Waging War on Terrorism
(By Ending Corporate Fascism)
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The “war on terrorism” is now used to justify everything from restricting our Constitutional rights, to massive public subsidies for an array of elite-controlled companies, to suffering gargantuan Federal deficits and cuts in social services. But is this really the war we should be fighting? Is that the best path to lasting peace, freedom and democracy?
Having effective military and police forces is certainly the only sane option for society, especially given the unpredictable and often violent nature of humans, including our tendency to resort to force whenever we fail to get what we want through negotiation. However, who controls these armed forces, and to what ends, are the central determinants of whether a society is ultimately oppressive and autocratic, or free and democratic. So we must constantly scrutinize who does control America and its allies, and we must ask “what is their agenda?”
Unfortunately, the answers to those questions are greatly disturbing: Western governments, and therefore their military and police forces, are dominated by transnational corporations with the explicitly stated goal of profit maximization. Period. These corporations are not run in a democratic manner, their focus is neither humanitarian nor populist, and their financial and political clout often outpaces that of entire nations. Further, a relatively small number of incredibly wealthy individuals maintain effective control of these major corporations.
If we are looking for a smoking gun, we need to look no further than the abundant evidence of rampant corporate corruption: Energy price fixing, savings & loan swindles, telecommunication shell games, internet company overvaluations, accounting fraud, executive compensation scandals, subversion and overthrow of foreign governments, etc. Can we really expect freedom and democracy to grow out of autocratic, controlling and profit-driven institutions?
Corporations are monetary abstractions granted legal personage by their own legislative hands. Even when they stop short of full scale war, corporations are propaganda machines relentlessly spewing a barrage of self-serving messages to their internal and external constituents. Given the psychological power of such an ubiquitous assault on our perceptions it is not surprising that we hum their jingles, internalize their slogans, buy their ephemeral products, believe in their fantasy value equations, and repeat their deceipts as though we created them ourselves. The problem with such a ‘reality’ is that the grand sum of all the self-interested acts of corporate servants is always lacking humanity; in daily existence these institutions have no spirit, no compassion, no appreciation of aesthetics, nor any concept of love. Yet they dominate our world.
The real enemy of peace, freedom and democracy is the soulless corporation. Corporations are the largest and most organized terrorists, so emboldened by their past century of successes that they strut around the planet in broad daylight, unafraid to threaten or use government force to bend the world to their own will. Study the methods the elite have employed to enable their corporations to conquer world’s resources and peoples and you will find ample evidence to prove our conclusion: If Americans really want peace, freedom and democracy we must wage war on corporate terrorism.
Fascism and Facades
Americans (and Europeans, too) are fed a steady diet of patronizing platitudes by the corporate masters. These well-crafted facades convince a majority of us that our governments and militaries are mobilized in the service of peace, freedom and democracy. We want to believe we are noble, and at an individual level perhaps many of us are, but the fact remains that the corporations pay the piper’s campaign expenses and so they call the tune. This leads to governments controlled by, and in the service of, corporations, not free individuals. Corporation ‘leaders’ cull the candidate lists, co-opt major party candidates, and promulgate the illusion that the public gets to select their government. In truth, as long as we pick A Democrat or a Republican we only get to choose between Pepsi Lite and Diet Coke; milk, gin, juice, wine and even water are not offered as viable choices. That is not a true democracy.
If we are NOT living in a democracy, then what is the proper name for our current form of social structure? Would you believe, Corporate Fascism? Does that sound too incredible to be true? Well, no less an authority than the original fascist leader, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, said, “Fascism should really be called Corporatism since it stems from the merger of interests between corporations and governments.”
Webster’s dictionary defines fascism as, “a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under central governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism.” The part about “private economic enterprise under central governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism” sounds like a fair description of any speech by Senator Trent Lott in support of a new weapons program for his home district. But why does Webster’s confine fascism to a ‘one-party dictatorship’? Corporations would certainly have no use for a single dictator since the elite trust no one, agreeing only to a rough balance of power disbursed between themselves. A puppet dictator might work, but not a real dictator. Wouldn’t it be just as effective to have two nominal parties both controlled by the same corporate masters? In fact, according to institutional analysts such as the eminent Dr. Noam Chomsky, an illusory two-party system is even more effective since it helps to divide and conquer the masses who might otherwise join forces and wrest true control from the elite. Thus, the President of the United States is a well-trained figurehead, a proxy for the elite interests who financed his $90 million dollar election campaign.
