How Capitalism Steered Innovation Toward Social Control Rather Than Technological Wonders

Why Don't We Have Flying Cars?
The technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance and work discipline.

By David Graeber, The Baffler
June 18, 2012

The following article has been adapted from the Baffler. To read the piece in its entirety check out the Baffler.com. 

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat.

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For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.

Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy.

With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and over determining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project

At this point all the pieces would seem to be falling neatly into place. By the sixties, conservative political forces were growing skittish about the socially disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements, or indeed directions that could support a campaign of reversing the gains of progressive social movements and achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites saw as a global class war. The change of priorities was introduced as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return to the market, but in fact the change shifted government-directed research away from programs like NASA or alternative energy sources and toward military, information, and medical technologies.

Of course this doesn’t explain everything. Above all, it does not explain why, even in those areas that have become the focus of well-funded research projects, we have not seen anything like the kind of advances anticipated fifty years ago. If 95 percent of robotics research has been funded by the military, then where are the Klaatu-style killer robots shooting death rays from their eyes?

Obviously, there have been advances in military technology in recent decades. One of the reasons we all survived the Cold War is that while nuclear bombs might have worked as advertised, their delivery systems did not; intercontinental ballistic missiles weren’t capable of striking cities, let alone specific targets inside cities, and this fact meant there was little point in launching a nuclear first strike unless you intended to destroy the world.

Contemporary cruise missiles are accurate by comparison. Still, precision weapons never do seem capable of assassinating specific individuals (Saddam, Osama, Qaddafi), even when hundreds are dropped. And ray guns have not materialized—surely not for lack of trying. We can assume the Pentagon has spent billions on death ray research, but the closest they’ve come so far are lasers that might, if aimed correctly, blind an enemy gunner looking directly at the beam. Aside from being unsporting, this is pathetic: lasers are a fifties technology.

Phasers that can be set to stun do not appear to be on the drawing boards; and when it comes to infantry combat, the preferred weapon almost everywhere remains the AK-47, a Soviet design named for the year it was introduced: 1947.

The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!

Overall, levels of research funding have increased dramatically since the seventies. Admittedly, the proportion of that funding that comes from the corporate sector has increased most dramatically, to the point that private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government, but the increase is so large that the total amount of government research funding, in real-dollar terms, is much higher than it was in the sixties. “Basic,” “curiosity-driven,” or “blue skies” research—the kind that is not driven by the prospect of any immediate practical application, and that is most likely to lead to unexpected breakthroughs—occupies an ever smaller proportion of the total, though so much money is being thrown around nowadays that overall levels of basic research funding have increased

Yet most observers agree that the results have been paltry. Certainly we no longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual revolutions—genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics—that people had grown used to, and even expected, a hundred years before. Why?

Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.

Here, our fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us to imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. This is not so, even though such research teams are most likely to produce results. Research and development is still driven by giant bureaucratic projects.

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point:

You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.

That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

READ THE REST OF THIS PIECE ON THE BAFFLER.

Ballots and Democracy: Corporate Media Is Just Not That Into It

Tuesday, August 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Thomas S. Harrington

 

Last Saturday, we witnessed what has been regularly touted as one of the first big events of the 2012 campaign for the White House: the Iowa Straw Poll. The results of the poll were the following: Michele Bachmann (4823, 28.55%) Ron Paul (4671, 27.65%), Tim Pawlenty (2293, 13.57%), Rick Santorum (1657, 9.81%) Herman Cain (1456, 8.62%) Rick Perry (718, 3.62%) Mitt Romney (567, 3.36%) Newt Gingrich (385, 2.28%) Jon Huntsmann (69, 0.41%) Thad McCotter (35, 0.21%).

I don’t know about you, but when I look at those figures I see a virtual tie for first place, one that is particularly surprising given the fact that the “just by a hair” second place finisher, Ron Paul, received very little mainstream media coverage in the weeks and months leading to the event.

During this time, the “experts” on our screens have told us lots of stories about Palin, Bachmann, Romney, Pawlenty, Huntsmann, and more recently, Rick Perry. But they told us very, very few about Ron Paul. Yet here was Ron Paul in a virtual dead heat with the much talked about Bachmann.

