The only thing we have to fear...

Is government itself. 

In the wake of the horrendous Nice killings, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were quick to pounce on the event in order to further their police state agendas by instilling the populace with the fear of an ever present, undetectable “terrorist threat” — in short by peddling ghosts. 

In the immediate aftermath of the horror, there were virtually no details about the assailant.  Before it was even known that he was a “French-Tunisian,”  Obama declaimed, “I condemn in the strongest terms what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack in Nice,”  

On what basis did it “appear to be”?  Given the U.S.’s experience with gun-toting lunatics, an American must certainly know that not every mass-killer is a “terrorist.” 

A tad more nuanced was Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May who said, “If, as we fear, this was a terrorist attack we must redouble our efforts [against] those who seek to destroy our way of life.”  May added, that “a terrorist attack on the UK is highly likely.”

A terrorist attack on the U.K. might be likely, but the present issue was whether the incident in Nice could be taken to be an indicator of that likelihood. May’s statement put two fruits on the table (voilá!) but failed to explain any connection between them. 

Similarly, France’s president, François Hollande spoke of the attack as having a “terrorist character” before going on to declaim against “terrorism” while extending the state of emergency that had been about to expire.  In speaking this way, Hollande engaged in pure sophistry.  His statement ought not to have fooled anyone but it certainly fooled the press whose character appears more and more to be that of terrified geese.

In the days following the incident, press and politicians (who are now merely manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon), sought to make up the evidentiary deficit with almost vaudevillian tabloid slurs.

The assailant was a “loner” with a “history of violence” who “allegedly beat his wife” and whose apartment contained fake weapons and “more documents.”

"He is a terrorist, probably linked to radical Islam one way or another,"  Prime minister Valls told France 2 television. “Yes, it is a terrorist act and we shall see what links there are with terrorist organizations."

Did anyone think to ask how Vals could say it was a terrorist act without there being any known links to terrorist organizations?

Evidently not.  Instead, the press decried the “failure” of the  French Security Forces.  The New York Daily News stating that “The fact he was not on the watch list will be of grave concern as an investigation into last year’s Paris attacks identified multiple failings by France’s intelligence agencies.

A watch list for what?  A watch list for spousal discord, relabeled “marital terrorism”?

Inspector Clouseau notwithstanding,  Securité is not a bunch of incompetents.  The fact that they didn’t detect any “links” even though he was known to police indicates not a failure of investigation but rather the absence of links.

As of July 16th “authorities have not found links to terror groups or evidence of radicalisation.”  That did not give any pause to Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, who pronounced that the killer most certainly was « radicalisé très rapidement »  

Indeed!  He was suddenly radicalized just moments before the attack.  This sort of thing happens, you know.

What is truly choice is that Cazeneuve can’t cite any evidence that Bouhlel was in anyway interested in Islam or ISIS or Middle east politics.  It cannot even be argued that “radical islamic propaganda” was festering and steaming in his brain until suddenly it reached a critical mass in his consciousness causing him to mow down bystanders in a instantaneous murderous “epiphany”

What is known is that he was was a petty criminal who drank alcohol, ate pork, took drugs  and never attended the small mosque near his block of flats. He was something of a cunt hound and was rumoured to have beat his wife.  He got kicked out the house and fell into depression for which he was taken to a psychiatrist by his father.   His actual criminal record consisted of petty theft and a road rage battery when he slammed another driver with an “improvised weapon” — i.e. one of the wooden pallets he has in the back of his truck.

 
The simple facts are that modern society engenders a great deal of alienation and at the same time furnishes a wide spectrum of lethal instrumentalities for misuse.  This incident had everything to do with societal dysfunction and nothing to do with terrorism.

Of course, ISIS is always there to rescue Western politicians from their hysterical inanity. According to the UK Guardian, “ In an online statement through news agency Amaq, it described the attackers [sic] as one of its “soldiers” carrying out the “operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State”

The only thing this statement proved is that ISIS is quick to seize any opportunity to puff up its strength and advance its agenda of fear.

