The New Feudalism
of the Republican Alliance

By Hank Edson

Chess Anyone?

Chess is a game that portrays the old power structures of feudal Europe and recognizes the alliance of different authoritarian interests that kept the people of society under the yoke of service to the elite.

The king and queen represent the economic oppression asserted through a monopoly on land ownership in an agrarian society.  The bishop represents the psychological manipulation exercised by the church.  And the knight represents institutionalized brutality.

To keep the pawns producing fortunes for their castles, the king and queen, the bishops and the knights worked in close cooperation just as the corporate monopolies of Big Business, the false prophets of the Religious Right, and the Neo-Conservative war-mongers do today. 

Let’s face it we are in an era of new feudalism.  The Republican Alliance of economic oppression, religious manipulation, and institutionalized brutality controls our government and we all work to make its elite leadership immensely, obscenely rich.

Democracy wasn’t supposed to come to this. 

Our founding patriots engineered our Constitution specifically to ensure that the people as a whole composed of equal individuals would always retain control over the government of society.  To achieve this goal, the drafters of the Constitution included numerous provisions to prevent an authoritarian alliance of an elite few represented by the king, bishop and knight from ever gaining the power to oppress the great many.

First, they sought to guard against the rise of king or emperor by dividing government among three co-equal branches and by providing “checks and balances” that would enable each branch of government to restrain the other two from abusing the power entrusted to them by the people.  They further divided power by adopting a federalist system that allocated some powers to the federal government, other powers to the state governments, and the rest of the power to the people.

Second, they sought to guard against the rise of religious manipulation and oppression by exiling religion from government activities.  This was accomplished through the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  The official religion of America was to be that every individual was to pursue his or her own understanding of religion and that no individual’s religion would be given the authority of law to control other people.  Churches could exist, but none would hold power in a nation of laws where the laws are not allowed to impose institutionalized religion. 

Third, our founding fathers sought to guard against the rise of institutionalized brutality of the military by guaranteeing the right of the people to bear their own arms with which to defend themselves and by placing the military under the divided control of the three government branches which would themselves be controlled by the voting public.

Our democracy was founded on the conviction that humanity was not defined in terms of one’s power over the powerless, whether through economic, psychological, or physical oppression.  We defied these types of authority and demonstrated that in reality the people, as a whole composed of equal pawns, had the power to toss the entire chess board and pursue happiness as we each saw fit.  We understood that authoritarian worldviews that justified the powerful and despised the powerless were irreconcilable with our belief that we the people are all created equal.

The Inter-Marriage of Royal Families

Some will, perhaps scoff, at the notion that corporate America now is king and our democracy as good as dead.  To be sure, the relationship between the old feudal order and the new one is too long and complex to deal with here.  But, let me focus on just one aspect of corporate America that supports my thesis and demonstrates that our failure to completely eradicate the old feudal virus has resulted in the evolution of a new more virulent strain which is now immune to the constitutional provisions engineered so long ago.

While we, the people, have done little to improve the sophistication of the technology our founding fathers gave us in the Constitution, those committed to an authoritarian concentration of wealth and power have been actively incorporating each new technological advance into their arsenal for undermining our democracy.

One way the wealthy elite engineer an economic advantage for themselves similar to that held by the old feudal nobility involves the use of interlocked corporate board rooms.   On the board of directors of each of the world’s largest corporations, at least one board member also serves on another board where another member serves on another board where another member serves on another board and so on until the vast majority of the world’s wealth is controlled by an interrelated clan in the same way that were the royal families of feudal Europe.[i] 

This arrangement creates a monopoly of corporate control which enables the elite precious few who hold executive offices and seats on corporate boards to impose an incredibly self-serving business model that further distances the elite from any responsibility to the rest of society.  Consider, for example, W.R. Howell who sits on Exxon’s board of directors.  Howell also serves on the board of Halliburton, Williams Companies, Pfizer and American Electronic Power.[ii] 

Exxon was the world’s largest and most profitable corporation in 2005.  Halliburton is the corporate platform for the most powerful Vice President in the history of the United States.  Williams Companies is a major player in the electricity market and a former co-conspirator of Enron in manipulating prices in the California energy market.  Pfizer is one of the world’s largest drug companies.   American Electronic Power is America’s largest generator of electricity.  One man sits on the corporate boards of all five of these huge economic powerhouses. 

Thus, not only do mega-mergers between the major players in almost every industry create a climate highly vulnerable to monopolistic forces completely hostile to the dynamics of a truly democratic and capitalist marketplace in which all players compete on a level playing field, but this network of overlapping board members adds yet a further dimension to the sophisticated dynamics of economic monopolies in our modern world. 