From a journalistic perspective this had to be seen as a great story. No? You know, an event with endlessly fascinating David vs. Goliath story lines. Right?

Well, not really.

The New York Times reporter on the case, Jeff Zeleny made quick work of Paul saying, “Ron Paul of Texas, whose libertarian views put him at odds with many Republicans, finished slightly behind Mrs. Bachmann in the straw poll.” He then went on to speculate at length about the candidacies of Bachmann and two of the notable laggards in the voting, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, concluding with the following:

“The race, at least in the short term, will focus on this trio: Mr. Romney, who is seen as next in line for the nomination, if the traditional rules of Republican presidential politics apply; Mrs. Bachmann, whose insurgent style has captured the imagination of many conservative activists; and Mr. Perry, who has held elective office his entire adult life, but has tapped into passionate small-government, anti-Washington sentiment within the party.”

In other words, never mind the outcome of the straw poll, the very vote that we journalists have endlessly hyped as being a good indicator of the “popular sentiment” of the people of Iowa, and from there, the nation. Those of us (wink, wink) who ride around on the bus with the candidates know certain things that the credulous dopes who actually went to the polls don’t yet understand.

The most important of these is the fact that no matter how many votes Ron Paul gets, he will never be considered a “serious” or “electable” candidate because he openly challenges the imperial foreign policy consensus embraced by 90-95% of the US political class.

Reporters who spend their time around policy makers know this. But, rather than pointing this out to readers and asking out loud whether it is “right” “democratic” or even “pragmatically advantageous” that it be so, rather than doing stories that deconstruct the many methods used inside the elite opinion-making apparatus to get people to view those like Paul who challenge consensual orthodoxies as “crazy” “ridiculous” or “unserious”, courtiers like Zeleny pre-emptively fold before their masters.

He and the many others who act like him say, in effect, “We know that you, the institutional power brokers, don’t want these dissident people in the limelight and that, should the need arise, you will invent any possible pretext to bring them down (Howard Dean scream anyone?). This being the case, and given the fact that we reporters want to remain in your good graces for reasons of personal ambition, we will help you out by simply pretending such people do not exist. When, after a fashion, no one hears about them, they’ll simply go away. Deal?”

It seems the people in big media, who never miss a chance to issue bathetic praises of our uniquely “democratic” system, one that is, they like to tell us, the “envy of the world”, aren’t really that into piddling little concepts like ballots and registering the people’s demonstrated preferences.

When those voting their consciences make the “mistake” of choosing for candidates with ideas that the high command of the empire will not tolerate, aren’t we are lucky to have the sophisticated Zelenys of the world there to remind the rubes how, and toward whom, they must now refocus their attention?

Tax the Rich: Fair Taxation Requires More Brackets at the Top (2 articles)

Monday, April 4, 2011 by Robert Reich's Blog
Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich
by Robert Reich

It’s tax time. It’s also a time when right-wing Republicans are setting the agenda for massive spending cuts that will hurt most Americans.

Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.

Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

Tax the Rich!

The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)

Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.

It’s just the opposite for super rich.

The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010 — $135 billion. That’s up 5.7 percent from 2009.

Yet, remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted. From the 1940s until 1980, the top tax income tax rate on the highest earners in America was at least 70 percent. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Now it’s 35 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II.

The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. Capital gains – comprising most of the income of the super-rich – were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.

If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.

If we also cut what we don’t need (corporate welfare and bloated defense), taxes could be reduced for everyone earning under $80,000, too. And with a single payer health-care system – Medicare for all – instead of a gaggle of for-profit providers, the nation could save billions more.

Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case regardless of where the tax rate is set. That’s why the government should aim high. (During the 1950s, when the top rate was 91 percent, the rich exploited loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent – still substantial by today’s standards.)

And yes, some of the super rich will move their money to the Cayman Islands and other tax shelters. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship, and those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

But don’t the super-rich have enough political power to kill any attempt to get them to pay their fair share? Only if we let them. Here’s the issue around which Progressives, populists on the right and left, unionized workers, and all other working people who are just plain fed up ought to be able to unite.

Besides, the reason we have a Democrat in the White House – indeed, the reason we have a Democratic Party at all – is to try to rebalance the economy exactly this way.

