by Brian Stalnaker
Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003 at 5:27 PM
All of the major problems in America and throughout the world today are caused by corporate irresponsibility.
The very concept behind corporations is to protect their owners from taking responsibility for their actions. This means that directors within corporations can dump waste chemicals in our drinking water, or keep our work environments in fatally dangerous conditions without any personal liability. Corporations murder thousands of people each year this way and are never held accountable.
The top 4%, the richest people in America, have more money than the lower 50% of the country combined. And it’s not because they scrimp and save or because they are somehow more deserving. It’s because they cheat and steal and twist the rules to their advantage.
They shatter smaller companies, downsize their own companies, and ship their own factories overseas or across the border to make fortunes in immoral money games. The people who lose out in this are the workers, the people who actually make things of value.
The question corporate capitalists have asked themselves is ‘why empower workers in America to demand better wages, better working conditions, and equal social rights, when you can ship those jobs off to a Colombian or Sri Lankan who can be forced to work under slave-like conditions?’
Don’t think the government is going to help us. Our government leaders are getting paid by them.
Selling out to the rich is inherent to political survival.
In order to afford dazzling election campaigns and make it into their positions of power in the first place, politicians will sell out to whoever can offer them the most money.
Likewise, the corporate lobbies that constantly press themselves upon our lawmakers have both billions of dollars at their disposal and great influence upon which laws are blocked or passed.
These things combined together means that someone who dedicates their lives to making other lives better will never be able to have the same political influence as someone who destroys lives and the environment in the pursuit of money.
Any laws established in the past that protect the American people, the environment, or smaller companies over corporate profits, our lawmakers will sweep away through Deregulation.
Corporate executives and well-preened conservative politicians talk about Deregulation in terms of ‘getting the government off our backs.’ This is because the role of the government is to protect its citizens, and ensuring that workers are protected costs these rich people money. But Deregulation simply gives corporations free reign over their markets, enabling them to overwhelm and envelope smaller companies, destroying our rights and natural resources along the way.
The government is also willing to look the other way while these same people claim outrageous tax breaks. Corporate executives buy gold-plated plumbing fixtures, stay in $3,000 a night hotel suites, take $2,000 wine-tasting classes, or buy $20,000 worth of rugs, and then have their corporations write these expenses off on their taxes. This means that those of us who actually do pay our taxes end up footing the bill for these luxury items!
Laws are even invented specifically for corporations, which enable them to avoid paying taxes in ways that the average person is denied.
Through the IRS’s Net Operating Loss deduction, corporations can demand back tax money they’ve paid if they lose money in their business. When you are just barely able to afford rent, and groceries, are you allowed to ask for your taxes back? No.
Yet many multibillion-dollar corporations finagle their way out of paying any taxes at all. And still, some politicians are willing to badmouth ‘Welfare’ as the big inefficiency of our tax system. But less than $23 billion dollars is spent on Welfare annually, whereas over $100 billion is given away to big business each year to help them do things they should pay for themselves, such as buying new equipment or advertising their products. This ‘Corporate Welfare’ is even claimed by some experts to soak up $800 billion dollars of our national budget. This is even outside of the tax money corporations save, and the other hundreds of billions of dollars given away to corporations for other reasons.
Corporations will not voluntarily give up their dominating power of political immunity and the financial wealth it gains them. And with all our government leaders either personally connected to corporations or sold out to them, if we try to remove this corporate influence by ourselves, we will find ‘the Law,’ with all its weight, upon us.
Our politicians have no serious proposals for the problems of health care, unemployment, crime, disappearing pensions, or any of the pressing social issues that actually afflict us, yet they vote themselves raises every year. They vote themselves solid health care plans. They vote themselves hefty pensions.
What about our health care? What about our pensions? Why don’t they watch after us the same way they watch after themselves?
It’s because if we had the opportunity to provide ourselves all of these things, the politicians and CEO’s wouldn’t be able to take the money for themselves. Having to spend all of our time to meet our middle and lower class needs means that we will not have time to fight against the forces that are actually pressing us into this situation. And the inevitable competition that results from this lifestyle splits us up, so that we cannot unite in an effort to destroy it.
The only uniting we are allowed is against the common enemies we are doctored to believe in, the foreign ‘terrorists’ who come to attack us. But these ‘terrorists’ do not violently attack the United States because they hate freedom, or because they think blowing themselves up is cool. They use violence against the U.S. because U.S. corporations and the U.S. government are murdering their families and destroying their countries.
As demoralizing as corporations make our lives, and as bland as they make our culture here in the U.S, corporations practice their immunity in far more brutal and murderous ways in foreign countries.
We are lead to believe that Third World countries are under-developed because the people living there just somehow don’t have the intelligence to drag themselves out of poverty.
The truth is that the people of these Third World countries know exactly how to get themselves out of their economic ruts, but are forcefully kept from doing it because of a dominating U.S. influence. These people want to develop their own industrial and technological industries by putting tariffs on U.S. products. But they can’t do this because the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is both dominated by U.S. corporations, and has the authority to regulate third world use of tariffs, prevents them from doing so.
Tariffs on U.S. products sold within Third World countries would raise their prices and ease consumption of them. This would give third world industries space in the market to strengthen themselves. Using tariffs in this manner is a fundamental tool for any country to develop into a more powerful nation, but the WTO is perpetually keeping them from doing it, just so U.S. companies can sell their own products there.
This is the exact same situation the American colonists were protesting when they threw the Boston Tea Party.
