As the Global Hegemon Collapses, Can Private Property Be Far Behind?

[PHOTO: Al Drago/Getty]

By Steven Miller

Tuesday’s Presidential debate showed the world how the politics of collapse are determining the election of the next President of the US. It was reminiscent of the Roman Senate when the Goths sacked Rome in 410 AD. Senators gathered in the Forum, protected by the Praetorian Guards. Suddenly one Senator would leap up and cry, “I propose a law making sacking the city illegal.” Everyone voted and the resolution passed unanimously.

The world was watching Tuesday and was shocked at how low the politics have sunk in the US.

There are actually real issues these days — COVID, systemic economic collapse, institutional racism, rampant police murder. But instead we saw the leadership of the most powerful country in the world, the global hegemon for the last 70 years, collapsing in real time right there on television. The candidates could not have an intelligent discussion of the tremendous issues that face the country. No vision, no ideas, no dialogue, no programmatic solutions. The Democrats, of course, agree with Trump on 80% of the issues and therefore dare not make programmatic attacks. The debate proved nothing more than the old adage that when you lay down in the gutter, you do not wind up smelling like a rose.

Meanwhile the organs of the State are fighting themselves. This is characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The FBI openly counters and reports to the American people to disprove the President. The President constantly usurps authority he does not legally have, including creating his own private police force aided and abetted by the most privatized elements of ICE and Homeland Security. The CDC, the Post Office and the Justice Department, every organ of the State, are politicized and coerced into being part of Trump’s election campaign.

The Senate and the House are in stalemate and cannot figure out how to help the American people now that 50 million are unemployed, have lost their healthcare, and are facing a looming Rent Apocalypse. Paralysis is another characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The Republicans are risking losing the Senate as they try to jam through a new Supreme Court Justice before the election. People are beginning to see that these “honored institutions of democracy” are far from neutral.

Twenty-six million people hit the streets in righteous wrath over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others. Their demands crystalized around defunding or abolishing the police, which acts like an occupying army in a country that treats non-violent civilians with the tactics of the War of Terror, while white supremist vigilante gangs stalk them in the dark.

The institutions of the US State were forged in slavery and infused with structural racism. One of these, the Electoral College, was established to prevent the popular vote from determining the President. It will begin to tear itself apart after election day on November 3. No one knows whether or how the institutions of government will hold up in the coming months before a President is inaugurated on January 20… or after.

A major indicator of how things are going will be the actions of the corporate media industrial complex, perhaps the most sophisticated thought-control apparatus ever devised. These corporations have given Trump billions of dollars of free advertising, and give credence to his slightest whim. They now work in tandem with social media, which openly operates with malign intent to confuse the situation even more. It was therefore significant that one day before the debate, the New York Times, released information about Trump’s taxes that reveal he doesn’t pay any.

Property Depreciation as a Legal Invention

Now the political exposures are beginning to enter the sacred zone of private property, an issue the capitalist class prefers to keep in the dark. The very State, legal system and tax code that is coming under public scrutiny is designed to give uber privileges to private property. This is what the Trump crime family exploits, as does every corporation in America.

Tax laws allow tangible private property, used for business, to be depreciated. Personal property, like a home, cannot be depreciated, but a landlord can depreciate rental property because the theory is that tangible property is “used-up” over time, so the property owner can “depreciate” it.

But depreciation is simply a legal figment. How do we know? When an owner sells business property, the depreciation starts all over again from the top! And anyone who is forced to rent knows quite well that the value of property appreciates and gets more expensive over time. It doesn’t depreciate at all.

Then the property owner gets to deduct the cost of maintaining the property, so s/he gets a double dip. And since depreciation is a business expense, it is a deduction from business income. The law allows the owner to get cash generated in the current year without paying any tax on an amount of income equal to the amount of depreciation.

The legal scam then is elaborated. Trump (and every corporation) borrows money to purchase property, like a golf course, say for $100 million. They take the depreciation of course. Then they get an appraisal of the property that claims the property is actually worth $300 million. The appraisal, say, is three times what it should be, but the inflated appraisal can be used to provide collateral for additional loans.

In other words, the happy capitalist buys property with other peoples’ money, gets paid in tax breaks, ie public money, to depreciate it, and then falsely appreciates the value, to borrow more money to buy more property, etc etc. What a deal!