All the President has to do is connect the dots – the explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of vital public services for the middle class and the poor.

This shouldn’t be difficult. Most Americans are on the receiving end. By now they know trickle-down economics is a lie. And they sense the dice are loaded in favor of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and their corporations, now paying a relative pittance in taxes.

Besides, the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it?

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Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by OtherWords
Some of the most affluent Americans actually pay lower effective tax rates than many middle class Americans.
by Mazher Ali

So many governors are hammering their budgets with a “we’re broke” message these days that it’s amazing our country hasn’t shattered into a thousand separate islands. More and more, however, rational voices are correctly asserting that we’re not broke.

The problem isn’t that the United States is out of money. It’s that a tiny sliver of households are under-taxed. The richest 10 percent of Americans own almost three-fourths of the country’s total wealth. Astoundingly, the most affluent 1 percent of Americans own more than one-third of our total wealth.

Thankfully, the message that our country isn't broke is making its way closer to the center of the tax and deficit debates. It can’t get there soon enough.

Many Republican lawmakers, along with governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, bizarrely think that they can erase deficits with tens of billions of dollars in budget cuts and tax breaks for corporations and wealthy people who don’t need them. They’re ignoring the greatest economic returns available, which are provided by public investments, federal aid to states, and even unemployment benefits. Instead of helping save the middle class, they're propelling us toward a busted, plutocratic disaster.

The GOP's deficit obsession isn't just misguided. It turns a blind eye on the struggles of low- and middle-income Americans. In contrast, Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s sensible Fairness in Taxation Act would raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, which better serves the American majority.

Currently, families earning $374,000 pay the exact same federal income tax rates as families with multi-million-dollar incomes, or even the handful who earn a billion bucks every year, such as the heirs of Walmart's founder. The lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy wouldn’t change in the least if they had to pay moderately higher income taxes. And it would boost our national economy.

The Fairness in Taxation Act calls for establishing five new tax brackets for incomes between $1 million and $1 billion, with rates ranging from 45 percent to 49 percent.

The Illinois Democrat's bill would also address an absurd aspect of our tax system, which wrongly favors wealth over work. Today, money earned through working nine-to-five or the graveyard shift is taxed at a higher rate than money obtained through windfalls. Capital gains, dividends, and other investment income derived from pre-existing wealth shouldn't be taxed at rates lower than income earned through work.

Three-quarters of all stocks and mutual funds owned by U.S. taxpayers belong to the richest 10 percent of American households. Therefore, some of the most affluent Americans actually pay lower effective tax rates than many middle-class Americans.

Take, for example, a weasel like Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. He raked in just over $13 million in 2010 (excluding his bonus of some $12 million worth of shares in his company). Of that $13 million, only his base salary of $600,000 will be taxed according to the federal income tax rates. The remaining $12.4 million will be taxed at a top rate of 15 percent. Unfortunately, Blankfein is just one example of the kind of gross inequity that exists in the current tax system.

A century ago, tax policies adopted during President Teddy Roosevelt's administration were guided by sound principles that stand in direct contrast to those of today’s Republicans.

“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned,” explained Roosevelt in a 1910 speech. “Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered--not gambling in stocks…I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes."

The Fairness in Taxation Act takes aim at the same inequities Teddy Roosevelt--a Republican--identified long ago. If it were enacted this year, it would generate $78 billion that could fund jobs and social programs that Americans need now more than ever.

Repeat after me: we're not broke. It’s time to mandate that the wealthiest members of our communities share in the sacrifice of the economic recovery and pay their fair share. The Fairness in Taxation Act offers a clear path in that direction.

The New Feudalism

Friday, January 14, 2011 – by Daily Bell Staff Report

TSA Pays Off In Breast Exposure Suit ... Texas woman, 24, receives "nominal" settlement ... The woman who sued the Transportation Security Administration after her breasts were exposed during a frisking at a Texas airport will receive a "nominal" payment from the government as part of a legal settlement ... The settlement was disclosed in documents filed last week in U.S. District Court in Amarillo, where Lynsie Murley last year filed a lawsuit accusing the TSA of negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress in connection with the May 2008 incident at the Corpus Christi airport. – Smoking Gun

Dominant Social Theme: Fairness is the least that can be expected.

