Industrial corporate management game plan

"The consequences to the average citizen from business crimes are staggering: The combined burglary, mugging and other property losses induced by the country's street punks come to about $4 billion a year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our corporate board rooms and the humble clerks in our retail stores bilk us out of between $40 and $200 billion a year." - Georgette Bennett

Industrial corporate management game, oops, I mean business plan

''Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty. The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly - not any ethics, but an ethics which is people centered.'' - Pope Benedict XVI

"My boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style - that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning." - Matthew B. Crawford

"The dominant ideologies of the most destructive and powerful transnational corporations are predatory and tyrannical in nature. The notion that they are even remotely interested in such things as "free trade," or democracy flies in the face of basic common sense. The corporations wreaking the most havoc on this planet, the central banks, the military, medical, pharmaceutical, agricultural, and energy industrial complexes, have set up monopolies and cartels by using the powers of government to legislate and regulate the industries they wish to control. The people inclined to abuse their wealth and power do what they always have done throughout history. They TAKE the most, give the least, and don't give a damn about the rest of humanity. There is a mountain of evidence to prove that powerful transnational corporations, through their control of our election process, the legislative powers of government, the courts, the international treaty process, the world's currencies and of course, virtually total control of our mainstream media, have just about totally taken over our country." - http://www.kickthemallout.com/

the Corporations Will Eat Your Soul

You may know the story of the frog and the scorpion.

A scorpion wanted to cross a swift river, and asked a frog to carry him on his back.

The frog asked "How do I know that you won't sting and kill me as soon as you get on my back?"

"Well," answered the scorpion, who was good with words when he wanted something, "then I wouldn't be able to get across the river."

"Well," said the frog, "then how do I know that you won't sting and kill me as soon as we're across the river?"

"Oh," said the scorpion, "because I'll be so grateful for the ride, why would I want to kill you then?"

This con-vinced the frog - apparently, frog are easy to con-vince in stories - so he let the scorpion on his back, and began swimming across the river. They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging river, when, to his great surprise, the frog felt a painful sting and looked around to see the scorpion pulling his stinger out of the frog's back.

Very soon, the frog felt himself becoming numb.

Just before he was completely paralyzed, the frog had the breath to ask "Why?"

"It's just who I am," said the scorpion, as they both sank into the river and drowned.

"It's just who I am."

Of course, the story was never really about scorpions.

It was meant as a warning against certain rare but dangerous kinds of people who are like scorpions intent on destroying others even if it destroys them too.

I think the reason this is such a frightening story is because a person like the scorpion, a person who lacked even basic compassion, isn't quite human. (soulless)

One of the scariest things we can imagine is a machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and feels nothing when we suffer, cry, or die.

Think of those android-type men in the "Matrix" movies, for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in "Lord of the Rings," or the governor of California as the "Terminator," that robot programmed only to destroy until it was destroyed.

I suppose the most famous story like this is still Mary Shelly's 1818 tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created from dead human body parts.

For nearly two centuries, the Frankenstein monster has been a symbol of creating something inhuman, giving it life and immense power without a soul, then living to see it turn on us, as the monster even killed Frankenstein in the end.

There have been a lot of movies on this theme in the past few years. The "Terminator," "Total Recall," Darth Vader in "Star Wars," the casual indifference to life in "Pulp Fiction," the powerful forces of greed and destruction in "Lord of the Rings" - you can probably think of another half dozen.

When I was growing up, the most powerful movie like this was the original 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

For me, it was a movie about the difference between real people and pathological people.

You probably know the story.

A mindless life force from outer space drifted from a desolate, dead planet and wound up on this one.

It operated under a simple program.

When a human fell asleep near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person, taking their body, looks, even their memory, and draining their life, then destroying the original and taking their place.

You could hardly tell the difference. They looked the same, had all the same memories. But they had no soul.

They had no compassion, no feeling for anyone.

The squeals of a dog getting hit and killed by a car in the road twenty feet away didn't even make them care to look.

Life didn't matter to them.

Only reproducing their kind, to no other end than reproducing their kind.

Eventually, like the frog and the scorpion, they kill everything.

Then if the cosmic winds are right, they may blow across the galaxy and suck the life out of yet another planet.

I've met a half dozen people who grew up when I did, saw that movie, and were similarly moved to think of real versus unreal people, the way kids 150 years ago probably thought in terms of real people versus Frankenstein monsters.

In both cases, they were persons lacking humanity, lacking the concern for others that makes them frightening and dangerous persons.

When humans act like this, we feel there's something fundamentally wrong with them.

Theologians call them evil, novelists call them monsters or body snatchers, and psychologists call them psychopaths.

Since psyche means soul, the word really means people with sick souls.

Here's a list of psychopathic traits I recently read.

Psychopaths are:

Irresponsible.

Grandiose, self-absorbed.

