Real-Life Bad Companies: The Empire of the Banks

(Note: The first two "Real-Life Bad Companies" posts were originally written last year. This was written first, but posted after the second entry, on mercenary corporations like Dictel.)

Sooner or later, I'll resume the hard work of editing Bad Company into something resembling a readable novel. Also, I've started drawing again for almost the first time in about 2 years, and I hope to reclaim my skills so I can draw Spanner myself. So I figure now is the time to write another little background entry. It's about "future history" and its history, so to speak. Recently I've noticed how so many "apocalyptic" novels are billed as "historical novels set in the future", and that future is supposed to be inevitable. I don't just mean various science fiction attempts at future histories (and not by the good writers, either). I mean especially the evangelical authors rewriting the same John Nelson Darby scenario. All these people have to support their claim that their scenario is inevitable is sheer blind faith. My advantage is that the events behind Spanner are already happening. My prediction: by the middle of this decade, the US, the EU, and all the other countries of the "Western" "capitalist" world will go bankrupt and get repossessed by the banks they're hopelessly in hock to. Thus the "Corporate Empire" is born, a pure corporatist dictatorship ruled by a tyrannical synarchy of not corporate bosses but of banking institutions led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which inflict their "austerity" on the whole "Western" world. (Synarchy, remember, is Greek for "junta".) Spanner begins when America ends.

Face it. Obama's just a puppet emperor, just like Shrub Bush. The difference is that instead of Dick Cheney of the Dark Side, America's new grand vizier and shadow dictator is Goldman Sachs. Its world dictatorship, and the oligarchy of financial parasites it represents, depends upon the nature of central banking itself.

A central bank is nothing other than a central planning agency for the economy. It starts just as the government authority that prints money. But like any bureaucracy, it is subject to mission creep. What starts as little more than the US Mint ends up becoming a Gosplan that interferes with the entire economy. And these are just the national banks. National banks, like private corporations, tend to consolidate. Thus you have the European Central Bank; ultimately, you have the supreme central bank, the World Bank.

But central banks are not controlled by their national or international governments. They're controlled by the commercial banks and other financial corporations, and rule in represent their interest. And the banks' interest is to use the central banks to put their governments so in debt to the banks that they can then take over. Note how uncontrolled greed easily metastasizes into insane power lust.

The fascist dictatorships, even Hitler's insane cult empire, were put into place by their ruling classes and corporate establishments. The Corporates aren't likely to delegate power to the generals and the extremist parties this time around. With the experience of the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization behind them, they're going to want to rule directly. After all, dictators are as likely to refuse to repay their debts as "democratic" leaders. The first order of business will be to make the job of cracking down on the recalcitrant masses easier by forcibly privatizing all the military services and police departments so they can be consolidated into a mercenary monopoly like Dictel, answerable only to the World Bank. Government armies and police have to at least pretend to protect their subjects. The corporatized police and military have no such excuse; they openly state in their corporate mission statements that their purpose is to defend their corporate clients against the people.

I'm not the only commentator who has compared corporatism to Communism. But I'm going to explain exactly how the United Corporations (as the oligarchy of corporations is called in Spanner) resembles the Soviet Communist Party so uncannily. Let's start with the hierarchical structure. The CPSU's rank and file — a minority of the Russian population to begin with — had little power within the party itself. On this level of the UC are nonfinancial corporations. Then there's the Party elite, the Communist aristocracy known as the nomenklatura, who get all the perks and privileges denied by law to their inferiors. The Corporate version of the nomenklatura is the banking and financial corporations of whatever size. The nomenklatura in turn is ruled by the CP Central Committee, which in the UC is the giant transnational banks. At the peak of the hierarchy is, of course, Tsar Comrade Stalin, the maximum leader the Soviet bureaucracy chose to rule over all. The top level of the UC more resembles the "sultan" and "grand vizier" setup of the old Turkish Empire that kept the Middle East in stasis and stagnation for an entire half millennium. The "sultan" of the Corporate Empire is the World Bank with its subsidiary institutions. The "grand vizier" which is the real power behind the throne is Goldman Sachs, corporate dictator of the world. The role of Supreme Soviet that rubber-stamps all Comrade Stalin's decrees and applauds him whenever he orders them to is played by every government in the "capitalist" world from the smallest town to the United Nations. "Western" corporatism maps to Soviet Communism quite nicely. The dictatorship of the corporations is having the same disastrous effect on the whole world that the dictatorship of the commissars had on the former "Communist" world.

