Of the World's 100 Largest Economic Entities, 51 are now
Corporations and 49 are Countries. (Institute for
Policy Studies 2000)
Indeed, the function of the transnational corporation is not
to promote a healthy ecology but to extract as much marketable value
out of the natural world as possible even if it means treating the
environment like a septic tank. An ever-expanding corporate capitalism
and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course, so
much so that the support systems of the entire ecosphere---the Earth's
thin skin of fresh air, water, and topsoil---are at risk. It is not
true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of
denial about all this. Far worse than denial, they have shown outright
antagonism toward those who think our planet is more important than
their profits. So they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists,"
"EPA gestapo," "Earth day alarmists," "tree huggers," and purveyors of
"Green hysteria." Michael Parenti
"Wherever it has emerged over the past thirty-five years,
from Santiago to Moscow to Beijing to Bush’s Washington, the alliance
between a small corporate elite and a right-wing government has been
written off as some sort of aberration—mafia capitalism, oligarchy
capitalism and now, under Bush “crony capitalism.” But it’s not an
aberration; it is where the entire Chicago School crusade with its
triple obsessions — privatization, deregulation and union-busting—has
been leading." Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine.
No
progress is possible until we can GET THE
CORPORATE-SPECIAL INTERESTS—ALL OF THEM—OUT OF OUR POLITICS AND OUT OF
THE MASS MEDIA!
Jay— http://jayhanson.ushttp://www.dieoff.com
"...this empire that we’ve created really has an emperor,
and it’s not the president of this country. The President serves, you
know, for a short period of time. But it doesn't really matter whether
we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running
Congress; the empire goes on, because it’s really run by what I call
the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest
corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They don’t need to
conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they
really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at
the wish of the people, they’re not democratically elected, they don’t
serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their
own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather
than the other way around. And they are the power behind this." From
John Perkins interview
with Amy Goodman June 5, 2007
" The most effective way to restrict democracy is to
transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable
institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas,
party dictatorships, or modern corporations." Noam
Chomsky
"We have reached the point in the United States where
corporatism has nearly triumphed over democracy. If events continue on
their current trajectory, the ability of our government to respond to
the needs and desires of humans - things like fresh water, clean air,
uncontaminated food, independent local media, secure retirement, and
accessible medical care - may vanish forever, effectively ending the
world's second experiment with democracy. We will have gone too far
down Mussolini's road, and most likely will encounter similar
consequences, elements of which we have already experienced: a
militarized police state, a government unresponsive to its citizens and
obsessed with secrecy, a ruling elite drawn from the senior ranks of
the nation's largest corporations, and war." From Thom Hartman's book Threshold
pg 202
"The power of our private managers over our public servants
was exemplified by the ability of business lobbyists to persuade
Congress to nullify the 1993 attempt by the Financial Accounting
Standards Board (FASB) to require stock options to be expensed in
corporate earnings statements. In June 1993, Senator
Joseph Lieberman introduced a bill condemning the FASB’s
attempt, which passed the Senate overwhelmingly. He later introduced a
side bill that would have put the FASB out of business if it
implemented its option-expensing initiative. The FASB had little choice
but to retreat, a sad example of legislation interfering in accounting
decisions." John C. Bogle in The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism pg
39
"Despite the much vaunted Corporate Responsibility Act and
the highly publicized round up of a few of the most heinous offenders,
the awful truth is that the corporate tricksters have pillaged the U.S.
economy and gotten away with it. They're still living in their
gargantuan houses, still feasting on their wildly inflated salaries,
and engorging themselves on staggering sums of stock options, while the
rest of America tries to figure out how to rebuild for retirement. or
send a kid to college on a worthless stock portfolio." Arianna Huffington,
Introduction to Pigs
at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political
Corruption are Undermining America (2003)
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an
invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no
responsibility to the people.
To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance
between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task
of the statesmanship of the day."
Theodore Roosevelt
(April 19, 1906)
"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 few hands and the republic is
destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the Aristocracy of our
monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a
trial of strength,m
and bid defiance to the laws of our country. "
Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Q: "What do you see as most fundamental obstacle to a
functioning and socially-just democracy in America?
