A Piece On Corporate Greed

By Leocthasme

"Mr. Speaker, we make war with such certainty, yet we are befuddled how to create peace. This paradox requires reflection if we are to survive. Making and endorsing war requires a secret love of death, and a fearful desire to embrace annihilation. Creating peace requires compassion, putting ourselves in the other person's place, and all of their suffering and all of their hopes and to act from our heart's capacity to love, not fear."
Dennis Kucinich, a speech on the floor of the house, during discussions of going to war in Iraq.

I'm telling you, people are absolutely on the warpath. If the elections are rigged again the situation will go out of control, we'll have no choice but to take to the streets to protect our democracy. If we want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth we can't get there obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by imperialists, Corporate Masters, and nature destroyers. We can't get there kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls from Corporate Greed is our only answer.

We now live in a country that is addicted to incarceration as a tool for social control. As it stands now justice systems are extremely expensive, do not rehabilitate but in fact make the people that experience them worse and have no evidence based correlatives to reducing crime. Yet, with that track record, these justice systems continue to thrive, prosper, and are seen as an appropriate response to children in trouble with the law. Only large Greedy Corporations see this as their means of controlling their profits and selling their drugs to so called 'unruly' children. Parents are told they are abusing their children if they punish them for misdeeds, thus the lawyers and the courts are controlling us from day one of our existence, and guaranteeing that the Greediest Corporations make huge profits. You can not punish your children, you must give them this or that drug, and then you wonder why later in life they become addicts. On Sunday, this last week, on '60 Minutes' there was an interesting piece on drugs that were not tested, nor approved, yet Bayer was sending these untested and actually deadly drugs to operating rooms for doctors to use. In the final report the drug resulted in the deaths of many people. And, Bayer did not release findings of reports of its disastrous results even though they knew of them. "Death for Profit". How Greedy can you get?

In Southern West Virginia inhabitants live in a war zone. Three and one-half million pounds of explosives are being used almost every day to blow up the mountains. Blasting communities, blasting homes, poisoning, trying to intimidate residents. Many will tell you they don't mind being poor, they mind being blasted and poisoned. There ARE no jobs on a dead planet, but Corporations don't seem to understand that as long as there are profits. Do they intend to move to Mars or some other far off planet to exploit the aliens and resources there while leaving the remains of this civilization to just die? Seems that way, if they don't care what they are feeding us or doing to our children.

Another example of Corporate Greed, Smithfield meats are produced in plants where workers are abused on the job, not given adequate protection, and then fired if they do get hurt. I do not buy anything with a Smithfield label, would you? Would you feed your children these poisoned products? As an abused worker, do you think they care about the products they produce? I would not.

Wal-Mart still has junk on its shelves that were recalled early last year, I suppose they figure if no one heard about it, sell it anyway. Profits are profits regardless of how they make them. And being the largest corporation on the face of the earth, do they care if someone gets hurt or some child gets poisoned? Send one of their lawyers to settle the case, or in the event they lose the case just appeal and drag it on till the person can no longer afford legal help or maybe they just die off. This is one of the worst corporations, worldwide, that exploits workers of all countries, for no other reason but profits.

While claiming to be attempting to increase the number of well-paying jobs in the U.S. (having created laws in the past explicitly designed to do this), the Congress has really been following a completely different course. Almost all recently passed laws have done just the opposite.

The following Acts of congress were ostensibly made in order to keep American workers fully employed and to create a healthy economy:

The Full Employment Bill of 1946 was designed for the federal government to promote "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power". Amendments removed a guarantee by the government to explicitly provide "full" employment, but certainly the intent of the bill was to provide this as indicated by its title. All part of the Republican Taft/Hartley Act that took away every gain American workers made during the Roosevelt Years. And, you think Greedy Corporations don't buy the persons we think we elect?

The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 was designed to attain full employment, growth in production, price stability, and balance of trade and budget. Goals were established including a maximum of 3% to 4% unemployment rate, an attempt to balance the federal budget, and the avoidance of trade deficits. If private business interests did not attain these goals the government was entitled to create a "reservoir of public employment." The Act explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of age as well. There was no effort to carry out the intent of these Acts. They were passed to create an appearance that these goals were being pursued while congress passed laws which did just the opposite. "Globalization" was intended to allow American businessmen to replace American workers with low-priced foreign ones. Since American corporations own much of the foreign manufacturing businesses, a foreign worker is simply an employee of an American firm hired overseas to replace an American worker stateside. And then, congress threw in an added tax sweetener to further facilitate this giveaway.

NAFTA and CAFTA had the same intent. So much for "promoting" full employment for U.S. citizens. Immigration policy, legal and illegal as well, was designed to do the same. No real serious efforts were made to stop the border crossings. The proof of this is in the number of illegal immigrants who succeeded. Legal immigration in the high-tech sector was a fraud from the get-go. Greedy Corporations simply wanted younger, less expensive, and more pliable employees. Those older native ones wanted to be fairly treated and paid appropriately for a highly-trained engineer. Again, it was the government that "legally" made the jobs giveaway possible. The age-discrimination laws were ignored and tons of young (inexperienced) but low-salaried foreigners came surging in.

The immigration laws themselves were violated from the very beginning, proof being that high-tech salary levels immediately took a big dip violating the law's requirement that immigrants were to be paid equal wages. When it was obvious that wages were falling, the congress did nothing, not Democrats nor Republicans. Do we need a change at the top, or do we need to kick the whole damn bunch out? Do we think anything will change as long as there are Bayer's or Smithfield's or Wal-Mart's in existence? Will a new bunch of so called lawmakers in congress help the common folk back home? Not One Bit, as long as they get paid by the lobbyists who are paid by the Greed Mongers. It will not change until we revolt against the Corporate World. How? Quit buying their crap they push on us from God knows where. Buy American Goods, they are still here. I can find a lot of good American companies, who hire Union workers to produce the things we all need. Too expensive? Hardly. Buying the junk from other countries has already cost us our National Treasury, which our kids, if any are left from the poison we feed them sold by the Greedy Corporations, will have to pay for. And you think that won't work either? Then we better take to the streets to take our country back. We better quit buying crap from the Wal-Mart's of the world. And, we better start being Americans again and show our fighting spirit and our determination to take our country back from the Greed Mongers.

But, something else we should know, the primary reason behind these Greedy Corporation's Tax Breaks was really not disclosed. The dollar's exchange rate has been manipulated over the last 30 years in order to suit the wishes of the rich, causing American worker's wages to become progressively less and less competitive. This ultimately resulted in American manufacturing wage levels, on average, of ten times those of foreign workers in those less-developed countries which had been perfecting their manufacturing capabilities. Only if an American wage earner agreed to work for $2-$3/hr. would he/she be competitive. This exchange rate manipulation resulted in the failure of one of the major goals of the aforementioned Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, a balanced trade. The other goals of that Act, concerning the unemployment level and "balanced budget", have failed as well. Needless to say, an effort to establish a "reservoir of public employment" went nowhere.

The public's inability or unwillingness to face up to these betrayals will result in the destruction of the working class in the U.S. If the public does not revolt or protest on the streets, they will continue to get a government that no one deserves and eventually The Greedy Corporations will control.

That is me and you, not the guys that have it made. If it gets too tough for them they will do the same as Cheney's Halliburton did, move to Dubai, wherever. Do we want the king back? I sure as hell don't, I read my history books about all that too.. --

Leo C. Tha's Me!