Corporations Are Feudal Manifestations

[Hannah Bell]

Note: I don't post this because I necessarily agree with it, but I think it brings up some interesting points.


Contrary to propaganda, there’s nothing modernistic about corporations. On the contrary, they’re a carryover phenomenon from feudalism...And once capitalism reached its terminal stage starting in the 1970s, where the combination of Peak Oil and the terminally declining profit rate threatened to attenuate forms of economic domination completely, the corporation became the basic unit of class war, and the anti-social, anti-political, anti-sovereign form around which full feudalism is intended to be restored.

The corporation originally arose out of medieval guilds and the monopoly charter. This charter was also called a “searching and sealing patent”. It had nothing to do with production. The charter-holder, generally some royal crony, didn’t produce or do anything but merely took a cut of some production process, nominally for “certifying the quality” of the product...

The main goal of these medieval institutions and practices was always to restrain economic activity in the interest of the existing power structure. The goal was always monopoly and economic control by setting up rent extraction points. The first corporate innovation was pooled capital, first used for the Russia Company (chartered in 1553), although it wasn’t fully developed until some fifty years later, by the British East India Company. Limited liability followed soon after, at least as early as a 1662 Parliamentary grant to investors in the BEIC...

Today’s internal mercantilism seeks the same end. The difference is that the alien monarchical/corporate monopoly is nominally our own government and “our” corporations. But in fact the policy and aggression of a Walmart or a Wells Fargo is exactly the same as that of the British East India Company. The community is a colony to be exploited and drained of its wealth. Remember the axiom, which applies in spite of every lie about “investment”, “ratables”, or any other trickle-down fraud: No big corporation would enter a region unless it expected to take out more wealth, usually far more, than it put in. The role of government, starting with chartering the corporation in the first place, is to aid this internal colonization...

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/corporations-are-feudal-manifestations-1-of-2/

[Hannah Bell]

1. Corporatism Has Been A Neofeudal Coup (2 of 2)

One of the features of the Land Scandal has been the gutter sleaziness of the many of the bottom-feeder participants. According to Naked Capitalism, a lawsuit seeking class action status alleges that two leading mortgage service providers, Lending Processing Services and Prommis, in addition to all the usual crimes, also engaged in systematic fraudulent and illegal extraction of legal fees. The allegation is that when a mortgage mill retained by one of these service providers to do the legal work filed its fee request with the court, it would inflate the request and then kick back over two thirds to the service company. This is illegal fee-sharing and practicing law without a license.


In another post Yves ponders how robo-signing, another typical piece of sleaze, became such a universal practice. After discussing how rampant it was at the Stern mill in Florida, she discusses the example of Fairbanks, a servicer who got very big very fast by buying a laundry list of other servicers along with their mortgage lists...So according to this interpretation Fairbanks undertook a rampage of M&As which no one could conceivably argue served any constructive purpose, solely in order to get big fast. Then when it inevitably found itself having bought all these junk loans perilously high, it was driven by the logic of its own criminality to undertake massive robo-signing binges. This, along with the same practice at dark slimy mills like Stern, contributed to the practice achieving critical mass and becoming the industry standard.


These are just two normal, everyday crimes in the MBS biz. Relatively minor details, really, of the overarching kleptocratic mortgage system. Here we see a similar mode of organization at a larger scale: The way (in theory, certainly seldom in practice) each loan had to go through the steeplechase of originator -> sponsor -> depositor -> trust. This was in order to ensure bankruptcy remoteness. In other words, participants were intending to go bankrupt and leave plenty of debt and liability on the table, while the assets would be long gone. IBGYBG. I’ll Be Gone, You’ll Be Gone. That’s how it’s meant to be. The banks were simply engaging in a shell game.

What’s the common organizational feature here? The corporate form enables a criminal to launder a criminal act or debt exposure through a series of corporate entities to push it as far away from his person as possible. He is personally the criminal, he is personally the debtor. But the corporation was formed to immunize him from these responsibilities, even as it multiplies his individual rights.

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/corporatism-has-been-a-neofeudal-coup-2-of-2/#comments

[zeemike]

2. Well I think it is spot on.

And it should be noted that Jefferson worried about that very same thing.

[bemildred]

3. Yep.

"The main goal of these medieval institutions and practices was always to restrain economic activity in the interest of the existing power structure. The goal was always monopoly and economic control by setting up rent extraction points."

Cable TV and Cell phones, for example, and of course anything to do with "consumer debt".

[NashVegas]

4. The Most Obvious Example of New Feudalism Is Corporate-Controlled Agriculture

But don't tell that to people on the labor and middle management end of the bio-tech sector. They think they're saving the world ...