Corporations remain repositories of enormous authoritarian power

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The Corporations –
Killers Of Democracy

By Siv O’Neall

02 June, 2008 [print_link]
Axis Of Logic

The Wall Street mob has plenty of reason to be "patriotic".

IT’S WAY TO LATE at this moment to ask the question: Are we going to lose our democracy? We may not all have noticed it yet, but the Big Corporations stole our democracy a long time ago.

How did they manage? They bought up everything, from the heavy to the light industry, arms, oil, chemical, to the people in Congress who are supposed to protect us from abuse of power by applying the rules set down in the Constitution. But, above all, they bought up the media. There is no objective source for authentic news in the U.S. any more, other than the Internet.

Robert Murdoch and his equally power-hungry fellow media moguls have seen to it that we just get pre-cooked baby-formula infotainment. People are dumbed down by the non-stop stream of meaningless chatter and unceasing propaganda.

Two major disasters

Among all the outrageous and inhuman crimes that plague the world today, there are two all-consuming current disasters which tie into all the other dictatorial abuses of power, from the executive to the lobbies that have bought up the government in all its forms.

There is first of all world hunger and, on the same level of emergency, the phenomenon of global warming – both those enormous problems having to be seen as the disasters that must be dealt with in the most urgent way possible. And today, there is virtually no urgency displayed in the way those disasters are dealt with – or not dealt with.

And yet, those two huge problems have to be solved if the world is going to continue in a shape even vaguely like the world as we know it.

There is the planetary inequality which has caused the world hunger that finally seems to have attracted wide-spread attention. It is obviously not a recent phenomenon, but it has been enhanced by the rise in food prices, which have multiple causes – the use of food for biofuel, the rise in the price of oil for transport, the droughts in Australia and in Africa, the enormous sham of GMOs that were made out to be capable of saving the world from hunger, but instead are doing the opposite. And let’s not forget about the role the speculators and the hedge funds are playing in their roulette game with heavily loaded dice.

The second enormous disaster is climate change, which we don’t seem to be able to do anything much about. Or rather, governments are, at their own peril, disregarding the imminent danger of inaction in the face of global warming. It would be perfectly possible to roll back the disastrous situation where we find ourselves today. However, instead of dealing with the problem of over-consumption of oil in a rational way in order to save our lives and the life of the planet, governments are forging ahead in the same old way of splurging on oil consumption as if there was no tomorrow. Oil companies go on making bigger profits than ever before in human history, while the people are paying the price for their obscene profits at the gas pumps.

Why the lack of action?

So, why can’t we deal with the two foremost disasters, poverty and climate change? Because the corporations are more interested in making big bucks than saving the planet or saving people from starvation. Once again, it’s that short-term profit that outplays all true concern for realism and sound planning. Speculators drive up the prices of commodities without a second thought for the consequences of their short-sighted game of quick profit which produces nothing and benefits nobody.

So the real rulers of the world, the Big Corporations, are condemning us to a life of increased poverty and hunger in third-world countries, a general increase in insecurity and joblessness for middle class people in the western world and increased pollution in the emerging economies in Asia, where the standard of living is actually rising – for the rich. And of course, alongside all these disasters, we are seeing the lives of steadily increasing luxury for the people who are reaping the profits of the plunder. The Corporations see to it that the so-called governments, their obedient front men, cut back the taxes on the top levels of income, on capital gains and on inheritance.

Ethanol is NOT the solution

There is big talk and lots of activity for the production of ethanol, which is exactly the way we should NOT be going in the campaign to lower the rate of release of CO2 gas into the atmosphere. This use of corn, sugar cane and soybeans for biofuel makes for less food for the hungry in the third world and also in Brazil, which is now considered an emerging nation rather than a developing one, increasing food prices in the entire world. It does not make for less emission of CO2 gas since the production of ethanol gives off more CO2 than it saves as an alternative fuel. But corporations and industrial farms are taking advantage of people’s ignorance and gullibility and making huge profits. (See Addendum on ethanol*) Rain forests are being cut down to make room for millions of acres of culture for the production of ethanol and biodiesel. And those rain forests are exactly the best protection on the planet against too much CO2 in the atmosphere. [1]

The Corporations make money off ethanol production, so that’s the way we are going, even though it increases world hunger and does absolutely nothing to save the world from global warming.

