Paul Craig Roberts on re-enserfment of west

Living through the 1980s de-industrialization of USA led me to the conclusion that what I was witnessing was a coordinated attack on the productive middle of the nation.  This was probably the central economic conclusion of Elegant Technology.  Much of USA industrialization was located in the midwest so the Predatory attacks were directed at the geographical middle as well as the economic middle classes.  At one time, this middle looked at the Wall Street moneychangers and recalled the 19th-century Progressives who referred to what is now called flyover territory as the Internal Empire.

The internal empire is where I grew up so I got to know some of the movers and shakers of small-town middle America.  In the town where I graduated from high school, the local high-tech enterprise was this small engineering / manufacturing company that made some of the vital bits necessary for the nuclear power industry.  In fact, they had parts in every nuclear power plant and research facility outside of the Warsaw Pact.  One of the senior management had a son who was fighting the same draft board in 1969-70 as I.  So I got to know him pretty well.  When he got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1944, he was the only doctoral candidate in E.E. that M.I.T. graduated that year.

Anyone watching The Big Bang Theory might conclude that M.I.T. engineers are these Wolowitz-level  buffoons.  My friend was many things but buffoon was certainly not one of them.  With his sons, he built an 8" reflector telescope, a serious ham radio, and a Thistle (a sporty 17' sailboat.)  He built a harpsichord for his wife.  He owned a 38' Alden Challenger that while he was in charge of maintenance was always shipshape.  I helped him launch it one spring and the main chore was stepping the mast.  As we were snugging up the stays, he appeared with this beautiful instrument that could determine the tension on every stay.  When we were done, it was put away in this beautiful teak box lined with red velvet.  This was how he lived his life.  He was the sort of person who built this nation and it is their accomplishments that were destroyed in the great de-industrialization.  I drove by his plant not long ago—it is empty and falling down.  So when I call the banksters vandals, I am not exaggerating one tiny little bit.

The Re-Enserfment of Western Peoples

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, NOVEMBER 10, 2015

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them.

On another level we are experiencing the financialization of the Western economy about which Michael Hudson is the leading expert (Killing The Host). Financialization is the process of removing any public presence in the economy and converting the economic surplus into interest payments to the financial sector.

These two developments deprive people of economic prospects. A third development deprives them of political rights. The Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships eliminate political sovereignty and turn governance over to global corporations.

These so called “trade partnerships” have nothing to do with trade. These agreements negotiated in secrecy grant immunity to corporations from the laws of the countries in which they do business. This is achieved by declaring any interference by existing and prospective laws and regulations with corporate profits as restraints on trade for which corporations can sue and fine “sovereign” governments. For example, the ban in France and other counries on GMO products would be negated by the Trans-Atlantic Partnership. Democracy is simply replaced by corporate rule.

I have been meaning to write about this at length. However, others, such as Chris Hedges, are doing a good job of explaining the power grab that eliminates representative government.

The corporations are buying power cheaply. They bought the entire US House of Representatives for just under $200 million. This is what the corporations paid Congress to go along with “Fast Track,” which permits the corporations’ agent, the US Trade Representative, to negotiate in secret without congressional input or oversight.

In other words, a US corporate agent deals with corporate agents in the countries that will comprise the “partnership,” and this handful of well-bribed people draw up an agreement that supplants law with the interests of corporations. No one negotiating the partnership represents the peoples’ or public’s interests. The governments of the partnership countries get to vote the deal up or down, and they will be well paid to vote for the agreement.

Once these partnerships are in effect, government itself is privatized. There is no longer any point in legislatures, presidents, prime ministers, judges. Corporate tribunals decide law and court rulings.

It is likely that these “partnerships” will have unintended consequences. For example, Russia and China are not part of the arrangements, and neither are Iran, Brazil, India, and South Africa, although seperately the Indian government appears to have been purchased by American agribusiness and is in the process of destroying its self-sufficient food production system. These countries will be the repositories for national sovereignty and public control while freedom and democracy are extinguished in the West and among the West’s Asian vassals.

Violent revolution throughout the West and the complete elimination of the One Percent is another possible outcome. Once, for example, the French people discover that they have lost all control over their diet to Monsanto and American agribusiness, the members of the French government that delivered France into dietary bondage to toxic foods are likely to be killed in the streets.

Events of this sort are possible throughout the West as peoples discover that they have lost all control over every aspect of their lives and that their only choice is revolution or death. more