Inanimate private property in itself has these rights, not people. They are not the rights of the owner, because if the owner sells the property, they no longer get the privilege of depreciating it. So private property is a legal entity that has far more rights than human beings, just because the law says so. OMG – if ordinary citizens can challenge a system of legal institutions that are infused with systemic racism, how far can they go? That is part of the transformative power and the danger to the capitalists of this moment.

Alone in the world in its COVID response, the US put private property in control of the emergency. America is learning the hard way that there are issues that absolutely need a federal government to take control, propose a single strategy and coordinate resources. This is something that private property can never do.

Extractive Capitalism

Since the capitalist system collapsed in 2008, it has been sustained on life support by public money. US corporations, especially the financial sector, have received $25 trillion to $39 trillion in direct payments (David Sirota, Jacobin, “We've Always Had the Money for Medicare for All - We've Just Given It to Corporations Instead”, 18 June 2020). Capitalists got to onshore $23 trillion of profit two years ago. Add in direct subsidies through the military budget of $1+ trillion a year and massive billion-dollar subsidies to the petroleum and pharmaceutical industries.

Yet the economy collapsed after the advent of the virus in one week, the biggest collapse in history. Add in the actions of a criminal President and suddenly the wheels are coming off the bus. Or are they?

Is it really true that the most powerful capitalist class in history, with an unsurpassed military and three centuries of experience in maintaining its rule both legally and illegally, is so inept that they can do nothing about an unpredictable leader that destabilizes everything?

The government is clearly the last profit center left in capitalism. Just as with depreciation, the actions of government alone can create the legalities that create markets for private property. Hence the battles within the government and the State apparatus. The various capitalist gangs do not have real strategic differences, but they certainly differ tactically on whether to maintain bourgeois democracy to achieve their goals.

Corporations merged with the government long ago; now they are rapidly merging with the State, as the provision of police services are increasingly under the control corporations. Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has been spending billions a year to affect this change. Private property is unified in the vision of disaster capitalism: take advantage of the situation to re-organize society to augment private profits. They are not moving slowly. They are re-creating the economy as an extractive industry.

Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, for example, was instrumental in creating the “rentership society”. After 2008, financiers understood that there could never be broad home ownership again in the United States. So they evicted millions from their homes, while graciously letting some stay as long as they paid rent, a sum that was dramatically higher than what they paid before. These policies drove millions out of the communities they had lived in for decades even as large amounts of new housing was built. But that housing was built to be empty, to be speculative property that supported hedge funds and not people. That is an extractive industry that sucks wealth out of communities, just as petroleum corporations extract wealth out of the ground.

US capitalism has big plans to transform other branches of the economy into an extractive machine. Constant privatization of every aspect of life is the method. Serious observers of England’s Brexit insanity recognize that when the dust settles, US-style privatized health care intends to invade and try to take over. Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee will likely vote to end Obamacare, and eliminate health care for another 25 million people or so. What can possibly arise to fill the void? What can allow US corporations to further invade public European health care systems?

Maybe it’s the new Apple watch?

Apple released the latest device during all this turmoil, and proudly stated that it was after long discussions with their “partners” in the insurance industry. Why? Could it be because the insurance industry is the main organizer of health care in the US? What is the connection here?

Haim Israel is a strategic director of Bank of America and head of the report, “The World After Covid Primer.” (www.bofaml.com/.../the_world_after_covid.pdf)

The report notes that 1/3 of the world’s data resides in the healthcare industry. It notes that value of data to the economy will increase from 30l billion euros in 2018 to 829 billion euros in 2025.

“We found that while the data generated is rising exponentially, just 1% of it is analysed or monetised effectively. The post Covid era could benefit technology companies who can analyse and monetise such data, but adoption is likely to vary by region owing to privacy concerns and regulations.”

And..  

“Big Government: a new social contract -- Growing surveillance, inequality and the current inadequacy of some healthcare systems versus others highlighted by the current crisis will act as a catalyst for change in politics, furthering populism trends and increasing the risk of social unrest. Covid-19 has handed governments a new social mandate to protect their citizens. Governments will exert greater influence on businesses with shareholder supremacy potentially eroding in favour of stakeholders. Further, this crisis has made the technology industry useful – if not vital – for implementing government power. We think this is unlikely to reverse…”

How far can this go? Vandanta Shiva reports in her article, “The Pandemic Is a Consequence of the War Against Life” (September 21, 2020):

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and in the midst of the lock­down, Microsoft was grant­ed a patent by the World Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Orga­ni­za­tion (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ​“Human Body Activ­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with a task pro­vid­ed to a user may be used in a min­ing process of a cryp­tocur­ren­cy system….”