Production of grazing land for cattle

Land is also being taken over for production of grazing land for cattle who are the heaviest consumers of grain and who, when converted to meat offer far less nourishment than they have consumed during their growing process.

One goal for corporations – maximum profit

In other words, the two problems of poverty and hunger and the problem of climate change are deeply intertwined. Both problems could be dealt with rationally, certainly to a somewhat satisfactory extent. But the corporations are not making money off a policy of improving the situation for the starving people in the world or on the urgent need to limit global warming and the disastrous consequences the planet will be undergoing in a near future. We have already begun to see the effects of climate change, but since the corporations own the governments, there is little chance that anything radical will get done very soon.

Renewable energy

There are several ways of producing renewable energy, but who cares? There is no money in it. There is, above all, solar and wind energy waiting to be developed, but no big-scale efforts have been made so far to save the planet using these fabulous non-polluting sources of energy. On a small scale, yes, enough to prove that it works. Even the tidal movements of ocean water can very efficiently be used to make energy. But it wouldn’t make any big bucks for the Corporations. And the Corporation is King. So what happens? We have opted for the destruction of the planet.

In short, the world has been taken over by the Big Corporations hand-in-hand with the Main Stream Media and they are all busy shredding our human rights and making our planet into a sterile desert. As long as wildfire capitalism is ruling the world, we are doomed.

SIV O’NELL was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y. and traveled extensively throughout the U.S, Europe, and other continents, including several trips to India. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France for 30 years, first in Paris and now Lyon. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and she also feels that ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’.

•••

*Addendum on Ethanol:

Ethanol And Biodiesel From Crops Not Worth The Energy
ScienceDaily (Jul. 6, 2005) – ITHACA, N.Y. – Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:
* soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
* sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Footnote:

[1] “Recent research has shown that the Amazon rain forest is not a stable mature forest with growth and decay in balance but is in fact an expanding forest that is being fertilised by the excess atmospheric CO2. The trees are getting bigger and there is a net take up of 5000 kg of carbon per hectare per year ( 1 hectare = 100 x 100 metres ). The total area of forest is 400 million hectares so the whole forest could be absorbing 2 billion tons of carbon per year.”

“If the Amazon rainforest burns and releases billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in a short period then this will be a further boost to global warming that will result in significantly higher end of century temperatures.”

© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com

BONUS ADDENDUM BY TGP EDITORS:

Corporate Power Facts and Stats

Author And Page Information

• by Anup ShahThis Page Last Updated Tuesday, May 15, 2001

• This page:http://www.globalissues.org/article/59/corporate-power-facts-and-stats.
• To print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print version:
  • http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/59

The following are collected from a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. The report is called Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power. Over time, additonal facts and stats will be added from other sources as well.

1. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).
2. The Top 200 corporations’ sales are growing at a faster rate than overall global economic activity. Between 1983 and 1999, their combined sales grew from the equivalent of 25.0 percent to 27.5 percent of World GDP.
3. The Top 200 corporations’ combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10.
4. The Top 200s’ combined sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) living in “severe” poverty.
5. While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the world’s workforce.
6. Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4 percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4 percent.
7. A full 5 percent of the Top 200s’ combined workforce is employed by Wal-Mart, a company notorious for union-busting and widespread use of part-time workers to avoid paying benefits. The discount retail giant is the top private employer in the world, with 1,140,000 workers, more than twice as many as No. 2, DaimlerChrysler, which employs 466,938.
8. U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
9. Of the U.S. corporations on the list, 44 did not pay the full standard 35 percent federal corporate tax rate during the period 1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world’s biggest corporation – General Motors.
10. Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200 made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to 46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued deregulation.