational policy of containment is required for Western nations to curb the loss of economic power and living standards in a world whose skewed view is dominated by redistributing a shrinking pie. America’s strategy must be to raise the standard of living for all our allies large and small while growing our own. With a finite globe limited in resources, however, multinational corporations’ calculations of costs must be made to account for all externalities so as to value the depleting inputs and costs of waste byproducts.

American multinational corporations must be co-opted to grow America. Policies must give corporations reasons to stay, to invest, and to prosper with America. Communities and employees must be given cultural and legal status as equal stakeholders to investors and managers. American jobs must be considered a matter of civil responsibility and national security.

The Federal Reserve must be constrained to the goals set forth by Congress. Employment and price stability are primary goals for the dollar. Yet hegemonic survival of the dollar is as important. Survival of world banks at the expense of the trashing the dollar, our reserve currency status, and the American middle class is not. If the Fed is not constrained to its mission, it must be immediately replaced.

Congress cannot continue its flagrant misrepresentation of the American people. Either Congress will restrict its violations voluntarily or the American people must rise up en masse and change our circumstances. This is not an option. It is imperative to our survival as a nation-state. And the Supreme Court must be educated by the words of most noble of counsels to understand the disservice they do to America in regarding corporations as citizens with all the incumbent rights but without the countervailing responsibilities. If the current make-up of the court cannot be convinced of the necessity to reverse direction, the matter is critical enough for a Constitutional convention.

If America is to walk the thriving path, these rogue elements that exacerbated our most recent crises must be curtailed, co-opted, cajoled, or coerced into supporting our future. For if we do not endeavor to succeed in rallying our most ardent adversaries to our cause, they will most certainly endeavor to follow their own as America burns.

Float Reality for Just a Moment…… Could America be in an Extremist Bubble? (Revised)

Have you ever taken a jigsaw puzzle down from the closet on a rainy day and worked on its 1,000 pieces to completion? Ever stare at the puzzle that you have worked on for hours, only to find it is missing one important piece right in the middle of the puzzle? That missing puzzle piece might tempt you to insanity, first looking incessantly around the table, and then in the box, and in the closet where you kept the box, and in the garage where you originally stored the box before putting it the closet prior to bringing it out one rainy afternoon to spend hours working on the puzzle before realizing that one piece was missing!

To many, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are frustrating puzzles with missing pieces. Some aggravatingly wonder why the Tea Party holds to their pledge of less government spending and taxes and why they are so willing to let America lunge over the cliff like a herd of possessed swine as they hold fast to their quest. It leads many to believe that Tea Partiers are just right wing ideologues blindly doing the bidding of globalist capitalists. Others question why Occupy Wall Streeters kept fluttering their fingers in free form street democracy even after authorities shut down their camps. They sensed that Occupiers were whiny idealists disrupting Middle America, following like sheep the directives of international Anarchists and Marxists who intend to destroy the capitalist foundations of America.

Many in America view these movements as extremist. But letting reality drift for a moment, what we found that these movements were actually Centrists and that America was the extreme one? If America were extreme, then under this remote scenario at least one of these two groups could actually be Centrist. If that were so, and if America could be tolerant for a moment, we might find that these movements were not irritating puzzles with missing pieces after all. We might conclude that they were truly two of the missing puzzle pieces that we are seeking in the midst of crisis, and that they were actually patriots trying to cajole America back to Centrism.

But many Americans don’t trust at least one of these movements for good reason. Those aggravated by the Tea Party surmise that it has accepted, as part of its platform, a globalist agenda that obfuscates itself in a cloak of Patriotism. Globalists solder Constitutional words like freedom onto words like trade so that the resulting power of the phrase “free trade” confuses America from a more prosperous course. Those annoyed by the Occupiers surmise that the Occupiers are influenced by Marxists who blame capitalism for harming America instead of the abuse of capitalism that has actually done the damage. However, if America paused for a moment to see that both movements were growing beyond their Globalist and Marxist roots, could we not find that they both have salient messages that could help turn-around America’s drifting course?

For the moment, let’s assume that both Occupy Wall Streeters and the Tea Party are solidly Centrist. Each appears extreme to some in America, so that is a difficult assumption. But if we suppose that America has indeed veered into extreme territory then we could imagine that they appear extreme because of America’s drift. Suppose that the bell curve of Western culture has shifted so far from true Centrism that America now stands on shifting sands of extreme change. If this were true, then America could perceive these two movements that might be chanting their centrist warnings from the terra firma, as if they are extremists spouting extremities, when in actuality they are not. If this were true, then America’s perception of itself being Centrist could also be quite extreme.

