For nearly 150 years now, it has been the philosophy of the socialist and communists that capitalism is the evil of the people. They would rather that you believe that only government sponsored business can guarantee that the market maintains viability and strength. Don’t worry about competition; the government will maintain a “balance” to ensure that the market remains healthy.
Let’s look at some examples of state sponsored “capitalism”. The Federal Reserve and the Federal Depository Insurance Corporation are real examples of this type of “capitalism”. First, there is no competition. No independent bank or financial insurance company is allowed to “compete” against either of these entities. This was done, through congressional law, in 1913, with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. To ensure that this particular entity was to survive without hindrance, it was devised as an “international” corporation which is outside the reach of civil law and common law. The Federal Reserve recognizes only maritime law (or admiralty law). This may be one of the reasons that Congress may be unable to bring any legal suit against the Federal Reserve under the guises of the Constitution (or civil law).
Next, let’s look at the separation of the United States of America as a country versus the United States as a corporation. Yes, you are reading this correctly. You have to separate the two to better understand why the United States of America as a country is in the shape it is today, due to the actions of the United States as a corporation.
Before 1933, the United States as a corporation had proven to be a formidable global economic force that could destroy the economies of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America (US notwithstanding) and South America. There were the economic collapses, recessions and depressions along the way, but the United States economy recovered and survived. What changed?
A few things occurred. First, the “implementation” of the Federal Reserve to have full and complete control of the United States of America’s treasury and ability to “mint” it’s own money. Secondly, in 1933, the President of the United States as a corporation made it illegal, once again through congressional legislation and executive order, for any citizen of the United States of America to own gold. All gold was to be turned into the banks controlled by the Federal Reserve (un-Constitutional confiscation of private property). Thirdly, all banks that wanted to continue to operate must purchase “federal depository insurance” to “safe-guard” the deposited earnings of the citizens of the United States of America. And finally, in 1933, the United States declared insolvency. This means that the United States as a corporation declared bankruptcy.
Now, it does not take a doctorate in economics to figure out that this was a corporate takeover. The corporatist have finally gained the foothold they so desired. For those that do not know what the term “corporatist” or “corporatism” means:
Corporatism by definition is that state capitalism is in a close relationship between the government and private capitalism, such as one in which the private capitalists produce for a guaranteed market. An example of this would be the military-industrial complex where autonomous entrepreneurial firms produce for lucrative government contracts and are not subject to the discipline of competitive markets. Many see this as part of a continuum characterizing the modern world economy with "normal" capitalism at one extreme and complete state capitalism like that of the former USSR at the other. This continuum has narrowed somewhat since the 1980s with the collapse of the USSR and its satellites and with large-scale privatization in Eastern Europe and most of the third world.
Both the Trotskyism definition and this one flow from discussion among Marxists at the beginning of the twentieth century, most notably Nikolai Bukharin who, in his book Imperialism and the world economy thought that advanced, 'imperialist' countries exhibited the latter definition and considered (and rejected) the possibility that they could arrive at the former. - Wikipedia
Anytime a government grants a contract to a private person, organization, company or corporation, they are granting these entities the ability to operate as a monopoly. There is no allowance for competition or free-enterprise style capitalism. This also creates a dependency on these entities by the government due to the lack of the free-enterprise market to drive down cost and the creation of innovation through competition.
Most citizens of the United States of America are unaware that they operate under corporatism and not under the Constitutional Republic form of government. This is where most Americans become lost when distinguishing between their country and the corporation. If you look at how corporations are managed today, you will see the same correlation as how the United States as a corporation is managed. The tiered hierarchy has been implemented by both, many departments implemented that are “specialize” to fit the need of the corporation, more “management” instituted and less “productive” resources. Now the major difference between the two is that the United States as a corporation does not “produce” any viable product.
This is where the next phase of corporatism begins taking over defunct or toxic assets, companies or corporations. This lends to completing the corporatist’s life cycle of “producing” by “corporate” takeover, monopolizing the market through government subsidy thus driving down or eliminating competition. While at the same time through congressional legislation, manipulate the markets for those who have made “investments” into the “corporate” takeover(s), and allow these individuals to make money off of the taxes that were imposed on the citizens of the United States of America.
This is no more different than insider trading, embezzlement and fraud. This IS NOT free-market capitalism. This is corporatism on a national and a global scale at the tax-payer expense.
Privatization of local, state and federal assets works in the same principle. For the citizens in the state of Indiana, the privatization of the 80-90 Toll Road was done under this same guise. This was nothing more than a corporatist approach to “seize” the assets of the state of Indiana through the state government by a foreign entity.
This goes hand-in-hand with the attempts by the SPP to establish an “international” highway through the United States of America from Canada to Mexico and not subject to the civil laws of the United States of America. One of the two roads that were identified as part of this project was the 80-90 Toll Road, the other Interstate 69. This may be a coincidence that the governor of Indiana may have chosen to “lease” the 80-90 Toll Road, but from the information that I have researched, this does not appear to be the case. The decision of the governor and the state went against the will of the people who did not want this to happen. This is a clear indication that this was a “corporate” decision, the voice of the people are not relevant. Indiana as a corporation had disregarded Indiana as a Constitutional state and moved forward with the lease.
