Dear Editor.
Kurt Vonnegut forecast our current existence in “Player Piano” describing how it’s difficult to free maroons from the chains they love. Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. The Supreme Courts, Citizens United ruling, further empowered the corporate world legalizing the idea that corporations deserve the same rights as living humans. They own the economy and buy politicians while indoctrinating “consumers”.
Exercising the privilege of corporate personhood, their greed increases the loss of non-renewable resources. Conscienceless corporations have heavily damaged God’s creation. Corporations have the privileges of personhood so shouldn’t they also earn the same punishments as individual criminals? Might workers gain access to the same “get out of jail free” card corporations enjoy?
Our future is at stake. Corporations have no allegiance to those whose lives depend on the land, water, air and food. Corporate motivation is profits/greed, escaping when resources are exhausted. The corporate “promises” to “trust them” to treat us right, are revealed as lies the morning after. Lawyers plan, before the pull-out, bankruptcy or merger, to legally forget promises, afterwards.
The 1984 Union Carbide/Bhopal catastrophe, for example, killed 25,000 Indians, and left uncounted numbers of people living in a poisoned neighborhood. They’re still delivering dead and malformed babies because of chemical residues that can’t be removed. The responsible party, Union Carbide, abandoned the victims and sold itself to Dow Chemical, the company that brought us Agent Orange, deadly silicone breast implants and other highly profitable poisonous products.
Union Carbide’s executives have been subpoenaed to appear in Indian courts but America hasn’t honored the extradition treaties it signed. There are warrants out for their arrests in India, just as there are warrants out for the arrest of Kissinger for his part in war crimes in Chile, East Timor, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. All remain free, harbored by corporate-controlled America.
Human and corporate criminals act in similar ways using any means necessary to evade justice. They don’t admit or accept responsibility for their actions. Exxon is still fighting payments for their Exxon Valdese crime. Now Canadian corporations want a pipeline to bring their oil south and tell us everything will be fine, so ignore those other pipeline disasters.
The poisons that unregulated chemical companies knowingly discharge into the water, air, soil could be seen as premeditated murder. Their murderous actions have already caused uncounted dead zones in the world’s life support system. “Our government” enables all of this.
Corporations blow off mountain tops for the resources beneath and then claim innocence when living things downstream die from the poisons and toxic sludge that contaminates previously pristine streams.
The smiley-faced talking head wants to convince us their companies are “responsible citizens”. Multinational corporations control “our government” using “campaign contributions”. The latest pacific free trade treaty will allow corporations to void local law wherever they choose.
The mythical “unbiased” Court has always been influenced by corporate power. Its wealthy judges are nominated by wealthy presidents that are members of the “old boy’s club”.
Mussolini said “fascism should be called corporatism as it’s a merger of state and corporate power”. Fascism’s right-wing nationalistic ideology controls “consumers” with media/military/police secretive national security system. Fascist nations create enemies to unify “consumers”. Often there’s a quasi-merger of church and state, crony capitalism and an obsession with law/ order using police state tactics, fraudulent elections and suppressing unions; sound familiar?
A corporate coup d’etat has overthrown democracy in America. We’re ruled by Corporations and their billionaires; they have their privatizing hands on our water, air, land and food. Wrist slaps are standard for corporations and the superrich when they’re “brought to justice”. Consequences for destructive actions are small, or the company threatens to move, leaving their mess to be cleaned up by us, just as one would expect of a psychopath.
In much of Europe healthcare and higher education is free. They know its investing in their future and don’t pay to police the world. Here crippling debt is the price. We spend more on prisons, than schools, with most of the inmates there for victimless “crime”. Our war machine costs more than most of the rest of the world spends. The wealthy own our political machine and fool many “consumers” into fighting to keep it like that. It’s a recipe for decline, feudalism and collapse. When will enough be enough for Americans?
Our kids are taught to give up privacy and freedom for security, which requires being watched, chipped, and tracked. We’re fed Orwellian messages; Conform; Don’t Question; Obey; Consume; Reproduce; Submit; Watch TV; Buy; Follow; No New Ideas; Feel, Don’t Think; Fear; Accumulate; Indifference; Believe Experts; Surrender; Spend; Want More; Hate; Yield To Power.
Corporate culture creates the whales we see lumbering around Wal-Mart with mindlessly chosen rubbish the TV told them would be magically delicious. You see them texting their every move while driving 80 mph. They camp in line Thanksgiving week so they can buy some cheap crap on sale to save some dollars on one of the five TV’s the store actually has. They’re the mindless herd animals trampling over you for overpriced sneakers so they can “Be like Mike”. They believe whatever they’re told on the “news”.
We can’t compete with nations, or be one, where a living wage doesn’t exist. Our democracy, with fake debates between two corporate “parties”, is meaningless political theater. There’s no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, fossil fuel industry or war profiteers.
And then there’s Fukushima, a corporate created nuclear nightmare becoming worse than you could imagine, daily, meltdown and all.
Craig Dudley