Where? Everywhere the few
live! But there is one land that is the most lawless ever in favor of the few from
the beginning of time and evermore, the United States of America (US)! The few,
of course, are the few thousand, the power elite of America’s corpocracy, its
industry chieftains and subordinate poohbahs in government. [1] The miniscule few
rule and ruin the world and are slowly taking the billions of human beings to
extinction later this century, so predict over 30 experts. [2] Let’s look at
some evidence.
1. The US Constitution
The purportedly
overriding law in the US is its Constitution. Bear in mind that it was written
by and for the British oligarchs who, African slaves in tow, invaded the Native
Americans’ land and proceeded quickly to slaughter the inhabitants and steal
their land.
Let’s examine some
segments of that lawless piece of document revered by deliberately snookered Americans
who are in the vast majority of the population.
Consider the Second
Amendment, the right to bear arms, the Holy Grail of the National Rifle Association,
and all other gun zealots. The Framers weren’t idiots. They knew what they were
crafting, and they were scared of possible repercussions from the masses. They
wanted to be sure that if the masses revolted against the Oligarch’s
subjugation, the Oligarch’s could count on being protected by a well-armed militia
that could be quickly summoned.
Now consider the
disingenuously crafted Eight Amendment: “Excessive
bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual
punishments inflicted.” You
don’t need to be a genius or a cryptographer to see that this Amendment is a
“go pass jail card” for the original Oligarchs and their power elite progeny.
“Hey, clan, the takings are yours for the wanting.”
2. Fake Anti-War Laws
Various laws exist that
outlaw war. Parts of the U.S. Constitution outlaw war, but remember, that document
was meant to be broken. International
laws such as the 1928 Kellog-Briand Peace Pact outlaw war but what lusty war
monger/profiteer cares if aware of such
far-away laws?
What about the belated creation in 2002 of
the International Criminal Court (ICC). Over 100 countries belong. The U.S.
does not. The ICC is basically toothless and timid, going after war criminals
only when they live in powerless states, and even in those cases, I don’t think
any genocidal leader, for example, has yet to be brought to stand before the
ICC court. Even so, the U.S. power elite are not about to take their chances,
given the long and continuing history of US warring and plundering.
Article 2,
paragraph 4 of the UN Charter stipulates that: “All Members shall refrain
in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the
territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other
manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The UN? It
is a worthless organization. Well, let’s modify that; Know many if any members
of the U.S. power elite who pay attention to the UN?
Incredulously, if possible, are laws
prohibiting wars conducted inhumanly! What
are the inhumane methods of war? They include prohibition on exploding or expanding
bullets (1868), expanding bullets (1899), poison and asphyxiating gases (1925),
biological weapons (1972), chemical weapons (1993), munitions using
undetectable fragments (1980), blinding laser weapons (1995), anti-personnel
mines (1997), cluster munitions (2008). Sure, tell inhumanly or humanly war
advocates that the late Albert Einstein once said “war is an act of murder.”
3. Meet People Corporations
Not corporate people, but corporate
organizational charts that act like real people, talking,
walking, and having emotions like gloating. These human qualities were bestowed
on corporations by an infamous US Supreme Court ruling. The metamorphosis gives
corporations a huge advantage in getting by with lawless acts. For example, legal
inspectors can no longer make a surprise visit to investigate illegal corporate
acts. The inspectors must be given permission by the corporation for any
on-site snooping, and you can guess how often that happens.
The chance of a personhood amendment even
getting to the ratification stage is slim to none. So, expect to continue
seeing corporate organizational charts walking the streets, chatting with other
charts, driving, going to the movies, whatever!
4. License to Kill
Did you know that a
corporation could get a license to kill? It all began with the corpocrats
copying King George’s chartering of corporations to do his lascivious bidding.
Greedy Delaware corpocrats were out of the gate first and the State quickly
became every corporation’s darling. Eventually the other States awakened and
followed suit. One, Virginia became the butt of a joke. The State may be the
laxest, having allowed, for instance, a group of anti-tobacco activists to get
a charter for their new tobacco company, “Licensed to Kill, Inc.,” even though
it was clearly stated in the articles of incorporation that the company’s
purpose would be to make and sell products that kill millions of people
worldwide![3]
5. Lap Dogs
Did you know that you are at the mercy of
lap dogs? Junkyard dogs would protect your interests. The corpocrats clearly
know that and use lap dogs instead. I briefly considered creating a catalogue
“Beware of the Government’s Lap Dogs.” Sections in it could start like this:
“Do you know what’s in the meat you eat? Meat inspectors don’t.” “Could this
pacemaker stop your heart permanently? Don’t expect medical device inspectors
to know.” “Could you get killed on this job? Don’t expect occupational health
and safety inspectors to know.” “Could this drug prescription be toxic? Don’t
expect the drug inspectors to know.” Would this be too risky an investment?