They lack empathy.

They won't accept responsibility for their destructive actions.

They are unable to feel remorse.

They're finally quite superficial: all power, no depth; all manipulation, no connection I can see you making a mental list of some of your ex-friends…. Now what is this about?

Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths and scorpions who have been programmed to destroy, even if it also destroys them?

What on Earth does this have to do with a respectable church sermon? It's a way of introducing the business of trying to understand the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world.

That sounds so dramatic it almost needs a science fiction movie with special effects to make it scary enough.

But I am talking about a person that we have created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense power, more money than God, and which, like the invasion of the body snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in, destroying the compassionate qualities of some societies and real people.

You'll think I've badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real person is the corporation.

So let me try and persuade you.

Only a very few of these insights are mine. I got the rest from a remarkable book by a Canadian law professor named Joel Bakan. The title of the book is "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power."

Joel Bakan explains the character and the danger of large corporations in a few pages, and I'll try to reduce it to a few minutes. But make no mistake: this is like a horror movie.

Even though there is some hope at the end, I want to scare you.

Corporations formed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, to pool the money of a large number of people in order to give the corporation more power than any single business could have.

Very early, laws were passed saying investors had no liability for whatever dastardly deeds the corporation committed. All investors could lose was their investment.

This gave the corporation limited liability, but unlimited ability to make money.

It's something you can't imagine ever wanting to do with a person, isn't it?

And from the start, as a matter of structure and law, the only purpose of a corporation was to make as much money as possible for its stockholders.

By the late 19th century, the courts had transformed the corporation into "a person", a "legal person", and even spoke of it in that way.

And in 1866, lawyers representing this newly-created "person" won a ruling from the Supreme Court saying that, as a "legal person", corporations were entitled to be protected by the 14th amendment for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the law."

These provisions of the 14th amendment, as you may remember, were written for the protection of freed slaves after the War Between the States.

But since 1866, it has been used almost never by freed slaves, and almost exclusively to protect corporations - even when they make slaves of workers all over the third world and, some would argue, within our own country.

I am betting that not many of you knew that.

Until a few years ago, I didn't know it either. Isn't that odd, that we didn't know that?

Since being christened as "persons", corporations have done what any person would do: they have fought for both survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor their aims, and buying influence, lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) when they can.

It isn't seen as evil. Its just business as usual. And what are their aims?

You might say that it depends on the corporations, that they are free to do whatever they want.

That's not the truth.

If the corporation sells stock, its sole legal purpose, under international and American laws, is to make as much money as possible for its stockholders.

The corporation can pretend to care about society or the environment, as long as the money they spend makes more people want to buy their products and so increases profits for stockholders.

Corporations may not, legally, spend money for social good unless they really aren't interested in social good, but only in profits.

Milton Friedman, who had been regarded as a second- or third-rate economist until he was adopted as the official economist of the greediest kind of corporatism, calls making money the corporation's only moral aim. Milton Friedman compares little acts of apparent social conscience to car manufacturers using pretty girls to sell cars.

"That's never really about the girls," Milton Friedman points out, "it's just a trick to sell cars."

Likewise, a corporation can donate to the special Olympics or civic projects, but only if it will sell more of their product.

They can't do social good for the sake of doing social good.

Peter Drucker, perhaps the oldest living guru of corporate character, says if you have a CEO who wants to do social good, fire him fast!

And there are laws supporting this perspective.

Ninety years ago, when Henry Ford was becoming astoundingly rich from selling his Model T Fords, he decided that he was making too much money.

So in 1916, Henry Ford "cancelled the stock dividends to give customers price reductions because he felt it was wrong to make obscene profits."

Two of Henry Ford's major investors, the Dodge brothers, took him to court, arguing that profits belonged to the stockholders, not the corporation, and the court agreed with them, establishing a precedent that still rules.

Corporations exist as persons only to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their stockholders.

Even if it harms people. (Yes, the Dodge brothers then started their own car company.)

In a 1933 Supreme Court judgment, Justice Louis Brandeis finally made the obvious connection, when he stated that corporations were "Frankenstein monsters" capable of doing great evil.

Joel Bakan cites another famous case from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas Day 1993 a mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while stopped at a stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to explode, burning and badly disfiguring all five of them.

During the trial, a report was introduced showing that GM knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could explode on impact, killing the car's occupants. In fact, about five hundred people had been killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new Malibu style cars were being planned.

An engineer figured that each fatality could cost the company $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the figure by 41 million, the number of cars GM had on the road. (Incorrect assumption unless all had the gas tank situated the same!) The engineer concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40 per automobile. The cost of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was estimated to be $8.59 per car. That meant the company could save $6.19 per car if it let people die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires.

The huge jury award was later reduced by 3/4, and GM appealed the case.

In support of GM, the United States Chamber of Commerce filed a brief defending the practice of using this kind of "cost-benefit analysis in corporate decision making."

