The result is that the U.S.-led corporate regime is more effectively total and pre-emptive of thought or act in opposition to it than any previous totalitarian interregnum - as successive catechisms of "no alternative", "globalisation", "controlling earth from space", and "the whole world has changed" reveal to connective thought. In Congressional expression of this totalitarian mind-set, U.S. Senator Bob Smith, whose legislation got the U.S. "Space Commission" for monopoly military control of the heavens passed in 2000 long prior to September 11, prescribes this new world order as the plan of Fate: "It is our Manifest Destiny. You know we went from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States of America settling the continent [sic] and they call that Manifest Destiny and the next continent if you will is space, and it goes on forever".9

This is the supra-terrestrial correlative of the doctrine of total power, and it can conceive of no limit to itself. As earth events interfere in resistance to the unaccountable world rule, military and police links are forged on the very sites of any resistance, constructing and exploiting the new Enemy to justify the sweeping new powers of coercion and terror which the global corporate system requires to rule an unwilling world. As in all protection rackets by terror and financial manipulation, the greatest threat to life comes from the very system of armed force, surveillance and attack which is said to be protecting citizens from it - conceptualised by presidential proclamation after September 11 as one in which all "in every region - - are for us, or are with the terrorists". U. S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick then explained this meaning to include those protesting against the WTO. "This President and this administration will fight for open markets. We will not be intimidated by those who have taken to the streets to blame trade - and America - for the world's ills".10

The Omnipresent Centre

Totality of rule is not the only parameter of totalitarianism. In Hannah Arendt's phrase, limitlessness of power also proceeds from "an omnipresent centre". In the new totalitarian movement, this omnipresent directive force communicates through global financial and media control centres, with Washington and Wall Street the dominant nodes of the interlocked system.11 The world's means of life and mass media are the material and symbolic vehicles by which the flows of goods and demand for goods control populations. The regulating principle of all decisions is to multiply by ever more deregulation and new financial instruments the monetised circuits of power through which directive control of all of the world's means of existence increasingly pass.

As with all totalitarian systems, the dominant instruments of social power are wrested from traditional authorities, and then unleashed with none of the formerly inhibiting mechanisms of law, custom and social norm to limit their use and magnification. The telltale sign of the totalitarian movement is that it cannot stop by its nature. It careens from one life-destructive crisis and suppression to another in supreme confidence of its limitless power and capacities until its overreach exposes it to collapse or destruction. This is the totalitarian career path we know in previous usurpations of accountable public authority.

Armed terror is not the essence, but the punctuation mark of the new totalitarianism's meaning. The money-and-consumption command channel is the secret of the movement's success because it avoids responsibility for its failures. Wall-Street prescribed market failures to provide for societies are, instead, always attributed to transcendental forces of "the invisible hand" punishing these societies for alleged sins against "market laws". Thus as catastrophes increasingly befall the majority of the world, the victims are blamed for their new deprivation, misery and oppression. This is a far more effective mode of rule than jackboot terror which is more overt, but it exposes the system to another form of resistance. For such a regime depends throughout on keeping knowledge silenced and repressed. This is its Achilles heel. As soon as people see through it and flag it to surrounding community, the collective trance which it depends on begins to come undone.

The new totalitarianism is, ultimately, an American corporate confidence game which rules the world by images and projections of power arcing over the globe's surface, while limitlessly rapacious financial sequencings called "free flows of capital and commodities" strip world's peoples and their life-ground underneath. The evidence is all around. The meta-pattern is most globally fatal with the planetary ecosystem, but has played out catastrophically on the social level in Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and South-East Asia since 1990.12 But never is the private and centralised financial control of these operations raised publicly as an issue, nor is the control of the money used by private investment banks and the financial divisions of corporations whose revenues are generated on the basis of creating over 95% of the world's money-demand. Thus "the omnipresent centre" of interlocked global finance can deprive hundreds of millions of citizens of their very means of existence or their life-security overnight, with no exposure of the foreign private powers behind the control of the world money supply constitutionally vested in national governments. The system's choice paths of value are assumed, on the contrary, to be as given as the laws of nature and as unchangeable as the tides - to which they are sinisterly compared.