 
What is dismal is that Western politicians have the same agenda.  ISIS wants to fan the flames of fear and Western governments want to use those flames to tighten their police grip on society.   We’ve seen, before, the symbiotic relationship between subversives, anarchists, disaffected loners and the apparatus of the state.

Manuel Vals has been on our shit-list ever since he called for a "total war" against terrorism in January of this year.    Beware the Ides, when politicians start sounding like Goebbels


Post Script (18 July 2016)

French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, admitted to day that links between the Nice killer and ISIS  have "yet to be established."  

Meanwhile, attending a memorial ceremony in Nice, prime minister Manuel Vals was roundly and loudly booed for minutes on end.   The gist of the disapproval was that Vals and his government were "incompetents."  

He got what he bargained for.  Had he not been cynically pumping this incident up as an act of terrorism he would not have been booed, because no one would hold the government responsible for failing to detect the act of a lone, nutcase, who could hardly be expected to be on Securité's radar.



©

Monsanto's Niebelung

Obama is in the United Kingdom pushing the idea that he is tickled pink by Little Prince George and that Britain’s exit from the European Common Market would be a disaster

A disaster to what?  Well... “it could be” — he says —five to ten years before Britain could negotiate its own trade deal apart from any trade deal with the Common Market.

The trade deal Obama has in mind is the TTIP  the Atlantic version of the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Obama’s tinsel tongue pushes both trade deals as a win win situation in which everyone trades even more furiously than they do now and everyone makes money, money, money. Good, good, good. Happy, happy, happy.

Obama lies. There is already plenty of trade between the United States, Europe and Asia. When Obama says that the trade deals will open up “market access” what he means is that various regional or national laws concerning the environment, health, safety and labor conditions will be swept away making it easier for predatory corporations to sell their goods.

To give a simple example. In order to protect the bee population and its own citizens from cancer, the E.U. passes a law forbidding the sale of products produced with Roundup. As a result, ecocidal Monsanto-Wheat cannot be sold in Europe.  The TTIP “frees up” trade by trashing Europe’s health and environmental regulations.

Not only does the TTIP do away with the regulation, to make sure Monsanto gets to peddle its poison, the treaty would also do away with citizen’s rights to challenge regulations in European courts.  The treaty will restrict judicial and legislative action and transfer actual judicial and ministerial governance to secret, corporate-run “arbitration” boards which would be more aptly called Corporate Courts & Councils.

It was recently pointed out by Robert Reich that neither of the trade treaties have anything to do with actual trade.   As a point of detail, Reich is right. But he misses the overall picture.  The trade deals are the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of liberalism.

The word “liberal” was invoked by the bourgeois revolutionists of the 18th and 19th centuries because the essence of their advocated political-economy was to “free up” trade from so-called “feudal encumbrances.”  Of course feudal encumbrances was just a popular whipping goat. What really irked the capitalist class was a wide range of customs, laws, policies that subordinated the act of acquisition and money making to “higher” civic, moral and national goals.  Let trade proceed unrestrained governed only by the invisible hand of what the market will bear!  So what if children haul coal for pence a day, exchange value is the unum bonum. 

No State shall...pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts

By the end of the 19th century even the most politically conservative realized that this trumpeting of moneyed egotism was an anti-social dead end.  Under various names and guises anti-liberal programmes of “regulating” the economy once again came into vogue.