The ​“body activ­i­ty” that Microsoft wants to mine includes radi­a­tion emit­ted from the human body, brain activ­i­ties, body flu­id flow, blood flow, organ activ­i­ty, body move­ment such as eye move­ment, facial move­ment, and mus­cle move­ment, as well as any oth­er activ­i­ties that can be sensed and rep­re­sent­ed by images, waves, sig­nals, texts, num­bers, degrees, or any oth­er infor­ma­tion or data.

Intellectual property rights, which is what a patent is, are just as much a creation of government as depreciation. It is another form of privilege for private property.

This step turns health care based on bio-data, especially privatized health care, into an extractive industry. We see this approach as well as corporations racing to develop vaccines. Corporations have long developed vaccines for pets and farm animals, but have resisted developing human vaccines, since they do not produce much profit as compared to “treatments” that you pay for across your lifetime.

One reason that government becomes the market of last resort is because economic production is increasingly done by computer systems and robots. As machines replace human labor, that labor cannot be exploited, which is the source of capitalist private profit. But maybe monetized data and data devices allow humans to be exploited for their information, not dissimilar to the exploitation of animals.

So — given these very real developments, with future potential for private profit, is it really likely that the financial industry, which is the major shot-caller in capitalist planning, going to put up with an incompetent, narcissistic, erratic fool for a US President? These boys have run the world since the advent of the Marshall Plan that re-built Europe after World War II. Are they going to give up now? Without even hardly trying?

Unlikely.

The battles we are living through today are a prelude to the battles that will ensue, regardless of who wins the election. The capitalist agenda will remain on the table. They fully intend to culminate their strategy of total privatization. But the story is not over, and the man behind the curtain is private property. The US hegemon is truly fumbling. The rising global popular movement to hold government accountable for public safety and the basic necessities of life in a time of collapse may be diverted for a bit, but it cannot be stopped.

All it requires is class consciousness and abandoning the notions that the status quo will maintain, that incrementalism and piecemeal solutions work and that we can reform our way into a world that puts healing at the top of the agenda.

Commodifying Neo-Fascism: The NRA's Carry Guard in Trump's America

By James Richard Marra

Neo-liberal fascism reigns triumphant in Donald Trump's great America. This neo-fascism does so in part because over 62 million Americans agree with him concerning America's defense against heralded threats. These include Muslim terrorists, immigrant terrorists, Black terrorists, pro-choice feminist terrorists, eco-terrorists, and a terroristic federal government that intends to imprison law-abiding gun owners in FEMA concentration camps . Anti-gun activists and Black Lives Matter protestors imperil America's Anglo-Saxon culture. Together these "bad guys" offer manifest and pervasive risks, which may arrive unanticipated and perhaps be unavoidable.

In America, protecting oneself from threats is big business, and the modality of that protection for 55 million citizens is the personal firearm. Gun owners are prepared, owning approximately 265 million weapons of various types and lethality. The firearm and ammunition industries earn $15 billion annually , and are politically adroit and entrenched in Washington, thus ensuring a steady flow of profits.

As the gun industry's obsequious marketing and lobbying arm since 1977, the National Rifle Association (NRA) offers its extreme right wing political branding to entice Americans to buy guns, accessories, and training for self defense. It does this by launching a tsunami of fear bating, fallacy, and misinformation, propelled by a white Christian and paternalistic nationalism. This is the moral vision that invigorates Trump's political base. Its imperialist military-security consciousness celebrates hyper-masculine intimidation and violence, and elevates "security" to the moral level of "Moses and the Prophets" (to paraphrase Karl Marx). "Freedom's Safest Place" is a Trump Tower of Babel, where a muddle of hysterical jingoism, fake news, and industry "reports" (read "advertisements") are counted as gospel. Not surprisingly, the gun industry funnels massive funding to political candidates guided by the NRA's moral compass, to the tune of $50.2 million.

The use of guns in self-defense comes with, in insurance parlance, a "moral hazard." This is because people may successfully defend themselves, yet in error or through malfeasance. When an injury (physical or financial) occurs due to a firearm discharge, a tort may occur that exposes gun owners to substantial civil liability, or criminal prosecution. These risks are exacerbated by the maze of complex, ambiguous, mercurial, inconsistent, and even contradictory gun regulations and self-defense laws among states. This legal and administrative morass complicates the task of complying with applicable laws. As the Carry Guard web page announces, the threat of litigation looms large: "You can do everything right and still lose….[L]awful self-defense can cost a fortune." Thus, a tool intended to satisfy a need for physical self-defense engenders a new need and a new tool: legal self-defense and the insurance to pay for it.