“Fifty years to the day after Ike put his pen to the Highway Act, another Republican signed off on another historic highway project. On June 29, 2006, Mitch Daniels, the former Bush administration official turned governor of Indiana, was greeted with a round of applause as he stepped into a conference room packed with reporters and state lawmakers. The last of eight wire transfers had landed in the state's account, making it official: Indiana had received $3.8 billion from a foreign consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm Cintra and the Macquarie Infrastructure Group ( mig ) of Australia, and in exchange the state would hand over operation of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road for the next 75 years. The arrangement would yield hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for the consortium, which also received immunity from most local and state taxes in its contract with Indiana. And, of course, the consortium would collect all the tolls, which it was allowed to raise to levels far beyond what Hoosiers had been used to. By one calculation, the Toll Road would generate more than $11 billion over the 75-year life of the contract, a nice return on mig- Cintra's $3.8 billion investment.
The deal to privatize the Toll Road had been almost a year in the making. Proponents celebrated it as a no-pain, all-gain way to off-load maintenance expenses and mobilize new highway-building funds without raising taxes. Opponents lambasted it as a major turn toward handing the nation's common property over to private firms, and at fire-sale prices to boot.
The one thing everyone agreed on was that the Indiana deal was just a prelude to a host of such efforts to come. Across the nation, there is now talk of privatizing everything from the New York Thruway to the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey turnpikes, as well as of inviting the private sector to build and operate highways and bridges from Alabama to Alaska. More than 20 states have enacted legislation allowing public-private partnerships, or P3s, to run highways. Robert Poole, the founder of the libertarian Reason Foundation and a longtime privatization advocate, estimates that some $25 billion in public-private highway deals are in the works remarkable figure given that as of 1991, the total cost of the interstate highway system was estimated at $128.9 billion.
On the same day the Indiana Toll Road deal closed, another Australian toll road operator, Transurban, paid more than half a billion dollars for a 99-year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and the Texas Transportation Commission green-lighted a $1.3 billion bid by Cintra and construction behemoth Zachry Construction to build and operate a 40-mile toll road out of Austin. Many similar deals are now on the horizon, and mig and Cintra are often part of them. So is Goldman Sachs, the huge Wall Street firm that has played a remarkable role advising states on how to structure privatization deals even while positioning itself to invest in the toll road market.
Goldman Sachs' role has not been lost on skeptics, who accuse the firm of playing both sides of the fence. "In essence, they're double-dipping," says Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, a truckers' group that opposes toll road privatization. "They're basically in the middle, playing one side against the other, and it's really, really lucrative."
Despite such concerns, the privatization model has the full backing of the Bush administration. Tyler Duvall, the U.S. Department of Transportation's assistant secretary for transportation policy, says dot has raised the idea with "almost every state" government and is working on sample legislation that states can use for such projects. "This is a ground battle in the United States right now," he says. "States just need to be convinced that this is basically something they should be considering."
The financial stakes are potentially huge. "You're buying the infrastructure of the economy, and it's enormously valuable," says John Schmidt, who served as associate attorney general in the Clinton administration and as counsel to the city of Chicago on the $1.8 billion privatization of the Chicago Skyway, the 7.8-mile freeway that connects the Dan Ryan Expressway in the west to the Indiana Toll Road in the east. "[Private road operators] haven't been able to get in here previously. There's been a demand, and it's been bottled up because we just haven't had privatized infrastructure in this country, so they've been buying toll roads in Chile and in France. Now, they suddenly have the opportunity to come into this country."
At the western end of the Indiana Toll Road, just over the Illinois border, the scenery rolls by like the lyrics to a particularly forlorn Bruce Springsteen song. Passing over Wolf Lake, infamous in these parts as the site where "thrill killers" Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb dumped the body of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in the 1920s, the highway skirts ghost factories and decaying main streets until, outside Gary, the smokestacks give way to cornfields and Christmas tree farms, and the scenery stays pastoral across the length of northern Indiana. If you've ever traveled cross-country on I-90, known here as the "main street of the Midwest," you've driven the Toll Road.
- The Highwaymen 2007 - Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway”
From the excerpt above, you can do the math. Cintra and Macquarie Infrastructure will make an estimated 7.2 billion dollars. This roadway was created through the taxes of the citizens of the United States of America and the citizens of the State of Indiana.
Another item to take note is the fact that Goldman-Sachs invested into both sides.
I do not know if you are starting to make the distinction, yet, but there are definitely two sides to the United States as well as each of the states. This is why people are confused, and for good reason, they have never looked at their country as two separate entities, one as a country governed by Constitutional law and the other ruled as a corporation. The latter has been losing ground due to unscrupulous people, companies and corporations that have bypassed the Rule of Law in the name of profiteering through treaty, legislation and market manipulation.
NAFTA and CAFTA are additional examples of the corporatist approach to capitalism. Going back to the original point, the United States of America’s economy still has the potential to destroy the economies of many regions and countries. The purpose of NAFTA and CAFTA is to marginalize this potential. This also allows companies and corporations to enter into the mezzo-American region, outside the grasp of the Rule of Law (Constitution). Since most of these countries are socialist and communist, already, the ability for these entities to create monopolies is unrestrained. The state determines who does business or who does not do business in their country. Determinate upon the contractual agreement between the two entities, competition could be stifled and the monopoly established within that country.
If the economy of the United States of America were allowed to operate as it did prior to 1913, no other country could compete against the productivity that the United States of America is capable. In the free-market capitalist system, the United States of America could pay off its debt in no time; it could prove once and for all that it does not need a foreign corporate entity to “manage” its money, like the Federal Reserve. The United States as a corporation would once again be a viable global economic force as it once were, and the people would no longer be subject to taxation without representation, as pre-1933 when the federal income tax was instituted through the 16th Amendment. What the corporatist fear the most are first COMPETITION and secondly, the CONSTITUTION.