With regard to civil authority, Leo XIII (1891), boldly breaking through the confines imposed by Liberalism, fearlessly taught that government must not be thought a mere guardian of law and of good order, but rather must put forth every effort so that "through the entire scheme of laws and institutions . . . both public and individual well-being may develop spontaneously out of the very structure and administration of the State." Just freedom of action must, of course, be left both to individual citizens and to families, yet only on condition that the common good be preserved and wrong to any individual be abolished. The function of the rulers of the State, moreover, is to watch over the community and its parts; but in protecting private individuals in their rights, chief consideration ought to be given to the weak and the poor. "For the nation, as it were, of the rich is guarded by its own defenses and is in less need of governmental protection, whereas the suffering multitude, without the means to protect itself relies especially on the protection of the State. Wherefore, since wageworkers are numbered among the great mass of the needy, the State must include them under its special care and foresight." -- Pope Pius XI, Quadressimo Anno  (1931)

What was realized was that the “right of contract” did not enshrine arms-length equality but, on the contrary, enforced gradually increasing inequality. If in any given exchange one party got the benefit of the bargain, the other must necessarily bear its loss.  On the second exchange those two parties are no longer negotiating from positions of equality but from legally enshrined positions of inequality, so that

To he who hath more shall be given; to he who hath not even that which he hath shall be taken away.

What made the hand invisible was that the inequality inherent capitalist accumulation was often shifted, displaced, hidden or simply bullshitted away from particularized view.  Many small exchanges are indeed barters where one useful item is traded for another. Even where money is used as a medium the completion of an exchange of useful items is merely deferred.  But money does not grow on trees.  Where the objective of the transaction is to make a profit, not simply to exchange things of particular use, the increased value acquired simply cannot come from an exchange of equal values.  Some party has to bear a decreased return.

The vicious canard of capitalism is that “freedom of contract” almost eo instante translates into “servitude of obligation.”  The happy bonhomie at loan signing quickly turns into snarling shylockery  when a payment is missed.    This was in fact well understood which is why the cited constitutional provision and similar provisions in various civil codes are phrased not in terms of "freedom" but of "obligation."

Neo-liberalism takes the game further.  Contractual rights no longer mean the right to insist upon the payment of an obligation, but rather the right to exact an annualized or expected profit.  This is what the law of patents and copyright have  turned into.  A supposedly civil society, inter pares, has been turned into a scrambling mass of debtors, renters, licensees, beholden to algorithms for their daily needs.   This is what the CEO of Nestlé means when he says, “there is no right to public water.”

Obama’s vaunted trade deals turn the Rule of Nestlé into global law.  Free trade means your right to be obligated in perpetuity.   The provisions of the trade treaties have been kept secret and their enactment has been fast tracked because what they actually do is establish global corporate economic despotism.  Rule by the same “folks” (an Obambi-word) that have brought you fracking, deforestation, desertification, polluted waters, global warming, mass-extinction, animal torture and cruelty, dis-employment, sub-subsistence wages,  guaranteed life-time debt-servitude, child labor, medical bankruptcy, and, in general, the dystopian hell that lies on the horizon.
 
And like a pedo-predator sweet talking a little child, Obama has the cunning and gall to tell young folks to “be optimistic.”

©WCG, 2016

Perimeters

WaPo:  Brussel’s Bombings Bring New Security Measures!

"Neffenger said local law enforcement officers also may conduct random checks of cars and taxis driving toward the airport, a practice already in place at the Los Angeles airport.

“You have to get away from thinking about a perimeter,” he said. “I’m much more interested in thinking about the security environment that is essentially from the moment that you make a reservation to the moment you physically arrive at the airport.” 

"[Is it time to set up checkpoints outside airports?]

 Fifteen years ago, one day after 9/11, the Chipsters wrote:

"In all events, this war against terrorism on which we embark today, like the war on drugs on which we embarked years ago, cannot be won. Today our politicians in all but chorus denounce the “heinous assault against civilization and freedom;” but just you wait, tomorrow they will palaver about the required “sacrifices” and “tools” needed to defend our homes and loved ones. What sacrifices? What tools? None other than the loss of the liberty supposedly defended.

"This war is nothing that can be won with a handful of battles. On the contrary, it presupposes a continuous engagement. And who is the enemy? All Arabs? No.... not all.... The American militias? Perhaps, but not always. The Irish? At times. The Basque?  Could be. What the Government will have to presume is that everyone is at least a potential terrorist. In the most fundamental sense that is a presumption that is entirely antithetical to the concept of civil friendship, i.e., societas.

