Down with evil corporations?
I don't know where this came from originally, but it's making the rounds and it makes a point that's worth addressing. I don't like it when people either do not understand, oversimplify or intentionally misconstrue a point, and I really hate to hear what a particular group of people thinks from somebody who really doesn't have a clue what they actually think.
Corporations are not "evil." The point is NOT to destroy corporations, to destroy corporate America. We all do business with them every day. We work for them, and some of the most humble small business owners among us are even incorporated ourselves. I'm doing business with a search engine and an internet service provider right now, and so are you if you're reading this. A corporation is simply a business entity, an organizational construct with certain privileges and regulations, morally neutral.
The point IS that corporate money, in unlimited amounts, unregulated and undisclosed, is spilling into OUR political system, buying it's own legislation, campaigns and candidates - and as citizens we do not have the time, money or organizational ability to counter it should we care to, and that's the agenda - to override our ability to control our own government. Unregulated corporate money dumped into our political system makes our government accountable to entities other than the American people. It enables those entities to write their own legislation, deregulate themselves, create massive tax loopholes for themselves, send our jobs overseas to boost their profits at our expense. It buys legislation that is not in our best interests, for workers, for the environment, for our our infrastructure and our overall well being as a country, and it can buy up massive amounts of media to persuade us into thinking that's a good thing. Despite an absurd Supreme Court ruling to the contrary, corporations are NOT people. They do not eat, sleep, shit, or have the insurance that they've been paying for yanked if they come down with cancer, and they don't die. But they have been given all the rights of actual flesh and blood persons - and more even, since you and I do not have the option of making money here in the US but then claiming at tax time that we're actually headquartered in another country since we have a post office box there in order to get out of paying American taxes. THAT is the whole point, and when people have it presented to them in that way, they tend to get it.
I do not think this is a liberal or conservative issue - this is an American issue. We have a situation where politicians - all of them - are forced to spend more time fund raising than they do working for US. It's a broken system, and the single biggest problem with that system is corporate money buying it's way with OUR government. It's impossible the way the system is currently constructed for any politician to unilaterally pull out of it. The politicians of BOTH parties know this - they would rather not have to spend their time fund raising. Whether or not you agree with a given congressperson, senator or president, most of them entered public life to do something they believed in - not because of all the great fund raising dinners they would get to attend. BUT - and this is a big BUT - conservative politicians have on several occasions thwarted attempts by Democrats to institute disclosure, and otherwise regulate and limit corporate contributions to campaigns and candidates. Why? Because Republicans will almost always uphold corporate interests over the interests of citizens, even, and especially, when those interests are at odds, and Democrats will, more often than not, attempt to uphold the interests of the citizens over the interest of corporations. And corporate America knows this, which is why, though they contribute to both parties, they contribute to Republicans far more heavily.
This is not about getting rid of corporations - this is about keeping them in their place, regulating them, limiting their impact upon our government, making government accountable to US, representing our interests. This is about becoming aware that corporate power has gotten too big for it's britches. Our founding fathers feared the rise of unchecked corporate power, were aware of the ability of corporate influence to corrupt the new republic. The Boston Tea Party was not only a rebellion against the British Crown, but against overreach by a corporation in collusion with the Crown - the Dutch East India Company. The fear of unchecked corporate power led the founders to institute corporate charters, which had to be renewed every two years, and could be revoked for poor corporate citizenship. Throughout our nation's history, we've gone through periods of nearly no regulation leading to serious abuses upon workers and even the economic collapse of the Great Depression, to the decades of the mid 20th century when some of the tightest corporate regulations coincided with the most prosperous decades of this nation. As those regulations have been dismantled over the course of the last 30 years, in the name of strengthening the economy and creating jobs, the economy has gone into the toilet and unemployment has soared. The wealth gap in this nation - the gap between the incomes of the lowest paid workers and the highest paid executives - has exploded to a degree that is destabilizing to our democracy, the wealth and political power in this country has not only become concentrated into fewer hands, but has trickled up from us instead of down to us, and then flown straight out of this country (to offshore tax havens, as jobs sent overseas) as a result. How can any working, tax paying American citizen of any political persuasion argue against the need to put corporate power back in it's place, to make our politicians accountable to and afraid of US again, instead of whispering behind closed doors with corporate lobbyists about what it will take to get us to swallow whatever it is they feel like serving up?
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