Nations for Sale (narrated) [JT #13]

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Nations for Sale (narrated) [JT #13]

On the Coming Corporate Dystopia

Johannes M. Koenraadt

Sep 29, 2019

Transcript

When actor John Cleese took to Twitter suggesting London was no longer English, he didn’t mean, as many had misunderstood, that London was no longer white. The comedian had meant to say, as understood by his political allies, that London is no longer part of the nation called England, but rather, part of a Global Open Society.

Major cities such as London, Paris, New York, and many others like them, have concentrated so much financial wealth within their city walls, and so many low-wage immigrants from afar, that they no longer need their host nation, nor its native population. Alliances between several of such multinational firms could easily pool their savings and put together world-conquering armies of their own. Networks of such extremely wealthy cities could act together to secede themselves from the very idea of nation-states, and so, liberate their multinationals firms from the burden of having to maintain national population.

For centuries, national governments, or nation-states, have pursued a business model of taxing citizens’ productivity in exchange for the oft false promise of old age and security. Traditionally, such rent-seeking schemes benefited an inner circle of ruling families and their wealthy lifestyles, the nobility and royalty. But today, nation-states and their ruling classes are in a direct competition with multinational corporations about who should have the right to exploit people.

While a national state can only tax the people that live within its borders, multinationals can, in principle, extract profits the entire world. An old model of governance is being replaced by a new, less scrupulous model. In order to increase profits, powerful multinationals not only seek to evade taxation from national governments, but also aim to expand their revenue stream by taxing and governing citizens themselves.

Big corporations want to have the power to govern their own nations. They want to govern their own affairs but feel that national governments are getting in the way. Since financial capital can be wired across borders more easily than labor can be migrated, in order to escape taxation, national citizens must increasingly carry the burden for corporate tax evasion. It’s age-old principle of privatized profits and socialized costs, but this time, on a global scale.

Globalism has disconnected multinational firms from the economic restrictions imposed on them by traditional nation states. If nations would impose high taxes on such supernational firms, it would simply drive their offices and their job offers elsewhere, offshore. Therefore, if national governments want to retain and attract businesses, and keep jobs within their borders, they must submissively appease to the corporate money men.

As a consequence of globalism, elites once loyal to their kinfolk are now turning their backs on them. When it comes to lifestyles, rich white people feel they have more in common with rich Chinese and Indian people, than with their own lower classes. The rich all speak English, travel in private jets, party on yachts, and live in urban penthouses. The British owners of finance feel, for example, that England’s native population and the requirements for its high maintenance, are dragging their profits down.

Greater profits could be won if British multinationals cut themselves loose from Britain’s rural and small-town populations, or in financial terms, write off the natives. Struggling to tax international capital, national governments have had to cut back on investments in infrastructure, social security, housing, schooling, and healthcare.

Because of this, governments have increasingly come to rely on a growing class of immigrants to do the jobs its own middle classes can no longer afford to do. Jobs no longer earn enough pay to afford middle-class citizens a mortgage and a family. To maintain the standard of living that one has grown accustomed to, middle-class families have been forced to reduce their sizes. We’ve come to prefer the iPhone and the 8K tv set to a second or third child.

We’ve decided to cling to materialist wealth, rather than to free ourselves from financial slavery. Indeed, in both Europe and the United States, despite our material riches, it has become almost unaffordable to stay a member of the middle class, unless we are willing to forgo having any children at all. At the same time, multinational corporations are working hard to escape the yoke of the masses who still expect them to honor their national duties.

Such developments are in line with a darker side of human history that very few dare to discuss. It is the progressive development from chattel slavery, to feudal slavery and then to financial slavery, that is to be topped off with the complete and total domestication of the entire human species. It was Russian author Leo Tolstoy who understood this, writing in his book on The Slavery of Our Time, that the American South resisted the abolition of black slavery because the North had already succumbed to the newer form of financial slavery.