The jury's decision, the United States Chamber of Commerce said, was deeply troubling, because manufacturers should use cost-benefit analysis to make the most profitable decisions.

The corporation's legal structure requires executives to make only those decisions that create greater benefits than costs for their stockholders. Executives have no authority to consider what harmful effects a decision might have on other people or upon the environment, unless those effects might have negative consequences for the corporation.

Do you see what has happened here?

This "person" we created through our own laws, by following its legal nature, can and does endanger and kill human beings in the pursuit of profit on purpose.

Now let's jump to a very different area of society, one you might not think is even related to corporations.

It's the subject of our armed forces, what they are really serving, and what our soldiers are really dying for.

Joel Bakan's book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school.

It involves a Marine Corps Major General named Smedley Darlington Butler, one of World War I's most highly decorated soldiers.

On August 21, 1931, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for corporatism.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long.

I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

Given that speech, and Smedley Darlington Butler's disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

{Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the midst of a banking crisis (sound familar?). He embarked upon a socialist scheme of massive proportions with centralized government planning and control. With many of these socialist projects an utter disaster Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked upon an industrial building project - World War II. Both of these attempts to increase industrial productivity took lives: on the constrcution site and in the battlefield. And both fed the maw of the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals.

Small business hated the price, wage and labor controls along with the army of "inspectors" which socialism brought. The actual controlling interests, large corporations and their owners, were then able to skim the cream off the entire output of the country. Large corporations have always supported fascism = corporatism = socialism as wealth flows to the center.}

In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler's was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment.

The "business interests" wanted Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of major corporations [see so-called Business Plot also known as the White House Putsch].

Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked.

Smedley Darlington Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else.

This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America's long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control." - Joel Bakan

Their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization has already sued nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into corporate profits.

When the full power of the World Trade Organization comes into effect corporations will be able to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede corporate profits.

NAFTA was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from Americans by the hundreds of thousands, "out-sourcing" them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and moving on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you.

I don't think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done?

Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we can change our opinions and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world.

You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction."

Eliot Spitzer isn't anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world.

We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us.

Corporations need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised (after all they do use government provided facilities for business purposes -ie. roads for transportation, ocean and river ports, airports, ad infinitum. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes.

That is why our middle class was empowered after World War II, because the money was being distributed fairly.

Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of corporatism for everyone else.

We can stop it. And now we're at war again, a war Major General Smedley Darlington Butler would recognize immediately.

Halliburton, Dick Cheney's former corporation, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even had to bid on. Other large American corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all.

They are dying, like Smedley Darlington Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Halliburton, other major American corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money.

If they get killed, at least they're cheap to replace. There's cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so.

It is un-American.

It is ungodly.

It is inhuman and it is disgusting.

And it is continuing.

Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can't write an ending for this sermon.

It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people.

But there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart.

It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society.

Nor can it really stop itself.

It has been programmed with a very simple program: justified by man's law.

Sermon by Davidson Loehr, November 7, 2004

We should be aware that under every stone a scorpion may be lodged!

The crow seizing on a scorpion thought he had got a delicate morsel only to be stung to death. The adage is applicable to persons, who, meditating mischief to others, find the evil recoil upon themselves with redoubled force.

As long as legal constructs, in the institutionalized form of corporations, have more say in governing American social culture than living American people, then it is guaranteed that American social culture will continue to degrade.

Corporatist propaganda claims that people are inherently evil; that survival-of-the-fittest is defined as winning no matter what; that the only monetary system that can work must be based on fractional reserve banking debt, fiat money and centralized private control; that bankers perform "magic" and need to be compensated adequately for their wizardly works; that centralized banking with an elite controlling the entire edifice is desirable as only those with special "magical" banking powers know how complex financial instruments based on intangible fungible assets function in the real world of investing.

The corporatist financial system is soulless and not having a soul it can not decide what is good for humanity and what is bad for humanity - all it can do is serve the purpose it was designed to serve - increase shareholder value.

Throughout history we have been warned of the time when money, though lacking a soul, develops a will.

That time is once more upon us as the financial wizards, agents of syndicate of the soulless, have risen their god - Mammon - which now enslaves us in debt bondage.

Life, based on debt bondage, sacrifices one's own flesh and blood through work to pay off debt -personal and cultural.

This is not freedom.

There is no liberty in debt bondage.

Life is granted by God.

Life, includes humanity - the children of God.

God does not want his children bound, especially not in debt bondage to the false god Mammon.

"No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. A man cannot serve God and mammon." - attributed to Jesus, Matthew 6:24

Humanity still can chose the path it wants to follow - now Mammon reigns supreme!

Will no one answer the call to put social justice - Jesus dharma - on the throne?

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This web site is not a commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes only.

This website defines a new religious ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate crime.”

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