Charles Hugh Smith – One of the themes I’ve been addressing since 2008 is the neocolonial-plantation structure of the U.S. economy. The old models of colonial exploitation that optimized plantations worked by cheap imported labor (or situated in peripheral nations with plenty of cheap labor) have, beneath the surface, been adapted to advanced capitalist democracies.
The adaptations have been so successful that not only do we not even recognize the Plantation structure–we love our servitude within it.
As noted yesterday, the current mode of production optimizes the commoditization of everything: computer chips, fish and chips, labor, expertise, everything.
This commoditization optimizes the Plantation Model of integrated production, global supply chains and distribution to global marketplaces, a hierarchical management focused on maximizing profits to send back to the owners, a ruthless focus on lowering costs via labor arbitrage (commoditize the work so it can be performed anywhere labor is cheaper/more desperate) and a fanatical desire to eliminate competition or fix prices via cartels to ensure high profits.
Global capital has optimized the Plantation Model in the form of global corporations. Wal-Mart is the quintessential example. Like a classic agricultural plantation, Wal-Mart enters a region with a diverse, employment-rich ecology of small businesses and supply chains of local and regional manufacturers and distributors, and it bulldozes the entire “forest” of businesses, suppliers and distributors with the irresistible blade of integrated global supply chains and “lower prices, always.”
Wal-Mart replaces the localized economy with a low-pay, highly efficient plantation economy in which the townpeople’s only choice is to work for Wal-Mart or scrape out a living feeding the Wal-Mart workers, doing their laundry, etc.–exactly as on a classic plantation.
Mark Patricks – During this past presidential election season, pundits and pollsters were tempted to draw a demographic picture of an average Donald Trump supporter and put them in a box that would be easy to categorize. The adjectives “poor,” “white,” “old,” “uneducated,” “rural” and “racist” tended to come up again and again.
Greg Hunter – Financial and geopolitical analyst Warren Pollock warns, “When I go swimming in the ocean, sometimes I have to duck under a wave. This wave may be too large to duck under, and I think that is what these large events are. I think we are seeing large events, the likes of which you and I haven’t seen, and haven’t been seen in generational memory. 80 years would be a generational memory. We haven’t seen what a world war looks like. We haven’t seen what a Great Depression looks like. We haven’t seen a political crisis. We haven’t seen total lawlessness, and these are all the things that are happening.”