If it were up to me, the world would be united by bio-regions: for instance: California, Oregon, and Washington, and British Columbia would form a democratic socialist Republic.
But it's not up to me, so I have to work with what is given: I do not agree that the root of all our evils is the United States, as many assert though many evils do result. This article explores the idea that the root of the problem is capitalistic oligarchy, the rule of the rich, which is embedded in our Constitution and institutions. This article explores the origins of fascism and the alternative, democracy. I hope to flesh out these concepts and show how the Deep State which serves the oligarchy, in which state and corporations are merged (fascism, as defined by Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism,1932), are mirrored by a shadow democracy which exists in our counter-cultural tradition, as old as the human community itself and reiterated in the Declaration of Independence and renewed by Abraham Lincoln.
This concept is reiterated in Brown vs the Board of Education, which declared that separate is not equal. Inequality brings separation, in class, in neighborhoods, and in institutions like schools and courts. My thesis, which I call deep democracy, is that we will never have universal liberty until we have universal equality: Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity.
I do advocate a new Constitution, democratic and based on equality and voluntary membership. But liberty without equality is a charade. In a world where a handful of rich men have more wealth than half the world's population, and billions are wage-slave and tens of millions are starving, the concept of liberty is a farce. A hungry man is not free; a sick man without healthcare is not free; a person working at a job they hate in order to pay off debt is not free. ,
For me the key to the evil the US does is the triumph of the proto-fascist idea articulated by Founding Father,First Chief Justice, and slave owner John Jay: "Those who own the country should run it"
This concept, which is the root of the fascist concept of the marriage of state, wealth and corporatons using coercion, is repeated by the main author of the Constitution, slave owner Madison, who stated at the Constitutional Convention that the main purpose of the political system is to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." The Constitutional Convention was 95% slave owners. They feared the people, feared slave revolts, feared democracy, and thus devised a Constitution which allowed them, the minority, whose power was based on slavery, to rule: the first 7 Presidents were all slave owners, and the first two were among the largest .04% of slave owners. Equality and consent of the governed were replaced with the rule of the slave owners. When slavery was abolished, the banks and major corporations took their place in a system of oligarch rule, using democratic institutions like elections as a mask for the raw power of the rich.
Adam Smith , the father of liberal economics , wrote that "Civil government...is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
And John Locke, the father of liberal political theory, wrote that "Government has no other end but the preservation of property."
And our new President, Donald J. Trump, has repeated this concept that the rich should rule (the goal of the merging of state and corporate interests) when he said he would select people to run the government "who had made fortunes."
This is the ruling paradigm, the ideology which created the modern state based on coercion: the state is not the cause but the result of this belief system in what has always been called plutocracy but takes its fascist nature from the fact that wealth is now concentrated in ways unimaginable in previous time (6 billionaires have as much wealth as 50% of the world's population, according to Oxfam studies) and these wealthy elites have now accumulated the means of force to control the entire globe. And at the center, the concept of American hegemony, that one state, ruled by those who own not only the country but a good part of the entire world (Trump has businesses in 22 nations) with the most expensive and dangerous military force in world history: those who own the world should run it, and if anyone disagrees, then they kill them. That is why the US only attacks nations which are independent or do not submit. The goal is world domination, the deep dream of all fascist movements.
For fascism, the magic key is war, which both increases the power of the state as it enriches the banks, which fund wars, the fossil fuel industry, which finds in war its main consumer, and the merchants of death who provide the killing machines....along with their shills in politics, the media, and academia, as well as NGOs, foundations, etc. The power of this ruling class, controlled both through the state, visible and deep, is the source of modern evils such as world wars, mass starvation, and ecological devastation.
The counter-ideology goes back to our ancient forefathers, the foraging tribes which created egalitarian, sharing, non-hierarchical communities in which violence was all but absent. In modern times, it was restated by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discourse on Inequality (pdf) the Diggers and Levelers of 16th Century England, the utopian socialists, the anarchists, and then leaders like Jefferson and revolutionary Tom Paine, both of whom believed that the natural wealth of the earth, the fertility of the soil, the mineral wealth, the fish in the sea, belonged to all humanity. Against the armed defense of enclosing fences which defined the property of the rich, they (though Jefferson was a large slave owner) produced a vision of a society based on equality and consent (the foundation of voluntary membership). Both were unwelcome at the Constitutional Convention, which served as a counter-revolution (see the Madison quote) to the proclaimed principles of the American Revolution, which has never been realized.
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