This short essay cites some of the facts about modern super corporations in the USA, and the role they now play in our government.
This is increasingly important in light of recent disclosures about their U.S. based private armies, available to the highest bidder.
Would they answer to U.S. authorities, or to their corporate paymasters?
Here's why I'm beginning to believe that instead of some hapless Arab zealots thousands of miles away, maybe rogue corporations are the real threat to America, our Constitution, and our freedoms.
Consider the following points:
Corporate owned private armies are now established in America. Blackwater is based in North Carolina. C.A.C.I. is based in Virginia, and there are others. Their employee-mercenaries are paid huge sums by their bosses... in some cases thousands a week. Do you doubt where their loyalties lie?
Corporations are controlling our recent very suspicious elections with their own proprietary secret software, and the paperless DRE (direct recording electronic) voting systems they've sold our states and local jurisdictions . These Rube Goldberg machines are famously unreliable, and were used in the razor thin 2004 GOP wins in Ohio and earlier in Florida. Disgraced Ohio Congressman Bob Ney is in jail with Jack Abramoff now, but both are linked to voting machine vendors.
(Thanks to tireless citizen activists around the nation these GOP dominated companies and their friends in Congress are now on the run, but does anyone really believe that G.W. Bush was honestly elected in 2004?)
Corporate influence is at the base of our problems with the news media. Most of it is now owned by large super corporations preoccupied with profits and shaping news. (Happily, the resulting coverage vacuum left by skewed news has been filled by great Alt News sources like OpEdNews and many political blogs, and helped debut an entirely new area of media and news.)
Corporations continue to oppose good environmental law and policy, and spend millions to oppose those who want to fix the
problems.
Corporations own our health care system and with millions of dollars support those legislators who are resisting Universal Healthcare or other meaningful reform.
Corporations are making hundreds of billions in war profits by supplying and marketing to our military. They are driving this selective war, and with millions of dollars they support those opposed to ending the Iraqi war or curtailing profits.
How do they get away with it? Corporations are legally treated as individuals, yet they control inhuman levels of capital and power and seem directly opposed to the concerns of individual U.S. citizens.
They have the same rights of people, which is the opposite of the intentions of the U.S. Constitution, which is all about the individual rights.
So finally we may have identified a real enemy: Anti-individual corporations. And now they have their own private mercenaries, here on U.S. soil.
This is a problem we need to fix NOW.
More than ever before we can see why Campaign Finance reform is essential. Letters and phone calls to legislators and public interest groups showing interest and concern about out of control corporate power is a good start.
Bill Bucolo has trained and worked in newspapers, public relations and magazine publishing since the 60's. During the Viet Nam War he was active in the Southern Student Organizing Committee and Students for a Democratic Society, and one of the publishers of the Florida Free Press which eventually prevailed in a 1st Amendment case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Since November 2000 He has been active in the fight for election system reform and against conservative excesses and writes frequently on these issues.
I am in North Carolina. I wonder if Blackwater has any connection to the rendition flights that are staged out of the Smithfield and Kinston NC airports. We have state lawmakers trying to force the govt to investigate, and are considering "anti-torture" legislation. "Anti-torture" legislation - who would think that we would have to do that here in 2007?
Meanwhile, I guess folks are starting to realize that something is wrong as every job under the sun is either privatized, outsourced or offshored.
Banks are sending every processing job, not just IT, out to foreign countries like India.
Bush signed a bill to let Mexican truckers drive on into the US, doing what we thought was the impossible - offshoring truck driving jobs, so to speak.
Will there be any jobs left, or will we be the new "serf" economy, with either extremely rich and extremely poor?
by
ncvoter (16 articles, 1 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 107 comments)
on Monday, March 26, 2007 at 8:15:04 AM
1 comments
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