The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (84 page)

“They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged.
 
Corporate dominance, especially financial power, and democratic values are incompatible.
 
They operate ruthlessly as private tyrannies.
 
They're predators, we're prey, and every day we're eaten alive.
 
They do it because they can, and in America by mandate.
 
Publicly owned US corporations, including financial ones, must serve shareholders by maximizing equity value through higher profits.
 
They do it by exploiting nations, people and resources ruthlessly.
 
Social responsibility doesn't matter, neither does being worker-friendly, a good citizen, or friend of the earth.
 
Bottom-line priorities alone, matter.
 
Failure to pursue fiduciary responsibilities means possible dismissal or shareholder lawsuits.
 
Yet nothing in America's Constitution or statute laws endow corporations with their rights.
 
They usurped them by co-opting Washington, the nation's courts, state capitals, and city halls.
 
As a result, over half the world's largest economies are corporations. Financial ones controlling the power of money are most dominant.
 
Corporate personhood enhanced their power, yet imagine.
 
Although corporations aren't human, they can live forever, change their identity, reside in many places globally, can't be imprisoned for wrongdoing, and can transform themselves into new entities for any reason.
 
They have the same rights and protections as people without the responsibilities.
 
As a result, they operate freely unrestrained, especially financial giants controlling the power of money at the public's expense.”
 
Stephen Lendman.
 
‘The Network of Global Corporate Control’, 16th December 2011

Let us begin with a brief comparison of Tanzania (the country) and Goldman Sachs (the corporation):

Tanzania – Annual GNP $2.2bn

25 million people

Goldman – Annual profit $2.2bn
       

160 partners

Spot the financial similarity and yet the discrepancy in the number of people who ‘benefit’.

At present, giant corporations are becoming larger and larger, buying up their competitors, and bribing and lobbying local authority councillors, mayors and representatives of government to scrap legislation which curbs their insatiable appetite for growth to the detriment of all else.
 
Already, the effect of this covert coup on free trade has left us with shopping malls which are almost exact copies of one another, offering little or no choice for the consumer and thus creating a virtual cartel.
 
Parking restrictions are being placed by local authorities on roads where small businesses are desperately clinging on to what trade is left.
 
Meanwhile, previously public spaces, even major roads, are being re-routed, driving traffic into giant shopping malls and supermarkets where the seemingly grandiose selection of shops is actually owned by just a handful of mega-corporations.

At present in the relatively small village where I live, opinion is divided on whether the supermarket giant, Tesco should be allowed to build a new store about one mile from the village centre.
 
Those people who say ‘yes’ argue that it will lead to greater choice, more convenience (ie. not having to drive the whole 6 miles or so to the next nearest other supermarket) and best of all to lower prices than are currently available in the existing local shops.
 
I can see the point to a certain extent but I firmly believe that it is far more important to our local community that we retain the existing, small, in many cases, one-man local businesses that have in some instances remained in the same families for a hundred years or more, rather than succumb to the might of the large corporations whose buying power and immoral treatment of suppliers and thus lower prices, will probably lead to the village centre becoming a ghost town in very short order.

In addition, should Tesco (or any other large corporate entity for that matter) decide say, two years hence that profits are not high enough after all, there not being a large enough local population to sustain their desired profit levels, then they will simply cut their losses and leave without so much as a thought to the local economy.
 
The reality then will be that having destroyed all the small, local businesses, then there will be nowhere for the locals to shop and they will wind-up having to travel even further whilst leaving desolation in the village centre itself.
 
It will also have a devastating effect on the local community in terms of job losses.
 
The loss of say 30-40 jobs in a small area such as this would be critical.
 
This scenario has been shown to happen in many, many examples throughout the Western world.

 
“One of the main problems that we have with our political system in the United States is that in many ways, corporations can literally buy seats in our Congress.
 
We have the United States Supreme Court that recently upheld a decision to allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts on independent expenditures.”
 
Marcy Winograd, Congressional Candidate and co-chair of the Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles

Corporations play a huge role in our day-to-day activities and they are constantly making decisions that have a profound effect on our daily lives.
 
For example, a corporation makes the decision to empty its chemical vats into a nearby river, the water supply is poisoned and residents of the adjacent town fall sick; or a corporation makes the decision to cut costs to increase profits and initiates a round of job losses and thus the community that was formed around the corporation is decimated.
 
We have often been appalled, angry and go on rants about the evil of corporations but according to Professor Simon Baron Cohen, evil itself is not the issue.

Baron-Cohen, an expert in autism and developmental psychology, is also a psychology and psychiatry professor at Cambridge University.
 
For many years he has spent considerable time researching the reasons why people commit vile and heinous acts.
 
His theory is that the lack of empathy is the root cause of all evil deeds and that this lack of empathy can be measured and treated.
 
He also defines empathy as the drive to identify another person's thoughts and feelings combined with the drive to respond appropriately to those thoughts or feelings.

He further asserts that the lack of empathy or failure to utilise it to its full potential is the driving force behind most of what ails our society on a global, domestic, community and family-unit scale.
 
The abstract arenas of diplomatic, legal, and military channels are insufficient to appropriately deal with conflict because their involvement forgoes empathy from entering the picture on a true person-to-person level.

In his books Baron-Cohen describes an empathy bell-curve spectrum and quotient test that indicates where an individual will be placed along this curve.
 
Most people naturally fall right in the middle but there is a zero degree empathy range and within this lie the psychopaths, narcissists, and individuals suffering with borderline personality disorders.

So what does all this information have to do with corporations?
 
Simply that corporations are legislatively derived artificial ‘individuals’ that can sue and be sued, raise funds, make political decisions, etc.
 
They are headed by a board of Directors that is by law duty-bound to make decisions in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders and not necessarily in the best interests of mankind in general, nature et al.

Since corporations are businesses whose sole purpose is to make money whatever the consequences, overall best interests are almost always those that increase profit, to the detriment of all else and empathy be damned.

True, there are some organisations that whilst in the process of turning a profit, strive to do no harm to society.
 
However embedded deep within Baron-Cohen’s bell-curve are corporations that seem to have made human suffering into a profitable side-line.
 
For example, that same name that has cropped-up in these pages many times, Monsanto Inc., creators of Agent Orange, DDT, Roundup, GMOs and a veritable plethora of other toxic substances that have caused horrific damage and injury to the world on a global scale.

Then there is Firestone and its rubber plantations in Liberia which poison the local and wider environment, pay slave-labour level wages and house workers in unsanitary conditions that most caring people would not see fit to keep an animal.

Likewise, Nestle and their cocoa plantations in the Cote d'Ivoire which employ young children and pay them less than subsistence wages and also keeps them living in substandard conditions.
 
Also, Big Pharma and their concerted efforts to keep us purchasing medicines that either patently do not work or cause more harm than good.

Let us also not forget Coca Cola, that caring organisation that has probably justly been accused of murdering individuals seeking to form unions to gain fair wages and treatment, although no punishment or retribution of any kind was forthcoming from complicit, bought-and-paid-for governments.

Not one corporate executive involved in making any of the above decisions or ‘giving the orders’ for any of the above actions has served any jail time or indeed in effect committed a crime.
  
By their very definition, corporations are able to forgo or bypass empathetic decision-making because they are abstract entities.
 
When making decisions that directly affect humanity, empathy is a necessary ingredient.
 
Take away the capacity for empathy and you are left with what we have today, psychopathic corporations spreading what we would deem to be evil all over the world, under normal circumstances.
 
The corporate machine is a coldly calculating force that makes decisions that are solely driven by bottom-line figures with the wellbeing and basic needs of humanity in a distant second-place, if even considered at all.