This is the reality of our modern Western politics: We are under the control of Corporate Fascism hidden behind a maze of jingoist facades (“freedom fighters”, “land of liberty”, national anthems, etc.) and emotionally charged symbols (flags, uniforms, monuments). Meanwhile, corporations routinely pressure governments to use military force to secure markets, resources, and labor pools, and to enforce corporate rules of trade. To paraphrase well documented argumensts by author Charles Smith (“The World’s Wasted Wealth”), ‘ultimately all wars are economic wars.’
It is appalling to realize that we are actually participants within a system of Corporate Fascism. Our self-image demands that we would work to overthrow such fascist forces, but we aren’t doing that. We are simply living day to day as best we can, trying hard not to notice all the corruption, destruction and control imposed by such a money ueber alles social structure. Our willful self-deception is aided and encouraged by the propagandists and marketing departments employed by the corporate masters. Years from now, at our collective trial for crimes against humanity, spectators will shake their heads in disgust that we could have ever allowed such atrocities in our names, much less that we could have been active apologists and even gung-ho cheerleaders of such a political and economic system.
The Christian belief in the second coming of Christ embodies the guilt and fear so many feel for their complicity. Somewhere deep inside us, we know this corporate focus on capital rather than people is evil. So we live in quiet desperation as we wait for the flood.
Terrorism Writ Large
Before we can fight terrorism we must know what it is. Referring again to Webster’s dictionary, Terrorism is defined as “Use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy.” Corporate propagandists like to focus our attention on small scale terrorism (a bomb in a cafe), and now archetypically the horror of the World Trade Center towers. While these disorganized acts have claimed the lives of several thousand people world-wide over the past 50 years, Western military machines (in the service of the corporate agenda) have slaughtered at least many hundred thousands, perhaps many tens of millions, of innocents (it depends on your exact definitions). So who is the more threatening terrorist? Perhaps we refuse to admit that Vietnamese villagers were terrorized by French and American troops, gunships and napalm. We prefer to pretend that war is not terrifying. That is simply ridiculous, especially in the eyes of anyone who has had to endure war on their homeland. The act of war, or even the threat of war, is an act of terrorism. The argument that we are imposing the lesser of two evils on people who our handlers insist want us to intervene is specious and conveniently ignores the dozens of military adventures specifically opposed to the desires of the indigenous populations.
Terrorism is not new to the corporate interests controlling our governments and military. Any honest inspection of U.S. and European policies, strategies and tactics over the last several hundred years (through the present) reveals a pattern of terrorist campaigns untaken to “intimidate, demoralize and sugjugate” native populations in support of elitist corporate goals, generally the control of valuable resources and assurance of abundant, cheap labor. The British, Dutch and Spanish empires were specifically organized and expanded through such tactics. The American slave trade and slaughter of indigenous peoples were conducted in precise accordance with the definitions of terrorism. The shoe continues to fit the conquests of oil and agricultural resources in Central and South America. When local governments were easily co-opted and corrupted overt terrorism was unnecessary, but whenever populist democratic movements threatened the domination of international corporations military force was quickly deployed. Hawaii was openly seized from its popular king by U.S. troops in order to advance the interests of American produce giants. The largest act of terrorism in history, of course, was when the Western powers demonstrated, not once but twice, that their corporations could produce atomic weapons, and that they were willing to use them when necessary. Ever since that fateful point in history, the elite have held this sword above our collective heads. This has led to 50 years of cold war terrorism, including duck-and-cover drills, McCarthism and, of course, the widely acknowledged policy of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (M.A.D.). Ask Panamanians if the U.S. helps to terrorized them. Ask Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Chileans, Hondurans, Columbians, Venezuelans. Don’t ask the elite in those countries, who are being paid handsomely for their complicity, but ask the peasants and the commoners. “! Yanqui Vamos !”, they scrawl on available surfaces. Ask the millions of Iraqis, Iranians, and Afghanis who pray to Allah for peace and brotherhood, just like Christian, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and even atheists worldwide. The ongoing campaign for Western domination of the Middle East is overt “use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy.” Oil policy to be exact. Keeping the properly broad definition of terrorism clearly in mind, it is apparent that much of America’s foreign policy is simply extended corporate terrorism: “Do what the capitalist elite tell you to do or suffer the brutal consequences.”
