To increase annual profits, the hired corporate managers, well paid individuals who have no guidelines to go by, except to gain the expected increase in corporate profits or leave, logically respond by doing whatever needs to be done to obtain that increase. They will, if they must, and often do, destroy the living capital of the planet in the process. The result: strip mined forests, fisheries, and mineral deposits; the aggresive marketing of toxic chemicals, and the dumping of hazardous wastes. Thus, states Korten, the corporation "destroys human capital...social capital...undermines the functions of government and democracy." He concludes: "To destroy (living capital) for money, a simple number of no intrinsic value is an act of collective insanity...We have created a global culture that values money and materialism over life itself!"
All of us are implicated. Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College and author of "Corporation Nation" writes: "The corporate mystique has helped to obscure not only the very question of corporate power, but how deeply personal the subject is. The personal identity of today's worker, consumer, and citizen is becoming a corporate construction.
"Corporations help create our growing obsession with money and success, molding both our morality and our material lives. We get our dreams and opinions from such corporate owned media such as Time/Warner or Disney; our children's education from ciricula provided by Microsoft or AT&T; our food from Phillip Morris, the world's largest grocer; and our credit from one-stop corporate superbanks such as Citibank and Chase;
"Every citizen has a place in the world of corporate ascendancy, including those not working in the corporations or not working at all. It is impossible to underestimate the extent to which one's own moral integrity and sense of self respect stem from how one is situated in that world; and the extent to which all of us are involved as both agents and targets of corporate power."
"We all live in a world suffused with corporations in every way: the air we breathe, the clothes we're wearing, the books we read; everything in our lives has been essentially subsumed under the rubric of the market and the corporation."
Still, even for the nothing but good times ahead crowd, there is a quiet "knowing" in the air: If we go on the way we are, a planetary reckoning is on the horizon, coming sooner, not later.
A more full deconstruction of the global economy from this tip of the iceberg assessment is better left to another place. The reader will either resonate with the truth of these words or will not!
Here is an unspoken secret which many know and others suspect: Real democracy has never really existed in this world!
In all history, there hasn't been a record of democracy worthy of the name. Democracy is a dream that recent western societies have pretended to possess as a fact. Western nations practice what I define as a "reciprocal democracy." The freedoms we enjoy are wide and broad, but shallow. As citizens, we will not be disturbed as long as we accept the power structure the way it is, or, at least pose no threat to it. As long as we go along or prove voiceless in expressing concerns and dissatisfaction with the power system, we get along.
