by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - February 25, 2008) Corporative is a word most of us never hear or use. It means, in its third sense according to Webster's Dictionary, that political and economic power is vested in an organization of corporations. From what I read, this is what my and our country has been reduced to on the national scale, albeit not fully within the individual states.
The party presidential race for Democrats now has "super delegates." They are over and above the ordinary delegates because they are part of government in various places with the huge privatization of our common constitutional life. They will have more say than the elected delegates -- a strange turn of events. Do their votes count for more than the People's? If so, how and why did that happen? Who gains by privatizing the unreal votes before the real actual votes when we get to November 2008?
And, how did all these special bodies come into play? There is the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, all of which seem to make decisions before the Congress does for the Congress. They are closer to the Executive Branch; however, their missions are all about what our country's purposes must be for resources, laws, profits, war, and hegemony, as in leadership or dominance of one state or nation over others. This has become their country. We do not count anymore.
Has anyone noticed that our national attention is not on the United States and the People? The attention is all over the world, except here. We have been deliberately distracted. As our people are neglected, lose jobs, get sicker, have fewer resources, have lost real Fourth Estate information, suffer from pollutants of every kind, lack good education, our corporatives -- that sounds like a cooperative of corporations -- band together to make us pay and pay and pay as they hire shills to strip us of the world under our feet with superficial distractions to buy and consume. Pay no heed to the content; just do it for the corporative. The distortions are so huge that every kind of distraction has been encouraged so we do not notice.
Even if we do notice, what good would it do? All of our ancient rights have been rescinded. We don't have any one left unless we pretend. No one in Congress answers my letters about this problem. The police are paramount and free speech is punished. How is that going to be corrected? Why don't police officers get demoted for overreacting on people who have gathered to protest one thing or another? The backlog of outrages against the People grows daily. Is free speech dangerous? To whom? Why?
Which brings up the question of the spy because we have hired innumerable persons to secretly see what We, the People, are doing, thinking, being, without our permission. What is worse, our taxes are paying for this without our permission. The executive branch gave itself permission and, then, strong-armed the Congress into agreeing with every anti-American agenda it can come up with, such as checking our "radical" thoughts, warring on the world to enrich the military-industrial complex, stealing the resources of the world's peoples by bombing them back to the stone (rubble) age, building a wall to keep people out after we devastate their economies and kill their children, teaching the police military tactics to be sure the First Amendment is defeated on the streets, polluting the world with radioactive materials just to rub it in forever, and on and on and on. We, the People, on the other hand, shop and shop and shop to "consume," even things inedible, watching "The Other Light" -- electronic -- as I wrote two weeks ago, to give us internal guidance in good citizenship because "taking it to the streets" is too dangerous.
The original culture of the landmass called "America" was one that did not approve of hierarchies, such as the Iroquois Nation. The Founders of the United States copied the concepts of the Iroquois Nations into the Constitution (see William H. Kotke's The Final Empire - The Collapse of Civilization and The Seed of the Future, 2007, for a complete discussion of our founding ideas) because those documents precluded the rise of empirical ideas, such as have been occurring today since we invented the atomic bomb. As Lord Acton, a British historian, said, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," which is the basic concept that destroys humanity wherever, and whenever, it rears its ugly head.
Working behind the scenes and right in front of our noses, those who believe the world belongs solely to them for profit, power, and the good life have slowly undone the Constitution and its checks and balances with political appointees and elite spokespeople of every type. We, the People, are never invited to their soirées. We do not count anymore, even by voting. In 1896, a clerical mistake made corporations into "persons" as I've said innumerable times before. This gives them the rights I have (lost, thanks to them) without the need for the lot of them to go to jail, or worse, for their massive transgressions against humans since the Vietnam War. Their money and power allows them to buy our senators, representatives, the executive branch, none of whom, by the way, have to do what they want.
Somehow, the skew is that our elected no longer intend or wish to do what we want. The fawning and partying, the trips and junkets, the rubbing elbows with worldwide groups who treat their peoples shabbily, have changed our so-called "leaders" into sycophants (flatterers, toadies, and parasites in too many cases). One small example: the king of Saudi Arabia is listed as the fourth worst dictator in the world. Our executive branch hobnobs, aids, and abets most of the others on the list in yesterday's "Parade" enclosure in the Sunday Oregonian. What is that about? How does that aid anyone except those at the top of the new food chain? After all, outlaws used to rob people until the sheriff locked them up. Now, the "sheriff" helps the outlaws rob and kill dissidents.
