I was chastised last night on Facebook for constantly posting about the reasons why I believe that the rebel flag should be removed from Mississippi’s flag and from South Carolina’s capitol.  And of course, trying in vain to promote my 15-year-old song about it (as friends and family keep suggesting I do).  It’s damn hard to make something “go viral,” as it turns out.  But I try:

But the futility of arguing over the old slavery–the exclusive kind, targeted at “the other” (not entirely, but mainly)–while failing to argue about the new slavery that has been in place since at least the Nixon Shock of 1971 and is all-inclusive and will be solidified under the TPP, which just won fast-track authority in the Senate, is not lost on me.  In fact, while we are arguing about the rationale for the South’s secession in the 1860s, it might be a good time to point out that the corporations of the world are also trying to secede from the U.S. and the other nation-states that allowed for their creation and want to declare their own sovereignty.  So they can keep us as slaves.

The “New” Slavery

Indeed, after the end of slavery in the U.S.—officially with the final ratification of the 13th amendment on Dec. 6, 1865—it only took a little over a century for the banks to turn everyone (not just people of a certain skin color or ethnicity) into not just wage slaves, but also debt slaves.  Slavery was reborn, but with the outward appearance of freedom.  This of course was achieved by the Nixon Shock/end of Bretton Woods in 1971, meaning that banks could “create” and “lend” the national currency at interest with no regard to any real world limits such as a supply of precious metals.  In other words, the banks were given the divine right of money creation, allowing them to literally rule over us because even the government has to borrow from the Fed  (by “selling” bonds created out of nothing to the Fed, which the Fed “pays” for with money it literally types into existence, not out of some pre-existing stash of money, i.e, the whole process is completely fictional and imaginary–and unnecessary). At interest, natch. Since then, household debt and national debt have skyrocketed, while incomes have stagnated.  That’s the essence of the new slavery.  Here are three charts that demonstrate this:

In many ways, this new slavery is the perfect form of slavery, from the perspective of the masters.  That is because this new slavery seems legitimate even though it clearly isn’t and the banks themselves don’t even try to hide that fact (to be fair to us, they don’t really try to publicize it, either)—as the common-but-completely-incorrect narrative goes, the banks have the money and we don’t, so we must depend on them for our money.  This new slavery is also not called “slavery,” it’s called a “loan.”  Or a “job.”  You get the picture.

The New Secession

In a similar way, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a new form of secession from government, just like the Confederacy.  The TPP will place transnational corporations above and outside of governments, as The Atlantic explains:

“…the U.S. government has consented in prior trade agreements, and in a leaked version of the still-secret TPP, to allow foreign investors to bypass our courts and instead move to “investor-state” arbitration. Thus, challenges based upon TPP to our duly enacted laws and other regulatory actions would be decided by three individuals who are not government officials and need not be American citizens. And they would have the final word as to whether the federal government will be compelled to pay damages, because there is no judicial review in any U.S. court of the merits of these arbitral rulings.”

We can see then,that the TPP is essentially the articles of secession for multinational corporations, who will in a very real sense secede from the authority of all governments and become essentially sovereigns unto themselves to a greater degree than ever before.

And just like the Southern states that made up the Confederacy seceded to preserve slavery, the corporations want to secede from governmental authority via the TPP and other so-called “trade” agreements to preserve slavery.  That is, to say, they want to keep us as their slaves and them as our masters.  They know we’re waking up to their free money scams, the bailouts, the fake foreclosures, the fake money, everything.  They fear us—as the owner of Cartier pointed out recently:

“How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?” he said. “We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.”

They know full well what they are doing, and do it anyway.  They want us to believe it’s for our own good.  And in the end, which affects us more right now, the Confederate issue or the TPP?  The answer’s obvious, but we still need to take down that damn rebel flag as an officially-sanctioned state symbol!