Don’t expect the SEC to force rating agencies to rate honestly. Etc., etc.
6. The “Houdini” Lawyers
You are also at the mercy of the
corpocrats’ “Houdini” Lawyers. Corpocrats’ escape hatches are often easy to
find or create. They are out in the open just waiting to be used. Whenever they
aren’t, corporations can turn to their hired Houdini’s, or lawyers, for help. Once they go to work finding or creating escape hatches the game is
up-for justice that is. It’s Corporation 1, Justice 0, in almost every instance.
7. The Touts “Swimming Upstream”
We commoners don’t stand a chance for justice and real law when the
touts (i. e. lobbyists) go “swimming upstream” on Connecticut Ave. to the Capitol
Hill. When a tout walks through the door to the office of any member of
Congress, the public’s interest goes out the window!
Here’s my doggerel about a real-life example of the touts’
clout when swimming up Connecticut Ave. on the way to Capitol Hill:
Along the political sewer
With far more
touts than fewer
With a
putrid present and past
With just one cast
Look at what I caught!
The biggest tout ever thought!
Can you guess that tout’s
real name? It’s the pharmaceutical
industry. Its touting expenses pay off handsomely in its return on investment! The
Center for Public Integrity examined the Congress-Drug lobby track record of
“Big Pharma” from 1980 until 2006. The Goliath giver and beggar got 20 some favors
from the “drugged” Congress. Here’s but one e.g.: “government listing of
preferred drugs prohibited.” [4] When you open your medicine cabinet, what do
you see? Big Pharma sneering at you?
8. The Burrowers
You undoubtedly know that
a burrower is an animal digging a hole to live underground. But have you ever
seen a human burrower or even know what it means? I’ll tell you. They come and
go to Capitol Hill. They are appointees of the US president. Once the Prez
leaves his (never a “her”) appointees burrow into civil servants, a guaranteed
job probably even if the burrower accosts a female subordinate.
9. The Revolving Doors
Now you see them here.
Now you see them there. Who are they and where are they coming and going? They
don’t stay put like the political careerists do. They are the pick pockets coming
and going, the shufflers back and forth through the so-called, perfectly named
“revolving door.” There are actually three kinds of revolving doors.
One is for corporate
officials and lobbyists who go through to appointments in key government posts
to ensure corporate interests aren’t denied by the American people.
There’s the
government-to-industry door through which public officials, having gotten
experience and valuable contacts from the inside in keeping public interests at
bay, go to industry and parlay their experience and contacts into furthering
corporate interests in exchanges, usually private, with the government.
And finally, there’s the
government-to-lobbyist door through which former legislators, their staffs, and
executive-branch officials pass on the way to lucrative positions in lobbying
firms to lobby their former colleagues.
Besides the revolving
doors there are the “archways,” the metaphor author Naomi Klein uses for the
passage of people who used to occupy top posts in the government, left for
lucrative positions in the corporate world, then left it but stopped short of
going through the revolving door.[5] Instead they remained outside as
influential advisors to top government officials and in so doing avoided
conflict of interest rules (which have never stopped conflicts of interest
among the revolving door people). She cites members of the Defense Policy Board
as an example. Those folks helped pedal the Iraqi War.
Let’s put to rest right
now the argument that appointing people from corporations and their allies to
influential government positions helps make government do a better job of
legislating, regulating, and enforcing measures to protect the American people
from powerful corporate interests. I’m not stupid. I know what happens when
foxes guard chicken houses!
10. Voting Hurdles
I
don’t want everybody to vote.
Elections
are not won by a majority
of
the people. They never have been
from
the beginning of our country.
They
are not now. As a matter of
fact,
our leverage in the elections
quite
candidly goes up as the
voting
populace goes down.
—Paul
Weyrich
Thank you “radical right
strategist,” Paul Weyrich for your candid remark at a 1980 training session for
15,000 conservative preachers in Dallas (just imagine being cooped up with them;
I should know, my father-in-law was a fundamentalist preacher).[6]
11. The Electoral College
This college doesn’t
award diplomas. It disallows the results of the vote when a candidate wins the
popular vote but loses the Electoral College vote, a perfectly legitimate but
terribly unfair outcome. I’m not going to get bogged down here in a discussion
of half a dozen or so alternatives to the ridiculous Electoral College such as
instant runoff voting, direct vote with plurality rule, etc. Truly fair voting may never see the light of day.
12. Voting Hurdles
I doubt if even an
Olympic hurdles jumper gold medalist could leap over voting hurdles.