Levels of Domination
International war and terrorism are not the only forms of brutal oppression in the corporate arsenal. We should never forget that the elite are forever searching for the cheapest and most completely subservient labor force they can create. Corporations show little care for the economic, social and psychological devastation they wreak when they move a manufacturing facility across the world to chase higher profits. What, if not terrorism, do you call it when executives threaten workers with a choice between willing pay cuts or the very real possibility that their jobs will be lost altogether? What have the corporate goons done to striking workers if not “intimidate, demoralize and subjugate” them?
Corporations show little care for the living and working conditions of the people who actually make the products which bring them profits. What do many governments of the world do to their own people at the urging of corporate masters? When corporations run sweat shops, or contract with forced-labor camps, isn’t that slow motion economic terrorism? If you do not think so now, imagine for a moment that YOU would have to live YOUR life under such conditions. If this thought doesn’t terrify you then you are not thinking about it. If these people are not terrified, then why do they sell their own children into sexual slavery, or purposefully disfigure them to make them more effective beggars, or simply abandon them to starvation. Most Americans and Europeans are simply happy that they are not (yet) subjected to the most severe terrors of corporate fascism so, like the psychologically broken Winston at the end of Orwell’s “1984”, most people are content to plea ‘do it to them, not me’.
Corporations also show little care for the environmental degradation they cause. While the elite who control the major corporations are careful not to live where they shit, or shit where they live, they are far more sanguine about what they deposit in our yards. Since cancer terrifies everyone who contracts it, toxic waste dumps, poisoned water supplies, nuclear waste contamination, and chemical-filled air are terror-producing consequences of the business school mantra, “maximize profits”. Since no one would choose to live near or consume nasty industrial wastes, many people (even throughout America) must be quite ‘intimidated, demoralized and subjugated’ to accept living in such circumstances.
Corporations show little care for democracy. They themselves are organized as rigid hierarchies where voting power is not ‘one person, one vote’, but instead one vote per share of stock ownership. Thus, one or a few elites who own 50.1% of the shares trump the will of hundreds of thousands of other shareholders. According to a statistic recent reported on the “Reclaim Democracy!” website (www.reclaimdemocracy.org), “The 200 largest corporations employ less than 1/100 of 1% (.01%) of the global workforce, but control 30.00% of the world economy.” And a few hundred family trusts have effective control over these corporations. What do they do to support democracy? They subvert it and corrupt it at every turn, obviously, or they wouldn’t be spending billions each year worldwide on lobbying efforts to ensure that governments act in the best interests of the corporations rather than follow the will of their populations.
We are threaten constantly… told that the alternative to letting corporations to do whatever they want is to lose our jobs, our houses, our ability to earn a livelihood and care for our families. Having been stripped of the family farm, most people in Western society are now clearly aware that they are trapped within the machine, left believing there is no way to opt out. Try to hold onto a rural farming lifestyle anywhere in the Western world today and you will quickly learn of the forces arrayed against you. Just look at the fate of Chiapas peasants, Amazonian indians, or even small farmers in mid-western America. A dependant population is a well-subjugated population, and this is precisely the goal and direction of soulless Corporate Fascism.