Next, I will now explain why I treat the corporations in my novels and comics as if they were the Elder Gods of Lovecraft. It's an idea I got from Carlos Castaneda by way of a book on The Matrix called Matrix Warrior (by one Jake Horsley). This is something don Juan called "flyers", demonic entities that feed on humans the same way humans feed on animals. Yes, we humans with all our creativity, intelligence, and independence are just ape meat to these entities; they hunt us the same way African poachers paid by the Chinese Triad gangs and their Nigerian middlemen hunt our cousins the chimpanzees. The "flyers" use nation-states as their "monkey coops". Castaneda's "flyers" don't quite map so perfectly to the robotic world of The Matrix, though surely he was a huge influence on the Wachowski Brothers' vision. But the description perfectly fits the race of predatory corporations that dominates the world today. Corporations (in the broad sense now, including governments, religious organizations, and criminal gangs) are the bodies the "flyers" have taken. Or maybe they really are the Elder Gods reborn; occultists today say that demons have pretty much stopped possessing humans now that there's such an abundance of soulless institutional entities to "bodyjack". It's a petty demon indeed that possesses a mere puny human anymore. The gods/demons/"flyers" become the corporations' souls. This is the source of what I call my "political horror". If you're of a spiritual bent, you'll probably think my depiction of the horror is accurate and realistic. And it's possible that you may be right.

In our corporatist world, what becomes of justice? In a "monetized" twist on the old Thrasymachean "might makes right" conception, justice today is defined simply as: the interest of the richest. And that, indeed is how our "justice" (sic) system works today. The system itself is criminal! The increasing moral reactionism of governments — not of society, but of government and the political elite — has a similar origin: the Corporates have traditionally been Social Darwinists obsessed with eugenics. Bram Dijkstra, in his books on the sexual ideology behind the Holocaust, reveals that they have a strange conception of human physiology. Certain Theosophists borrowed this one from the Brahmins: men of the upper castes of India are taught by their priests and gurus that blood, brains, semen, and money are the exact same magic substance, called bindu in Sanskrit. Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern lampooned this notion, central to eugenic pseudoscience, in Dr. Strangelove when they had General Jack D. Ripper rant about "the pollution of our precious bodily fluids". This "pollution" was graphically illustrated in one notorious 1915 propaganda film of the "bindu cult", A Fool There Was, in which a vampire (Theda Bara in the role that made her a superstar) sucks the life out of a pureblooded European Corporate aristocrat without so much as touching his neck; she can do this because according to this ideology, semen and money are the exact same thing as blood. He becomes anemic, poor, impotent, and stupid — once again, one and the same thing according to the cult. After reading Bram Dijkstra and Klaus Theweleit (and this World Socialist Web Site historical article on the German workers' revolution that would have been were it not for Comrade Stalin), you will understand the sheer hysteria of the class bigotry that led the German and European Corporates to enthrone as their god-king a political gangster named Adolf Hitler. Malthus and Machiavelli aren't all that far apart after all.

Note that I haven't mentioned specific financial companies other than Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. The identity of the corporations that rule us is not as important as the fact that they rule us. If the Brahmin priests and gurus are right and blood and money are the same, then these "flyers", the corporations, are quite literally sucking our blood. They have, indeed, been called vampires. Are you scared yet? Wait till you read the next installment of "Real-Life Bad Companies", in which I deal with those corporate armies the banksters are using the American Empire's colonial wars to build up into the future military masters of the world.

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