The most obvious aspect of this monopoly power is that the board members all take turns supporting completely insane, outrageously obscene compensation packages for their executives.  Since these board members have been or are mostly all executive officers in large corporations themselves, it is only a matter of time before the good turn they do to the CEO of the corporation on whose board they serve returns to them where they are CEOs receiving their own stratospheric compensation package from the board that oversees their corporation.  It is not a bargained for direct exchange of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,” but rather a culture which the elitists understand they must support in order to realize wealth and power not remotely possible under the self-regulation of the “invisible hand” of the competitive market place. 

Thus, for example, as head of Exxon’s compensation committee, our man Howell granted Exxon’s retiring CEO Lee Raymond, a retirement package in 2006 worth an estimated $398 million.  These modern feudal lords have created a culture in which all participants understand that free market economics are not the governing principle when it comes to CEO compensation.  Instead, the governing principle requires maintaining cooperation with the mythology of their own mightiness which they then use to justify spending hundreds of millions of their shareholder’s dollars upon each other’s salaries.  Without this false justification mythology, these salary expenditures clearly violate the board’s legal duty to serve and protect the best interests of the company’s shareholders.  Meanwhile, the same board directors pursue a take-no-prisoners business strategy that emphasizes the utter insignificance of the people that make up the nation.  It is a truly feudal mentality on a modern, technological and global scale.

Exxon

Exxon for example, still refuses to pay the $5.2 billion punitive damages award entered against it over eighteen years ago in a court of law for its responsibility for the Exxon Valdez oil spill that wreaked oozing, sticky death across the Alaskan coastline.  At the time of the spill, CEO Lee Raymond promised the people of Alaska, “We will make you whole again.”  This was a shameless lie.  Since he spoke those words, 6000 plaintiffs have died and to this day the multi-million dollar herring fish industry remains closed indefinitely.[iii]  Exxon made a record $36 billion in profits in 2005, the largest annual profit for any corporation ever.  The next year Exxon awarded a single human being, the already filthy rich CEO who promised to make the people of Alaska “whole again,” a $398 million golden parachute, but still it resists paying its legal obligations for the disaster it inflicted on tens of thousands of average Americans.[iv] 

All the while, Exxon was developing a mass production approach to the pursuit of limitless greed through a deliberate and malign disregard for the mass of humanity and the environment of the planet.  Specifically, from 1998 to 2005, Exxon gave 43 “advocacy organizations” $16 million to impede public awareness of the nearly unanimous warnings from the world’s scientific community that global warming is real and poses a serious threat to even the survival of humanity on our planet.[v]

Halliburton

Halliburton, of course, is famous because America’s most unpopular Vice President ever served as its CEO from 1995 to 2000.  Cheney’s control over our infamously incompetent president, as well as over the entire executive branch, is unprecedented in American history and his abuse of this power has led Americans to curse him daily for it.  Although Cheney denies a continuing professional relationship to Halliburton, through the first several years of his vice-presidency he continued to receive in excess of a million dollars annually in deferred compensation.  Furthermore, while Cheney might not have a “contractual” relationship with Halliburton any longer, he definitely maintains a mutually beneficial professional relationship with Halliburton in that they are both intimately involved in the same projects and share a common culture of elitist greed and absolute disdain for the welfare of the people.  The barons of the Republican Alliance’s modern feudalism are not restricted by dependency on contractual relationships; they have acquired the sophistication of other types of cooperation through which the relationships they publicly deny continue to thrive for mutual profit.

Halliburton was a minor player before its relationship with Dick Cheney.  Today it is one of the ten largest military contractors in the nation and has received government contracts not just in Iraq, but also to address the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and to build illegal immigrant detention centers for the government.  Like Exxon, Halliburton had a record year in 2005, posting $2.4 billion in net income.[vi]  Of course, neither the reconstruction in Iraq or New Orleans has been successful.  In Iraq, Halliburton has been subject to criminal investigations for overcharging the government billions of dollars and its former subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root Services, Inc., may have to pay the government back nearly half a billion dollars for charges prohibited by government contract. 