The following example might shed light on the pretense that America could already be extreme. As housing prices skyrocketed during the first half of the decade, their relative prices compared similarly. As prices shot into the stratosphere like a runaway freight train, mid priced homes continued to price in the middle of the mayhem, perhaps Centrist if you will. We now know however that what appeared as moderately Centrist home prices were actually quite radically priced.

Yet, while many Americans entered the house flipping craze, a few held steady mortgages for years. They did not refinance to meet material wants and they lived within their long term means. Many at the time viewed their peculiar steadfastness as ultra conservative. Yet we now know that they were only conservative through the lens of America’s momentary lapse of judgment. They were in fact true Centrists by historical terra firma standards.

If one example of misinterpreted centrism exists, might there be others? When a tsunami slams the shore, it forever rips the landscape from its modest history into a extreme future. The two World Wars of the 20th century that swept 80 million people off the face of the earth was a social tsunami. In its deadly wake, America produced Boomer Babies that disrupted the balance of everything in their path. Some would say that this Baby Boom tsunami swept America’s culture to extremes in unobservable slow motion, except to those who deliberately paused to reflect how Boomers ripped the world from its foundation.

If the two Great War tsunamis that destroyed 80 million souls and the subsequent tidal wave of Baby Boomers did in fact violently sweep America off its centrist foundation, perhaps the view from our shifted reality is now not Centrist at all, but instead radical. We tend to think of progress as forward motion. Any reversion of progress to a former era is viewed as radical. However, if we are really already radical, then placing America’s path back on the centrist foundation it would have had been on if not for our Baby Boomer tsunami should not be labeled as a radical reversion but rather as a righting of our true Centrist progression.

History shows that America did not return to our stable, pre-WWII Centrist path after the war. In fact, an objective examination of history would show that our entire generation embarked on a path that could in objective hindsight only be labeled as extremist, whether observed through the prism of either the conservatives or the progressives. If we are to find a way back to a growing and secure future in America, it is now time to honestly reflect on our history. That reflection might conclude that America did get caught up in a tsunami of extremism.

Our first post-war extremist thrust by both conservatives and progressives was to barrel down the path of building a military greater than all other nations combined. After WWII, America determined that an overwhelming military, more powerful than had ever existed before, was the correct measured response to the 20th century’s industrial unleashing of mankind’s destructive nature that had twice swarmed its deadly will. Our obsession with military superiority imbedded itself into our culture of defense and created a partially planned economy in America centered on our military complex. In the process of creating this modern dynasty of protection, our collective extremism sacrificed our economy to stave off the inevitability of man’s destruction.

We then recklessly spent our children’s future hoping not only to prevent the war that might otherwise end humanity, but also hoping to end poverty and oppression. After decades of budget increases, we were able to provide our poor with material consumption that made them wealthier than 85 percent of the rest of the world, but at what cost? Our national debt is now over 100 percent of our GDP. A centrist review of America’s deficit spending would have to conclude that we have not been Centrist in our spending.

Our extremism was not confined to the military and the Great Society. Baby Boomers also naively lived in the moment without securing our retirement. We now have a crisis over the empty coffers of Social Security and Medicare but we knew for decades it would come because America’s Baby Boomer generation chose not to save even knowing doing so would end in crisis. Was it not extremist to plan to bankrupt our children, forcing them to enjoy only half of our materialism so that we could consume half of their future? This extremist denial of responsibility to pay for our own military and Great Society excesses glaringly contradicted our perception that we were centrist champions of social equity.

Our generation spent our children’s’ future to extend the great society, to stave off Armageddon, and to enjoy the fruits of our parent’s frugality. Having forsaken our foundation of Centrism by indenturing future generations to pay for our excesses, how could we judge others who found it acceptable to gut America of jobs and factories, or who built banking Ponzis that indebted Americans to feed our capital to China. Who were we to judge when the Federal Reserve shook down other nations to fund our excesses or when the two reigning parties of Congress sold their souls to secure continuing re-elections.

With such moral ambiguity, we became trapped in relativism. Our nation was then unchained from any semblance of fiscal restraint and was free to drift toward a new norm of extremism, one in which we could argue amongst each other the relative turpitude of our choices while at the same time viewing our own progressive or conservative ideas as Centrist. In this drift toward a conscious denial of extremism, there were too few of our generation that publicly warned America for having been as extreme as posterity will most undoubtedly judge us to have been.

Finally in desperation, Tea Partiers exclaimed that this nation had drifted so far from its original moorings that they had to stand up to America’s extremism. Aghast, America bemoaned this movement’s presumption of claiming they were the purveyors of True North. Yet, if America has drifted into extremism, then the Tea Partiers actually were most clearly viewing our danger, and should be regarded as heroes for having identified our nation’s drift before it destroyed us.