In other words, white Southerners were fighting for their financial freedom, and lost. Had over-reaching transnational partnerships such as the now-defunct TPP and TTIP schemes been put in place, we would have witnessed the advent of a global neo-feudalism trapping the lives of the 99%. Despite that these partnerships were stranded, supporters of globalism never stopped looking for new ways to turn the whole world into a single internal market.

There’s no greater form of vendor lock-in than a global economy in the hands of an elite few exploiting a financially enslaved humanity. The world’s largest multinationals already wield the necessary financial power to compete with smaller nations. For example, Samsung Electronics spent about $14 billion on advertising and marketing in 2013,[i] nearly the equivalent of Iceland’s gross domestic product. Yet, to their frustration, national laws still bind global firms to local taxation. The people still demand to be cared for.

If a collective of powerful multinationals decided to make a successful push to deconstruct national governments, and in the process create a so-called borderless world, such corporations would effectively replace the nation-state model with a privately-owned corporate state of their own. Although some political activists have adopted the phrase ‘world without borders’ to promote their idea of global citizenship, multinational firms embrace the same slogan merely as a first step toward submitting unsuspecting human beings to global corporate rule.

Multinationals aim to ensnare citizens robbed of national an cultural identities in commercial rent-seeking schemes provided by them. Imagine a future where women have ceased having children, a world in which corporations breed babies in plastic bags in commercial incubation facilities, a world requiring of women who wish to be mothers, to rent their child at a monthly subscription from the Apple Empire. Imagine your social security, healthcare, pension plan, even your children’s education will one day come at a life-time subscription from the Republic of Walmart. This dystopian view of the near future will take some time to get accustomed to, but the idea of a political state owned by a commercial enterprise isn’t new.

Founded in the year 1602, the Dutch East India Company quickly rose to power as the world’s first multinational firm, and also the first to be publicly traded on the first stock exchange.

“The [East India Company] was a powerful company, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies.”[ii]

The East India Company was its own state. Its private shareholders, not bound to Dutch law, crowned themselves kings. Today, we can observe a similar power struggle between multinationals and their home nations. In 2014, ING Bank allegedly co-authored a piece of Dutch legislation that awarded banks a fiscal benefit when issuing risky bonds.[iii] Samsung’s 2012 revenue equaled to 17% of South Korea’s gdp,[iv] affording it a degree of involvement in its home nation’s politics. That year, Royal Dutch Shell raised over $555 billion in revenue, equaling to over 84% of Dutch domestic product.[v]

One can’t compare gross national product with corporate revenue, but it is evident that some multinationals could afford to maintain real armies and direct them to invade and usurp lesser nations. Would it really surprise anyone if evidence finally emerged showing that a coalition of U.S. oil companies and weapons manufacturers had in fact pushed for the war on terror in the Middle East? Or if not for oil, then to keep Russia and China out of their markets?

Thanks to globalism, there is now a market for peoples and their nations. If this is the case, then who will be the first people to be written off? Who will be the first people abandoned by their own elites, sold into slavery, or simply driven to extinction? Who are those strong, rebellious individuals clinging to ideals of freedom and self-determination whose demands put a drain on corporate profits? Would it perhaps be us, white people?

A key development driving the transition from public states to privately-owned corporate states has been the historically recent rise of mega-cities. With over half of the world’s population now living in cities, in Western Europe nearly three-quarters, national governments have largely driven their political responsibilities into the hands of commercial enterprise. The privatization of housing, sanitation, transportation and even prisons and pension plans has shifted the center of political power away from democratic representation and toward corporate fascism.

But what was the purpose of establishing democracies only to sell them to the highest bidder? How can we reverse this global feudal trend? People who don’t like the idea of being traded on the stock market have no choice but to rise up and resist their globalist masters. If our financial elites seek to the cut themselves loose from us, perhaps we, can beat them to it, and cut ourselves loose from them. By taking matters in our own hands, at the very least, we shall retain that one aspect of life we seem to value so much, our self-determination.

The greatest threat to globalist slavery is a single individual who learns to think for himself and decides to leave the plantation.

Just say “no”.