Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
- 16,829
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You don't get it, do you? Corporations are nothing more than groups of people. People incorporate for many different reasons, one of which is that the government actually requires that people who want to do certain things, **** get together to tell others about something bad that is happening, If you insist that corporations have no rights, then you are saying the government can tell people not to talk about some things. The only way you can logically argue that corporations do not have rights is if you argue that people don't. Even if you accept the absurd position that our rights come from the government, only idiots want people to give up their rights completely.
Corporations are great things, but they just shouldn't be allowed to have undue influence on government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.
What do you mean by undue influence? How do you know what my aspirations for America are? I can name half a dozen corporations that have the exact same aspirations for America you claim you do, should I be able to force them, and you, not to be able to aspire to those goals? Do you think you can mount a cohesive argument that actually describes and defends your position without resorting to demagoguery?
Do you need a few examples? The tobacco industry for years had so much undue influence in Washington and State houses, that they were able to market poison without sanction. And show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
A free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.