"In present day England they have already mounted cameras on every corner in the country in order, it is said, to defend against IRA terrorism. But what this entails is that every movement anyone makes in public is made under the all seeing eye of the Command and Control Center

"Such things are but the visible manifestation of what is in actuality a policio-military apparatus of espionage and control that is gradually being erected over us. Bit by bit, the denizens of this country have been led to accept incremental police measures, soothingly reassured at each step that -- the police being husbands and fathers themselves -- these powers will not be abused. Bit by bit, fear has been insinuated between government and the governed and, ultimately, between citizens and neighbors themselves. And, as always, fear goes shadowed with intolerance and hatred of anything different or unusual.

"The most stupid thing about this new “war” is that the security it purports to achieve cannot be attained.   The problem presented by so-called terrorism is not the criminality of the act but the criminal status of the actor.  The difference between “lawful war” and “unlawful terrorism” is not that the former is in actual fact less terrorist, but that it occurs within a larger context of regularity and stability.  The unofficial terrorist, on the other hand, is like the ordinary criminal who, precisely because he is a nobody, has nothing to loose and is nowhere to be found.

"To declare war against an unseen, amorphous, invisible enemy who is given no option other than implacable hate, is a gross stupidity which can only be explained by this country’s overweening arrogance and self-righteousness. For that pride the Devil will have to be paid."

-o0o-

Elsewhere at the time, the Chipsters pointed out that every wall has two sides.  If people are kept  out; others are kept in.   Duh.  Neffenger is wrong.   The concept of "perimeter" still exists; it is what used to be known as the borders of a country.  All else in between is what is known as a prison.

Scurry little mice, scurry.  The Devil demands his due.

©WCG, 2016

Chicken Feed & Moralizing Hypocrisy

NEW YORK TIMES  DECLARES WAR  ON BERNIE

No sooner was Hillary’s loss a done failure in New Hampshire, than the New York Times fired a broadside at Bernie.

In a front page Op-Ed, Marc Schmitt of the “New America” foundation declared that the era of expansive liberalism was over; the future belonged to invisible incrementalism. 

“The essence of Mr. Sanders’s version of liberalism is government programs. Expansive initiatives that provide benefits to a broad cross-class constituency,...

“That’s in sharp contrast to the policy approach of the Obama administration since about 2011, and also to Hillary Clinton and most of Mr. Sanders’s congressional colleagues...

“[T]he future of social and economic policy will involve, for better or worse, these complex, incremental and often invisible changes, instead of big programs.”

If one substitutes the word “chicken-feed” for “incrementalism” you know all you need to know about Hillary’s “progressivity” and the Times’ left-over centrism. 

Schmitt’s piece cannot be considered a “guest column” printed — on the front page — as “diversity of view.”  The New America foundation is headed by Anne-Marie Slaughter a political intimate of Hillary Clinton whom the Times has endorsed for president.  Schmitt’s piece is a Times broadside in alter voce and represents what the Times thinks is bad about Sanders and good about Clinton.

Feel the Invisibility

One might wonder exactly what “often invisible” changes might be.  Does the author of this assertive piece mean  “You’re feeling better, you just don’t feel it.” ?

Actually, yes. He goes on to say, “Citizens don’t see or feel these initiatives and may not know that they are benefiting from a government initiative at all.”

Not only do they not feel the benefits, the benefits might actually not exist! 

As an example of invisible incrementality, Schmitt cites an obscure regulatory tweak which will “set millions of Americans up with low risk, low-cost retirement savings accounts.”  Five paragraphs later, Schmitt acknowledges that the tweak will “not be enough to meet the shortfall in Americans’ retirement savings or reduce inequality of wealth.”

Rejoice!  Not only will you not feel the invisible benefit, you won’t be benefitted at all!  You will be incrementally less screwed.