Thus arises the NRA's Carry Guard membership plan. In addition to a general membership, the NRA joins with the Chubb Group to offer, through its subsidiary Lockton Affinity, insurance reimbursement coverage for legal defense costs, either criminal or civil, resulting from acts of self-defense with firearms; along with a package of related products and services. Carry Guard insurance is a personal liability commodity, combined with financial assistance benefits for criminal defense, which intends to fill a gap in most homeowners insurance that usually excludes potentially morally hazardous acts, like intentionally shooting in self-defense.

Chubb's new product has a potential market of approximately 400,000 gun owners. The $154.95 price of the Bronze-level Carry Guard premium (minus $40 for the NRA membership) covers policy administration and claims costs paid to Lockton, with the remainder going to Chubb. The potential gain for Chubb is considerable, given that the United States Concealed Carry Association's self-defense insurance has an estimated annual revenue range between $30 and $70 million .

Carry Guard embodies the ideological interdependence among the gun industry, the NRA, and Trump's neo-fascist regime. The gun industry exists to maximize profits from selling firearms, regardless of the enabling marketing. While gun manufacturers and the Chubb Group enjoy the profits offered by their partnership with the NRA, the Carry Guard suite of benefits also satisfies two fundamental needs of the NRA: increased membership and expanded political power. They do this by stoking fears that a greedy liability attorney will convince an Untermensch from some disliked group to file a civil suit; or that district attorneys from an overreaching "leftist" and anti-gun government will file criminal charges. Fears of the racial "other" and government "tyranny" are the marketing the NRA brings to Carry Guard.

This marketing finds it origin in the NRA's extreme right-wing Cincinnati Revolt of 1977 . The Revolt established the NRA's aim to make America great again by arming its citizenry to the teeth. By doing so, the nation can be ostensibly defended from threats to its Second-Amendment rights, capitalism, and its social Darwinist worldview. It is no wonder that the neo-liberal Ronald Reagan was the first president to endorse the NRA, or that the NRA's darling neo-fascist, Donald Trump, told the 2017 NRA Convention that he would, "come through" for them. Carry Guard membership affirms a commitment to the threat-filled worldview of Trumpism. That worldview, as the NRA website celebrates, is championed by a cabal of extremist gun-rights advocates, racists, militarists, and proto-fascist law enforcement, and the virulently anti-Muslim Trump supporter Rep. Clay Higgins, who was rendered notorious by his Auschwitz gas-chamber debacle .

As a commodity, Carry Guard satisfies the basic human need for security against threats unmasked at "Freedom's Safest Place," including supposed unjust litigation. It also satisfies a fundamental need for group membership, which is accomplished through an association with a right-wing political organization, along with the blessing of a neo-fascist national leader. Self-esteem comes with one's self-identification as a "responsible" gun owner, a defender of Constitutional rights, and a law-abiding citizen standing for law and order.

Carry Guard's insurance represents a controversial niche market product. However, its notoriety as so-called "murder insurance" should not obscure the fact that Carry Guard is a bundle of mutually supportive products and services. Its "use values" for the NRA, to use Marx's term, are to: 1) promote the purchase of firearms for self-defense, 2) help to increase NRA membership and funding, 3) and provide an additional venue for the indoctrination of NRA members and public advocacy; thereby increasing the political force of the organization. Viewing Carry Guard as a consolidated suite of products provides a basis an understanding the product as a neo-fascist political project which combines, as the Trump "administration" does, neo-liberal capitalist and extremist right-wing political agendas.

