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A scorpion wanted to cross
a swift river, and asked
a frog to carry him.
The frog
asked "How do I know that you will not sting me?"
"Well," answered the
scorpion, who was good
with words when he wanted something, "then
I wouldn't be able to get
across the river."
"Well," said the frog, "then how do I know that
you won't sting and kill me as soon as we're
across the river?"
"Oh,"
said the scorpion, "because I'll be so grateful for the ride, why would I want
to kill you then?"
This con-vinced the frog as
frogs are easy to
fool - so he let the scorpion on his back, and began swimming across the
river.
They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging river, when,
to his great surprise,
the frog felt a painful sting and looked around to see the scorpion pulling his
stinger out of the frog's back.
Very soon,
the frog felt himself becoming numb.
Just before he was completely paralyzed, the frog had the breath to ask
"Why?"
"It's just who I am," said the
scorpion, as they both sank and drowned.
Of course, the story was never
really about scorpions.
It was
meant as a warning against certain rare but dangerous kinds of people who are
like scorpions intent on destroying others even if it destroys them
too.
This is such a frightening story is because a person like the
scorpion, a person who lacked
even basic compassion, isn't quite human.
One of the scariest
things we can imagine is a
machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and
feels nothing when we
suffer, cry, or die.
Think of those android-type
men in the "Matrix" movies.
Or the
Orcs and
Sauron in "Lord of the Rings," or the
governor of California as
the "Terminator," a robot
programmed only to destroy.
I suppose the most famous story like
this is still Mary Shelly's 1818 tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he
forged from dead human body parts.
For nearly two centuries,
the Frankenstein
monster has been a symbol of creating something inhuman,
giving it life and immense power without
a soul, then living to see it
turn on us, as the monster
even killed Dr. Frankenstein.
There have been a lot
of movies on this theme in the past few years.
The "Terminator," "Total Recall," Darth
Vader in "Star Wars," the
casual indifference to life in "Pulp
Fiction," powerful forces of greed
and destruction in "Lord of the
Rings" - you can probably think of another half dozen.
When I was
growing up, the most powerful movie like this was the original 1956 version of
"Invasion of the Body
Snatchers."
It was about the difference between
real people and
pathological people.
You probably know the story.
A mindless life force from outer
space drifted from a desolate, dead
planet and wound up on this
one.
It operated under a simple program.
When a human fell
asleep near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person,
taking their body, looks, even
their memory, and draining their life, then destroying the original and
taking their place.
You could hardly tell the difference.
They
looked the same, had all the same memories.
But they had no soul.
They had no compassion,
no feeling for anyone.
The squeals of a dog
hit in the road drew no attention.
Life didn't matter to them.
Only reproducing their kind, to no other end than reproducing their
kind.
Eventually, like the frog and the scorpion, they kill everything.
Then if the cosmic winds are
right, they may blow across the galaxy
and suck the life out of yet another
planet.
When humans act like this,
there's something fundamentally
wrong.
Theologians call
them evil, novelists call them demons or monsters, and
psychologists call them
psychopaths.
Since psyche means soul,
the word really means
people with sick souls.
Psychopaths are:
Irresponsible
Grandiose,
self-absorbed
Psychopaths are unable to
feel remorse
Psychopaths won't accept responsibility for their
destructive actions
They're
finally quite
superficial: no depth; all manipulation.
Why am I talking about
persons who are not real, psychopaths and scorpions who have been programmed to
destroy, even if it also destroys them?
It's a way of introducing the
business of understanding the
money power that
has taken over American society and
is on the verge of taking
over the world.
I am talking about a fictious person which, like
the invasion of the body snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in,
destroying the compassionate qualities of people.
You'll think I've
badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a
real person is the corporation.
There is remarkable book by a Canadian
law professor Joel Bakan is "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of
Profit and Power."
Corporations began forming in the late 17th and
early 18th centuries, to pool the money of a large number of investors.
Laws were
passed saying investors had no liability for deeds of the corporation.
All investors
could lose was their investment.
This gave the corporation
limited liability, but
unlimited
profitability.