Some claim that the Tea Party’s adoption of Globalist ideas has kept it from winning over America to reverse our joblessness, a symptom of our excess. Even though their keen observation of our extremist drift did help to fight the expansion of our extreme Federal budget deficit, it did not give them the ability to see all excesses and to find a way to bring America back fully to Centrism. As such, the Wall Street Occupiers have emerged to help identify a possible course correction, and I suspect other movements will emerge as well.

America is annoyed by these two movements’ persistence, almost like an alcoholic would be annoyed by an intervention. Yet intolerantly scapegoating these movements will not change the fact that we are floating on debris of relative progress. However, if our entire Baby Boomer generation is “the bubble” and all of these economic bubbles that were and that are unfortunately imminently yet to come, are just exacerbations of our true bubble, then our Baby Boomer bubble must, as all bubbles do, return to its point of trend origin so that the world can begin again its balanced progression.
We can continue to argue in the extreme that housing prices should remain high but they will not. We can argue in the extreme that the stock market should stay inflated but it will return to its historical trend. We can argue that our national budget should continue artificially bloated to fund our Baby Boomer experiments of the war on poverty and a military to end all wars but it cannot. A few of our elite will continue to argue that unemployment will have to drift sideways for years to come, but it cannot. Instead America will drift back to what can be funded by the normal and Centrist progression of tomorrow’s workers and we will once again find our Centrist path.

We can continue our disdain for the “extremists” of our country, yet they are the Centrists of True North and we are unfortunately the extremists. To disdain ourselves would be unhealthy and thus we must return to a path of Centrism. Our nation was thrown excessively off course by world events and our Centrist Tea Party pointed out our excesses. Our Centrist Occupiers are searching for a way back to a Centrist capitalist democracy. Can we, having taken this journey of disorientation, now find our way back to true Centrism as well?

Inevitably, we will revert to the world’s centrist progression whether through the relative comfort of a blazoned and enlightened trail of American determination or through the precipitous fall of continued denial leading to economic implosion. However, the sooner we stop pointing fingers at our skewed perception of each other’s extremism and begin pulling our collective weight toward our historic and future Centrist progression, the sooner we will begin our nation’s reorientation to True North and the sooner we can begin our recovery.

America Faces a Worldwide Economic Revolution

In the midst of America’s great economic crisis, factions from every point in the political spectrum have raised issues as causes for America’s demise. Yet most of America’s problems, when examined in the light of day, are simply symptoms of our greater issues or even just political noise, offering no real hope in deducing the core of our dilemma. America will ultimately begin a path toward our thriving future. Yet, to do so, we must first clarify the true essence of our core problems before we can agree on viable solutions.

To that end, let’s peel back the political onion to examine what some say are our core issues, and then continue to peel until we briefly reach and peer into the collective complexity of our true core. Fret not however. An onion can make one cry because of its many stinky layers, but America’s solution knives, even those identified within these bindings, can cut through all of them.

Over the past three decades, we Americans spent our way to a debt mountain and a housing bubble that will take years to correct. Factions such as the Tea Party have risen up to chastise our government and to slow its ballooning debt even as record Federal deficits are predicted to continue for at least the next decade. Theirs is a worthy cause for what seems a politically irresolvable dilemma. But even if America comes together to solve our debt issues, reducing our debt will only remove a symptom of our nation’s core problem.

If we are to reduce America’s debt without defaulting on our worldwide financial obligations, we must once again employ all able Americans in productive, well paying jobs. Yet in the midst of our bursting housing bubble, we discovered that for three decades America had also created a false employment bubble, which burst as our economy faltered. As a result of our jobs deficit, America is now in danger of lingering in a severely dampened economy for many years to come, certainly another critical symptom.

America has fallen into a monetary contraction resulting from a combination of our housing debt overhang, our poor credit and a lack of jobs. A viable turnaround solution to this monetary implosion should be immediately implemented to begin America’s journey toward our thriving path, and Congress and the President must support it. Yet, while our slowly eroding jobs base, diminished credit and housing debt overhang must be simultaneously corrected if we are to have any hope of more than a token recovery, our monetary implosion, however frightening, is still at the edge of America’s core problem.

Faced with such dismal prospects for debt reduction and job creation, America is now forced to choose between two competing constituencies. Our very concept of freedom almost demands that we support free enterprise, for it has helped America’s multinational corporations compete in the world’s rapidly transforming marketplace. Yet, the immense worldwide scale of free enterprise is now tearing apart our middle class, assaulting the American worker, and we seem powerless to even slow its destructive path. This choice between competing alternatives of either 1) supporting American businesses in their quest to rise above world competition or of 2) supporting the American worker, who is being diminished by those same corporations’ conquests, begins to converge toward the core of America’s problems. Over the past thirty years, emerging nations have conducted mercantilist attacks on America’s gross national product. Yet, our government has resisted creating the economic weapons required to defend our nation against modern hybrids of global competition.

