The Corporate Campaign to Corrupt Society

We, the people of the United States, are in the middle of a war between our government which is instituted to promote the general welfare and corporate wealth which knows only the maximization of shareholder value.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to convince us that corporations are benign, efficient, job creators, that they just want to be "good citizens." More specifically, the propaganda machine has three tasks in this war: replace moral values with dollar values, spread a mistrust of government and convince people they are overtaxed.

Political values like freedom, social values like family and religious values like faith, are irrelevant to the governance of the corporation.

These and other moral values, they say, are irrelevant because money values are the only legitimate measure of general welfare. Interjecting moral values into the debate distorts markets and suggests morals matter and may even take precedence. Similarly, we must mistrust government because it, too, claims institutional and legal precedence over corporations. Government also supplies public goods that do not respond to the market calculus. Taxes are bad because they empower governments and are spent on public more than private goods.

We, the people of this political-economy, have lost a lot of battles. The anti-people corporate agenda now occupies a large part of the contested terrain. Corporations spend a great deal of money to convince us that that is good. But corporations are not benevolent or even morally neutral. Traditionally, we have feared them.

The immoral corporate agenda, money and only money as a measure of value, fosters criminal collusion, pauperizing of the citizens and stealing of the commons. Our newspapers and broadcast media are full of stories of polluting firms, fraud committing bankers and poison selling pharmaceutical firms.

Independent government regulators indict them all the time but the corporations end up in court paying fines that are miniscule compared to the profit realized by the crime. Like the bankers, whose crimes caused the 2008 financial crisis, no one goes to jail and they get to keep all the bailout money. The criminal activity continues, despite promises and court orders to cease and desist. It's a no risk deal.

Wealth is winning. Market/money values are crowding into every sphere of human life. You can buy your way out of waiting in almost any queue whether it be the free "Shakespeare in the Park," a seat in a congressional hearing or waiting for "the next available operator." Don't be naïve, they do NOT "take calls in the order in which they were received." But then, the Supreme Court has defected and says the corporations have a constitutional right to lie to you.

Every social, moral or religious value is for sale! You can buy a surrogate mother for $6250 or a permanent Green Card for $500,000. You can upgrade your prison cell for about $150 per day. With cap and trade, you can buy the right to pollute. Armies of mercenaries fight for us at $1000 per day. We now have more private security guards then we have police.We are losing the battle and our soul when motherhood, citizenship and our security are for sale.

Do we really want to encourage the market for children, mercenaries, sex, and kidneys? We earlier would have said no to the market allocation of pollution, health care, motherhood, blood and NASCAR-like advertising on police cars and public buildings. But now all of this is commonplace, even in our grade school classrooms, cafeterias and sports.

The more that money and markets dominate our lives, the more unequal we become, the less opportunity we afford the individual. Those who have money are indeed different. They do have better healthcare. They do have better schools for their children. They do have easy access to the best universities. The corporations have made the rich so rich that this inequality in wealth and power will pass from generation to generation into a new feudalism.

We are becoming the peasants, deprived of an independent income or life. The privatization of the commons is a 21st-century enclosure movement.

America used to stand for moral and political values in the world. Now, we reach globally to protect our "national interests" (the energy companies, the bankers and our offshore manufacturing) with drones and mercenaries. And, please, this is not a partisan issue. All of our politicians have bought into and have been bought by the corporate agenda.

Every citizen has to choose a side in this war: our public life can be governed by market and money-driven corporations or by a morally responsible, people-controlled republic – if we can keep it.

At this point, organized money, the corporations, have convinced a lot of Americans that seizing the commons and selling off the government, whether it is our schools, prisons or public parking, is a really good thing. It is not. The consequent inequality of treatment and opportunity are corrupting our political, social and moral life.