Well the most pressing obstacle was one of the themes of the
leading American social political philosopher of the 20th century, John
Dewey. He pointed out that, as long as we live under what he called
industrial feudalism, rather than industrial democracy (by industrial
feudalism he meant the corporate, capitalist structure) then politics
will be nothing more than the shadow cast by business over society.
Industrial democracy would mean placing economic decisions and
workplaces under democratic control. And yes, that's true. As long as
there's a very high concentration of private power, essentially
unaccountable to the public and overwhelming influence in state policy,
then yes, politics will be the shadow cast by business over society.
That's a major obstacle. You can't have a democratic society, a
functioning one, where the major decisions are out of public
control." From an interview with Noam Chomsky.
...[The] "corporation enjoys the same rights as a living
person under Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This concept was
held in 1886 by the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pac
Railroad Company and has been a fact of law ever since ...d I
emphasized... the corporation should be required to accept the same
responsibilities as those expected of a person; it too should be a good
citizen, an honorable, ethical member of the community. In the case of
international corporations, that community has to be defined as the
world.
In actual practice, corporations are the opposite of good
citizens. They bribe politicians to write laws that cheat society on a
mammoth scale, most significantly by allowing them to avoid paying many
of the very real costs incurred in conducting their businesses. What
economists refer to as “externalities” are left out of pricing
calculations. These include the social and environmental costs of
destruction of valuable resources, pollution, the burdens on society of
workers who become injured or ill and receive little or no health care,
the indirect funding received when companies are permitted to market
hazardous products, dump wastes into oceans and rivers, pay employees
less than a living wage, provide substandard working conditions, and
extract natural resources from public lands at less- than-market
prices. Furthermore, most corporations are dependent on public
subsidies, exemptions, massive advertising and lobbying campaigns, and
complex transportation and communications systems that are underwritten
by taxpayers; their executives receive inflated salaries, perks, and
“golden retirement parachutes,” which are written off as tax
deductions." John Perkins: The Secret History of the American Empire
The requirement that corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder profits over any other consideration
must be removed also, which is the worst law of all, permitting, in fact inviting, hostile corporate invasion.
Mary Lehmann
U.S. corporations are intent on continuing — and
even expanding — foreign
wars, low taxes for the wealthy, and when needed, further
bank/corporate bailouts. These policies are incompatible with the
current expenditures on social services, education, and Social Security
and Medicare — thus the gigantic and expanding U.S. deficit. global
research: 4/15/2010.
When Republicans deregulated, what they did was allow corporations
to do almost anything that they wanted. What we got was a carnival of
corruption including massive theft from companies like Enron,
Tyco, Worldcom, with complicity from Arthur Anderson, major banks,
brokerages. In addition, these same Corporations bought political
favors, special legislation, pollution permits, tax breaks, and access
that allowed them to control the agencies that were supposed to be
regulating. Since big money controls our press, we get only corporate news. Mussolini (and some dictionaries) defined fascism as control of the government by
corporations. We've got that.
Because Republican partisans manufacture voting machines they took the election, then because they
controlled the Congress there was no oversight, because they own the media they installed right-wing cheerleaders for
war. We went to war in
Iraq on false pretexts and there was no accountability for war profiteering. Corporate profits soared. The
military-industrial complex rules.
Corporate representatives were inducted into regulatory
agencies to further serve their industries...not the people. For
example, see Robert F Kennedy's book "Crimes against Nature".
Wal-Mart is a prime example of a monopsonist: a
company which is such a powerful buyer that it can pressure its
suppliers into suicidal terms. The only way suppliers could meet
Wal-Mart's demands was by moving manufacturing to third world
countries. The US has lost 3 million manufacturing jobs since the
beginning of the Bush regime. Not only has
Wal-Mart helped strip the manufacturing base from this country, the US
trade deficit has soared, and overseas sweatshops
have flourished. It's not all bad though, we exported the pollution
associated with manufacturing abroad as well.
Wal-mart
has devastated thousands of small towns,
vigorously opposed labor
unions. pushed their minimum wage employees onto the public
dole, strained public health facilities. Those low prices are
not without cost. See Wal-Mart.
Before Ronald Reagan there might have been anti-trust
enforcement for Wal-Mart,
but ...Republicans don't enforce
anti-trust. It's part of their race for the bottom.
US corporate
governance needs re-examination. For one thing there is a revolving
door between government and the private sector which everyone is
rewarded...except the public.
