{"id":12401,"date":"2014-08-02T09:25:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-02T09:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nonesoblind.org\/blog\/?p=12401"},"modified":"2014-09-13T18:51:22","modified_gmt":"2014-09-13T18:51:22","slug":"divided-we-fall-the-need-to-stop-the-corporate-takeover-of-our-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/divided-we-fall-the-need-to-stop-the-corporate-takeover-of-our-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Part of this Force: A Sociopathy Built into the Structure of Our Corporate System"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the series-within-a series \u2013 \u201cThis Evil Force\u201d can be seen \u201cMoving Through Time\u201d \u2014 I argued that the force that’s taken possession of the American right in our time is the re-emergence of the same spirit that took hold of the South in the 1850s and drove the nation to Civil War.<\/p>\n

But that is not the only component of the destructive force now operating. Another grows directly out of the Corporate Capitalist system. In some ways, this power-seeking, greed-fueled system is akin to the corporate world of the age of the Robber Barons. But this is also different, because this sociopathic conduct is built into the structure of the system.<\/p>\n

So we end up with a system on “Automatic Pilot,” so that it is not really human beings — like a John D. Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie — deciding on the path ahead, but the system itself. <\/p>\n

This piece ran as an op\/ed in almost all the major newspapers of Virginia’s 6th congressional district.<\/em><\/p>\n

*************************<\/p>\n

Divided We Fall<\/p>\n

Oh how I wish the people of America \u2013 liberal and conservative \u2013 could join together to protect our common interests and shared values. While focusing on issues that divide us, we are in danger of losing our birthright.<\/p>\n

Power in America has shifted from the citizenry to the corporate system. The role of money in American politics \u2013 always a problem \u2013 has greatly expanded. At the same time, wealth has been drained from the middle class and increasingly concentrated in the hands of giant corporations and the relatively few individuals who run them. <\/p>\n

As our democratic government becomes ever more an instrument of the corporate system, our nation\u2019s constitutional doctrine is being pried open ever wider to allow corporations the political rights of actual \u201cpersons.\u201d<\/p>\n

We Americans should be asking, \u201cWhat kind of \u2018persons\u2019 are these corporate giants whose rights and powers in our political system are expanding so dramatically?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer is not comforting.<\/p>\n

The original idea of a \u201ccorporation\u201d in American law was an entity that would serve the public good. But our giant corporations today are set up in a way that virtually requires that they behave immorally whenever their profit-making conflicts with the public good.<\/p>\n

Those who run our publicly-traded corporations declare that their fiduciary duty is to serve the interests of those who own their companies. But while real human beings care about many things, the corporate system is set up so that the \u201cinterests\u201d of the owners of corporations (i.e. stockholders) are defined in purely financial terms. The ostensible owners have no effective way of registering other concerns. As a result, the corporate decision-makers see themselves as obligated not to allow any other values to interfere with the maximization of profits.<\/p>\n

In other words, our corporate system is structured so that these mighty \u201cpersons\u201d will behave like sociopaths, governed by selfishness unrestrained by conscience.<\/p>\n

This sociopathic quality shows itself in virtually every case where industries have discovered that their products kill people. The asbestos industry is still in courts around America and the world for hiding from their workers the lethal truth the companies knew full well. The result of their deception was that many thousands died terrible deaths from asbestos they breathed on the job.<\/p>\n

The big tobacco companies lied for decades about the connection between their products and fatal illnesses, maximizing their profits even at the cost of their customers\u2019 lives. <\/p>\n

Now the hugely powerful energy industry is doing much the same, running a public disinformation campaign to sow doubt where science says there is none. In the pursuit of short-term profits, they work to keep us addicted to their products even if the disruption this causes to the earth\u2019s climate has a catastrophic effect on the lives of our children and grandchildren.<\/p>\n

Are these the kind of \u201cpersons\u201d we want controlling our government, making the decisions about what kind of nation America will become?<\/p>\n

This power without conscience is increasingly visible in countless decisions being made in our political system.<\/p>\n

We can see it in the laws that remove protections for the pensions that hardworking Americans earned. We can see it in the bankruptcy rules that favor banks over American families devastated by medical crises. We can see it in the weakening of the rights of workers in an era where the proportion of our national income going to wages is already way down. We can see it in the perpetuation of subsidies for a fabulously rich oil industry. We can see it in policies that revive the prosperity of Wall Street while Main Street still suffers. And on and on.<\/p>\n

All of us real persons in America have a profound common interest in protecting our founding vision of a government not just of the people but by and for the people as well.<\/p>\n

When we get distracted by the issues that divide us \u2013 the issues on which our differences cannot be resolved \u2013 we are falling into the trap set by powers working hard to weaken us. Divide and conquer is clearly their strategy. Our strategy must be united we stand.<\/p>\n

******************************<\/p>\n

In the context of this series, this piece shows one of ways that our institutional systems can be sources of brokenness. (There are others.) For human beings, the central challenge is first to understand the dynamics by which our systems tend to take us, whether we want them to or not, and second to get some control over how our systems evolve, so that we as a nation and we as humankind can arrive at a destination that we, and not our systems, have chosen.<\/p>\n

It is essential that we learn to understand these systemic forces of brokenness and that we devise ways to use the powers of wholeness to block the force of brokenness from doing its damage. <\/p>\n

In this instance, such ways would involve wise, fair, and efficient regulation of corporate activities where that’s needed in both the economic sphere (such as rules limiting pollution) and the political sphere (like campaign finance reform that puts effective barriers to prevent the great financial power of the corporate system from being translated into ownership of the American government).<\/p>\n

And one other remedy for this problem of structurally mandated sociopathy: I present a solution, giving more real power to the legal owners of these publicly-traded corporations, in chapter 11 (“Autopilot”) of my book <\/em>The Illusion of Choice: How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the series-within-a series \u2013 \u201cThis Evil Force\u201d can be seen \u201cMoving Through Time\u201d \u2014 I argued that the force that’s taken possession of the American right in our time is the re-emergence of the same spirit that took hold of the South in the 1850s and drove the nation to Civil War. But that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12401"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13595,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401\/revisions\/13595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}