From the start, as a matter of structure and law,
the only purpose of a corporation was to
make as much money as
possible for its stockholders.
It was the only way in which to get
people to invest in
stock.
By the late 19th
century, a single court clerk had transformed the corporation into "a person",
a "legal person", and even spoke of it in that way.
In 1886, lawyers
representing this newly minted "person" won a ruling from the Supreme Court
saying that, as a "legal person", corporations were entitled to be protected by
the 14th amendment for "due process
of law" and "equal protection of the law."
These provisions of the 14th
amendment, as you may remember, were written for the protection of freed slaves
after the War between the States.
Since 1886, it has been used almost
exclusively to protect corporations - even when they
make slaves of workers all
over the third world and, some would argue, within our own country.
Since being christened as "persons", corporations have done what any
person would do: they have fought for both
survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor
their aims, and buying
influence, lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents (Woodrow Wilson,
Herbert Hoover, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, Harry
Truman, Lyndon Baines
Johnson, Ronald
Reagan, George HW Bush,
Bill Clinton,
George W Bush)
when they can - and, looking back, it seems they can quite often.
It isn't seen as evil. Its just
business as usual.
And what are their aims?
If the corporation sells stock, its
sole legal purpose, under international and American laws, is to make as much
money as possible for its stockholders.
A corporation can pretend to care
about society or the environment, as long as
the money they spend makes
more people want to buy their products and so
increases profits for
shareholders.
| When
John Maynard Keynes
wrote his tragically optimistic essay Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren, he thought that the automation of compound interest would
create a swift-running river of
capital that would be so deep and so wide that there would be no
scarcity. |
Corporations may not, legally,
spend money for social
justice.
Corporations really aren't interested in
social justice,
only in profit.
Milton Friedman,
a third-rate economist, adopted the
greediest kind of corporatism - neoliberalism in the EU or
neoconservatism in
America.
Milton Friedman compared acts of social conscience to
car manufacturers using pretty girls to sell
cars.
"That's never really about the girls," Milton Friedman points
out, "it's just a trick to
sell cars."
Altruism just does not
have a place in the vision of Milton Friedman.
A corporation can donate
to the special Olympics or civic projects, but only if its intent is to sell
more product.
Peter Drucker, the guru of corporate management, claims
if you have a CEO who wants to do social
good, fire him fast!
There are laws supporting
this perspective.
Ninety years ago, when
Henry Ford was becoming
astoundingly rich from selling his Model T Fords, he decided that he was making
too much money.
So in 1916,
Henry Ford "cancelled the
stock dividends to give customers price reductions because he felt it was wrong
to make obscene profits."
Two of Henry Ford's major investors, the
Dodge brothers, took him to court, arguing that
profits belonged to the
stockholders, not the corporation, and the court agreed with them,
establishing a
precedent that still rules.
Corporations exist as persons only to do
whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their stockholders.
Even if it harms people.
The
Dodge brothers start their own corporation in competition with
Ford.
In 1933
Supreme Court judge
Louis
Brandeis finally made the connection.
He said corporations were
"Frankenstein monsters" capable of great evil.
Joel Bakan cites another
famous case from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas
Day 1993 a mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while
stopped at a stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to
explode, burning and badly disfiguring them.
During the trial, a report introduced showed
General Motors knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could explode on
impact, killing the car's occupants.
In fact, about five hundred people
had been killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new Malibu
style cars were being planned.
A statistician figured that each
fatality could cost the corporation $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the
figure by 41 million, the number of cars General Motors had on the
road.
The statistician concluded
that each death cost General Motors $2.40 per automobile.
The cost
of fuel tanks that did not explode in crashes added $8.59 per car.
That
meant the corporation could save $6.19 per car if it let people die in fuel-fed
fires rather than alter the design of
vehicles to avoid such fires.
The huge jury award was later reduced
by 3/4, and General Motors
appealed the case.
In support of General Motors, the United States Chamber of
Commerce filed a brief defending the practice of using this kind of
"cost-benefit analysis in corporate decision making."
The jury's
decision, the United States Chamber of
Commerce said, was deeply troubling, because manufacturers should use
cost-benefit analysis to
make the most profitable decisions.
