Syndicated Tyranny
What is National Socialism? What is Communism? What is Corporatism? What is Syndicalism? As a researcher and writer attempting to describe the ideology behind the technocratic tyrannical systems of control that are being implemented in this country, the first impulse is to try to find the parallel movement in history. The problem with that becomes obvious rather quickly. The -isms are defined within the historical context in which they become known to the rest of the world. It seems to this writer that they are not so much ideologies as methods of management that become political when adopted as governing practice.
-ism, [L. -ismus; Gr. -ismos.] A suffix implying a doctrine, theory, principle, system, or practice of; abstract idea of that signified by the word to which it is subjoined; as, monotheism, spiritualism, republicanism, mesmerism, Presbyterianism, libertinism. Source: Webster's Monarch Dictionary, "Splendid Edition", copyright 1909
What precipitated this re-look at the -isms was the recollection of the FDR's National Recovery Act - NRA - at least that was my stored memory of the name. Actually, it was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 administered by the National Recovery Administration. It was one aspect of FDR's New Deal which was the umbrella name for a set of public policy programs for economic recovery following the stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930's. It was declared unconstitutional in 1935 in the case of Schecter Poultry Corporation v. United States. There is an excellent article about it on the American Thinker website titled, The Supreme Court and FDR's Power-Grab. The facts of the case as presented on Oyez website.
Facts of the Case
Section 3 of the National Industrial Recovery Act empowered the President to implement industrial codes to regulate weekly employment hours, wages, and minimum ages of employees. The codes had standing as penal statutes.
Question
Did Congress unconstitutionally delegate legislative power to the President?
What the NIRA legislation did was to privatize and cartelize public policy under the color of law.
CODES OF FAIR COMPETITION
SEC.3. (a) Upon the application to the President by one or more trade or industrial associations or groups the President may approve a code or codes of fair competition for the trade or industry or sub- division thereof, represented by the applicant or applicants, if the President finds (1) that such associations or groups impose no inequitable restrictions on admission to membership therein and are truly representative of such trades or industries or subdivisions thereof, and (2) that such code or codes are not designed to promote monopolies or to eliminate or oppress small enterprises and will not operate to discriminate against them, and will tend to effectuate the policy of this title: Provided, That such code or codes shall not permit monopolies or monopolistic practices : Provided further, That where such code or codes affect the services and welfare of persons engaged in other steps of the economic process, nothing in this section shall deprive such persons of the right to be heard prior to approval by the President of such code or codes. The President may, as a condition of his approval of any such code, impose such conditions (including requirements for the making of reports and the keeping of accounts) for the protection of consumers competitors, employees, and others, and in furtherance of the public interest, and may provide such exceptions to and exemptions from the provisions of such code, as the President in his discretion deems necessary to effectuate the policy herein declared.
FDR gave a monopoly of governing power to syndicates of special interest. The idea was "self-governance" of industry along functional lines with function being defined as "the market" in which the syndicates are engaged. The following is an excerpt from the above mentioned American Thinker article by J.R. Dunn:
"What went unmentioned, then and later, was the fact that the NRA was adapted almost entirely from "corporatism," the economic system of Italian fascism. Italian industry was divided into state-run "corporatives", which set hours, wages, working conditions, and industrial policy, the same as the code authorities. (Curiously, coming from a die-hard anti-cleric such as Mussolini, the concept was originally Catholic.) Mussolini considered the corporate state to be a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, providing all the benefits of government control with none of the drawbacks of expropriation as practiced in the USSR. Tugwell and Berle appeared to agree."
Setting aside the militarism of fascist Italy, corporatism was a management philosophy based on syndicalism. The syndicates were unions of industry participants that were given license to set public policy with the force of law behind them and in the case of Italy, the military.
In the United States today, we are beset by a corporate designed Syndicalist system imposing private materialist policies through government agency (as in instrumentality). In other words, it's organized crime operating through government. With Homeland Security ramping up operations, one could say that we are in the early stages of a replay of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in a modern context.
The initiation of projects to redesign the systems of government began during the George H.W. Bush administration but the real work on the systems began when Al Gore and Bill Clinton came into office. The "Reinvention of Government" project was exactly that... reinvention with the redesign of systems being led by the large technology corporations who by definition exist within and operate from a corporate, totalitarian model of control and that model of control was the thematic center to the "reinvention of government". The enabling legislation was the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991. This legislation opened up the nation's telecommunications system effectively creating a national corporate communications backbone that is the platform to enable the design of corporatized systems of management of everything.
"This is the end of this business centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. It's coming to an end". Justice Louis Brandeis, speaking of the NIRA.
"Stakeholders" were invited to participate in working groups of the redesign of government projects. The Stakeholders are representatives of the industry for which the centralized systems were designed and as a consequence, the systems were designed to further the profit incentives of the Stakeholders rather than the interest of the public.
The most recent example of corporatized systems management is the Health Insurance Exchanges.
The leading corporations in an industry write legislation to
serve their interest in a monopoly market. The roles that public officials
play are transmitted through associations of government officials like the
U.S. Conference of Mayors, the
National Governor's Association,
the Council of Chief State School Officers,
the International Association of Chiefs of
Police, the National
Sheriff's Association, the National
Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the
American Legislative Exchange Council, the
American Planning Association, etc.
Corporations also fund citizen activist groups and environmental groups to promote policies that purport to represent a public purpose but that actually promote the private purpose of the syndicates - for example Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Smart Growth Network, Environmental Defense Fund, etc.
In sum, what we have is organized crime acting as government and with few people today with the character and backbone to stand against it.
Vicky Davis
February 20, 2013
P.S. The issue of the forced installation of Smart Meters is very likely a good Supreme Court case on the same principles as the Schecter case because the Public Utility Commissioners exceeded their authority under 16 U.S.C §2621(d)(14). Further evidence of organized criminal activity is the decoupling of utility rates with fixed costs in furtherance of a nebulous goal of collective efficiency to save the planet - while giving special price breaks to insiders.
Decoupling for Electric & Gas Utilities: Frequently Asked Questions
Data Management and Analytics for Utilities
"But the truth is that while the amount of data being collected by utility companies has increased vastly with the advent of smart grids, not all that information is being converted to meaningful intelligence."