It’s 2018 and the world is a global corporate state, containing entities such as the Energy Corporation, a global energy monopoly based in Houston which deals with nominally-peer corporations controlling access to all transport, luxury, housing, communication and food on a global basis. Although this construction of the world in 2018 is from the 1975 dystopian fiction film Rollerball, it paints a very real portrait of where we stand today in America and around the globe.
There are many variations and arms of the corpocracy (defense, finance, goods and services, etc.) at work at any given time. It is always and only interested in the fiscal bottom line even when it comes at the expense of democracy and human rights.
Thirty multi-million dollar American corporations expended more money lobbying Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, ultimately spending approximately $400,000 every day (this, by the way, includes weekends) during that three-year period to lobby lawmakers and influence political elections, according to a 2011 report from the non-partisan Public Campaign.
Additionally, in an International Business Times article from Dec. 9, 2011, these companies spent about $476 million during the same period to lobby the U.S. Congress, as well as another $22 million on federal campaigns, while in some instances laying off employees and increasing executive compensation.
What are they getting for those millions spent? And, does it translate into what the vast majority of American people want?
Corporations and environmental concerns
Mountaintop removal with all of its pillaging and decimation is made possible by the millions in lobbying spent by corporations (and by the banks who loan them the money) to ensure that their agenda goes undisturbed.
PNC, Citi and UBS are the top three financial facilitators of mountaintop removal coal mining, according to a 2011 report by Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club that ranks 10of the world’s largest banks. These 10 banks have provided more than $2.5 billion (in 16 loans and bond underwriting deals) to mountaintop removal companies since January 2010, according to the report.
Nevertheless, as difficult as it must seem at times, it is possible to make decisions as a corporate entity that makes an impact for the greater good. The groups behind the report say that five banks have issued new policies on mountaintop removal since last year’s report card: Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC, UBS and Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse had the best record this year: “The bank has no exposure to coal-mining companies that practice mountaintop removal extraction … ”
An ever-expanding corpocracy opens up, protects and expands corporations’ foreign markets and exploitation of natural resources (oil and minerals) and cheap labor; keeps the corpocracy’s politicians in office; and distracts the American public from growing socio-economic deterioration at home (e.g., soaring poverty rate, joblessness, etc.).
Modern-day corruption
Abe Lincoln said, “Corporations have been enthroned—an era of corruption in high places will follow.” It did (in the age of robber barons), but public outrage and Teddy Roosevelt, the trust-buster, challenged that incarnation of the corpocracy. The second manifestation was during the Flapper Era and the Roaring 20s. The Great Depression, WWII and FDR impeded the beast, but did not slay it altogether. The third phase of corpocracy was during the Cold War. The military industrial complex, through fear-mongering and faux-patriotism, helped sustain it.
The overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mosadegh in 1953 was orchestrated by the CIA but was done at the behest of AIOC (the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), now BP. In 1954, the United States CIA led a coup in Guatemala and this time the puppet master was the United Fruit Company (we know them as Dole). These are just a couple examples of the corpocracy at work during the Cold War.
Endless militarism deepens the pockets of the defense industry, including the explosion (no pun intended) of weapons sales (the U.S. is the world’s top arms seller).
We are now living in the current embodiment of the corporate-dominated and financed governance of world affairs, where even the implosion of the world’s wealth and the creation of the greatest income inequality ever has not been enough to slow this recent version of the corpocracy down.
Most recently (August 2012), just 1 in 10 respondents in the Public Affairs Pulse survey said they would think more positively of a corporation that employed lobbyists. In all, just 8 percent of respondents had a more favorable opinion of companies that explicitly backed a specific candidate, and 13 percent thought more highly of companies that supported a particular issue or policy.
Yet, the same survey stated that about two-thirds of the people had a favorable view of corporations. So while the man and woman in the street bangs their not-so-free-market-free-market drum for them, corporate and financial titans continue to help shape policies that create stagnant and unlivable living wages.
Selling to the American public
One may be inclined to ask … why? Corporations are particularly skilled in the art of public relations. With one hand, they give us oil spills and cancer clusters, and with the other, they create foundations that mollify outrage. No, we will not see any commercials that say: Your child’s struggle with asthma was brought to you courtesy of the Fill-In-The-Blank Corporation. Nor should we expect any widespread corporate accountability when it comes to the destruction of lakes, streams, wetlands etc.
What we have seen, however, are endless commercials that tout their “unyielding” commitment to the community. And the cruel irony is that there is yet another hand that collects subsidies and tax breaks courtesy of the American citizen’s tax dollars.
Fines become another cost of doing business. Of course, when pollution turns a profit, individuals divide the money. Enron and other scandal-plagued corporations may have been forced to pay the piper, but in relation to corporate wrong-doing as a whole, this isn’t even a drop in the bucket.
Let it be understood, not merely being a corporation makes one a bad actor in their dealings with the American public, but the corpocracy is pervasive and autonomous. They are free, because of the complicity of all three branches of our government, to undermine democracy in any way that they choose.
This is not about left or right, but right and wrong; it is not a partisan concern, but a concern about and for democracy.
The sad truth about corporations and too-big-to-fail financial entities is that they have been able to sell a great many Americans the bill of goods that says that any opposition of their agenda is unpatriotic or un-American, while they, themselves, have no allegiance to any nation; committed only to their almighty bottom line at any cost.