The Rapidly Accelerating U.S. Police-State

Eric Zuesse

On America’s political right wing, here is how it is being reported:

“Whole Foods in Downtown San Francisco Closes Due to Spiraling Crime”

National Review, 11 April 2023

… The news comes after a recent spate of violent attacks upon prominent San Franciscans. CashApp founder Bob Lee was fatally stabbed last week, cycling champion Ethan Boyes died after being struck by a car, and former fire commissioner Don Carmignani was brutally beat over the head with a pipe by a homeless man, surviving.

When a team from CNN traveled to San Francisco’s city hall to report on the crime issue, members of the crew had their bags stolen out of their rental car nearby.

The crime wave that has hit that city shows no sign of abating. San Francisco has been experiencing lower foot traffic due to remote work, which has caused many small business to shut down and street conditions to deteriorate. The city’s ability to deal with its continued problems is compounded by a deficit which has ballooned to nearly $800 million. …

On America’s political left, here is how it’s being reported:

“Illegal Corporate Price-Fixing Conspiracies are Widespread in U.S. Economy”

Good Jobs First, 18 April 2023

Large companies operating in the United States have, since the beginning of 2000, paid $96 billion in fines and settlements to resolve allegations of covert price-fixing and related anti-competitive practices in violation of antitrust laws.

Illegal pricing conspiracies have occurred in a wide range of industries, affecting the cost of products ranging from everyday grocery items and auto parts to life-saving medications and electronic components. In industries such as financial services and pharmaceuticals, just about every major corporation (or a subsidiary) has been a defendant, often more than once. Banks, credit card companies and investment firms dominate the top tier, accounting for nine of the 10 most penalized corporations by total dollars.

These are the key findings of Conspiring Against Competition, a report published today by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, a non-profit research center focused on corporate accountability. The report, available at goodjobsfirst.org, draws on data collected from government agency announcements and court records for inclusion in the Violation Tracker database.

“Large corporations which are supposed to be competing with one another are often secretly conspiring to set prices,” said Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First and author of the report. “In doing so, they cause economic harm to consumers and contribute to inflation.”

Of the more than 2,000 cases in which companies made payments to resolve civil and criminal price-fixing allegations:

• 357 were brought by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department and other federal regulators ($26 billion in penalties)
• 269 cases were brought by state attorneys general ($15 billion)
• 1,407 class action lawsuits were initiated by private plaintiffs ($55 billion)

Of the $96 billion in penalties, over one-third ($33 billion) was paid by banks and investment firms, mainly to resolve claims that they schemed to rig interest-rate benchmarks such as LIBOR. The second most penalized industry, at $11 billion, is pharmaceuticals, due largely to owners of brand-name drugs accused of illegally conspiring to block the introduction of lower-cost generic alternatives. …

Despite the billions of dollars corporations have paid in fines and settlements, price-fixing scandals continue to emerge on a regular basis, and numerous large corporations have been named in repeated cases.

“Higher penalties could help reduce recidivism,” Mattera said. “But putting a real dent in price-fixing will probably require aggressive steps to deal with the underlying structural reality that makes it more likely to occur: excessive market concentration.”

Whereas the media that are controlled by America’s Republican billionaires (the right-wing media) blame only the direct perpetrators of street-crime, who are overwhelmingly poor people, who can go to prison if they are caught, the media that are controlled by America’s Democratic billionaires blame only the direct perpetrators of suite-crime, who are ‘corporations’ whose stockholders get hit with only at most penny-on-the-dollar fines as penalties if they are caught; and, so, in either case, the super-rich few billionaires who ‘earn’ and grow their fortunes from corporate crime, and who suffer little if at all from street-crime, have virtually no reason to worry about any crime, of either the street or suite variety. The laws have been written for them.

Whereas the man in the street needs to worry about it, the man in the suite does not, and the billionaire, who has hired the men in the suites, and who have, in turn, hired the men in the streets, might find difficult even to know (much less care) anything much about the men in the streets, other than what his own men in the suites tell him about them, and about how proud that executive is to keep so low the wages of the men in the streets whom the billionaires’ controlling owners have organized in order to make themselves even richer than they already are.

