The New German Anti-Semitism

companies have dedicated themselves to making the rich even richer.’ Photograph: Charles Krupa/AP
Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator tipped as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, has unveiled new plans for legislation aimed at reining in big corporations, redistributing wealth, and giving workers and local communities a bigger say.

Warren will introduce the bill dubbed the Accountable Capitalism Act on Wednesday. The proposal aims to alter a model she says has caused corporations to chase profits for shareholders to the detriment of workers.

Under the legislation, corporations with more than $1bn in annual revenue would be required to obtain a corporate charter from the federal government – and the document would mandate that companies not just consider the financial interests of shareholders.

Instead, businesses would have to consider all major corporate stakeholders – which could include workers, customers, and the cities and towns where those corporations operate.

Anyone who owns shares in the company could sue if they believed corporate directors were not meeting their obligations.

Employees at large corporations would be able to elect at least 40% of the board of directors. An estimated 3,500 public US companies and hundreds of other private companies would be covered by the mandates.

In an article announcing the bill, Warren said she was looking to reverse “a fundamental change in business practices” dating back three decades that made corporations beholden to the bottom line at the expense of better worker wages and local investment.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/15/elizabeth-warren-accountable-capitalism-act-richest-companies

Italian Fascism involved a corporatist political system in which the economy was collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at the national level.[37] This non-elected form of state officializing of every interest into the state was professed to reduce the marginalization of singular interests (as would allegedly happen by the unilateral end condition inherent in the democratic voting process). Corporatism would instead better recognize or "incorporate" every divergent interest into the state organically, according to its supporters, thus being the inspiration for their use of the term "totalitarian", perceivable to them as not meaning a coercive system but described distinctly as without coercion in the 1932 Doctrine of Fascism as thus:

When brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.[38]

[The state] is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual... Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State... Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers.[38]

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" ("everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state").

Three Pillars of Totalitarianism

"Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.”

There are three pillars of the totalitarian outlook. The first is its totalist agenda—the elimination of private space and the abandonment of the liberal idea that there should be limits to government authority. In its place, totalitarians insist that “the personal is political.” Since the hierarchy of oppression that inspires social justice warriors encompasses all social relationships between races and ethnicities, between men, women, and multiple politically correct genders, there is no area of social life that escapes political judgment and is protected from government intrusion. Already, in New York City—to take one municipality controlled by the political Left—there are 31 government designated genders, and fines for failing to recognize them.

The second pillar is the idea of the social construction of race, class, and gender. This anti-scientific idea that races and genders are socially created rather than biologically determined is already the unchallenged premise of virtually all academic courses relating to gender and race, and informs many of the planks of the official platform of the Democratic Party. Recognizing the role of biological factors in determining gender and race would require an adjustment to reality, whereas the goal of identity politics is revolutionary and “transformative.” Removing and/or suppressing the alleged creators of genders and races will make possible the social transformation whose goal is “social justice.” The alleged creators of genders and races are the designated villains of identity politics: patriarchal and racial oppressors (white supremacists) who employ these categories to marginalize, dehumanize and dominate vulnerable alleged victim groups.

The centrality of these victim groups is encapsulated in totalitarianism’s third pillar: objectification—the elimination of individual agency and accountability in favor of group identities and oppression status. This, of course, is the inevitable consequence of collectivist ideologies which make groups primary and remove from individuals their agencies as subjects. If there is inequality its source is an invisible hierarchy of oppression, never the inequalities and failures of individuals themselves. If homicide is the number one killer of young black males, whites must be responsible because whites allegedly control all the institutions and social structures that determine black outcomes—notwithstanding the fact that the same crime statistics plague municipalities run by blacks as those run by whites. What may go on in black communities to account for these and other appalling statistics—out of wedlock births, physical abuse by parents, drug trafficking, lax law enforcement policies instituted by liberal authorities—is rendered invisible by an ideology which regards race as the determining factor regardless of individual behaviors and failings. If women are “under-represented” in engineering positions at Google, this cannot be because of individual choices made by women—to think so is prima facie sexism—but must be the work of a patriarchal conspiracy, however invisible."

The third pillar, Objectification, is also relevant to the identity politics of the Alt-Right, a topic Horowitz does not address in his essay. It is important to see that both the Left and the Alt-Right share the pernicious "elimination of individual agency and accountability in favor of group identities." 'Objectification' is exactly the right word for the refusal on both the Left and the Alt-Right to view people as individuals, as persons, as subjects irreducible to their class or racial or sexual membership.

maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2018/02/how-identity-politics-is-made-to-destroy-us.html