We are at a crossroads. Our commonwealth is dying along with our planet. We no longer live in a democratic state. Rather, it is a plutocracy run by corporations.
I used to write about "living by a different measure" than making money. I used to call it, "your money or your life," using the metaphor of a robber demanding you hand over your money or he will kill you. That is what corporations are doing to us, in my opinion, with the help of their minions in Congress and in state legislatures across the country.
Money is an important tool to be used in trading for services, but under corporate control it has become an end unto itself, to the detriment of all of life. I recently discovered the New Economy Working Group quite by accident, that articulates this far better than I ever could:
From Real Wealth to Phantom Wealth
Real wealth has intrinsic value. Examples include healthful food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, quality education, affordable health care, fulfilling opportunities for service, and time for meditation and spiritual reflection. The most important forms of real wealth are beyond price and unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy children, loving families, caring communities, and a beautiful natural environment.
Phantom wealth is money or a financial asset that is unrelated to the creation of anything of real value. It can appear or disappear as if by magic, as in the case of the inflation and ultimate collapse of the tech-stock and housing bubbles.
Phantom wealth also includes financial assets created by debt pyramids, in which financial institutions engage in complex trading and lending schemes based on fictitious or overvalued assets in order to appear to generate profits and justify outsized management fees. Debt pyramids may be used as a device to feed financial bubbles.
The United States carried out two major experiments in money system design during the 20th century, one favoring the creation of real wealth for all, the other favoring the creation of phantom wealth to increase the claims of the few over the real wealth of the many -- a form of theft. The first, a response to the Great Depression, introduced financial reforms that limited financial speculation and supported the creation of a well-regulated and accountable system of local banks, savings and loans, and credit unions that functioned as public utilities responsive to community needs. This system helped to build the U.S. middle class and make the United States the most prosperous of nations, but left in place the basic structure of a system of concentrated financial power referred to as Wall Street.
This articulates everything I've been thinking about for the last seven or eight years. It's worth reading the site like a book, straight through, or jumping all about. You will learn everything you need to know about what is wrong with our current economic system, and what must be done to fix it. Here is a brief history of the corporation, which points out all the ways our lives have been sold out to a corporate cartel:
Instruments of Imperial Rule
The legal form of the contemporary for-profit, limited-liability corporation of global reach is an invention of imperial kings who contracted out to private entities the work of colonizing and exploiting the resources, labor, and markets of distant peoples beyond the reach and oversight of parliaments. The design, by intent, allowed the virtually unlimited concentration of financial power accountable solely to the monarch and a group of favored private investors. Generations of corporate lawyers have worked diligently since to preserve and expand the legal privileges of for-profit corporations, narrow their purpose to the single goal of profit making, and shield them from liability for the harms they cause.
The notorious British East India Company chartered in 1600 by the British Crown was the original model. It conducted a thriving drug trade in China that precipitated the Opium War of 1839 and ruled India for many years as if a private estate. The Dutch crown chartered the United East India Company in 1602 and vested it with sovereign powers to conclude treaties and alliances, maintain armed forces, conquer territory, and build forts to establish and enforce a monopoly over Dutch trade in the lands and waters eastward from the southern tip of Africa to the southern tip of South America. These corporations were essentially criminal syndicates officially sanctioned by their home jurisdiction to engage in activities in foreign jurisdictions that would be subject to severe criminal penalties if carried out in their own country.
Through a serious distortion of legal reasoning, a corporate-friendly U.S. Supreme Court has over more than a century issued a series of legally and morally flawed decisions that interpret the rights guaranteed to natural born persons by the Constitution as applying equally to corporations. These decisions belie the reality that corporations are artificial legal entities created when a government issues a charter. The idea that corporations should have the same Constitutional rights as natural born persons, yet enjoy special exemptions from the responsibilities of citizenship and morality expected of natural born persons turns logical, legal, and moral reasoning on its head. To achieve true democracy this legal travesty must be eliminated.
Wall Street is writing our laws (through
ALEC) and by hiring
lobbyists as staffers, and now even the
integrity of our votes is no longer guaranteed.
This strikes at the very core of what it means to be an American citizen. Only we citizens can fix this, but I'm speaking to the choir. We must mobilize everyone — conservatives, independents, corporate Democrats, Tea Partiers and progressives — to effect the changes we need to end this corporate takeover of our democracy. Legislators depend on the very wealthiest corporations and their owners to get elected; unless they are forced to, they will not address this issue, they will only make it worse.
In my opinion, only progressive legislators can be trusted. Certainly any candidates pandering to the wealthy are not credible — we know they will deliver the legislation that favors the corporate criminal syndicates.
Read up on what is going on. Sign petitions. Write letters to the editor. March in the streets. We need a revolution. And most of all, we all have to vote out this cartel! That's the least any of us can do!