It's The Corporate Feudalism, Stupid
By nashville_brook

What the teabaggers need to understand: we're all serfs under the new feudalism their beloved leaders have created.

One thing I'd like to ask a teabagger: How are things where you work, these days? My work fucking sucks right now. Compared to 5, 10, 15 years ago, the stress level is off the charts. On the best days there's just a mopey resignation wafting about our cubicles. On bad days it's like we're all suicidal gerbils running for our lives in sharp, rusty wheels, terrified that we'll be the next rat kicked out of the cage.

We're exhausted and the positive reinforcements (raises, bonuses, vacations) that used to mitigate burnout are vague memories. And the kicker is, as much as work sucks it really sucks to be unemployed right now.

With every shitty day, I'm feeling less like a free person selling my labor on an open market, and more like a serf whose labor is coerced if not enforced de facto. No more carrots. Only sticks.

The New Serfdom
Serfs have no "right" to work. Instead we serve at the pleasure of our lords who bestow certain protections upon us (such as living in a house, and seeing a doctor). We enjoy these "protections" only for as long as we please our lords. There is no check on the power that's exercised in the workplace. You either suck it up or get the hell out. Often you suck up as much as possible, and you still get shit-canned. Fail to impress the wrong person at work and you face Depression-era hardships that may include homelessness, and without insurance, dying from readily curable diseases. If there's a better description of the Shock Doctrine I'd like to hear it.

The economic crisis was engineered by the lords of finance who gamed our corrupt system with transactions opaque enough to hide their looting, and the fallout from this has changed the nature of employment. There's no "free market" of labor anymore. We used to have the illusion of a free market during the dot-com bubble when you could quit your job on Tuesday and have a couple of better offers by Thursday. When there's no option other than the grave conditions at your current workplace, then you don't have a choice -- your labor is coerced, and you'll accept longer hours and less pay because there's no alternative. I believe this is fueling much of the rank-and-file teabagger anger. And it's pissing me off too.

Corporate Klepto-Feudalism
Imagine you're a new feudal lord. How valuable do you think our serfdom is? They're balancing their books on our desperation and declining salaries because they know our fealty and productivity are proportional to our level of insecurity. Things aren't going to improve for us without a fight, and right now, the only people riled up are bruising for the wrong side. The elite haven't seen this kind of power since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In a declining economy, our enslavement is jealously guarded with obscene amounts of money thrown at swarms of lawyers and lobbyists...and teabaggers themselves.

So, this is modern feudalism: the tyranny of the quarterly report. The nihilism of free-for-all capitalism has finally trickled down to your cubicle like you always knew it would. Those 29 miners died because their feudal lord was long ago awarded his own Divine Right of Kings by the kleptocracy that protects only those who pay. The judges, lawmakers and regulators whose job it was to keep those miners alive are still more interested in begging for crumbs from Massey's table, and kissing his ring than they are in doing their stated job, which is supposed to be looking after us, their constituents, and the engine of the economy. Massey can do no wrong because lords are not subject to earthly laws, that's what the Divine Right of Kings means. Ironically, this was the fundamental outrage of the original tea party: pushback against King George's divine right to our wealth and labor.

It's tragic that instead of standing up to the real villains, the tea baggers have been co-opted by the very powers at the core of their grievance. But the truth is, they'll only get coverage on FOX News as long as they're doing the bidding of their feudal lords. The second they realize they've been had, there won't be a TV camera in sight. They'll be as invisible as the war protesters and environmental activists. Which is to say, they'll no longer have the King's purse behind them.

And that's when things might get interesting.

I have not been participating in my own blog for a while, as I have been particularly unsettled by recent events. I have not been sure how I feel about it all, so I've been quietly waiting for something to gel. So far, no luck with that...

I watched HCR pass, with some trepidation. Sure, it represents reform - but I am not certain it will actually be reform, since so many of the things necessary for true reform were negotiated away to Republicans in pursuit of a mystical bipartisan compromise...that never materialized.

I watched as Scott Brown tore the Democrats a new one, and watched Ted Dutch do the same to Republicans. What it all means, I do not know. Are we stuck in some Dickensian nightmare of forever repeating ourselves to the beat of an unheard drum? Have our politics become tribally ritualized, meaningless beyond our raised hackles?

Sigh.

Much of what we are doing to ourselves is so senseless, so meaningless, so self-destructive. The same players, the same dance, the same story, over and over and over and over and over again. It is boring the shit out of me...

For a "Christian" nation, we sure don't seem to be trying very hard to reflect the ideals supposedly represented by Christianity. I am stunned by the Tea Party movement - it's obvious racial overtones, it's propensity for political violence, it's sheer ignorance - I find it astounding that people in this country fail to see the contradiction present between the Tea Party and the Tea Party's loudly proclaimed Christianity.

And so here we sit, collectively spinning our wheels, jealously protecting our personal self-interests, full of anger and righteousness, and a complete lack of direction for any of it. I must ask you, dear and occasional reader - where do you think all of this is leading us?

Okay, you anti-government, anti-socialism nuts. Let's do it your way. Let's get rid of government, let's get rid of any program, good, or service that even hints at socialism - and THEN you'll be happy. Right?

So, in the brave new world you anti-everything types are intent on building for us, tell me - how do we cover these things, that are currently being handled by government, with the financial support (socialism) of all of us collectively:

Air Traffic Control
National Weather Service
Water and Sewer
National Institutes of Health
Center for Disease Control
Social Security
Medicare
Medicaid
Unemployment Insurance
Fire
Police
FDA
USDA
DOT
The VA Hospital
The Post Office
Prisons
Parks (national and local)
Beaches (national and local)
Libraries
Road, Streets, Highways, Byways, Freeways
Schools
The U.S. Military

Do we just do away with all of these evil, socialized things? Our society can do without them, is that it?

Because I have to say - your brand of American life WITHOUT these things, seems a lot more like anarchy, than the Democracy you claim to love.