Unfortunately for the world of normal people, living in a world run by psychopaths may feel like we've entered the Twilight Zone, but it is indeed, our Reality.
"Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." — Anonymous In 2010 the pro-corporate Roberts' 5/4 Supreme Court decided, in the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling that favored right-wing multimillionaire businessmen and amoral multinational corporations by making it easier for them to steal US elections by allowing unlimited, anonymous monetary contributions to political campaigns, political action groups and politicians. This ruling, called by many fair-minded observers to be the worst Supreme Court decision of the past century, has emboldened the already powerful and corruptible corporations (that already have dominion over the economy) to now also be able to thoroughly bribe any number of favored pro-corporate politicians to do their will but also to more effectively brain-wash voters through multi-million dollar ad campaigns (that can't be effectively countered by small contributions from average voters). The US Supreme Court has thus made legal the absurd notion that inanimate paper corporations like PolyMet and Glencore should have the same privileges (but not the same responsibilities) as living humans. Both of those out-or-state companies are potential despoilers of northern Minnesota's irreplaceable wetlands, rivers, aquifers and aboriginal land and water rights. After the ruling came down, there was only a brief bit of outrage from the so-called national and state leadership of our essentially "one-party system" (one-party, that is, when it comes to the Republican and Democratic Party's corporate and militarist agendas). What should be the punishment for corporate entities that plunder and pillage? But if corporate America has new privileges, shouldn't it be honoring the responsibilities of personhood as well? Any thinking person would agree that if any entity enjoys the privileges of a human, it should also bear the same responsibilities as humans. Thus it should incur the same punishments as individuals do when it hurts people, commit crimes, poisons the water, fouls the air or rapes the land? One of the rare victories against corporate giants occurred at Shapleigh, Maine, when that town managed to protect their water rights from the insatiable water-extracting corporate giant Nestle. (See video and more information on this episode at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/40335). Nestle, one of many multinational corporate exploiters around the world, has no allegiance to any state or municipality or any location where it tries to extract water or minerals that never were theirs to begin with. But when the minerals are gone and the water has been used up or polluted, Nestle, PolyMet, Glencore, et al will be long gone, which has always been the case of giant resource-extractors and polluters like Exxon/Mobil, Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum, Halliburton, Deep Water Horizon, Coca-Cola, Perrier or whatever other corporate intruder that covets the people's resources. And who benefits? Why, of course, the major benefactors will be faceless, out-or-state investors, corporate shareholders and CEOs living and doing business at some luxurious corporate headquarters, none of whom will have to live with the poisoned environment that they will be leaving behind. Move to amend: Overturning Citizens United Shapleigh, Maine's small victory against injustice should inspire the rest of us to do what must be done if America's fragile democracy is ever to thrive again. The outrageous Citizens United decision must be overturned with a constitutional amendment. (See www.movetoamend.org for more.) The future of the nation, our children, the planet, our drinking water, natural habitat and aboriginal rights are all at stake. Exploitive corporations don't really seem to care. They are mainly interested in next quarter's profits, the outlook for future share prices and who or what might be their next victim They have lots of laws on their side and a surplus of legislators and corporate lawyers to defend their unethical activities. It should be emphasized that the allegiance of big corporations is to its fellow co-investors, its private or mutual fund shareholders, and its executives and management teams. Their responsibilities are not to the people whose lives and health depend on the usability or sustainability of the land, water, air and food supplies that they will be inevitably depleting or poisoning. Corporate shareholders and executives from the trans-national corporations that make up Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Agribusiness, Big Oil, Big Finance, etc are selfishly motivated by profits and not the common good, and therefore they are not really concerned about the struggling, degraded communities that are left behind to fend for themselves. "Trust us, we're the experts"; "Toxic sludge is good for you"; "We'll clean up after ourselves" — and other corporate lies Conscienceless mega-corporations that swoop down on naïve and unsuspecting people and local governmental bodies, usually ask them to "trust us, we're the experts" and that — at some time in the uncertain future - they will un-poison the usually permanently-toxified environment that they secretly intend to leave behind. Under-employed or laid off workers, understandably desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, are easily fooled into believing the well-crafted disinformation - until it is too late and the mess is no longer the corporation's problem. It's an old con. Promises made during the courtship phase are likely to be broken with impunity when these foreign corporations pull out, merge with other entities or file for bankruptcy. Silver-tongued CEOs and their shyster lawyers are very good at getting us rubes up north all starry-eyed over a relatively small number of temporary jobs while (that will last until the inevitable bust) discounting the huge risks of permanent dead zones that will be created from the poisonous chemicals. The crimes of WalMart, Coca-Cola and Union Carbide/Dow Chemical and Henry Kissinger A good example of the many tax-avoiding mega-corporations is WalMart. Most of its profits go to a handful of Walton family multi-billionaires in Arkansas. WalMart successfully - and legally - avoids paying for healthcare insurance and other benefits for most of their exploited, underpaid, part-time employees, who are also victims of the corporation's notorious union-busting policies that conservative politicians are always pushing for (ask any Wisconsinite about the success that Scott Walker and his