As Karl Marx explained, capitalists are adroit at discovering or fabricating new needs, and developing products or services that satisfy them. While some human needs and desires can potentially be satisfied, those that can do so through use values. A firearm is a use value that fulfills the need for self-defense, even if the perceived threats are largely imagined. While some people personally fabricate firearms, ammunition, and accessories, most purchase them on the firearm market; from which the gun industry acquires its profits. However, the employment of a firearm in self-defense, that moment when the gun owner realizes its use value, engenders a new litigation risk potentially requiring a new use value. This new use value might take the form of a personal financial reserve intended to pay for self-defense litigation. However, the cost of litigation is high and the risk of a large civil settlement substantial. The cost of self-funding a legal defense is prohibitive for most gun owners, and " peer-to-peer " funding looks much like the specter of communism. These consumer concerns provide Chubb with an opportunity to sell a new use value in the form of an insurance commodity. As such, it obtains an exchange value within the insurance market; and is for the gun owner the premium price of the insurance. Thus, capitalists double dip into the gun owner's pocketbook. They sell the use value of a firearm as a commodity within the firearm market in order to satisfy a need for personal self-defense. Then they sell the use value of an insurance commodity to satisfy a need for legal self-defense arising from the actual use of the firearm. Thus, Carry Guard members, wishing to enjoy the practice of "American rugged self-reliance," ironically become inextricably dependent upon a capitalist enterprise to insure their financial security and personal freedom.

This irony reflects a deeper alienation of human beings from what Marx views as their own human essence. According to Marx, what distinguishes human beings from other species that exploit natural recourses instinctively to satisfy needs (like birds constructing nests from twigs and human refuse), is that humans do so through purposeful and creative labor. When gun owners are not able to personally design and establish their legal defense, the Chubb Group offers their capital and the creativity of their workers (policy administrators and actuaries, for example) to market a suitable insurance commodity to meet the need. By doing so, gun owners become "alienated" from the means of producing their own protection. Thus, Chubb "rents" NRA gun owners, for the price of an insurance premium, a safe place that is manufactured, so to speak, and administered by the Chubb Group exclusively for profit. Viewing Carry Guard from a Marxian perspective dissolves the myth of the product as primarily an enabler of self-reliant defense. It exposes the function of Carry Guard as a vehicle to establish a dependency of policyholders on the Chubb Group and the NRA (through the needed self-defense training), and for the enrichment of the capitalist class.

This Marxian perspective illuminates the dynamics of the gun market not only in terms of the commodification of physical use values (firearms and their accessories), but also with reference to affective use values; those psychological needs that the physical use values satisfy. Affective utility plays a central marketing role. Most gun owners are middle-aged, white, high school educated, and politically conservative; for whom firearm ownership is exciting and patriotic. The adrenaline rush triggered by shooting firearms creates a sense of physical strength, heightened masculinity, and rugged independence, stirring to life the "badass" warrior within. Badasses don't feel insecure, powerless, fearful of strangers, dependent, or confused in an uncertain world. An obsession with design innovations and hi-tech accessories also proclaims who are the baddest asses; those who possess the baddest ass magazines or laser sights. Given that the shrinking civilian firearms market requires repeat sales to maintain profits, gun manufacturers and the NRA appeal to the super-hero fantasies of hyper-vigilant males to continually stir a toxic stew of affective needs to maximize sales.

In this sense, Carry Guard represents a commodification of "peace of mind" (as all personal liability insurance does) in the face of the looming threats prophesied by the NRA, as well as a social acceptance and self-esteem that comes participating in the defense of hearth, home, and country. When the satisfaction of these basic human needs is couched in the NRA's neo-fascist worldview, the commodity sold is not simply self-defense, but a comforting neo-fascist worldview as well.

Commodity marketing is remarkably successful and adaptable, in part, because it can effectively appeal to affective desires, while simultaneously wrapping them in a self-actualizing political worldview. The Virginia Slims' 1960s accolade "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" celebrated both the vanity of a Twiggy-like female body, and a self-actualization promised by second-wave feminism. Today, the post-sexist spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, has come a long way as well; roaring from the Carry Guard website as a confident and square-jawed gun owner, squeezed into a skin-tight Carry Guard tee shirt. Coca Cola underscored its iconic advertisement with the jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)," sung by a commune of sanitized and serenely spellbound hippies residing in the Nirvana of the 1960's "Counterculture." Now, Barneys is banking on their M65 anarchy jacket to appeal to Millenials who are confronting Trump's neo-fascism in streets across America, in a desperate struggle for a secure and compassionate world; one free from the exploitation and repression of "The System." Barneys hopes there will be value added from sales to those who choose to safely impersonate revolutionaries at a safe distance.

Altogether, Carry Guard's carefully designed and marketed package of commodified use values embodies the symbiosis between neo-liberal capitalism and right-wing extremist politics that forms the core of, and is a marketized metaphor for, Trump's neo-fascist regime.