Think tanks are the modern version of feudal vassals or roman clientela.   All three are made up of interlocking (and often inter-marrying) networks  of  patronage existing through  complex social bonds in service of agreed upon socio-economic-military interests as symbolized in some grand personage.   Roman clients were expected to attend, applaud and make  hubbub about and for their patrons, including  a display of Fumbling the Scrolls (Oh how many scrolls!) in the great man’s wake.   

In the present case, the New York Times is simply orchestrating the parade.  What it and Hillary’s coterie have decided is that, for better or worse, the incremental benefits will be so eensy teensy weensy, you won’t even notice them!  Hurrah for “common sense” programs.  Phooey on big, broad, gauche liberalism!

But the Times did not only have Bernie in its sights.  It was taking aim just as much at Theodore Roosevelt who, back in 1910, pronounced,

“Where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government...

“The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock."

Contrast,  the New York/New America Times Op-Ed,

"[Hillary’s] agendas are most interesting and novel for the absence of big, universal programs that require legislative action. Instead, they test the limits of what government can do by rearranging the pieces of existing programs, using regulations, incentives to states, tax credits and “nudges” informed by behavioral economics in place of direct spending."

“Most interesting?”  Certainly not “novel.”  What the Times is advocating — and what it makes abundantly clear that Hillary is trumpeting — is a return to what did not work under Wilson or Hoover. 

“Nudges  informed by behavioral economics”?  What the hell is that?  It’s Hooverian “volunteerism” dressed up in millenial-speak; for the difference between Hoover and Roosevelt was not that Hoover did nothing, but that he refrained from “broad-based” mandatory national programs to address a national crisis.   

Hillary’s ghosted Op-Ed is also hard nudge advocacy for Justice Rhenquist’s “New Federalism” — the core of which was his engineered devolution of power to the "laboratory of the states"  (quoth) as testers and tinkerers’ of social fixes. 

A fuller-bore reaction could hardly be imagined. Rehnquist’s New Federalism might better have been called the New Feudalism, because the States were holdovers from the pre-monarchical era.  No — I am not making this up.  The Andrus Plan of 1688 had sought to consolidate the colonies into a single Dominion in common; but the Colonies (that is the Chief Families in them) revolted at the prospect of loosing their manorial privileges, including some rather peculiar ones.

It is hardly unfettered imagination to imagine Rehnquist slurring and salivating at how the States were best suited to “test” and incrementally  “experiment” with social issues such as Negro slavery.

After writing a clerk’s memo against desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) — (“I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by "liberal" colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.") —  Rehnquist went back to Arizona were he became national campaign manager for Barry Goldwater...   Hillary Clinton’s own youthful hero.

To ramble on in this vein may seem like a digression, but it is actually not.  It helps to put things in historical context because the Times hopes you wont.  

It supported Clinton (II) because he “refashioned the Democratic Party’s approach to government”  He “stood up to the spendthrifts in his own party”  He “bucked the democratic leadership to secure the free trade agreement”   In the same breath, without a blush, it lauded Clinton’s “promise” to ease “unfair attacks on the poor and legal immigrants.”

It supported Mondale noting that, “He has laudably continued the deregulation begun by Jimmy Carter.” 

It endorsed McGovern, Humphrey, Johnson and Kennedy because Goldwater was a loose cowboy and because the Times bore a deep (and mutual) animosity against Nixon on account of the latter’s anti-semitism and hopelessly pathetic, back water petite bourgeois background.

But this apparent liberalism was only “situational” like the occasional lapse at a truck stop. More true to form it  endorsed Eisenhower twice, Thomas Dewey twice and Wendell Wilkie over FDR.

In 1936   the editorial board pronounced, “The New York Times, a conservative newspaper in its own sphere, believes that the public interest will best be served” by the reelection of Roosevelt because the president will “make his second Adminstration more conservative than the first”  and his reelection will provide insurance against radicalism of the sort which the United States [i.e. its ruling class] has most to fear.”

1933 endorsed FDR because “his speeches have not [sic] indicated clear and strong and burning convictions.... Imagine what would have been done by such a man as William J. Bryan...!” 