Corporations don’t commit crimes: people do — and the actual perpetrators of ‘corporate’ crimes are the controlling owners, who have no liability, at all, for those crimes, because of the legal fiction of the corporate veil. But it’s even worse than that, because even if the corporate veil becomes “pierced” by a court, none of the owners can become imprisoned: only fines can then be imposed against owners.

In other words: Corporations exist in order to keep corporate owners out of prison regardless of how many people might die from their crimes (such as the Bhopal disaster) and of how many millions of people might have been robbed by inflated prices from price-fixing conspiracies, or whatever.

In other words: in a political system that is, as Mussolini advocated, “corporationist” (= “fascist”), the state represents the owners of corporations, especially of the largest ones, whose controlling owners are the wealthiest people of all. The corporationist = fascist state exists to protect only them, against everyone else. And that is what a police-state actually does.

No ‘corporation’ commits any crimes, individuals do; and the corporation’s controlling owners are the ultimate source of any ‘corporate’ crime and its major beneficiaries; and, therefore, in any authentic democracy, it is only they who will suffer the major proportion of the penalties including becoming penned-up in prison longer than anyone else, for those crimes, which are the crimes that do the most harm, to the biggest number of people and to the environment. If the penalties are to be proportionate to the total harms from a stated crime, then this is the way it will happen: in short, end fascism and start democracy. But, to achieve this, the laws regarding corporations will need to change drastically.

As Marjorie Kelly said in her 2003 The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, p. 187, “Corporations today are governments of the propertied class, exercising power over Americans that is greater than the power once exercised by kings.” Although she falsely said on its page 12 that the only people who are affected by a corporation are its employees, and although she failed to address the issue of whom the individuals are who control a corporation — two huge and fatal flaws in her book and in liberalism itself (but without which she might not even have obtained a publisher) — she brilliantly exposed there the fraud that the ‘corporate veil’ actually is and was intended to be, and this was the biggest “The emperor has no clothes” exposé of capitalism by anyone yet. The capitalism that exists is actually fascism, just as Mussolini advocated for, and it is incompatible with democracy. She didn’t say that this is so, but she showed it. Unfortunately, she provided no understanding that goes deeper than that mere statement of the problem. But what she did achieve there was very important.

The reason that the analysis needs to go deeper is that the protection of the worst criminals, who control, and profit from, huge corporations, is behind the increasing concentration of wealth in America; and the higher that this concentration (this wealth-inequality) goes, the more desperate the more people will become and so the bigger a percentage of the population will be in prison (virtually all for street-crimes), which, in America, is already a higher percentage being in prison than in any other country. (Is that because it has the worst public, or because it has the worst rulers of that public?) So, the percentage can’t go much higher than it already is. This means that street-crimes will be rising even higher, without limit. It’s a vicious circle, that will destroy the country.

The laws regarding corporations need to change drastically. Not only the corporate veil must be eliminated, but all legal limitations of personal liability for stockholders must be removed, and all corporate liability, civil and criminal, needs to be placed 100% on the individuals who share in the control of, and appointments to, the board; and this means that each board-member must be on public record as to the investor(s) who selected that person; and, on that basis, each of the controlling stockholders will be assigned a portion of that 100% control over the corporation. Anonymity (or any attempt at such) in this regard needs to be, itself, a severe crime, which increases yet further that anonymous shareholder’s proportion of the 100% control over the board. Liability-insurance prices will be affected accordingly. Only in this way can accountability be fair and honest upward, and not only downward, in an organization. Controllers must earn their keep; as-of today, they do not, and all of the accountability is upward to the ultimate boss, which are the controlling stockholders. That is control by unaccountable power. If this change in accountability will not be instituted, then the U.S. Government will finally crash into anarchy and a chaotic revolution, towards which it now is ominously heading — an empire that is rotting at its very top, and so degenerating into chaos down below. Ever since 1945, this vehicle has been heading for a fatal crash, which now has become perilously close. It must fundamentally change its course.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.