Stonecrest, a suburb of Atlanta, GA, has just announced it will de-annex 345 acres of land and sell it to the retail giant Amazon, creating a new corporate town as part of the company's next expansion according to a recent report:
The latest local pitch to attract Amazon? Create a city of Amazon for the company’s planned expansion site.
The Stonecrest City Council voted 4-2 on Monday to de-annex 345 acres of land if the e-commerce giant picks the area for what the company calls HQ2, a corporate hub where Seattle-based Amazon says it will one day house 50,000 jobs.
The city’s resolution asks the Georgia General Assembly to form the city of Amazon on that land, located off Lithonia Industrial Boulevard and Coffee Road in DeKalb County.
“There are several major U.S. cities that want Amazon, but none has the branding opportunity we are now offering this visionary company,” said Stonecrest Mayor Jason Lary. “How could you not want your 21st century headquarters to be located in a city named Amazon?”
Amazon is seeking a 175-acre site located near an international airport, public transit and high quality of living. Lary said he hopes MARTA expands rail service to Stonecrest.
The proposed city of Amazon could enter into an agreement with the city of Stonecrest to provide city services, he said.
Stonecrest officials plan to submit a bid for Amazon’s HQ2 by the company’s Oct. 19 deadline.
Stonecrest, which includes about 53,000 residents in southeast DeKalb, incorporated as a city this year after voters approved it in a November referendum. (source)
The idea of creating "corporate towns" or having governments substantially submit to the demand of companies is not something new in America. Two hours north of Atlanta, the city of Chattanooga, TN working with the Tennessee Department of Transportation has been re-designing Interstate 75 specifically for the purpose of accommodating to the demands of the German automobile maker Volkswagen, which has a large presence in the city.
Both cases illustrate a common pattern in America, which is the direct collusion between business and government in such a capacity that the latter is actually at the service of the former. Far from a government "of the people and by the people for the people," it is more accurate to say that government rules over the people and executes or ignores laws imposed on the masses at the behest of the corporate entities who control the government.
Suzette Kelo of Kelo vs. New London. This was a very important, precident setting case in US courts in which the woman, Suzette Kelo, had her home confiscated under eminent domain by the state of Connecticut on behalf of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. The case went to the Supreme Court and she was ruled against in a 5-4 decision.
Indeed, while there are certain considerations in any kind of legal case, her case emphasized two points. First, that nobody actually owns his own property in the USA, but simply "rents" it from the government (try not paying property taxes and see what happens to a home). Second, and more importantly, that governments many times may and do act on behalf of private financial interests with no respect to the people in question, using the law to rob the average man so that those whose lust for money and power is never satisfied may continue to indulge themselves.
President Eisenhower famously warned about the rise of the "military-industrial complex" in the USA, and while his warnings were true, the fact also is that this complex well existed before Eisenhower, in fact going back to the earliest days of the nation's history. The veritable obsession that American has with promoting the idea of "capitalism" is not at its essence about whether this particular economic system is preferable to another, but about a philosophy in which a man's life is measured in terms of his capacity for "industriousness" and a man's place in society is determined by a standard of "productivity," "usefulness," or "wealth" that is established by a purely human social contract. This philosophy, which has its roots in the heretical teachings of the heretic John Calvin on the nature of man and his heretical claims of being "predestined" to success or failure is an early stage of Darwinian thought. Indeed, if a man is predestined by God to salvation or damnation by God Himself, then one may claim (among the many that can be made) that success is an intrinsic quality and certain people are "failures" or "poor" because the were always losers and nothing can be done to help them. It is easy to see why a wealthy man with a desire for power would be attracted to such a philosophy, as it would give him a religious justification to exploit and abuse others for the pursuit of his own aggrandizement.
Henry Clay Frick. Known as a great "captain of industry," Frick was infamous for committing the fourth sin that cries to heaven, which the Bible lists as the deprivation of a working man of his justly earned wages.
Indeed, while it is important for men to work in a righteous and just manner for their employers, employers also have a moral responsibility to conduct business in a manner that accords with the laws of God. But owing to the Protestant heresy and the subjugation of the Church to the State, the employers have been able to take on the role of God by defining right and wrong and defining religious belief in terms of obedience to the laws that are called "socially acceptable." It takes different forms throughout the centuries, depending on the controversies of the day, but the problem is the same, and it is the reason why the Catholic Faith maintains the three estates- Government, Church, and People, with the Church uniting and separating both groups.
