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Kapitalism Korporate Krime
Why does Capitalism thrive today? Despite being an ugly powerful monster out of control, it has won the hearts and minds of almost everybody in the developed nations. Why?
Because it is a closed circuit. There is no opposition because there is no outlet for change.
NGOs with extremely limited resources do their best by picking at the crumbs of the capitalist table, but what hope can they have when the opposition is so formidable.
Armed to the teeth with massive budgets, international lawyers (Clifford Chance), PR companies (Burson Marsteller -‘Shamelessly building unfair advantage for their clients’) , security systems (read Military), pocket politicians (Bush, Blair), creative accountants (Anderson),all driven by a ruthless exploitative motivation – Profit! The Global Corporate Kings all scratch each others back, so fighting one is like taking on the whole gang (Oil companies lobby Bush to drop the Kyoto Agreement). None of them want change. Esso prosecutes Greenpeace for Trademark abuse while ignoring the case Greenpeace makes for Corporate Climate Crime. Drug companies denigrate Brazil for breaking patent law by producing drugs that Brazilian people need but cannot afford.
Global giants make the law and then enforce it for their benefit. Almost all the patents registered in the world today have been done so by developing nations. In many cases patenting commodities available only in less developed countries. Trademark cases are also in the same vein. Less developed nations have no trademarks, they have nothing to trademark unless they could make AIDS and starvation into a logo. The institutions administering these ‘ownership’ cases are set up by the Developed nations in order to control the less developed.
Go to this link and just see the sad statistics which the WTO themselves have complied resulting in their own suicide! If only the IMF would do the same!
http://www.gatt.org/trastat_e.html
Religious institutions could be players in the opposition to capitalism. But the Catholic Church has more money for honouring dead saints than for real action against the causes of poverty. It is one of the richest organizations in the world, but with a feeble geriatric as its puppet head, and the pomp and pageantry to be paid for, the message of compassion has slipped off their agenda. A movie coming out soon called ‘Amen’ shows they even tolerated the Nazi holocaust, so the fact they stay out of the Globalisation critique is no surprise. Other religions such as the Muslims are too fractured to be a focal point and many are too poor to be influential. The Anglicans, more concerned with electing gay priests than anything concrete. The fundamentalist self righteous Christians of the Bible Belt are more concerned with saving themselves than their ‘neighbours’ across the sea. Most religions are in decline precisely because of their ambivalent positions in the world today. All religions embrace compassion but at a local level instead of a global one. The days of David vs. Goliath are gone. We need a Goliath.
What defies my imagination is how many religions speak of the love of thy neighbour and yet the majority of the neighbours are financially worse off than 50 years ago though a process of bullying by the World Bank and IMF. Western religions are in a state of decline, not wanting to move in political worlds and not even sharing their wealth for the poor, it is no wonder they are under subscribed.
Governments are in the pockets of the Global Corporate Kings. Accepting funding from the Global Corporations in order to get elected in the first place, and riding the backs of the media conglomerants, places them in the laps of the Corporations. They then focus on short term electoral gains and have no stomach for the long term change necessary to bring the world back from the extinction predicted by the WWF in their Earthlog Report. The idea that a government would set up major change that would eventually and logically lead to their decline on a national level, is inconceivable. Besides which they hold less financial power than the Corporations. Look at the quivering attempt of the British government to stop navigation instruments being sold through America to Israel, a clear case of Trade wins over ethics.
The most devious tool of the Corporate Giants is……
Advertising – the brainwashing of our age!
Never before has those who rule had so much direct control over our habits. Control of the media has converged such that it functions much like Orwell’s novel 1984 predicted, blurting out thought control. With the subtle difference we can turn it off. But can we? With coordinated subvert campaigns on the street, in the papers and magazines, on the web, sponsoring events, in schools, on train tickets and in your face, the average city dweller receives over two thousand subvertisments per day. That makes over 700,000 BUY suggestions each and every year. I find this information sad. Bad enough that our working lives have been dehumanised by computers and labour saving devices and still our personal lives are riddled with messages from the same corporations we work for hypnotizing us to spend back our poultry wages . We live to consume in the ‘developed’ nations. Political power no longer exists because the Global corporations are more powerful than governments, now the only power we have is on mass, as consumers. In the face of the worst famine in Africa, Coca Cola press office rejoices in the launch of a cola with a local name in Tanzania, one of the countries most affected by the famine. Nice one Coke! Where is the consumer power there, they have no income to spend!
Where does the majority of advertising dollars go …….Television.
