Pure capitalism is bad, but corporate feudalism is worse. When the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel control the media, control the economy, control the government, including national, state, and local, those outside the top 1% suffer badly.
In my daily Google news feed, I read: Elon Musk said…….., Bill Gates said………., Jeff Bezos said…….., Peter Thiel said……., Mark Zuckerberg said….. These guys, born to wealthy, connected families, who got lucky and made gobs more money than what they were born with, now control society. As Nobel Laureate, Dr. Daniel Hahnemann, Ph.D., teaches us in Thinking Fast and Slow, the wealthy become wealthy mostly through luck. Its not just dumb luck, its ruthless luck. Donald Trump was a puppet on a string for these lucky guys, and Genocide Joe appears to be a hand puppet for a different set of these lucky guys. GJ supported Busch’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now supports Israel’s continued destruction of Palestine. So captured are the serfs of Donald Trump that they attack the institution that could support them. If only these knuckleheads were educated and understood that the US government could be controlled by them if they voted for people who supported the middle class. Instead, they attack the very institution that could serve them, doing so in support of a man who is a mean spirited, feudal landlord, Donald Trump.
Voting for a president who champions the middle class hasn’t happened since the plutocratic-shill Ronald Reagan was first elected, who deregulated and privatized almost everything in support of the rich men. At least in the Democratic party there is descent and has been a majority vote to limit the powers of our feudal landlords. Still, most Democrats are supported by corporations and PACs, such as AIPAC, which is reported to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to beat members of congress who dare to question Israel. Currently, we have the Israeli tail wagging the American dog. And from where does AIPAC receive its money in order to bribe congress? Rich, right-wing billionaires of course. The word democracy when used to describe the US is a joke. The US government, led by shills for rich and corporate forces is constantly lying to us and deceiving us. People such as myself and Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D. at Columbia University are leaving the Democratic party. And, no, we sure are not joining the Republican party – that group is bunch of nutjobs, who even if they weren’t bribed by the rich and corporations, wouldn’t have a clue how to run this country.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel is giving lectures at Stanford, underneath the Hoover Tower, a landmark for the neoliberal Hoover Institute, espousing the “every man for himself” credo. Yes, our private universities have been, and continue to be, educators of the rich man, corporate class. And today’s corporations no longer value the society that allows them to exist, no longer values the workers that bring capital to the corporation, but value one thing, and only one thing, the owners of the corporation.
Capitalism, in theory but not reality, is about free markets. Capitalism has never really existed. The era of the Robber Barons is but one example. What existed at the time was feudalism. This was a time when the rich man (nobility) controlled everything. A small middle class was allowed to exist in order to have middle managers. The rest of the people were slaves. If the workers tried to stand-up to the plutocrats, they were shot. and their houses burned. This happens world-wide. If you think Genocide Joe sides with the workers, think again. The railroad strike was proof he doesn’t. If the slaves could afford to vote because they had enough money to pay the poll taxes, the choice of candidates was only a choice between rich men who were stamped as either Democrats or Republicans. What you believed was a function of what you learned, and what you learned was through the publications of rich men – you could read King James‘ bible, or Randolph Hearst’s fabricated stories, for example. Both were billionaires, sons of billionaires and both fabricated many stories. Options now include Fox News, owned by a billionaire who wouldn’t know the truth even if Elon Musk programmed it into Rupert’s cortex with Neuralink.
During the years of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter, we had reduced feudalism in the US. A burgeoning middle class arose and public institutions were greatly supported. Under Eisenhower, the greatest increase in public education ever experienced on plant Earth occurred, and the middle class became smart and powerful. The rich men acting through Ronald Reagan put an end to that. Rich men losing their power cannot be tolerated. How dare these middle class people interrupt our war in Vietnam? That was a very brief time in man’s history when the rich man’s power was receding, that time between Roosevelt to Carter, but we’ve gone back to curtailing democracy for the last 40 years. It’s becoming worse. It’s our new Neoliberal age where Neoliberalism protects feudalism against democracy. Real wages are down, the middle class is shrinking fast, people can’t afford to buy homes, massive numbers of people are sleeping on streets, public schools are being obliterated, school lunches became a contributor to obesity, and the rich man continues to trick serfs to fight one another over fake religious and cultural causes – for example the Islamic Republic of Iran versus Jewish State of Israel, as right-wingers call the US a Christian State. The rich keep people in an emotional state, using religion and fear to dismantle their rational thought. They control the media and have ignoramuses believing in things that are against their best interest.
As described by Yanis Varoufakis, under feudalism, the overlord would grant so-called fiefs to subordinates called vassals. These fiefs gave the vassals the formal right to exploit economically a part of the overlord’s realm – to plant crops on it, for example, or graze cattle – in exchange for a portion of the produce. Bill Gates is the largest private owner of farmland. Forget mom and pop farms – they’re now owned by the rich and corporations. The overlord would then unleash his sheriff to police the fief’s operation and collect what he was owed. Bezo’s relationship with the vendors on Amazon is similar. He grants them digital fiefs, for a fee, and then leaves his algorithm-sheriff to police and collect. In the process, Bezos plays one state against another to receive tax breaks and payouts in order to setup feudal estates on the people’s property. And people in Red States are so ignorant of what’s happening that they embrace the overlord’s taking of their property. How stupid can you be?
Amazon was just the start. Alibaba has applied the same techniques to create a similar digital fief in China. Copycat e-commerce platforms, offering variations on the Amazon theme, are springing up everywhere, in the global south as well as the global north. More significantly, other industrial sectors are turning into digital fiefs too. Consider Tesla, the electric car company that Elon Musk did not found and did not create any of its technology. he stole the company in a hostile takeover. You wouldn’t know this listening to Elon Musk, the pathetic little man ladened with inadequacy issues One reason financiers value Tesla so much more highly than Ford or Toyota is that its cars’ every circuit is wired into the cloud. Besides giving Tesla the power to switch off one of its cars remotely, if for instance the driver fails to service it as the company wishes, merely by driving around Tesla owners are uploading real-time information (including what music they are listening to) that enriches the company’s cloud-based capital. They may not think of themselves as serfs but, alas, that’s precisely what the proud owners of new Teslas are. There’s a huge number of decorticate fan boys associated with Musk, bobbling their heads to his thousands of lies and misinformation.
It required scientific and engineering breakthroughs, fantastical-sounding neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? Our universities gave us technological marvels, but the monetization of these marvelous technologies by greedy investors turned it all into the mecca of the overlords. Its all used to turn workers into toiling in warehouses, driving Ubers and Amazon trucks, and delivering processed food into digital proles. Its used to create a world where markets are increasingly replaced by digital fiefs. To force businesses into the role of vassals. And to turn all of us into digital serfs, glued to our smartphones and tablets, eagerly producing the capital that keeps our new overlords on an ever increasing pile of cash. The more they have, the more they want. And then send them off to war to protect your feudalism so that self-aggrandization can continue. Technofeudalism has been great for the overlords. It amplifies their voices and consolidates their power.
Technofeudalism erects great barriers to mobilization against it. But it also bestows new power on those who dare dream of a way to topple it – a capacity to build coalitions, organize and take action via the cloud: what is called cloud mobilization. None of this is either easy or inevitable, but is it harder or less likely than what the miners, the seamstresses and the dockworkers envisioned and sacrificed their lives to achieve in the 19th century? The cloud takes – but the cloud also gives to those who want to reclaim freedom and democracy. It is up to us to prove which is greater.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 