It is only a small step from Calvinism to secular Darwinism, for all that is needed to go from one to the next is the lack of Faith in God. As such it is natural that when many people, owing to the influence of Calvinism and other heresies in the UK, came to America, they brought these ideas with them. Since these people were for the most part isolated and lacking any historical context, the natural fruits of these heresies were allowed to blossom into a vertiable garden of diverse heretical beliefs. It was simply a continuation of the Protestant Revolution in that it sought to reinforce the idea that obedience to God and His Church was equal to being a "good citizen" and obeying the will of the government, thereby inverting the roles and thus making the Government's will into God and the Church the enforcer of the government's will. Such an idea is completely contrary to the Catholic Faith, as the Catholic Church has always taught there are Three Estates- Government, the Church, and the People. The Church is the uniting force and the separating medium between the government and the people bringing them together for the good of all and also keeping one from overtaking the other.
A German woodcut from 1488 showing the divisons between the Three Estates. Note that Christ is at the center between the two, emphasizing the Social Reign of Christ the King.
If the purpose of life is to serve God, to do His will, and to strive for Heaven, then this must not be simply a pursuit which takes place on Sundays. It must be a practice that penetrates into the lives of every person each day. As such, this division was for centuries an attempt to help realize this.
The Protestant Revolution smashed this division, and instead in the name of FOLLOWING JESUS AND NOT ROAM (spelling intentional), they attempted to co-op God's will to justify their own lusts for power. As we have seen in the following centuries with the wars, rise of industrialism, and the subsequent dehumanization of countless millions of people in the name of "progress" and "the good of society," the fruits of this separation have been completely disastrous and served nothing other than the will of those who desire power before the good of their fellow man.
As Peter Wiener argued in his famous book Hitler: Luther's Spiritual Ancestor, Hitler's evils were simply the metastized form of the disease Luther was spreading through his heresies. It was why both Luther and Hitler hated the Catholic Church. It was why Calvin hated the Church so dearly- not because he was a GOOD FOLLOWER OF THE LORD AND NOT THE POAP (spelling intentional)- but because he wanted to make himself Pope, and he attempted to do this by creating his failed commune in Zurich, Switzerland. Calvin and Luther's criticism of the corruption of the time within the Church was for the most part based on real facts- nobody will deny this- but just like their spiritual ancestors in the National Socialists of the last century and today, they did not actually care to fix the corruption, but used it as an excuse to seek power and wealth for themselves.
Hitler was famously quoted for saying that the National Socialist movement is "Christian." While he was also a liar, in one sense he did not lie in saying this because it IS Christian- Protestant style.
As Peter Wiener noted, Hitler was the philosophical and social fruit produced by the philosophical and social seeds that Martin Luther watered, nurtured, and protected in the early stages of development. The technique which National Socialists use of championing unpopular fact in order to use them to sell their perverse ideas is directly taken from the Protestant Revolution, which rightly criticized the abuses in the Church of the time but instead of actually trying to combat them used them to attempt to get power.
What Amazon did in this story (as well as Volkswagen) is not new in an American context. However, it is the illustration of a deeper problem in the society, which is that people are viewed as cogs in a machine that can be abused and replaced with no moral objection or regard to their lives or the good of society, and that it is these same businessmen who use the government to carry out this will. This is not something that "just happened," but is the rotten fruit of anti-Catholic, anti-clerical heresies that took power during the 16th century which were spread by evil men such as Luther and Calvin. Indeed, it is sad and ironic to view that in the south, where there are many well-intended Protestant Christians who claim to be supporters of John Calvin and his heresies, would express concern about the abuse of men in businesses yet ardently cling to the same philosophical beliefs that allowed for them to rise to power and then with equal vigor to attack the Catholic Church which was and still has been often times the only obstacle in the way of these same evil men of power.
People wonder today why National Socialism is rising against, and why the horrors of the 20th century seem to be coming back. The fact is, National Socialism never went away because the philosophies from which it came were not destroyed. Like a disease, they went dormant but still persisted until the social conditions were right for them to rise again. While there always have been heresies, the fruits of the 20th century came from seeds originally planted in the 16th century and manifest in a myriad of ways, from rebellion against the Church, to rampant industrialism, to nationalism, to darwinism and genocide. Indeed, the idea of any company buying and entire town and in essence ruling through governments is just one branch on the same tree trunk from which grows nationalism, eugenics, and anti-clericalism. They do not appear related only because they are separate branches, but they all feed from the same philosophical roots and lead to the same end.
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