Imperialism As A Service

Many of us are familiar with the danger of the Military Industrial Complex (a dangerous crossing of boundaries between Government and Industry; for supplementary information check out the books “War is a Racket” and “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”), but we are entering a new age where End Stage Capitalism and Governments are merging. We see two major manifestations of this: the Plutocrat Mafioso, and State Sponsored Capitalism. The former embodied by Donald Trump where commodification has moved beyond the private sphere and into the National sphere, and all our public goods/services/policies are all for sale. The latter is embodied by China, where they’ve put the full power of state resources and sovereign currency behind corporations, to the point they can impose the “Amazon Model”...that is “operate at a loss until all competition is out of business,” but also with the benefit of infinite R&D and capital.

We used to carve out a sacred space in our institutions for our principles and public good, but now all of that has been sold out to global Capitalism. Our laws/militaries/institutions are all now just tools to generate more perceived “economic power.” We have forgotten the essential and practical purposes of our governments and institutions: to reach for our greatest collective aspirations and better angels of our nature, to make all of our lives better, to ensure stability and sustainability, and to progress our civilization/knowledge/technology. Instead, we have created a system that views everything as zero-sum and the goal of which is to own and control everything.

At this very moment the Trump Administration is toying with the idea of the military becoming its own economic entity and extracting the economic productivity of other countries (Venezuela) natural resources, while this has -informally- happened in the past as “reparations” or some other justification, now it’s being considered explicitly and as policy. Meanwhile, China’s entire being has become “the world’s corporate factory,” shoving out mass produced junk with no consideration for pollution or overextraction; all to feed this insatiable infinite growth paradigm, designed for infinite consumption, all to perpetuate this unsustainable, unequal, zero-sum, childish game of an economic system.

We cannot allow “short-term economic interest” to be the driving force behind every decision; Capitalism is a cancerous religion. Lines in the sand must be drawn, and we must have the courage to try new things. Reason and evidence must have a say in policy, and the well-being of people must prevail over greed and conventionalism.