[NOTE: InformationClearinghouse.info REFUSED TO PUBLISH THIS ARTICLE]Last December 16, I published an article on Information ClearingHouse.info (The Real Culprit: Corpocracy)(1). That article exhorted newly elected representatives in the U.S. Congress to use their mandate to begin seriously scrutinizing the activities of those Big Money Plutocrats known collectively as the corpocracy (rhymes with “hypocrisy”). This would include mega-corporations, corrupted government and military, international banking, and big media.
Seven months have passed since then, and the corpocracy appears to have remained invisible – effectively off the radar screen. Perhaps not surprisingly, politics remains “business-as-usual” because politics has been reduced to a horse race, i.e., the public is bombarded with info on how much (and sometimes whose) money is on which candidate. Mega-corporations have the money to give and the influence to buy via lobbyists, PACs, foundations, institutes, think-tanks, NGOs,…the list goes on and on. Tragically, the Teflon corpocracy endures – despite the widely available facts that have already come to light on corporate corruption.(2) Don’t underrate its resourcefulness, citizens, and how the corpocracy strategically uses big media as its propaganda machine!
At a recent conference in Washington, DC – Taking on the Giant Corporation – Ralph Nader came out swinging from his gadfly bully pulpit.(3) But I have yet to hear anything from Capitol Hill on the corpocracy’s corrupting influence. Most tellingly, few, if any, words emerge from the mouths of presidential candidates that implicate corpocracy’s designs as fueling our misadventure in Iraq; a corpocracy whose insatiable lust for positioning and profits in oil and other mineral riches in areas such as Iraq, Central Asia, the Amazon - in Sudan and other areas of Africa - is overwhelmingly driving our foreign policy. But don’t simply take my word for it, read, e.g., Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy (4) , or former economic hit man John Perkins’ latest book on the American Empire.(5)
At home, corpocracy’s agribusinesses and factory farms have been destroying the health of American citizens. Still, in every “health care program” offered by candidates, no one considers the root of the problem; no one seems to think it important enough to premise his or her program upon a complete re-evaluation and overhaul of how corporations have ruined the nutrient value of food and have contributed to an epidemic of diseases, e.g., obesity, cardiovascular problems, diabetes. Agribusinesses and factory farms, with a cow-towing US Department of Agriculture and FDA, ever-push synthetic engineering to destroy the nutrient value of crops and the sustainability of the farmland on which they are grown, keeping farmers co-opted, overly processing food crops, and subordinating real farmers and real food to food processors, suppliers, and shippers – ultimately destroying people’s health while funneling profits back to corporate coffers. But don’t simply take my word for it, read, e.g., The Omnivore’s Dilemma(6) and get some facts for yourself.
And so, before debating military commitments vs. pullouts in Iraq, and before devising ways to provide health insurance by a frontal assault on insurance and pharmaceutical companies – may I again suggest looking first at the often subtle, sometimes brazen designs of corpocracy – look behind and beyond the simulacra fed by corporate-owned, big media – get out of your comfortable, solipsistic bubble, stand up, and speak out – organize, act up – resist becoming a complacent, ill-informed consumeroid, programmed to participate as an unwitting puppet on the strings of corpocracy’s dance dualismo – Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal, capitalist/socialist, right wing/left wing, industrialist/environmentalist – i.e., the nonsensical notion of, “if you’re not one, you must be the other”; it is debate-by-labeling, rather than by substantively, dialectically exchanging ideas so as to search for just where the truth is rooted.
As long as we just keep sniping at one another, the citizen movement falters and stalls. In its place, what Nader calls the “corporate sovereign political economy” will continue to reign supreme over our public policy makers – over their ideas for education, social justice, the environment, jobs, unions, wages, and even clean water – before they are even out-of-the-gate all of the so-called issues become subject to erosion by the powers of corpocracy. And now, as China, India and other states industrialize ever more – following the USA’s corporatist model in order to “compete” (while lusting after the very things that oppress them) – the problem of corpocracy now has many, many fronts globally.
Beware the laser-like focus of the commercial interests and their capacity to transfix the consensual reality of our representatives into a culture trance run amok!
(1) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15924.htm
(2) See, e.g., http://www.ratical.com/corporations/; http://www.bapd.org/kcolon-1.html; http://www.thenation.com/special/2006_entertainment.pdf; http://www.corporatepredators.org/top100.html#Annotated
(3) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9185122577177790396&hl=en (Amy Goodman interviews Ralph Nader)
(4) Blowback (2000); Sorrows of Empire (2002); Nemesis (2004)
(5) The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption (2007)
(6) Michael Pollan (2006)
The author is a marginalized cultural mutant whose work can be accessed from various netpoints:
http://www.academici.net/userprofile.php?u=sussjd
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=1232404961&Fmt=7&clientI%20d=79356&RQT=309&VName=PQD&cfc=1
Interactivist Info Exchange: http://info.interactivist.net/
Information ClearingHouse.info: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16055.htm
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