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CEOs drain la alma



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.



The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs



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.



corporatism

The Tyranny of Economists

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.

eurozone foreclosures


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.



moneyed class profits


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.



caution tyrannical world order ahead

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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