In 1912 it endorsed Wilson first, Taft second... any one but Roosevelt third.  “It would be an ill omen and ... want of sense if so large a part of the people should yield to the appeals of Mr. Roosevelt.

This sketch of the Times’ editorial trajectory indicates what a fundamentally conservative paper the Times actually is.   It may espouse socially symbolic “liberal” causes on behalf of “cognized groups” but it reacts with horror and disparagement at any “broad based” programs aimed at ending the economic alienation of the working class.

Let us be clear.  The fundamental injustice of the U.S. political economy is that it alienates the worker from the fruits of his own productivity.  He produces economic value (“profit”) but it accrues to others rather than himself. To make matters worse he is economically oppressed by a variety of taxes, fees and other transfers of wealth labelled as “cost of living.”  His work itself is alienated from his own free will.  It is not an expression of anything he wants or of any collaboration among self-owning men; rather he is simply a unit of labour (a “human resource”) in someone else’s scheme. The American worker is “free” to travel where he wants, to tune in the channel where he wants, to sing the hymns and buy the junk he wants; but he is in all fundamental respects a slave and a serf.  

Neither Bernie Sanders nor LBJ nor either of the two Roosevelts proposed to fundamentally alter this system. They wanted some broad and pervasive adjustments that would render it less unjust; return some greater quantum of value to the worker who produced it; spread the costs and ease the burden of overall living expenses; provide the worker with economic security and social leisure if not actually determinative political power.

It is this adjustment which the Times disparages today and has always disparaged as “radicalism.”   What it toots as “incrementalism” is simply code for the least redistribution of anything the ruling class can get away with.

The genocidal vileness of the Times’ invisible incrementalism is best illustrated in relation to climate change.  Exactly what degree of imperceptible incremental reductions in global warming does the Times have in mind?  Something small enough not to be noticed at all?

What kind of insanity is this?

Oh but surely when the Times decries “broad brush liberal” approaches it doesn’t have global warming in mind.  Oh but surely it does, because “broad brush” reductions in global warming are absolutely not possible without predicate broad-brush reforms to the industrial-financial system which produces global warming.

One of the key ingredients of Clintonian Triangulation, is what might be called “issue alienation” — disconnecting the necessary relationships between various aspects of an underlying problem. 

In fact “issue alienation” is the key feature of so-called U.S. “liberalism.”  It is what enables a creeps like the Clintons to pretend to be all in favor of Black empowerment or women’s rights or Our Precious Children even while they work to end welfare, curtail unions and undercut the laws and programs which would give people — including Blacks, women and children — real security and real opportunity. 

In tandem,  issue-alienation allows the Clintons — and their toney clarions in the Times (or is it the reverse?) — to erect a moralistic Potemkin Village of cognized group chicken feed (“entitlements”) and pleasant but largely symbolic measures which hide the political disenfranchisement and economic impoverishment they actually -- and broadly -- promote.

As if matters could not be more nauseating than they are, one need only recall that there was nothing “incremental” about NAFTA or the TPP or the 2009 bank bailout.  When it comes to safeguarding the core interests of American Capital, Blue Dog Democrats and the Times get as non-incremental and broad based as necessary.

To niggardly stinginess one can add grotesque hypocrisy. That is what the Times and Hillary stand for.

   

©

Benie Concedes

Allowing Clinton to label herself a "progressive" (because she believed in progress) and conceding that Obama was also a progressive, Bernie all but conceded the nomination.  By failing to distinguish himself and define his cause as something other than what Obama and Clinton have offered, Bernie undercut the raison d'etre of his vaunted "political revolution."

As explained in Chipster's Journal,  the word "progressive" has a defined meaning in U.S. political history.  It includes nice and decent things like raising standards of living, conservation, and so on.  More importantly, however, progressivism was and remains a rejection of Jefferson individualism and its political correlative of State Sovereignty.  It stands for a concept of government as the custodian of common resources and socio-economic welfare with powers to regulate the use as well as the distribution of wealth.   

