China Invented The Perfect Tool To Kill Democracy And Corporate America Is Bringing It Here

[marmar]

Coming soon to a country near you: The Chinese government, working closely with giant corporations, have finally figured out how to completely enslave its people to the State. They’re going to turn “patriotism” into a game and all of its citizens into game players. Yeah, it sounds silly but what if your “score” was your credit score? And the more “patriotic” you are, the higher your credit score gets?

You’ve seen the endless Credit Karma commercials, right? They talk about your credit score and how having a low one can hurt you while a high one can get you a great deal on car and house loans? Now imagine that your credit score was determined not just by how much debt you have but also by what kind of articles you post on Facebook?

What if posting pro-Wall Street articles boosted your credit score? Or maybe pro-tax cut articles? Pro-life? Pro-cop? Pro-government? Would you do it?

And what if posting anti-Wall Street articles made it harder to get a loan? Or pro-choice? Or pro-democracy? What if following liberal websites made your credit card interest rates go up? Would you keep doing it? .....................(more)

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/12/22/china-invented-the-perfect-tool-to-kill-democracy-and-corporate-america-is-bringing-it-here-video/

[BlueJazz]

1. Ah..it's about time. You stinking-ass, unpatriotic Liberals are destroying this fine country.

If it wasn't for the banks, we'd be a third-world country like Sweden.

[TheBlackAdder]

2. Facebook - I stay off that data miner. That 'free' service is a crack addicting set-up. nt

[Karmadillo]

3. But will it kill our inverted totalitarianism?

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/02/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism

Monday, November 02, 2015
Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism
byChris Hedges

Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” and “Politics and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.”

Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive—even distinctively American—analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”

Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy Incorporated,” details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.

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