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Corporate Tyranny

Because we thought it would provide a gravy train, we foolishly allowed corporations in America, and now the world over, to gather such powers to themselves that they constitute a tyranny.

Their decisions control our lives. They possess power and resources beyond those of some soveriegn nation states and the result is a tyranny that is amoral, apolitical, anti-democratic and concerned primarily with greed, profit, property, and the bottom line. This corporate tyranny controls individuals, communities, governments, the environment, the world. We are literally controlled by corporations and decisions made in board rooms we know not where. Huge multinational corporations are our masters and we their servants. We have sold ourselves for a mess of potage, for crumbs from the corporate table, into slavery and oppression, and we groan under the burden.

This tyranny must be fought, must be resisted, must be broken. If it is not, whatever decisions you and I make are totally irrelevant. Until we assert and exert our sovereignty once again, we shall continue to be tyrannized. And we shall continue to deserve everything we get as result of our spinelessness.

Corporations are very useful tools, and like any useful tool, they need to be used properly or they can be dangerous, even life-threatening. Along the way we stopped enforcing the rules that kept them under control. "Give us greater freedom," they said, "and we'll make you lots of money." So we did. But something went wrong. They have more freedom and greater rights than we do. They make lots of money, but they keep almost all of it or parcel it out to a select few, often to those who have plenty already. Now many of our corporations run amok, answerable to no one, simply out of control:

They steal from us by consuming our common resources or by spoiling them;
They depend on others to clean up their messes and don't want to pay for it to get the job done;
They argue for the importance of the bottom line, but cook the books;
They defend the free market but demand government subsidies and favored import legislation;
They demand absolute freedom to set prices and wages;
Money investment is more significant than a worker's labor investment, etc. etc.

Corporations alo create an environment in which ethics are slid away in favor of the bottom line, competition is only good for the other guy, and personal honor is compromised for the bottom line. Thus we have the specter of some of the brightest, best educated, and capable people in our society breaking the law in letter and spirit for greater profit in a world in which nearly anything goes as long as you don't get caught.

We have surrendered our lives. We have surrendered our wills, we have surrendered our minds and intellects. We laid down our responsibilities and obligations to be careful and watchful. We have allowed the corporations to grow like giant beanstalks for the promise of gold at the top. Meanwhile, down below, here, the gigantic roots and the needs for nourishment and fertilizer for the growth of those beanstalks devastates human lives, homes, and the countryside, like malevolent dragons in a fairy tale.

Giganticizing Mergers

While the rhetoric surrounding coporations is about lean and mean and competition, look at these largest mergers, enormously increased concentrations of power and resources, that have happened since 1984 according to the Associated Press:

And these don't even beging to account for the major merger in banking and communications that have occured in the last year.

 

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© 1997, C. Grigsby, All Rights Reserved. 2 Aug 1998

Comments? E-mail to: Channing