Voting hurdles are mostly
constructed in the form of regulatory, legislative and administrative
skullduggery, although occasionally illegal tactics are used such as Republican
operatives jamming a Democratic phone bank.[7]
Other noteworthy hurdles
are unjust voter eligibility criteria that bar otherwise eligible voters from
voting, vote tampering that corrupts honest votes, and understaffed and
incompetent personnel at polling places that complicate or distort the voting.
The Supremely
Corporatized Court, not long ago in a 6 to 3 vote upheld Indiana’s voter
identification law, allegedly the strictest in the country. The majority said
the law was not unconstitutional, would improve the election process, would
deter fraud and shrugged off counter arguments that prosecuted fraud is rare to
nil; and that an unjustified, nontrivial burden was being imposed “on people
who are old, poor or members of minority groups and less likely to have
driver’s licenses or other acceptable forms of identification.”[8] I have no doubt
that in conservative Indiana the real motivation for the law in the first place
was to bar otherwise eligible voters from voting for the opposite party (alas,
Indiana is my home state).
13. Powell’s “Howl”
Before he was appointed
by Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court, Lewis F. Powell, gave a “wake-up” call in
1971 to a moribund big business and to wealthy conservatives. Powell was at the
time a successful tobacco industry lawyer who specialized in securities laws
and who had also been president of the American Bar Association. A staunch
advocate of keeping government out of the affairs of business, he had become
alarmed over what he perceived to be a pervasive assault on the free enterprise
system from the gamut of public institutions and the liberal elements of the
public itself. Big business, he fretted,
was taking the assault lying down.
So, he wrote a
memorandum, eventually dubbed the Powell “manifesto,” to the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce proposing that it lead a counterattack.[9] Business, he
wrote, was “ill-equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who
propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage
it” and “have shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics.” He
went on to lay out what amounted to a “battle plan,” apparently to help
business conduct “guerilla warfare.”
He suggested numerous
strategies targeting four major American institutions: education, the media,
the political arena, and the courts. The strategies were all very aggressive. A
few on paper at least seem militant and even paranoid and Orwellian in nature,
to wit: It is “a long road and not for the fainthearted.” “There should be no
hesitation to attack [those] who openly seek destruction of the system.” There
must be “constant surveillance of textbooks” and “monitoring of national
television networks.” Does that read like it’s coming right out of some
Orwellian pages?
His manifesto triggered a
tacit conspiracy of new conservative think tanks, conservatively activist legal
centers and an awakened, alarmed, and determined corporate America that all
worked together to revitalize America’s corpocracy. Powell demonstrated without a doubt the power
of one. But the power grab could never have happened without a submissive
government partner, the Carter administration, and continuing with all
successively submissive administrations to this day.
“Mr. Powell, wherever you
are, free enterprise is nothing more than a crucible for enslaved and exploited
customers!”
14. The Mind Readers
The corporatized court is
a great friend of criminal corporations. The judicial doctrine of criminal
intent is yet another good example of legal sophistry that says being motivated
to commit a crime is immaterial, while intent to commit a crime is material.
Now, I’m a psychologist who thinks the difference between motive and intent is
gossamer thin if different at all and that both require the judiciary and the
jury to be what neither they nor anyone else can possibly be, psychics who pretend
to read minds.
15. A “Shore” Way to
Escape Accountability
When corporate executives
are wanted by foreign countries for corporate crimes committed on their soil,
and our captive government refuses to allow their extradition, the criminals
become fugitives but apparently only in the eyes of the plaintiff countries. Scofflaw
corporations are also fugitives when they incorporate offshore.
16. “Phantom Substitutes”
Government will sometimes go to extreme
lengths not to prosecute corporate criminals, as in cases of what I call
“phantom substitutes.” Instead of having to give a “death sentence” mandated by
its own harsh (on paper only) rule, the prosecution has a phantom or defunct
unit of the criminal corporation plead guilty (I guess the phantom can write
and talk) and gives it the death sentence. The “parent” criminal, meanwhile,
continues to milk the cash cow.
17. “Forgive them for they know not what
they do.”
I use this scripture to refer to criminal
corporations being given amnesty. Telecom companies, for instance, were granted
retroactive amnesty from massive prosecution for invasion of privacy in the
administration’s surveillance operations seeking to ferret out possible
terrorists. Amnesty is a central part of the US Department of InJustice’s
“corporate leniency” policy.
18. The “Pamperers”
Yes, diapered politicians. Reminds me of
this riddle: Why are politicians like diapers? Astute readers, you undoubtedly
know the answer, but just in case: Because they have a load full and need to be
changed often! They pamper, not prosecute and jail corporate criminals through
such means as non-prosecution and deferred prosecution.