Finally, with less than nine corporations controlling over 90% of the world’s media, the domination of Corporate Fascism extends into every living room, and now even every classroom. Their messages, their agenda, their indoctrination surrounds us like an ocean, pressing in from all directions at every moment. Cleverly designed and highly synchronized marketing campaigns shape how we feel about our bodies, how we conceive of love, and what we must do to consider ourselves worthy of self-respect, and ALWAYS which products WE MUST BUY NOW! Speeches are scripted, policies are ‘spun’, analysis is bounded, and public personas are packaged. Through raw repetition we, the masses, are taught to think and act in accordance with the goals of the elite. Thus, even mothers willingly send their sons and daughters to war in foreign lands, perhaps to die, but definitely to terrorize other peoples who have never marched into our towns. This is not to say that there are evil other, non-corporate, evil rules around the world, only that the soulless corporations (quite evil in themselves) are not fighting on behalf of democracy, but on behalf of only themselves and they got us to swallow THEIR agenda.
Do NOT delude yourself into believing that we are depicting some massive conspiracy where a couple dozen elites meet regularly to rule the world. Although the highest ranking servants to the elite (well-paid attorneys, lobbyists, bankers, etc.) do meet, and overtly collude on occasion, the key problem lies in the very rules by which our ecomonic and political systems operate. Once corrupt rules are in place, you can predict that people acting in their own interest will tend to behave in similar fashions. Change the rules of the system from a capital centered ‘maximizing profit’ focus to a humanitarian ‘Liberty & Responsibilty’ focus and people’s behaviors will change positively predictably.
As for that one-percent of the folks at the top of our present hierarchy, such rule changes would threaten their domination so they do everything in their power to maintain the status quo. They are moving now to cement their positions of domination by creating supernational organizations with non-democratic boards whose decisions trump the laws and customs of entire nations. The names of these new institutions are now infamous: WTO (World Trade Organization), IMF (International Monetary Fund), The World Bank, etc.; as are their documents of (il)legitimization: GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), etc. How dare our “democratic” governments execute “treaties” which grant such powers to unelected boards composed of international corporate executives? Can you now understand how grandeous and pervasive the power of multinational corporations has become?
Considered together, this is an awesome list of domination brought about not through the chaotic acts of a madman dictator, but instead through the sum of careful and deliberate acts by the servants of corporations chasing the Sisyphian goal of profit maximation.
Out of The Jungle
Humanity has evolved, slowly but consistently since we first emerged from the jungles of Africa. Our collective maturation occurs in fits and starts, suffering ocassional set backs but, overall, history has witnessed true progress. For example, slavery, once openly practiced and advocated, is now relegated to shameful and illegal status. But this progress does not happen automatically, it comes only when we, the masses, awaken to demand new rules and structures. The powerful of every era have violently resisted such changes, but ultimately they are too far outnumbered to win. They must obfuscate the truth and delude us into believing that their way is the only way. Citizens of Spain believed in the Inquisitions. Citizens of Germany believed in the Nazi philosophies. So, too, do modern citizens believe in the virtues of capitalism, that somehow a frenzied focus on money, and laregly unrestricted power for those who possess the most money, will make our lives and our world better. Like those perverted systems which fell before, these ideas will one day be seen to be as inhumane and self-destructive as the crucifix, the rack, the burning stake, the gas chambers, or the nuclear weapon.
Once we accept the truth of our circumstances, we are free to contemplate ways to end corporate fascism. Waging war on the consistent terrorism of corporate fascism is only way humanity can hope to obtain lasting peace, freedom and democracy. But can it be done? Is there a viable strategy?
In short, yes, but it is as simple and as complex as getting common people to take responsibility for their own beliefs and actions. To begin, we must recognize that PEOPLE, not CAPITAL, must be the central focus of any political and economic system.
Here then are the tangible steps we should take immediately:
1) Discard the notion of “profit maximization”. This is a discredited philosophy which proves ruinous to our pursuit of peace, freedom and democracy. Instead we should favor “reasonable and consistent profits” based on sustainable economies.
2) Repeal laws which grant corporations equal status with people, and impose “the death penalty” (stripping a corporation of all of its assets) whenever a corporation commits serious violations of law anywhere in the world.
3) Eliminate corporate money from political campaigns in favor of a “one person, one voice” networking structure. Thus, every candidate can put their views into the public forum, and no candidate can buy the brut force advantage of rote repetition through mass media. Once corporations are viewed as abstract financial instruments, rather than as equivalent to people, it will be legally obvious that corporations have no “rights of free speech” and therefore no legal right to influence campaigns or political policies in any manner.
