Corporatocracy

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If Dickens were writing today about the conditions of the citizens versus that of their employer, his “Scrooge” would be corporations.  However, Dickens’ efforts to reform corporations would fail. Corporate people recognized years ago that they, like Scrooge, might one day grow a heart. They used their lawyers to ensure that they would never have a Scrooge-like conversion, even if they wanted too.

The men who started corporations learned from Dickens’ lessons about Scrooge.  They realized that humans, even the most “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clinching, covetous old sinners”, can, given the right circumstances, become people who “know how to keep Christmas well”.  These men needed to find a way to protect their profits from such a conversion.

They found an easy way through their lawyers. First they created corporations and legally bound their CEO’s to make as much money as possible for the corporate shareholders.  Thus if three ghosts visited the CEO and got him to grow a heart, he’d still be legally bound to continue his Scrooge-like ways.  He’d have two choices: die rich with no friends a la Scrooge, or quit the CEO position and become a humanitarian.  He cannot do both.  He cannot change corporate policies to benefit humanity. Scrooge was the sole proprietor of his business.  With his conversion came positive changes for his employee and the local charities.

A CEO, unlike Scrooge, is purposely powerless to change conditions for his employees because what matters most is making money for the top shareholders. The CEO is legally bound to this task.
“Consequently, communities, workers and the environment are left to pick up the tab for corporate irresponsibility. Any economic model that solely relies on profit and growth to gauge success is fundamentally unsustainable and flawed because it neglects critical components of a healthy society: the well being of communities, workers, and the environment. A huge component of this problem is that there are very few avenues available for the voices and concerns of employees, communities or other stakeholders to be heard and heeded as they are excluded from the corporate decision-making process.” CitizenWorks.org.

Because it is a cold and heartless way to do business, corporations saturate us with messages that make us think it is all fair and above-board. After all, there is nothing unlawful about this structure. Granted they wrote the law and the government that is suppose to protect us the citizens, passed the laws that favor corporations, but it is the law of the land. To remove some of the guilt from this structure the government and the corporations used the 14th Amendment to establish that corporations are actually people.  They call it “corporate fiction”, but there is nothing fictitious about the fact that by labeling corporations as “people” the government can work for them first and foremost with a clean conscious. “Government works for the people.”

With the government supporting their every move corporations now own all the media. The very media that should be used as a voice for the people is now a voice for corporations.  Since corporations are people, it’s all fine and dandy, but there are no Dickens’ left on the air-waves to point out the abuses. Through their media the corporations stand on its head the notion of hard work to get ahead. Fair play is for the weak. If you want to get ahead you need to sacrifice your life to the corporation. You need to be able to throw Bob Cratchet out on the street for not working on a holiday and let tiny Tim die.  You must be able to put your arm around Crachet as you do this and say, “It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.” If you lack the constitution to do this, then you are weak and not a hard worker.  A “hard worker” is someone who gives all to the corporation and whose end reward will be a pat on the head when their job is cut and sent overseas.  A hard worker leaves the company jobless, with no friends and the comfort that it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.  

A Christmas Carol taught us to remember that people are more important than business, or at least as important as business.  Because corporations write the Christmas messages these days we are taught that sacrificing yourself for business is the ultimate Christmas gift for your family. It is hog wash. Corporate salaries are so low that both spouses have to work thus destroying the family unit. Vacations and holidays are interrupted by cell phone calls and Blackberry messages from the office.  We worry that our corporate lords might think ill of us if are not ready to “hop-to” on our own time. Corporations have taken us back to the Dickens’ era time by wiping out the middle class. Now all we are left with are the super-rich corporate owners and the huddled-masses who, like serfs of old, live in fear of their corporate lord’s next move.

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country," Thomas Jefferson.

"They (corporations) have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate." Baron Thurlow (English).

“Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces,” Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), Swiss-born scientist and physician.

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless," President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864.

Thomas Jefferson pointed out, in an 1816 letter to William H. Crawford, "Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association." He also pointed out in that letter that some people - and businesses - would prefer that government not play referee to the game of business, not fix rules that protect labor or provide for the protection of the commons and the public good.
We must, Jefferson wrote to Crawford, "...say to all [such] individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens [like corporations], on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease."

Most of the Founders advocated - and all ultimately passed - tariffs to protect domestic industries and workers. Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln actively stood up for the right for labor to organize, intervening in several strikes to stop corporations and local governments from using hired goon squads to beat and murder strikers.
But conservative economics - the return of ancient feudalism - rose up after Lincoln's death and reigned through the Gilded Age, creating both great wealth and a huge population of what today we call the "working poor." American reaction to these disparities gave birth to the Populist, Progressive, and modern Labor movements. Two generations later, Franklin Roosevelt brought us out of Herbert Hoover's conservative-economics-produced Great Depression and bequeathed us with more than a half-century of prosperity.

But now the conservatives are back in the driver's seat, and heading us back toward feudalism and serfdom (and possibly another Great Depression). Only a return to liberal economic policies - a return to We The People again setting and enforcing the rules of the game of business - will reverse this dangerous trend. We've done it before, with tariffs, anti-trust legislation, and worker protections ranging from enforcing the rights of organized labor to restricting American companies' access to cheap foreign labor through visas and tariffs. The result was the production of something never before seen in history: a strong and vibrant middle class.
If the remnants of that modern middle class are to survive - and grow - we must learn the lessons of the past and return to the policies that in the 1780s and the late 1930s brought this nation back from the brink of economic disaster. Thom Hartmann.

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent," Gore Vidal.

We, the huddled masses need to smash the corporations.  Laws need to be re-written.  Incorporation needs to become illegal; lobbyists must be banned from Congress; we need to over-turn the ruling that corporations are people.  Let the middle class rise again through individually owned businesses: small businesses. We have separation of church and state now let us have separation of corporations and state.  It’s our republic not the corporation’s republic. 

If you believe what the talk show hosts and others say on the media that we cannot survive without corporations, remember that they are employed by a corporation.     
 
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men,” Plato

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves,” Edward R. Murrow

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public,” Theodore Roosevelt.

“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority,” Ben Franklin.

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