This intermingling takes the following forms, as well as others:
1.) Leaders from the business sector become elected officials. This is not inherently a bad thing. Leaders exhibit certain useful qualities whether in the business field or public office. However, these business leaders operate under conditions which are not acceptable as public officials. Further, they often serve in one capacity to benefit their private undertakings. Dr. Bill Frist, George Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and many many others are prominent examples.
2.) Corporations have the means to contribute to the campaign coffers far beyond those of individuals. There is no reason to give examples of this here. While there are certain constraints on this process that are beyond the scope of this post, the fact is corporations have a voice much louder any person can ever hope to have.
3.) The lobbying system allows for the proliferation of corporate friendly causes to receive much more attention on Capitol Hill than any people friendly cause can have. In fact, most of the time this phenomenon serves discredit the people friendly causes through various forms of smearing.
4.) U.S. policy formulation anymore takes place in think tanks and similar organizations that receive grants and forms of patronage from corporations with the goal of creating influence in the political structures. If they cannot buy their politicians in the campaigns, often it pays to get involved during at the policy level. It's an efficient method of outsourcing that conveniently cuts regular people out.
Corporations must turn a profit. One of the overt ways this is done is by cultivating close ties to the structures political power in every state capitol as well as in Washington D.C. The revolving doors of leadership in addition to the process of buying causes leads the nation to pursue causes that are extremely beneficial for the corporations, and therefore, their owners, but extremely offensive to everyone else.
I discussed the telecoms in the last post. As an example here, I would like to use Blackwater USA. As you can read, Blackwater is a private security firm whose value grew exponentially after 9/11. One of the functions of the group is providing a private military force. It receives government contracts to operate in Iraq and wherever else there are wealthy people to pay for them. Its largest client is the U.S. Government which pays Blackwater hundreds of millions of dollars every year. That means you and I pay hundreds of millions of dollars every year for this private military force to exist, in addition to our regular military.
Blackwater USA benefited from 9/11 in ways that ordinary people cannot imagine. Think about this for a moment. There is a private army that answers only to its shareholders. That obligation to its shareholders demands that it attempt to influence foreign policy if that is the area in which the corporation operates. A private army is useless without trouble spots. A powerful corporation's CEO is liable to its shareholders if it does not maximize the corporation's profits even if those profits depend on the existence troubled spots. A tiny corporation will just go out of business. However, a powerful corporation, with billions in market capitalization, and access to the White House is going to find trouble spots whether or not they actually exist.
In another bleak scenario, the current system of corporation governance ensures that such private military groups will be deployed against its own population to stamp out dissent, crush protests, take organizers prisoner, and execute people who try to exercise their constitutional rights. This brings to mind the clones in Star Wars Episodes II & III. At the right time the person who has such a force at his/her disposal will wipe out all dissent. Truly the founders of the Gestapo, and SS could, which did the same thing last century, would be jealous. We will see this in our country before too long if we do not revise the governance of our corporations. I would doubt this could be a possibility under other administrations, but the Bush administration has shown little regard for law, extreme hostility for dissent, and a shamefully poor record for humane policies. (By that I mean, under his administration, the U.S. practiced torture, disregarded international and domestic law, and followed many of the other abuses of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.)
No one is a bad person because he/she works for a corporation or founds a corporation. However, under our current system of governance, no one can stop a corporation from repeating some of the most terrible events of human history.
How could this happen? Wouldn't national outrage percolate after people see this stuff on the news? Next time I will discuss the news outlets.
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