Presently the most popular of all buzz words is the label "conservative," cleverly used by corporate power brokers to provide semantic cover for their radical strategic plan for the union of Big Business and many government institutions. Their actions have nothing to do with actual conservatism, but no matter. The word is more powerful than any deeds to the contrary. Take president Ronald Reagan's statement that he had a "conservative' agenda, namely, "a strong defense, lower taxes and less government." That he was not consistent - under his presidency there were much larger deficits, taxes reduced were later raised, and government grew-did not affect his image. He knew the hypnotic power of a slogan endlessly repeated.
Corporate lobbies, knowing a good thing when they see it, seize the label "conservative" to shield many very un-conservative demands and policies. They have misleadingly exploited revered economic philosophers, such as Adam Smith, whom authentic conservatives draw on for justification, authority, and identity. But no matter how often these corporate commercialists call themselves conservatives, it is hard to mistake them for old-line conservatives since the two minds (corporate versus old-line) hail from very different moral, historical, and intellectual antecedents.
Whereas true conservatives look back to Smith, Edmund Burke, and other major theorists as their forebears, corporatist antecedents hail from the worshippers of Mammon and those who held and abused their wealth in the days of merchant power. True conservatives should disdain such precursors. Meanwhile corporatists ride on conservative coattails and claim as their own the old-line conservative thinkers.
Corporatism or "corporate statism," as Grover Norquist calls it, is first and foremost a doctrine of corporate supremacy. Whatever advances that system of power and status over the constitutionally affirmed sovereignty of the people comprise the widening, all encompassing corporatist agenda. As befits the ever-concentrating command of ever more mobile capital, labor, and technology--as well as its own media--the corporations' dynamic of expanding control with ever more immunity knows no self-imposed limitations. Large corporations usually push, with whatever political, technological, economic, marketing, and cultural tools are required, the frontiers of domination in all directions. Wielding the tools to advance their agenda is an army of diverse experts and operators bound together by common economic interests within the authoritarian hierarchy of the modern global corporation.
However you might describe them, it is hard to deny that their DNA commands them to control, undermine, or eliminate any force, tradition, or institution that impedes their expansion of sales, profits, and executive compensation. That is what their extensive strategic planning is all about. What they want is maximum predictability and the most feasible control of outcomes, with government being the preferred servicing or enforcement tool.
That is what is meant by corporate statism. And as it gets stronger, it delivers a weaker economy for a majority of Americans, a weaker democratic society, and record riches for the few.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though hailing from the patrician class, put this finger on the dangers of corporatism. He wasn't charitable in his message to Congress in 1938, successfully calling for the creation of a Temporary National Economic Commission (TNEC) to examine the concentration of corporate power. He averred that "the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state....in its essence is fascism." Though World War II's Axis powers gave the word a more lethal meaning, Roosevelt was equating fascism with the corporate state, uniting corporate influence with, over, and inside the government at state and national levels.
In recent years, as trade, investment, and other relations between nations have tightened. the corporate state has heightened its international "governing" power through much transnational systems of autocratic decision making as the International Monetary Fund, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and various regional agreements. Corporate managed trade, with its many pages of self-serving rules, is not " free trade."
-excerpt from Unstoppable: The Left-Right Alliance To Dismantle The Corporate State by Ralph Nader.
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