Just when I think I've heard it all, something comes along to remind me that we probably will never find bottom for human willful stupidity. I lived (somewhat) through Sarah Palin's rewriting of American history--after all, I have some degree of familial interest in the ride of Paul Revere since my grandfather's family were redcoats and probably there--but Republican hopeful Cain leaves me in tears wondering if that party can field a candidate on this side of ignorant.
For those who don't know what I am talking about, Mr. Cain pronounced Jesus Christ a conservative. Has he read the gospels? Or is he just spouting the Christian brand and hoping that someone salutes without looking too far into things.
Jesus Christ a conservative. Please! I am no religionist. I think all religions are dangerous, none less so that the Christian. However, I do this on the basis of knowledge. I know the enemy. I have actually read the Bible, not just listened to the cherry pickings and pretty sayings (King James version) spouted as homilies on Sundays before a fidgeting congregation already looking at their watches. In particular, I have read (and studied) the gospels, which are the purported history of the Christ.
So what do I learn. Christ does not like bankers. In fact, he hates them and drives them out of the temple. He also doesn't like rich people. They have as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. In other words, zippo. A young man came to Christ as asked what he had to do to earn heaven. "Give away all your stuff to the poor," he was told. The young man went away "troubled." I'll bet he did. Why should he give away his ipod, his car, his flatscreen to undeserving illegals here to drain his tax money. Christ's minstry was to the poor, the undertrodden, the disinfranchised, and we're not talking about people earning less than $200,000. Christ would tell us that any of us with anything to our name should give all way and embrace a life of poverty.
Compare this with the Puritan ideas (those nasty little folk that England threw out because they were obnoxious) that wealth means that god approves of you. Not in the New Testament he doesn't. The Old Testament is a different cup of tea. But that's where it says people can own slaves, turn their daughters into prostitutes, and stone people to death. Hello, anyone. If you are following the Old Testament, you are not Christian (logic: you have to follow Christ to be Christian). Christ apparently negotiated a deal for humans; he got god to back off, but notice that hell isn't there in the OT. It shows up in the NT with the Christian era, thus allowing the born-again movement and thunder and brimstone preachers.
The bible and its supporters are neither consistent nor even particularly informed about the document they like to hit us over the head with.
No, Mr. Cain, you claimed Christ as so many have before you--to justify wars, to justify killing those you don't like, to justify persecuting others, to justify slavery in the South. But this man was no con servative. In fact, he would have been the first to tell you that your job was your fellow man, not supporting those who make money off his misery. Mr. Cain, please accept my wishes for you : pffffft (the sound of your deflation.)
Friday, October 21, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Our Corporate Masters
A couple of days ago, I listened to an interview on Public Radio. A fellow from some free enterprise institute was asked if he thought there was corporate responsibility for creating jobs in this country. His reply was predictable but unusually chilling in the coldness of his certainty.
Personnel are a just an entry in the expenses column, he said. Asking a corpotation to hire more people is the same as asking them to raise their expenses. Providing jobs is not their responsibility. Corporations owe nothing beyond making profit. They aren't the same as the government, he said.
Beyond the fact that I made that same argument in a previous blog--corporations are not governments--I find his easy dismissal of any responsibility beyong lining the pockets of the wealthy to be repulsive.
If I had been interviewing this cold fish, I would have asked him why, given that corporations exist only to generate profit, they insist on doing their best to prevent the government from governing the people it has sworn to serve. Instead of demanding greater and greater profit squeezed from public resources, why aren't they out there being businesses instead of buying our legislators and lobbying for laws to the own advantage.?If they are not governments, what are they doing on Capitol Hill in the first place. That, supposedly, is where governing goes on, not in the boardrooms and the CEO bathrooms.
Instead of demanding concessions from us taxpayers, they should be paying us for the privilege of having access to our markets.
By any measure, our largest corporations have done well in this country except when their own greed has pulled them down. Economists now look on them as small nations in their own right. Walmart Stores, for example, ranks twenty-second in GDP revenues when compared with the economic resources of the world's nations. That's right--in comparison with national GDPs, Royal Dutch Shell ranks thirty-fourth, Exxon Mobile is thirty-fifth, and Toyota ranks forty-fourth. The only things larger than these corporations are countries such as the US (still the world's largest economy) and other nations including (in order) Japan, China, Germany, France, and the UK.