If Bernie's "democratic socialism" did not mean this it meant nothing.  Clinton and Obama are not progressives but globalist neo-liberals (to say nothing of warmongering).  Bernie was not obligated to delve into the arcana of political philosophy  -- arcana that are beyond the mental capacities of most U.S. denizens in any event.   But it was incumbent on him to draw a line between himself and his opponents and to assert, at the very least, that while Obama and Clinton might like to think of themselves as "progressives" they have both utterly failed at enacting anything on par with either Roosevelt.

©

And from Versailles....

Asked the other day, why she ate cake while the people in Paris starved, l'Antoinette replied, "Well, that's what they served."

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Hillary's Inner Goldwater

Recoiling from her victory in Iowa, Hellary Clinton lashed out at Bernie Sanders saying,

“Our founders knew if we were going to survive as the great democracy they were creating we would have to have a system that kept the passions at bay ...”

Oh! the progressivity!  What “the Founders" knew is that if they were to survive as a ruling class they had to keep the populace at bay. Anyone who has gone to law school or studied U.S. political history must know that the Federalist Convention of 1788 was a pre-emptive counter-coup by the conservative elements who feared those populist, democratic movements they called "mobocracy."

There were a several factors which impelled the newly sovereign states toward a “more perfect union.” Among them,  intra-state jealousy which made the newly minted “republics” susceptible to being played off against one another by some foreign power. Settlement of claims and access to credit was another.  But the chief concern was democratic radicalism among single family farmers, indentured servants and a growing number of young, illiterate under-employed hired hands.  

James Madison put it succinctly in Federalist Paper 10, in which he famously discussed the inflamed passions of political factions,

"But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

Madison went on to say that while “the causes of faction cannot be removed, ... relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.” 

Controlling the “effects” of the lower classes was  the principal purpose of the “more perfect union.”

The Federalists succeeded admirably. They resurrected House of Lords (the Senate) and gave it effective veto over the lower popular House. If that didn't work, they concocted a judicial form of Curia Regis, to veto anything that might get by the Senate. From the Holy Roman Empire, they borrowed an Electoral College to insure that no passionate leader would ever really be elected president without approval from the better, cooler class. They dressed up institutional deadlock as "checks and balances" and packaged the whole reactionary affair as "the world's first and best democracy."

Even States’ rights got into the act; for it has always been assumed and understood that the States themselves would be the first line of defense in “handling their own.”  Over and over throughout the course of U.S. history movements for national, popular reform have been broken on the rock of state sovereignty — or “federalism” as it is sometimes called.

On the other hand, the “imperative” of national (“interstate”) commerce got trucked out whenever the issue concerned the facilitation of railroads, industrial development, corporate rescue or the promotion of more innovative financial “products.” The entire premise of F.D.R’s  “national regulation” was implicit in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)  and  in the Lexicon of Doubletalk that regulates political discourse, “regulation” includes the granting of privileges and immunities to corporate capital. 

The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court frankly (and correctly) dubbed F. D. Roosevelt’s reforms as National Capitalism.   But the truth is that national capitalism was always the American Agenda.  When  Calvin Coolidge said that the “business of America is business” he was not being polemical but laconically factual.

Hillary knows all of this  and is perfectly content with it.   She is more than content with the "super-delegate" system which gives 12 to  20 percent of primary and convention votes to unelected delegates, appointed on the basis of their status as "party officials" and "friends of the establishment."  Her unmistakable allusion to Madison's essay on controlling the impulses of political passions could not be more clear.  Anyone who knows Hillary knows that keeping the populace at bay is what she has always been about.

This is the same shameless Hillary who just last Fall was gushing over how much she admired Eleanor Roosevelt... you know that passionate advocate of the not-so-well-off.  But at last Hellary’s Inner Goldwater has burst out.  It could not be repressed forever.   Hopefully people will not forget it in favor of the bullshit she puts on a plate.

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