A Message from John
Perkins: Corporations first obligation
should be to be good citizens.
Boston
Globe reports that financial industry contributed heavily in
Mass. Senate race to block Obama's reform plans: "In a six-day span
just before the US Senate election, Republican Scott Brown collected
nearly $450,000 from donors who work at financial companies, a sign the
industry is prepared to spend heavily in the upcoming midterm elections
to beat back new controls and taxes President Obama wants to impose ...
The Financial Services Roundtable, one of the industry's most
influential groups in Washington, has been increasingly vocal in
opposing [the House financial reform bill] ... its chief lobbyist,
Scott Talbott, said both donations and activity have picked up more
recently..."
Ronald Reagan gutted anti-trust enforcement and helped
corporations bust unions. (Did you know the right to form a union is
part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights ?)
Yesterday
I had a post on how K Street is no longer shunning Democrats. Thomas
Frank explains the significance of the K Street Project in the New
York Times:
K Street is not neutral. From all its complex machinations
emerges a discernible political project best described by Joseph
Goulden in “The Superlawers” back in 1972, when the lobbying business
was so many acorns beside today’s forest of towering oaks. The
“Washington lawyers,” Goulden wrote, had over the years “directed a
counterrevolution unique in world economic history. Their mission was
not to destroy the New Deal, and its successor reform acts, but to
conquer them, and to leave their structures intact so they could be
transformed into instruments for the amassing of monopolistic corporate
power.” (Goulden, by the way, is no radical: he is a former director at
the very conservative press watchdog Accuracy in Media.)
K Street’s bright young men fill the top posts at federal
agencies; K Street’s money keeps wages low and prescription drug costs
high; K Street’s “superlawyers” fight to make our retirement insecure;
K Street’s deregulation gurus turn our electric utilities into the
plaything of Wall Street. What K Street wants from government is often
the opposite of what the public wants. And yet what K Street wants, far
too frequently it gets — if not by the good offices of Bob Ney, then by
the timely disappearance of the now useless Bob Ney.
Whether we are Republicans or Democrats, we are all aware of
how much more power corporations hold over everyday life than they used
to. “Those who own the country should govern the country,” John Jay
used to say, and thanks in large part to K Street they do.
Written by Ron Chusid
Condoleezza Rice comes to mind. "The United States,"
she said, "is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty
that is taking place in Burma." What she is less keen to keep a focus
on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of
directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the
French company, Total, that operates in Burma's offshore oilfields. The
gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built
with forced labour and whose construction involved Halliburton, of
which Vice-President Cheney was chief executive. From John Pilger (the Guardian 10/27/2007)
See
http://www.faireconomy.org/reports/2006/ExecutiveExcess2006.pdf
for the Institute for Policy Study’s 13th Annual CEO’s Compensation
Survey titled “Defense and Oil Executives Cash in on Conflict.” It
notes that since 9/11, the average pay for the 34 top military
contractors has increased from $3.6 million to $7.2 million.
While the average army private makes $25,000/year, the average military
contractor CEO makes $7.7 million.
Better pay can be an incentive for better performance. Much as
Republicans favor this concept, there ought to be some limitations
dictated by common sense.
Examples: When Merrill Lynch revealed a
$7.9 billion loss on subprimes in 2007. It fired its CEO, Stanley
O'Neal, but not without giving him $161.5 million parting gift first.
The same happened for ex-Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince, who walked with
$140 million. Even as $17.5 billion disappeared from Citigroup's books
in just six months. And $34.6 billion vaporized from Citigroup's
outstanding shares. These are enterprises too big to fail, so, though
it is kept quiet, there'll be considerable taxpayer money used to keep
them solvent. And so it goes. There are many others and they seem to
point to problems in corporate governance. Are these examples of pay
for performance ?
CEOs that rip the red meat from their
companies have become a commonplace in the US. It is but one more of
the symptoms that substantial
reform of corporate governance should be a high priority. There
should be severe limitations on corporate control of media...particularly news
media.
An aggressive program leading to
shareholder democracy would be a good start. Workers should always be
represented on the Board as they are in Germany. A highly graduated
income tax would solve many problems.
New Internet Tool for Executive Pay Comparisons: The
Securities & Exchange Commission launched its on-line tool that
enables comparison of executive compensation for major corporations. http://www.sec.gov/xbrl
