Fjordman’s Course Correction

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


Fjordman notes in an email:

“I keep thinking I have been focusing too much on the Marxists, and forgot about Big Business and the corporate interests behind mass immigration to the West. They have the money, and money makes the world go around, after all. The problem is that they treat countries as if they are corporations, and people as if they are commodities. They want us to import people as if they were toys or cheap toasters made in China. But people are not commodities, and countries are not corporations. It is a concept of capitalism that I cannot approve of, of reducing man to nothing but a worker and a consumer, homo economicus:”

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To reinforce his course correction to take into account Homo Corporatus, Fjordman uses a snip from from The Vanishing American blog. Here, Jerome Corsi is explaining why Jed Babbin kicked him off the masthead of contributors at Human Events (online e-zine)

I also tried to explain to Babbin my view that right now, the Republican Party is controlled by what used to be called the “Rockefeller Wing.”

Like David Rockefeller himself, the Rockefeller Wing involves millionaires and billionaires who run multi-national corporations.

Rockefeller Wing Republicans are already beyond borders in their determination to advance their multinational corporations for unbridled profit, whether or not U.S. sovereignty and the middle class are destroyed in the process.

I have reflected that Howard Phillips was probably right when he urged Ronald Reagan to form his own, new political party.

I’m not sure the moral Christians belong in the same party with the Rockefeller Republicans.

At any rate, George W. Bush in his second term seems determined to destroy the Reagan coalition once and for all.

[...]

We would be better off without a Republican Party if having a Republican Party means sovereignty under this false banner of one-sided trade agreements that have nothing to do with legitimate “free trade.”

This quote Fjordman uses highlights very well the fractures and fissions within the Republican Party. The Dems have their own quite different problems, mostly concerned with how far they want to go in copying Europe’s and the EU’s socialist policies and anti-war attitudes. But the Republicans are equally fractured.

Both parties have to deal with the reality that many — if not a majority — of Americans have begun to toss off their party ties, preferring to be known as conservatives or liberals, even while chafing at the broad-stroke definitions that these labels imply.

I disagree with Corsi’s statement above, about “moral Christians” vis-à-vis the Republican Party. There are many “moral Christians” to the left of me, though they tend toward the socialist “social justice” issues that so attracted me in my liberal youth. Liberation theology, which caught on in South America, grew out of the culture shock many European and North American Catholic priests encountered in their work in South America. Surrounded by a comfortable (and what seemed universal) affluence, they were staggered by the soul-numbing poverty they encountered — and which they proceeded to attempt to live while they were there. The passion of those priests in the front lines of this conflict was, unfortunately, not founded on any real understanding of economics. At most, in their seminary studies, they are introduced to a distorted version of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

A more encompassing view of Christian economics can be found at The Acton Institute which was founded to study religion and liberty. From liberty, “justice” follows; it is not the other way ‘round. The Institute has been responsible for the spread of the ideas of both Lord Acton (“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) and of Frédéric Bastiat, a French Catholic economic philosopher who was much impressed by the deleterious effects of the Corn Laws on the English economy:

England (and other countries of Europe) suffered from protectionist trade policies in the first half of the nineteenth century. The British public was plundered by the mercantilist Corn Laws, which placed strict quotas on the importation of grain. By raising food prices, the laws benefited landowning political supporters of the government at the expense of consumers, especially the poor.

Bastiat’s work was interrupted by his early death, but his “Parable of the Broken Windows” is still used to illustrate the fallacy of some economic theories and to expose the problems of hidden costs. [Scroll down the link]

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I have wandered far afield from Fjordman’s original focus: the fact that large, multi-national corporations make bottom-line decisions that have world-wide repercussions. In his quote from Jerome Corsi, the important part for this discussion is this:
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Rockefeller Wing Republicans are already beyond borders in their determination to advance their multinational corporations for unbridled profit, whether or not U.S. sovereignty and the middle class are destroyed in the process.

Corsi has chosen to focus closely on the North American Union and for that he has suffered the wrath of Jed Babbin, the online editor of “Human Events”, who has indulged in some name-calling to make his point.. In fact, some of our commenters have taken Gates of Vienna to task for what they describe as a “myth.”

Fjordman has considered this topic in “Mexicans Welcome the North American Union.”

If you google the words “North American Union nothing but a conspiracy theory” (without the quote marks) you can find any number of skeptical reports on this issue, though the hits on this phrase also contain links to pages which say it is to be taken seriously and is a part of the large global corporations' plan to improve profits and efficiency for themselves at a cost of sovereignty for the U.S. and Canada. Mexico is in many ways a failed state, full of corruption and lack of accountability, not to mention restless rebels who do on-going damage and disruption to the oil pipelines in their country.

And there are many Mexicans anxious to incorporate parts of the southwestern United States into Mexico territory, a fact which complicates our illegal alien problem. It’s akin to the Muslim concept of the Ummah, only this takeover is called Aztlan.

Of course, anyone who believes in Aztlan’s plans or the NAU is dismissed as seeing “Commies under the bed.” That quote, repeated derisively by the Left in the U.S. in the 1950’s, actually turned out to be true. There were active Communist cells in this country. When Soviet Russia imploded, these Marxists worked their way over to the Greens, dragging their outmoded theories along. Meanwhile, “Commies under the bed” has been dumped down the oubliette where inconvenient pieces of Leftist history are relegated. It beats ever having to admit they were wrong.

Fjordman’s corncern is spot on. We can be so busy looking at one problem that we forget to take in the bigger picture. There has never been a point in history where being informed in so many areas was so crucial. Whether it’s the hijacked climate issues with their faux science and charlatans who stand to make big money from people’s fears of the invented catastrophes, or the erosion of sovereignty all over the world, or the grasping mechanisms so apparent in Big Business — including Big Oil and the economic stupidities of the current alternate energy “resources” — we are in for a long haul.

And in America there are no political parties who are competent enough to handle any of these issues. Our political class is lazy, uninformed, and rapacious. Last year our Imperial Congress worked a total of 103 days, even as they voted themselves another raise and more benefits. These people may be our worst enemies and yet we have nothing better to replace them. Real leaders with integrity are absent from the scene and we end up settling for what we see as the least odious choice.

Batten down the hatches. We’re in for a long, stormy journey.

Meanwhile, stock up on some real economic and political theory. You could begin with Thomas Sowell.