paymasters, the Koch Brothers have had in destroying Wisconsin's unions).. US taxpayers are left holding the bag while WalMart legally avoids what should be their corporate responsibility: to be fair to their employees and the region in which they are doing business. WalMart's (and McDonald's, and every other fast food chain) notorious below-subsistence level wages forces many of their workers to work a second or third job and also seek welfare benefits from the local government entity - a cunning cost-shifting tactic that places unfair economic burdens on tax-payers. Another example is Coca-Cola. Coke depends on water that it extracts from any and every publically-owned water source from which the corporation can extract it, including, as a particularly egregious example, the aquifers that are situated beneath thirsty, struggling, impoverished, starving (and then suicidal) Indian farmers who are losing their farms in newly drought-stricken India. Millions of gallons of water from aquifers that have traditionally been used for farmland irrigation are being depleted by Coca-Cola in order to meet the artificial demand that has been created for the sweet, sugary (or chemically sweetened), caffeinated (and therefore addictive), nutritionally useless, obesity-inducing and diabetes-producing soft drink that contains a few pennies worth of ingredients and then is sold to poor people everywhere for as much as the market will bear. Coke's predation of poor people in India and elsewhere brings to mind another bunch of corporate criminals who have never been brought to justice. The infamous 1984 Union Carbide cyanide catastrophe in Bhopal, India that killed 25,000 slum-dwellers left 100,000 permanently poisoned - and often blinded - impoverished, sometimes homeless victims whose lives were ruined, with uncounted thousands of others living on poisoned soil, drinking poisoned water and breathing poisoned air. Every Bhopal victim that was exposed to the Union Carbide cyanide plant environs is chronically ill, with women - 30 years later - still delivering malformed babies and dead fetuses because of the pesticide residues that cannot be detoxified. Union Carbide, the American corporation responsible for the disaster, has consistently shirked, as criminal entities typically do, its moral responsibilities to their suffering victims. Carbide eventually sold itself to the equally infamous Dow Chemical, the company that brought us Agent Orange, napalm, immune-destroying silicone breast implants, polyvinyl chloride, and plutonium contamination from the Rocky Flats, Colorado plant that manufactured the plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs. Carbide's corporate executives have been indicted for their crimes and have been repeatedly subpoenaed to appear in Indian courts. But the US has not honored the extradition treaties it has with India. These amoral executives have refused to appear and are therefore in contempt of court. There are warrants out for their arrests in India, just as there are warrants out for the arrest of Citizen Henry Kissinger for his part in the international war crimes and crimes against humanity that he was a part of in Chile, East Timor, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. All of these accused criminals remain at large, and America's Big Business-friendly, corporate-controlled nation has been proudly harboring them. The common denominator linking human and corporate criminals There are a number of common denominators that link human criminals and the multinational corporations that populate the Fortune 500 and the Dow-Jones 30 Industrial Average lists (like WalMart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Chevron, Exxon/Mobil, du Pont, British Petroleum, Halliburton Monsanto, Merck, Pfizer, Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Perrier, Nike, Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan Chase, etc, etc). For one, the corporations, are just as afraid of facing the music as were Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Kissinger, Mr Ponzi, and the other multibillionaires of their ilk (that are rich enough to employ rafts of cunning defense lawyers). Be certain that they will use any means necessary to evade or delay justice. Similarly, none of them can be expected to show any genuine remorse for the human suffering that their actions have caused. There are checklist diagnoses for various supposed personality disorders in the billing bible and diagnostic manual for psychiatrists (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel [DSM] which, by the way, contains no statistics). One of the 374 disorders that are listed in the 4th edition of the DSM is antisocial personality disorder (code number 301.7), which identifies pathological liars, chronic cheaters, abusers, thieves and killers whose cunning and lack of morals, ethics or consciences commonly enable them to avoid being caught or punished for their crimes and misdeeds. These "sociopaths" (aka psychopaths) typically refuse to accept blame or responsibility for their actions and typically run away to avoid prosecution (as per the recent Whitey Bolger case). In the case of sociopathic mega-corporations that are occasionally successfully sued in court, business-friendly judges will often impose a "gag rule" for the successful human plaintiff and a slap on the wrist and a plea bargain for the guilty "non-human" corporation. On top of that, corporate-friendly judges often allow the corporation to officially deny any wrong-doing as it accepts the penalty! Those corporate entities have always met the definition of antisocial personality disorder. They are famously incapable of showing genuine remorse if or when they are caught and/or convicted for their crimes. (Learn more about corporate sociopathy athttp://www.thecorporation.com/, especially by watching the 2003 Canadian documentary titled The Corporation athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhqtY2khc.) Below are seven diagnostic criteria that are used to diagnose antisocial (aka, sociopathic or psychopathic) personality disorder in humans (in the DSM, it only takes three of the seven to make the diagnosis):
Comment: Until the world of relatively normal people learn to understand the depths of depravity, corporate-run or otherwise, that psychopaths manifest on a daily basis, and until the world of relatively normal people learn to recognize the very structures of power of that enable psychopaths to do what they do - and find constructive ways to offset it - there is little chance for humanity to thrive as a whole.
See: Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)
(sott.net)
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