Furthermore, while these countries economies are weak, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) takes advantage of this weakness and forces them to restructure their national production in ways that are simply murderous- preventing farmers from producing crops to sustain themselves and their communities, and instead churn out more of whatever luxury products the U.S. and other developed countries want.
The IMF places such a high interest rate on its loans and restructures its debtor nations in such ridiculous ways, that these nations become locked perpetually in a poor, subservient role, unable to pay even the interest on their debts.
Then, when Third World peasants hold their own ‘Tea Parties’ and revolt against this foreign domination over their lives, corporate lobbyists cry foul and the U.S. military is called in to protect ‘U.S. interests.’ Soon following, a corrupt, U.S.-friendly government is installed, or reinforced: one that will accept blood money to do what the U.S. tells it to, and do whatever it takes to keep its own people from interfering with the U.S. role of economic supremacy.
George Kennan, the most powerful voice in U.S. foreign policy following World War II, clearly gave away these brutal motives for U.S. dominance when he said-
"[America has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity… To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality… We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization… The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better."
American government’s collaboration with big corporations has turned America from a Republic into an Empire. In the same spirit that Rome was an Empire, raping foreign lands for labor and resources- in the same spirit that Britain was an Empire, which caused us to turn from Her in hatred.
Just as Rome and Britain did, America has military bases all over the world. How many foreign bases are established in the U.S.? How many would the American people allow?
We’re told a series of lies to make us willing to believe that having our military spread across the globe is reasonable.
The conscience of the American public is satiated with racist rhetoric, proclaiming us the ‘true defenders of freedom,’ and ‘the world’s one and only hope.’
We are told that we are the policemen of the world. We are told that our unique national position gives us the responsibility to check and balance other countries. We are told that the western citizen values life more than the overpopulated third world savages.
We are raised on something that sounds a little like this-
"We are more valuable than the others, who outnumber us and will always outnumber us. We are more valuable, because our blood has fitted us to be more inventive than the others, to be better leaders of our people than the others, because it has fitted us to be better soldiers, better statesmen, to attain a higher culture, to be better characters."
That was Heinrich Himmler who said that, Hitler’s associate, speaking of why it was necessary for Germany to dominate the world.
Americans are no more naturally gifted with human capabilities than any other people in the world, and our lives are no more valuable than any other people in the world, either.
But these lies work because we want to believe them. It feels good to believe them.
Our leaders fervent our desire for war abroad and a police state at home by telling us that these people fighting for their freedom are ‘terrorists.’ Then they promise to protect us by destroying them through a process that will simply require us to give up a little freedom, and send our soldiers far over seas.
Hermann Goering, Hitler’s master of propaganda, explained the process like this-
"Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in Germany... But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy… or a communist dictatorship… the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Does that formula sound familiar?
Successful campaigns of conquest must have a cover story to gain the support of the people who will be forced to fight in it. They are given a common enemy and distracted from their problems at home. The Nazis focused on the injustices of the Versailles treaty to motivate the German people into conquering Europe. We used to focus on ‘communism’ to steal all throughout Central and South America, and other parts of the rest of the world. Nowadays we focus on ‘terrorism’ to go into Afghanistan and Iraq. Notice how the reaction from the average American to the dual knowledge that we didn’t know where Osama Bin Laden was, but were still going to attack Afghanistan anyways, was, "Well, we gotta do something." Yes! But let’s review our options first!
George Bush isn’t sending our soldiers all over the world to protect American or any other innocent lives. This becomes obvious when we realize that the U.S. military has killed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan than were killed in the World Trade Center, and that the family members of these innocent civilians are more devoted to anti-American ‘terrorism’ than ever before.
The only way to stop ‘terrorism’ is to stop raping and destroying the places ‘terrorists’ are from.
The real reason for sending our soldiers- Iraq is sitting on top of one of the richest OIL fields in the world. The truth is that George Bush is risking our soldiers and killing foreign innocents so that he can STEAL OIL.
The U.S. military is being used to steal this Oil. But our military does not exist to murder people so that the American rich can steal these dead people’s resources. It exists to protect our country and our lives. The government and corporations have bastardized our military away from us, endangering us and our soldiers for their own monetary gain.
They’ve been doing it for a long time.
But many veterans, after leaving the service, step back and look at U.S. foreign policy to see it for what it is.
As a response to President Reagan’s imperialistic attacks throughout Central America in the 1980’s, Charles J. Liteky, veteran and holder of the Congressional Medal of Honor, publicly renounced and returned his Medal. The Congressional Medal of Honor is the most coveted, highest possible honor a U.S. service-person can receive, and Liteky basically said, ‘If this is what our military is about, then I don’t want it.’
But even further back than that- Major General Smedley Butler, a U.S. Marine, looked back on his 33-year career, which took him to combat in over 5 different countries, and determined that, "War is a racket… conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many."
Smedley Butler attained the highest rank possible at the time and was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor throughout his career. Once he retired, though, he realized and publicly stated that he had given all those years and sweat and blood, simply to make foreign lands safe for Wall Street. Butler proclaimed, "To Hell with War!" and went on to state that to get rid of War we must take the profit out of War.
The American government is violent all over the world to protect its ill-gotten money and goods.
But the American People don’t have the right to profit off foreign deaths and silently enjoy our position, then scream bloody murder when those foreigners react to our violence with violence.
If we refuse to recognize what our government is doing and why, if we refuse to realize that American lives are no more, and no less, valuable than other nation’s, then we deserve the ‘terrorism’ that we are forcing these people to commit.
So our government is sold out to corporations, and corporations are destroying the world.