Looked at another way, of the top 100 economies in the world, 44 are corporations. The figures are not mine. I borrow them from the work of Tracy Keyes, Director of Strategy Dynames Global Limited and Thomas Malnight, professor of strategy and general management.
Figures such as these make it very difficult to feel sympathy for pathetic bleats regarding the need for ever yet more concessions and the continuance of subsidies that serve only to enrich the bonus checks of higher management. It doesn't make for compelling reading when what jobs remain in this country (free trade ventures seemingly only free to the extent that our jobs are freed to other countries) are held hostage to the corporate desire to wring yet more profits as the expense of this nation.
I'm not surprised that we are seeing the start of a grassroots movement that is spreading across the country. People are staring to recognize how much we are at the mercy of our corporate masters.
Just in the food industry, they centralize production for efficiency, destroy our local businesses by undercutting costs, and then feed us foods laced with chemicals to preserve them while they are shipped across the country to us. They claim lucrative farm subsidies and then drive out the smaller farms who are unable to compete. All this is justified by giving us more "choice" and lower prices. The logical end place for this is very hard to comtemplate. They will utterly control our food.
In the face of this, I have resolved to buy local wherever I can, although how much can one do in the face of oil companies with incomes larger than most of the nations of the world?
I, for one, hope this occupy Wall Street movement continues because the stakes are very high. I read somewhere that we have 300 million guns in this country. Let's hope we can bring about peaceful change and have our voices heard. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
Personnel are a just an entry in the expenses column, he said. Asking a corpotation to hire more people is the same as asking them to raise their expenses. Providing jobs is not their responsibility. Corporations owe nothing beyond making profit. They aren't the same as the government, he said.
Beyond the fact that I made that same argument in a previous blog--corporations are not governments--I find his easy dismissal of any responsibility beyong lining the pockets of the wealthy to be repulsive.
If I had been interviewing this cold fish, I would have asked him why, given that corporations exist only to generate profit, they insist on doing their best to prevent the government from governing the people it has sworn to serve. Instead of demanding greater and greater profit squeezed from public resources, why aren't they out there being businesses instead of buying our legislators and lobbying for laws to the own advantage.?If they are not governments, what are they doing on Capitol Hill in the first place. That, supposedly, is where governing goes on, not in the boardrooms and the CEO bathrooms.
Instead of demanding concessions from us taxpayers, they should be paying us for the privilege of having access to our markets.
By any measure, our largest corporations have done well in this country except when their own greed has pulled them down. Economists now look on them as small nations in their own right. Walmart Stores, for example, ranks twenty-second in GDP revenues when compared with the economic resources of the world's nations. That's right--in comparison with national GDPs, Royal Dutch Shell ranks thirty-fourth, Exxon Mobile is thirty-fifth, and Toyota ranks forty-fourth. The only things larger than these corporations are countries such as the US (still the world's largest economy) and other nations including (in order) Japan, China, Germany, France, and the UK.
Looked at another way, of the top 100 economies in the world, 44 are corporations. The figures are not mine. I borrow them from the work of Tracy Keyes, Director of Strategy Dynames Global Limited and Thomas Malnight, professor of strategy and general management.
Figures such as these make it very difficult to feel sympathy for pathetic bleats regarding the need for ever yet more concessions and the continuance of subsidies that serve only to enrich the bonus checks of higher management. It doesn't make for compelling reading when what jobs remain in this country (free trade ventures seemingly only free to the extent that our jobs are freed to other countries) are held hostage to the corporate desire to wring yet more profits as the expense of this nation.
I'm not surprised that we are seeing the start of a grassroots movement that is spreading across the country. People are staring to recognize how much we are at the mercy of our corporate masters.
Just in the food industry, they centralize production for efficiency, destroy our local businesses by undercutting costs, and then feed us foods laced with chemicals to preserve them while they are shipped across the country to us. They claim lucrative farm subsidies and then drive out the smaller farms who are unable to compete. All this is justified by giving us more "choice" and lower prices. The logical end place for this is very hard to comtemplate. They will utterly control our food.
In the face of this, I have resolved to buy local wherever I can, although how much can one do in the face of oil companies with incomes larger than most of the nations of the world?
I, for one, hope this occupy Wall Street movement continues because the stakes are very high. I read somewhere that we have 300 million guns in this country. Let's hope we can bring about peaceful change and have our voices heard. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
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