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The Shape of the Beast

The world has been usurped by a pattern familiar in the microcosm, but not yet decoded at the macro level - a revolt against human society itself. The historical maturation of nations after the world's greatest Depression and War was called "the Great Transformation" by Karl Polanyi, but the Great Reversal has not yet been publicly understood. Its meaning is primeval. It is the atavistic return of society to an unaccountable male gang seeking to dominate the world.

We see this pattern in the 9-11 War. Its public phase began when thousands of people of mixed nationalities, most American civilians, were killed by suicide bombers of a foreign male gang of Islamic fundamentalists.3 Each side then duly proclaimed the other the embodiment of evil, each repudiated the rule of law from start to finish, and both killed as many innocent people as got in the way of their war to rule other countries. While the gang leaders throughout stayed unscathed behind walls of armed protectors, both called each other "cowards".

There is little difference in moral substance between these atavistic gangs, although a megalomaniac rhetoric of each side proclaims direct backing from God. Both sides are mass killers, and both systematically destroy civilians and their means of life with sanctimonious justification overriding all accountability to truth or due legal process. Both proclaim their mission as the working of divine Justice, and both destroy the lives and human conditions of innocent others with a pathological abandon that takes the breath away. This is, in fact, the function of the demonstration killings and destructions - to command by terror, and seize whatever is wanted. With complicit governments like Britain's and Canada's barking and crouching behind, the real deal is struck beneath public notice - incalculably more innocent people in terror in exchange for incalculably more oil supplies for U.S-led. oil corporations and, as a side deal, $200,000,000,000 in giveaways of public revenues to corporations and the very rich.4

But the primeval criminal-gang structure is not tracked for two reasons. The first is that saturating conditioning disconnects people from reality. "It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."5 These are Herman Goering's words, and they transmit the code of this the gang form of rule. Concealed under the most ludicrous lies, its coercion reigns supreme. Already university employees and a talk-show host have been unconstitutionally suspended in the U.S. for pointing out the most undeniable truths. The disorder goes to the heart of the ruling corporate psyche.

Images of Manliness Decoding the Global Market as Corporate Gang Occupation

Consider the pattern. The adolescent group-mind plots in secret behind the closed doors of secluded forts for control of the rest of society to maximise the gang's private take. Privately multiplied debt issuances are the currency of the global corporate gang's control. Sex and violence are the ruling images of its kingdom of ever bigger deals and attacks on designated out-groups. The gang's ethos of power and control pervades the larger society with a barbaric code of acquisitive stratagem, takeover of others' territories, continuous extraction of gang tribute, and indiscriminate violence and armed force at will.

Throughout, group slogans and tough-talk re-enforce the bonds of male and servant-female bravado in the face of ever greater extremes of life-depredation, confiscation and fear. The universal insecurity the many feel is, as the resistance grows, played back to them as what the gang is protecting them from. The logic of rule by force is then openly declared. The U.S. President declares an ultimatum to the world - "You are either with us or for the terrorists", and after starving Afghanistan is carpet-bombed, his administration proclaims, "Who will be next?". Charles Krauthammer declares the mood in Time Magazine: "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms - - - How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will".6 The extortion racket of the neighbourhood is, in a word, writ large as "the international war against terrorism" - a war in which those who monopolize terror are licensed to exempt themselves from its meaning.

Lacking the resources of character to compete head-on, the global corporate gang everywhere relies on controlled images instead. The image-set loved most by the gang's crowds are performed around the clock - symbolic male gangs in corporate logos attacking one another day in and day out in competitive spectacles, all constructed to glorify the riches of the winners. The never-ending sudden-death dramas hold the many in thrall, and so the actual violent struggles of life and death in the wider world are diverted from. They are displaced onto the sports or war screen as a universal marketing site for corporations and banks.

"Sport", as it is ironically called, is the corporate gang's daily morality play of trained groupthink, fanatic factionalism and ever more money for those with most. Defeating others by overpowering monopoly is the heroic display most highly revered. Pistols, bombs, collisions, space thrusts, takeovers, wars, round-the-clock terror,