4) Eliminate corporate welfare and subsidies. Our current reality is ‘state capitalism’, which is really socialism by and for the elite and their corporations, but masquerading as laissez faire capitalism.
5) Eliminate corporate liability shields and make all equity owners financially responsible in proportion to their ownership interests in the corporation.
6) Require corporations to pay living wages and adhere to basic human rights regardless of where they do business in the world. Revoke their right to do business if they fail to uphold basic standards of decency and humanity.
7) Imposed and enforce severe criminal penalties upon executives, directors, and even major shareholders, where the corporations they control fail to uphold basic standards of decency and humanity.
8) Prohibit corporate control of basic resources and natural elements (air, water, food, genomes, energy, etc.) required for life, and require all institutions controlling these resources to be democratically accountable.
9) Promote family and community scale economic structures in preference to corporations, national and international institutions. Restrict and heavily tax corporate transfers of assets across state and national borders to ensure that communities retain a significant portion of the value they have created through their investments of human and social capital… but let human beings flow across borders with relative freedom.
10) Eliminate debt interest and preferred returns in favor of common equity ownership so that everyone is similarly motivated and compensated in proportion to their investment.
While fervent apologists for state capitalism and corporate fascism will deride the above list as hippy-socialist crap, reasonable observers will recognize that these suggestions are necessary to reign in the abuses and corruptions which laissez faire corporatism has wrought upon our humanity. If we will not make these changes, are we explicitly accepting that the world will be ever more completely dominated by an increasingly concentrated group of elites? What other outcome can be predicted given the abundant historical and economic evidence?
What can we common citizens do, personally and immediately, to move our society away from the terrorism associated with corporate fascism? Here are eight things YOU have the power to do starting today:
1) Educate ourselves and those around us regarding this topic;
2) Support local economies by purchasing clothing and organic food produced in your community, use local merchants rather than WalMart and McDonalds, buy only fair trade coffee and chocolate, etc.,… that is, vote with our wallets, that’s where it hurt them most;
3) Boycott corporations whose products are built using sweat shop and slave labor practices (e.g., most major clothing and toy companies fit this profile).
4) Protest GATT, NAFTA, WTO and other “globalization” structures, and demand that our governmental representative rescind our countries’ participation in these organizations;
5) Vote ONLY for independent, third party candidates (e.g., Greens, Libertarians, etc.) and never for Democrats and Republicans (whose co-opted and corrupted members got us to this spot in the first place, and who will continually do the bidding of their corporate sponsors);
6) Suggest and/or support a ban on all campaign contributions and lobbying efforts by corporations;
7) Demand corporate law reforms to make specific humans personally and financially responsibile for the actions of their corporations;
8) Write your elected officials at state and federal levels and promise to change your vote to an independent party alternative if they do not immediately and publicly work to pass the legislative agenda we have outlined above.
If we really believe in peace, freedom and democracy we must revise the rules of our society to favor the majority of people, and handicap those who would attempt to consolidate power and wealth. That would make us truly noble, not puppets marionetted in front of our own facades.
Summary & Conclusions
If we truly want to end terrorism then we must begin with the largest and most well-organized forms of terrorism, and attack these at their source. The singular focus on profit maximization by private corporations (and the elite who control them) is the greatest source of terror and war in the world. Lacking a soul or the ability to feel love and compassion, corporate giants roam the Earth with little regard for the devastion they cause. They profit from war. They profit from fear. They profit from subjugation. They profit from manipulation and subversion of democracy. They profit from the illusion (but not the reality) of freedom. In short, they are diametrically opposed to everything we, the common citizenry, desire from our society.
By simply changing the rules of the system we can change the results of our collective behaviors. Choosing rules aligned with populist humanitian goals rather than rules which serve to consolidate wealth and power will swiftly alter the course of history. Choosing a system of Liberty & Responsibility will help us take the next progressive steps into our future.
Thank you for your attention, interest and concern.