Free-Market Analysis: A new feudalism is being born. It is a quite deliberate effort of the power elite in our view, but people don't notice it – or haven't verbalized it – because it is difficult to analyze something when one is in the middle of it. But the feudal evolution is surely occurring. We can see its signature in the article above but there are many other signs.

Feudalism's "flourishing" or time-span was between ninth and 15th century, apparently. It was not a formal system but a sociopolitical evolution of relationships between various power nexuses. Wikipedia describes feudalism as "a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs. There is also a broader definition, as described by Marc Bloch (1939), that includes not only warrior nobility but the peasantry bonds of manorialism, sometimes referred to as a ‘feudal society.'"

The evolution of the new feudalism can be seen in various ways, including the erosion of property rights for the middle class and the increasing molding of employment around the vast portfolios of the powers-that-be. (Lawyers and accountants are in high-demand.) The Western middle classes – especially in America where they have been the most vital – are under sustained attack. Taxes, inflation and unemployment are signatures of such a society, along with expansive regulations.

Of course the economic issues mentioned above have been features of Western regulatory democracies for some time. What is changing is the regulatory environment and people's attitudes towards its enforcement. Partially as a result of a bad economy, people are more willing to put up with a level of authoritarianism that would have disturbed them years ago. Ms. Murley is something of an exception, yet even here it is not her reaction that is so noteworthy as the attitude of those who harassed her. Here's some more from the article:

The 24-year-old Murley alleged that after being "singled out for extended search procedures," a TSA agent frisked her and "pulled Plaintiff's blouse completely down, exposing Plaintiff's breasts to everyone in the area." Her complaint noted that, "as would be expected," Murley was "extremely embarrassed and humiliated." Murley charged that TSA employees "joked and laughed about the incident for an extended period of time." After leaving the security line to be "consoled by an acquaintance who had brought her to the airport," Murley returned to the line, where a male TSA worker said that he had wished he was there when she first passed through. The employee, Murley recalled, added that "he would just have to watch the video."

There is a sense of entitlement, even arrogance, among TSA employees, or so it seems; and this is evidently and obviously shared by other government workers in the US, including law enforcement officials. There are endless reports in mainstream media of inappropriate use of tazers, and of outright shootings; the drug-war has been especially corrosive to American civil rights, encouraging government "takings" of private property without due process. Government service is increasingly glorified, if not rhetorically than through compensation. The average government worker apparently makes up to 50 percent more than the average individual in the private sector.

The inequities are increasingly obvious. Senior government officials contravene tax laws without penalty; central banks hand out trillions to favored financial firms and corporations; government secrecy is increasingly enshrined by judicial fiat along with the ever-expanding power of the US executive bench via authoritarian executive orders. As the inequities increase, so does the arrogance. Gradually a two-tier society is created.

At the center of the new feudalism, apparently, are the Anglosphere's great banking families and assorted appendages: major multinationals and even elements of church institutions. Beyond the core are lesser families and wealthy entrepreneurs, along with the corporate and government lieges that carry out the will of the central core. Still further down are government workers, soldiers, intelligence agents and others working within formal government institutions. In the private sector, lawyers, accountants and academic professors provide resources for the emergence of the new feudalism. Then, finally, there are the vassals ... everyone else.

The new feudalism is evidently to be worldwide; and the drive toward increased global governance is to be accompanied by eroding economic conditions, food insecurity and heightened authoritarianism. There is evidently and obviously a pattern in what is occurring; a level of planning seems evident and the implementation is ongoing. On the other hand, as we have pointed out, there has been a shock to the system: the Internet, the advent of which was unexpected. It has resulted in close scrutiny of the emergent new feudalism and may yet help ameliorate it.

Conclusion: The new feudalism is not being built openly but in secret; society is to be reorganized gradually and without any fanfare. But it is difficult to conduct a pan-social reconfiguration under the bright lights of electronic scrutiny. The Tea Party in America and the austerity riots in Europe are but two examples of the Internet's impact in our view. And just yesterday, protests flared in Tunisia, with much of the organizing apparently taking place on Facebook as occurred previously in Iran. Signs of the new feudalism are widespread; but because of the ‘Net, its imposition remains somewhat problematic.