19. “Baseball” Thieves
Not named because baseballs are stolen,
but because it’s “three strikes and you’re out” for petty thieves in the State
of California who thieve pettily three times. Corporate criminals never strike
out in any state.
20. “Culpability Score Card”
It is a provision in the corporate
sentencing guidelines (eventually made advisory rather than mandatory of course
by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling) that allows for fines and other penalties to be
reduced up to 95% if the corporation gets a low “culpability score” by having
adopted and begun implementing a compliance program prior to the offense. Now
obviously the program failed or there wouldn’t have been an offense in the
first place! And that isn’t surprising because compliance programs tend to be
window dressing anyway. Moreover, having a compliance program tends to give
corporations a sense of immunity and brazenness.
Pit Bull
If a pit bull approached you, you might
rightly be petrified, but you would be well advised to proceed cautiously. So,
it would also be wise to confront the few thousand power elite pit bulls very
cautiously, wisely, and strategically. A good way to do that would be to follow
these steps:
1. Target the vulnerabilities of the power
elite. There is a slew of them that I have detailed elsewhere. [10]
2. Identify all the dissident groups in
America. There are around 17 of them, such as, for example, consumer groups, political dissidents, angry veterans, etc.
3. Ask a public opinion polling
organization to poll the American people, asking them questions such as a) would
you be willing to join at no cost a virtual organization, the “US Democracy Corps,”
to carry out strategic objectives to topple peacefully the power elite’s
vulnerabilities? b) could you name one or more public figures you think should
lead the USDC? c) would you be willing to join at no cost the USDC’s “America’s
Freedom Legionnaires” and affiliate with one or more alliances of people with
concerns and experiences such as yours in public education, financial
management, research, alliance coordination, etc., etc.?
4. Recruit a public figure to be the USDC’s
“field marshal” with responsibilities such as seeking funding from public
figures whose wealth is not ill-begotten.
I am confident that if the above proposal
were to materialize, the US corpocracy would eventually “dematerialize.”
Law vs Morals
A “Law Abiding America” may or may not be possible
to achieve. A “Moral America” would be improbable if not impossible, for law is
the lower standard for civilized behavior whereas morality is the higher
standard.
Michael
Josephson, a brilliant lawyer turned brilliant ethicist (an unusual career
change) searched far and wide throughout time and places looking for moral
values that consistently showed up no matter where he looked. He found [11] what
I call the “universal moral values.” Here is a list of them in alphabetical
order:
Accountability
Caring for Others
Excellence
Fairness
Honesty
Integrity
Justice
Loyalty
Promise Keeping
Respecting Others
Responsibility
Being
curious to see how the corpocracy at work stacked up against those high moral
standards, for several years I compiled news accounts of work incidents in
these sectors: corporate America in general, the agriculture/chemical/food
industries, the ammunition/gun/war industries, the communication/entertainment
industries, the financial industry, the health care industry, the
pharmaceutical industry, the transportation industry, and government. [12] In
all, the compilation comprised over 160 depictions of work incidents. Guess
what I found? Every incident violated every one of the moral values (e.g., “Markets
a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among children.”)
They represent not just immoral behavior but evildoing, for the Merriam Webster
dictionary defines evil as “profound immorality.” Now, I will leave it to you
to decide whether and how evil the few thousand members of the US corpocracy’s
power elite are.
In Closing
Readers, please think about
being “careful ancestors of the future,” especially if you have a progeny.
And please do not make these
two “death wishes” for humanity:
1. Things must get worse
before they get better.
2. There is nothing I can
do about it.
Notes
1. Brumback, G.B. The
Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch. Bloomington,
IN, Author House, 2011.
2. Brumback, G.B. “911!” KDP, 20 September 2019. Pp. 150-151.
3.
Drutman, L. & Cray, C. The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and
Restoring Democracy. Berrett-Koehler, 2004.
4.
Jilani, Z. Big
Pharma Gets 77,500% Return On Lobbying Investment: It Pays to Hire an Army of
Lobbyists. United Republic, April 3, 2012.
5. Klein, N. Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Knopf Canada, 2007.
6. Dwyer, B. Wednesday
Journal of Oak Park and River Forest. February 11, 2021.
7. Packer, G. The Empty Chamber: Just How Broken is
the Senate? The New Yorker,
August 9, 2010, pp. 38-51.
8. Stout, D. Supreme
Court Upholds Voter Identification Law in Indiana. The New York Times Online, April 28, 2008.
9. Greenpeace. The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate
Democracy. Undated.
10. Brumback, G.B.
Achilles Heel of Public Enemy No. 1. KDP, June 25, 2021.
11. Josephson, M. Teaching
Ethical Decision-Making and Principled Reasoning. Ethics: Easier Said Than Done,
1988, 1, 27-33.
12. See Note 2, pp.
21-30.