The corporate legal structure
requires executives to make only those
decisions that create
greater benefits than costs for their shareholders.
Executives have
no authority to consider what harmful effects a decision might
have on other people or upon the environment, unless those effects might
have negative consequences for the
corporation.
Do you see what has happened
here?
This "person", by following its
legal nature, can
and does endanger and kill human beings in the pursuit of profit on
purpose.
On August 21, 1931,
Major General Smedley Darlington
Butler stunned an
audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had
said:
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military
service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine
Corps.
I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to
Major General.
And during that period, I spent most of my time being a
high class muscle-man for Big
Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster
for corporatism.
I helped purify
Nicaragua for the
international banking house of Brown Brothers
in 1909-1912.
I
helped make Mexico,
especially Tampico, safe for American
oil interests.
I brought light to the
Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests.
I helped make Haiti
and Cuba a decent place for
the National City Bank
boys to collect revenues in.
I helped in the
rape of half a dozen
Central American republics
for the benefit of Wall
Street.
In China
in 1927 I helped see to it
that Standard Oil went its
way unmolested.
The record of racketeering is long.
I was
rewarded with honors,
medals,
promotions.
Looking back
on it, I feel that I could have
given Al Capone a few hints.
The best he could do was to operate a
racket in three districts.
The Marines operated on three
continents."
Given that speech, and Smedley Darlington Butler's
disgust with the role the military played, not in
serving democracy but in serving
the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly
stunning.
 Franklin D Roosevelt took office
in the midst of a banking
crisis.
He embarked upon
a socialist scheme of
massive proportions with centralized government planning and control very
similar in many respects to the Soviets.
With many of these
socialist projects an
utter disaster Franklin D Roosevelt embarked upon
an industrial building project
- World War II.
These
attempts to increase industrial
productivity took lives - on the
construction site and on the
battlefield.
Both fed the maw of the disastrous greed of the
wealthiest corporations.
Small business hated the
price, wage and labor
controls along with the army of "inspectors" which
socialism brought.
The actual controlling interests, large corporations and their owners,
were then able to skim the cream off the entire output of the country.
Large corporations have
always supported socialism as wealth flows to the center.
In
1934, Fortune
magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of
fascism and the economic
miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions,
and generating greater
profits for corporations.
On August 22nd of 1934, Major General
Smedley Darlington Butler's was approached in a hotel room in
Philadelphia by a messenger of a
group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and
dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment.
The
"business interests" wanted Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to assemble
a volunteer army, take over
the White House, and install himself as
the fascist dictator of the
United States, with the financial support of major corporations [Business Plot/White House Putsch].
Some observers
feel with a different
general it may well have worked.
Smedley Darlington Butler refused,
and told the story.
In 1934, the business interests believed they would
have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy,
and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest
corporations and individuals in America,
to the degradation or
destruction of everyone else.
"Today, seventy years after the
failed coup, a well-organized
minority again threatens democracy.
Corporate America's long and
patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much
quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is
now succeeding.
Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and
using dollars rather than
bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so
desperately wanted: freedom from
democratic control." - Joel Bakan
Their reach is now worldwide.
The
World Trade Organization
sues nations for safety
or environmental laws that
cut into corporate
profits.
The World Trade Organization is effective in
preventing governments from enacting environmental regulations that impede
corporate profits.
NAFTA, an investor protection plan, enabled corporations to break
unions and out-source
wage labor to
cheap wage labor markets
around the world.
Corporations get richer by
destroying the lives of American and
other workers, gutting entire societies, leaving husks and
moving on to drain the life from
another society, exactly like the invasion of the body
snatchers.
Is there hope? Can anything be done?
"If a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies
that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the
corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its
assets taken and sold at public auction." -
New York Attorney General Eliot
Spitzer
We change our laws and change the way in which this
Frankenstein
monster is allowed to do business in this country and in the
world.
We created corporations, we defined them, and
we have the authority to
redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they
are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society by being
unable to externalize
costs, break laws and sling poison.
Sermon by Davidson Loehr, November 7, 2004
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