America is already thirty years behind the curve of economic revolution. We are seemingly only observers to a world in which free enterprise is a both a bulwark of defense used by nations against those that would employ mercantilist offenses against them, and also an offensive siege weapon used by emerging corporate-states to destroy the classical defenses of nations that would attempt to resist their growing invasive economic powers.

During these thirty “standstill” years of observing the world’s economic revolution, America’s baby boomer generation rose to positions of power in business and government. In the comfort of our former world prestige, our baby boomers enjoyed the luxury of basking in decades of societal actualization. We focused our attention on America’s internal problems at the expense of creating a competitive manufacturing base. Our political struggles over competing societal goals of social justice and military superiority blinded us to our emerging jobs crisis. Yet, the hungry world fiercely competed for and took from us our very own consumers and employers.

America’s consumers naively embraced the world’s competition for our dollar. We enjoyed the low priced fruits of a desperate world’s labor, not understanding the impact that our purchases would have in the destruction of American jobs, the explosion of our debt, and the diminishment of future opportunities for America’s growth. For awhile, the savings we enjoyed from globalization offset our slowly diminishing purchasing power. Yet, over three decades, our purchases raised the world’s productivity, brought an onslaught of global competition to our shores, and ultimately replaced the American worker with an army of overseas laborers.

Eastern nations adopted hybrid economies of neo-mercantilism to rise above the fray of neo-colonialism and to position Asia for a century of prosperity. Unchecked by any natural defenses against them, neo-mercantilist nations joined forces with international banks and emerging corporate giants to concentrate the world’s economic power for China’s 21st century rise toward hegemony. In the process of this world economic shift, America’s future competitors, the corporate-states, were born.

Fierce, global competition required American businesses to employ all manners of competitive measures including intercontinental scale efficiencies. As the world would soon come to realize, the international skills multinational corporations learned to survive included those necessary to pit nations against each other and to overcome the regulatory frameworks nations imposed in vain attempts to restrict corporations’ intrusions into domestic markets.

In the process, these commercial behemoths of corporatism trampled on America’s two hundred year foundation of classical free enterprise. Within the context of our government’s regulatory framework for fair competition, America’s version of free enterprise envisioned all nations playing by our rules of engagement. In the past thirty years of economic revolution, America instead became Redcoats in the global economic war. Our structured business legal system was a bright red target easily slaughtered by guerrilla warfare of nations and corporate-states intent on pillaging America’s capital and intellectual property.

As defined by our anti-trust laws, America’s isolationist views of perfect competition required that our industries limit any one competitor’s size to well under what could be called a monopoly within our borders. Our legislated size limits were smaller than the mega-factory direct foreign investments required to compete globally. As a result, even if not the root cause of business flight, America nonetheless needlessly influenced American businesses offshore in their bid for massive customer markets such as India’s and China’s.

Some of American corporations’ resulting worldwide operations have grown into virtual states. In their unquenched quest for profit, they have created international offensive siege weapons to easily circumvent the purposes of such antiquated American concepts contained within the Sherman Antitrust Act. Many of our historically American-centric enterprises have since blurred their connections with America. Consequently, the Sherman Act has become increasingly challenged by free market advocates as an albatross of regulation. Alternately, it has been condemned by those charged with protecting the rights of consumers and domestic small businesses in America as a weak, antiquated tool of defense.

Globalization has brought competing American interests to the brink yet we dare not allow political dysfunction to keep America on the sideline of global competition any longer. We somehow must now collaborate to support America’s multinational industries’ quests while simultaneously protecting our own competitive domestic market. We must provide a pro-business environment that places America’s businesses on par with those of other countries while stopping international corporations from employing siege weapons of free enterprise against our citizens. We must provide competitive yields for capital in America to ensure America’s posterity by reversing the tide of capital outflows from our country. And we must ensure that our loose federation of American businesses can compete globally against neo-mercantilist countries. America must define the post neo-mercantilist era.

We will soon be living in a land full of global corporate giants that employ modern offensive economic weapons to consume nations. Yet unlike the neo-mercantilist countries that have attempted to create hybrid, state run industries immersed in private capitalism to compete with these futuristic monstrosities, America has not yet even begun to create its weaponry against neo-mercantilists such as China, and certainly has no viable plans against emerging corporate-states.

As America faces the prospects of diminished power in this 21st century economic revolution, we must adapt to the corporate power realities that all nations will face. Our future thriving path strategies will inevitably merge the goals of our giant, American born, corporate-states with those of our nation and its citizens. Yet our government must go beyond such surface strategies to create America’s post neo-mercantilist framework to harness the power of corporate-states for the betterment of our citizens and for all nations.

If we are to create a thriving outcome from the 21st century economic revolution for all on our finite planet, America must seek out the core of our problems and create a model for other nations to follow. Our thriving path forward begins here.