OPINION:

Public Enemy #1: The Corporations

The corporations our Capitalist system spawned, encouraged and supported have now left our borders and become entities of life unto themselves. They have turned on us. The nature of a corporation, like a virus, is to survive and multiply like cancer. A corporation may be comprised of humans, but unlike humans a corporation has no soul and no inherent, self-imposed standard of ethics. Anything and anyone that stands in the way of profits is an enemy to a corporation.

Each corporation has become its own special interest group, its own nation. Unlike individuals, corporations can easily afford to buy influential and connected people who will lobby the president and Congress to do their bidding. The corporation has only one legally-required loyalty, and that is to the shareholders of the corporation. As such, the corporation of today is frighteningly similar to an HIV infection, blindly doing its bidding no matter what the outcome, so long as the shareholders are satisfied.

American capitalism may have given birth to most of the multi-national corporations, but in their quest and requirement to satisfy their shareholders’ demands for higher profits, they are now eating their own mother nation.

You cannot legally purchase perfectly safe prescription drugs from Canada or elsewhere at one-third the cost because the same corporate interests stopped your senators from approving it.

You cannot stop or even inhibit your own elected representatives in Congress from voting for a bill that nine out of ten Americans oppose, like the current Immigration Reform Bill, because the same corporate interests are promising “your” elected representatives high-paying jobs they can rely on long after you throw them out of office. You no longer have the kind of citizen control the Framers of the Constitution intended you to have.

At one time, huge corporate credit card companies were kept in check by anti-usury laws that prohibited those corporations from charging exorbitant interest rates. As much as I liked him, it was President Ronald Reagan who did away with those controls, and once the credit card companies were off that leash they relaxed their lending standards and started offering credit to anyone, so long as they paid the interest charged.

Once that hurdle was crossed, the credit card corporations faced only one more threat, that being mass-filings for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy by a future debt-ridden population engulfed in an economic turndown, so they got together and bought George W. Bush the presidency in return for his promise of “Bankruptcy Reform” legislation that basically made filing Chapter 7 Bankruptcy a thing of the past.

Whatever the corporations want, the corporations get under the present administration, and I’m not at all certain the Democrats will perform for us better. The Dems have already capitulated by passing a bill to finance Bush’s war in Iraq without any strings attached, setting up another voter backlash for 2008. But the voters are also becoming a lot more savvy and cynical where their elected representatives are concerned.

It has become obvious that the moment anyone is sworn into federal office as high as representative or senator, all voter control is lost and corporate control takes over, and it is easy to understand why. After all, the voters can turn a Representative out of office in only two years, Senators in six years, but a corporation can reward a representative for just one critical but unpopular vote with a high-paying career for life, so why shouldn’t that person show more loyalty to the corporations than to the voters?

The one thing the corporations fear is the man or woman with so much personal integrity they cannot be controlled no matter what promises are made them, and in the instant case, the corporate powers are deeply concerned by the grass-roots popularity of presidential candidate and Representative Ron Paul of Texas.

The corporations already know they can’t control Ron Paul because of his voting record, and they also know a President Ron Paul would be disastrous for them, so they’ve given marching orders to every popular, corporate-controlled media outlet to marginalize, dismiss and discredit Ron Paul at every opportunity.

When Ron Paul takes the top scores in debates, it is not reported. If Ron Paul makes any statement whatsoever that can be taken out of context to make him look goofy or just plain stupid, it is widely reported. In the meantime, the corporations’ favorite boys, Giuliani, Romney and McCain, keep getting center stage on every media corner, as if no other candidates exist.

These days, if the corporations sponsor and support something or someone, you can be relatively certain it is not good for America or Americans in general, but at this writing, I can’t think of an effective thing we can do to reverse the power-grab that has taken place.