Apparently, civilization is never sustainable. Not one in all the history of the world has succeeded until this day. They are gone because their goals were selfish and ugly and personal. They destroyed what they wanted. Today will be no different soon. The scientists have now named a new age to replace the Holocene; it's called the Anthropocene. This is the name of the First Age of Humankind's Depredations to the planet. I could list most of our "sins," but our "consumers" aid and abet the destroyers of the only planet we have. Perhaps, the dry "oceans" of the moon and Mars offer solace to them because our problem seems to be: "It can't happen here."
We have, apparently, lost jobs, lost our healthcare, lost our taxes to war without any accounting whatsoever, lost our honor, lost our morals, and, finally, lost our way of life. The exalted humans still talking to each other in the halls of power are working very hard to remove every shred of social security, among other items. The power of education has been diluted for the young. Our students rank 27th in the world in mathematical concepts. The quality of our foodstuffs is suspect; the safety of our children's toys is worse because we know they contain poisonous substances and, yet, the executive branch has fired its real scientists for "cute" political operatives as we see on television.
We have abandoned the law for the quick and dirty ancient fix of "guilty until proven innocent" through torture as if the medieval churches were still in charge of trials, instead of citizen juries. We have promulgated so many laws to jail humans that our prison population numbers ten times as many as it used to be. There are not more crimes; there are just more "privatized" prisons run by corporations requiring big profits for despicable care of those sentenced.
As to the profits once again, "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" Read the five short chapters -- 21 pages -- by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's "War Is A Racket." It's the most succinct writing on obscene profits for death I've ever seen.
The worst about this time in history is the lack of care about the People, the children, the taxes, the Constitution, the state of the actual world, the lack of accounting as if "money grows on trees" philosophy. Being healthy, wealthy, and wise is a mere nursery rhyme today. No one cares if people are sick, poor, and ignorant because no one counts except the elites and their mouthpieces, the media, behind which is always a mega-corporation. I keep asking myself who profits when there is no one left to flesh out the bottom lines? This leads me to believe that everyone is living for the moment and there is no future. We, the People, just haven't realized yet that alpha persons are extremely selfish and base for all the pampering that goes into their upkeep.
These elites intend to remove ordinary farmers from planting seeds saved on their small farms. The earth will soon be a desert with the tweaking of the legacy of thousands and thousands of years of humanity's care for life, seeds, and land. The new seeds self-destruct unless fed chemicals of dubious benefit to anyone except the moneyed class. No doubt they will raise their foods in greenhouses using slave labor. I wonder if any of them knows that a spiral can wind down to a point; then, what? They will poison themselves; we won't be liable for it as they are now "innocently" poisoning the rest of us on the lands and in the grocery stores and in the air we all breathe.
Another amazing thing is that overpopulation is happening; yet, women are not supposed to freely limit their families if they choose. This is a religious concept, often written into state laws, to prevent the death of a fetus; whereas, the death of a child or a soldier or a mother in war is fine, good, for it prevents "terror." The worry about "terrorists" is also religious in scope. It's the followers of Christ and Abraham against the followers of Mohammed. Certain humans use this as the best way to war against other humans for profits: oil, land, money. The fact that Christ said the opposite seems of no concern to anyone except the Quakers.
Honesty seems to be sorely lacking in these first few years of the new century. Is war the reason? Is life getting worse, so much worse, because ethics are meaningless to most people? Debt has risen to absurd proportions, both nationally and personally. I cannot comprehend the size of a nine trillion dollar national debt -- some say fifty-three trillion.
What did the People do to deserve this malfeasance in office where the miscreants remain untouched by laws or impeachment or removal from office? Maybe it was our focus. We focused on electronic lights that dazzled us with made-up stories instead of truth. We want to believe the country is just as the Founders left it to us.
We lost our way somewhere in the Vietnam War and haven't found the path back to sanity since. Perhaps, it is karma; i.e., what goes 'round, comes 'round. Now, it's our turn. The people -- most of them -- running the country and the corporations are one singular generation of individualistic idealists. The "Boomers" are legion and their idealism is not to the group but for each of them alone to define. This makes for saintly ideals in a world where terrorist witches are tortured -- a world we once had and have again because we do not want to hear that ideals can be deadly if not matched by understanding, learning, and compassion. Since these are in short shrift today, we have governmental and world chaos at a cost to the children who will inherit a broken, alien earth from us. Perhaps, they will grow up and change everything back to living with and within nature, rather than outside of it as we think we can.
After all, this is merely the third dimension; none of us gets to stay here forever. Our progeny will probably thank God we are all gone. This may be why the Bible says a mere 144,000 humans will survive. That's a loss of 48,541,000 people for each person who lives through this new Anthropocene Age, the Age of Mankind. Were the Maya correct in their assessment of human nature? Who will be here to notice? Will the corporative cooperative survive, too? I hope not. That goes double for empires, rumors of empires, and rulers -- unelected -- of every kind.
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