Halliburton was given the first no-bid reconstruction contract for Iraq even before congress approved the invasion.  Since the occupation of Iraq began, Halliburton has charged the U.S. government over $20 billion for its services, but over 10% of those charges, $2.4 billion (coincidentally) are, according to Congressman Henry Waxman, “unsupported” and “questioned” costs.[vii]  After bilking the American government of as much plunder as it could under the tenure of Dick Cheney, Halliburton recently announced it plans to relocate its headquarters to the nation of Dubai, a move some critics contend is intended to shield its chief executives from criminal prosecution in the U.S.  In short, Halliburton preys on the disaster wrought by a White House controlled by its former CEO, not just treating war, hurricanes, and the suffering tide of human migration as good for business, but cheating the American tax payer in the process.

Williams Companies and American Electric Power

As for Williams Companies, they were fined tens of millions of dollars for participating in the price manipulation schemes that bilked 36 million Americans collectively of $30 billion during the California energy crisis.[viii]   During the crisis, Bush and Cheney refused requests for a federal investigation.  Instead, they blamed Californians for not deregulating enough, all while maintaining a secret energy policy task force that involved face to face meetings with CEOs and other representatives of many of the companies later found to be engaging in price manipulation.[ix]  American Electric Power has likewise been forced to pay $81 million for manipulating prices in the natural gas market.[x]  The leaders of corporate America and its Republican Alliance are not principled proponents of free market capitalism as an expression of democratic values.  They are economic monopolists who seek to concentrate unlimited wealth and power among themselves and to use the leverage of that wealth and power to keep the people from threatening their control of government, the economy, and society.  These are authoritarians with no regard for the people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Pfizer

Finally, there is Pfizer, a company that has been plagued with scandal, the most shocking of which is based on allegations in a suit filed by the Nigerian government against Pfizer.  The suit alleges facts frighteningly similar to the plot of the best selling John LeCarré spy novel, The Constant Gardner.  Specifically, the Nigerian government accuses Pfizer of engaging in widespread testing of a new drug during a meningitis outbreak in that country without informing the patients that they were participating in an experiment using an unapproved drug, “Trovan.”  According to the complaint, 196 children died as a result of the testing and 37 others suffered various health complications including deafness, muteness, paralysis, brain damage, loss of sight and slurred speech.[xi]

Elsewhere, Pfizer’s misconduct includes alleged retaliated against AIDS patients in France, Spain and Germany who insisted on observing the rights of severely ill patients by denying all AIDS patients in those countries the opportunities to participate in studies of new drug trials.[xii]  In another scandal, Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in settlements related to its fraudulent promotion of unapproved treatments for its drug “Neurontrin.”[xiii]  Pfizer has also been accused of teaming up with Merko, a company with a history of consumer protection and antitrust violations, to use churches to promote a prescription drug card that will lock consumers into contractual terms that can be changed by the card company at any time.[xiv] 

Finally, a former Deputy Manager in Pfizer's finance department, Mr. Ashok S. Idnani, has recently come forward with allegations and supporting documentary evidence indicating that Pfizer hires detectives to pay bribes, uses corporate spies, engages in pretexting, bribes employees of competing drug companies to turn over to it confidential information, and uses other potentially illegal means of obtaining information for the company.  The evidence indicates that senior Pfizer executives in India and New York have authorized these activities and received large raises in compensation while doing so.[xv]

Let Them Eat Cake

All these stories are just a slice from the cake that feeds the interlocking boardrooms of Corporate America’s new feudal empire.  They represent the modern equivalent of a scene from Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities, on a much larger modern scale.  Describing an example of the oppression suffered by the peasantry under France's 18th century feudalist monarchy, Dickens writes:

The complaint had sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner….

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way.  At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged….

"Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!" said a ragged and submissive man, "it is a child."

"Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?"

"It is extraordinary to me," said he, "that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that."
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, "Dead!"[xvi]

The hard driving carriage has become the hard driving business conduct of corporate America.  The dead child is our democracy and the powerless victims the world-over of corporate America’s reckless disdain for humanity.

These stories of just five such corporations represent the participation of just one single link in the interlocking chain of royal corporate boardrooms.  Author and investment fund manager, John Harrington describes the interlocking corporate power structure ruling our modern world in bleak terms:  “There are probably only about two hundred thousand people across the globe that control our natural resources, wealth, and truly act as self-appointed kings (or Niccolo Machiavelli’s ‘princes’), preaching free enterprise while exercising authoritarian capitalism, feeding at the public trough, and privatizing everything that moves.”[xvii] 

The world is a giant authoritarian chess board on which we, the people, are being overrun by the Republican Alliance.  We need to update our Constitution with new ways to remove these more sophisticated new feudal powers from any role in the democratic government of our society.

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Copyright © Hank Edson 2007