Power in the Wrong Hands

Money, power and corporate greed are subjects that can get liberals and conservatives snarling at each other like dogs fighting over a greasy bone . Conservatives claim liberals want to take others' hard-earned money, cripple businesses and bankrupt the world. Liberals respond that conservatives are tyrants who will stop at nothing to dominate a society of starving serfs. While some people may fit these stereotypes, I believe the majority want a world where we are free to succeed or fail on our own merits without the option of harming others to get there.

If this is the goal, then we aren't even in the ballpark. In fact, we're not even in the car on the way to the ballpark. We're still in the bathroom deciding what to wear.

While we're fussing over whether to wear the red sun dress or the blue capris, there are corporations who are amassing enough power to make the entire world in their own image. In fact, that's exactly what they've been doing for decades. They provide us with trinkets and entertainment and we give them the world. No one asked what they would do with it once they had it.

In our present system, enough money can absolve corporations of any real responsibility for their actions. It can give them access to media that shapes public opinion. Their money can create and defeat laws and tear down beneficial practices. At the same time it can also build up practices that benefit no one but those with their hands in the corporate coffers. With enough money, a corporation can hide important information from the public and spread ridiculous lies.

We are quickly becoming a world ruled by corporate entities instead of well-chosen human beings. If these entities were programmed to benefit society, the system might still be ok. But corporations were designed only to increase profits year after year. They are without a moral conscience. Although humans work for them, they are not human -- a corporation has no emotions. If the corporation is slowly poisoning its customers, it may not register concern until the dying user base cuts into its profits. Are these the "people" we want in charge of our lives?Some argue that the free market will solve these problems. How can it, when corporations control the media? Even when the free market does remove a bad apple, the shunned and broken apple simply hires a publicist to recreate it's image. Or the shamed parent company sells the bad apple to a subsidiary of itself and claims it doesn't know what apple we are talking about.

Fox News Kills Monsanto Milk Story

While the underlying idea of corporations is sound -- people working together to provide goods and services and being amply rewarded for leadership or innovation-- the corporate structure as currently designed is like the King Louis XVI court of our times. We are going to have to take it to the guillotine. When we do, we'd better have in mind a better system to replace it.

I don't claim to know yet how to stage this revolution or what will work in place of the failed system. In future posts I'll put out some suggestions to get a dialog going. We'll look at specific examples of corporations gone bad and ways to deal with them. We can do some brainstorming and start to take steps. Perhaps we'll conclude that the only solution is to let global warming knock out humanity and pray the cockroaches evolve more gracefully than we did. What I really think, though, is that human beings are capable finding amazing and innovative solutions. Let's start looking for them.