Who has control of Television, is it the politicians whom we elected to control us? Wishful thinking, no it is the same people who control over 50% of the Global economy. The unaccountable Global Corporations leaping transnational boundaries in an effort to exploit the local resources of the ‘less developed’ and avoiding taxation from the more developed nations in a single bound. News Corporation the largest media conglomerate paid less than 7% tax globally last year. We applaud the financial acumen of these companies as they dribble a dividend or two into our consumer pocket, only to be swallowed up by our next conditioned, useless purchase, ‘Oh! my mobile phone is so out of date’ ( read - functional but unfashionable). Fashion itself is a huge exploiter, an icon of capitalism, constantly discarding last seasons clothing which it championed the season before. Its not that the clothes from last season are not wearable, they just need us to purchase again this season in order to keep their Profits high, while reducing humans to machines in their sweatshops (GAP, Nike, Tommy)
Television feeds us bite sized chunks of useless entertainment (Ally Mcbeal, Friends, Who Wants to be a Millionaire! Sex in the City, Survivor, Big Bother) with mechanistic determination. They are only separated by thousands of iconic subvertisments conditioning us to consume with out conscience. This is the role of Television in the world today. It is simply a tool of Corporations to hypnotically force us to consume. Not only does it force products upon us, it also forces its viewpoints. Television precludes questions, its information is a one way street, and only in the format that supports Global Capitalism. In Naomi Klien’s book No Logo we see alternative organizations trying to buy airtime on national television stations. Are we surprised that they are refused. It would be anti capitalistic to let them air their views. Certainly it is undemocratic.
Violence in television is another tool . I have seen thousands killed on TV in dramas, movies etc but surprisingly enough, I have never seen a murder or a shoot out in real life. What is the message? It supports the spending on arms for all governments and reduces our oneworld view, forcing consumers again and again to consider that there is an evil force out there ready to prey on us. This message separates us from one another. It destroys compassion. It allows force to be used against peaceful protest (Genoa, Mayday protests) as that is what the public is used to seeing, much like the Roman arenas the public hysteria want blood! That’s entertainment.
Football the new religion! A game of chance attended by millions every year, true to the faith of capitalism, most of the successful clubs are in fact companies. The richest being the highest on the stock market giving them the ability to buy the best players. Manchester United with its product range generating more sales than the team does in ticket sales. The mass hysteria shown in the recent world cup was despicable, that grown people should care so much about a game and yet care so little about the AIDS victims in Africa. (The amount of money spent on AIDS research in the last 20 years is $400 million, about the size of two Hollywood blockbusters. Very sad given that 70 million people are predicted to die from this Blockbuster epidemic within the next 20 years.) The salaries of these players like the Boardroom Barons of the Capitalistic model are extraordinary. While millions of people in Africa live on $1 per day, David Beckham is given millions. Injustice! Do we not care about those unnamed people in Africa and South America, subsisting on poultry handouts from us, only to repaid doubly with phenomenal interest and exploitation of their natural resources. We would much rather read about Posh & Beck’s latest nail varnish…….give me strength.
Of course this does not surprise as when one considerers the driving motivation and fuel of capitalism is Profit and to make a Profit, you must rip someone off. Therefore Capitalism is synonymous with exploitation and then we get a clear picture, The Developed Nations need the ‘less developed nations in order to survive. For Capitalism to survive in such a heighten state as it is today, it is necessary for 2/3 of the world to be under privileged, In order to take part in Capitalism you must be prepared to make others suffer that is the sad truth. Capitalism needs cheap labour (Nike, Addidas, Reebock) it needs cheap resources (Shell, Texaco, DeBeers), it needs military protection (Afghanistan, Colombia, Philippines), it needs dumb shareholders to rip off (Enron, Worldcom,) Every politician every business man every employee is in fact part of the status quo and their subconscious mission is to enslave the majority of the world in order to maintain their privileged position. Darwinism has been espoused by Wall Street to justify the survival of the fittest. The fact that all religions go against this hypothesis suggests that people do want to be compassionate, they do not want others to suffer for them, but the singular decline in religion these days attests to the reduction of the power of compassion through religion.
What is important about today’s global economy is that finally we the people are able to act global instead of just nationally, in both government and economics. Corporations have showed us that they can defy international barriers. We the people can also defy the national barriers. We can act globally and take back the power to exploit in order to promote compassion. Instead of relying on a few under funded radical organisations to fight our battles through their lack of media access, we can make this world a better place and safer by restoring equilibrium to an unbalanced earth.
The web is our weapon. It gives us instant research, it connects us instantly across nations, this is our revolution from within. Fight brothers and sisters, don’t just bicker and bitch, turn the energy into positive action, research your causes, bring more dirt to light, convert your friends, families, keep the ball rolling and contribute to the good of mankind!
To effect change we need a majority and that means that the majority must understand the present system is the cause of many of the problems in the world today. Poverty in Africa , South America and Asia is a direct result of the IMF, corrupt governments and the continuation of the global corporations to exploit natural resources in these wonderful continents. Sure they suffer from droughts, floods, lack of infrastructure, education etc but none of these problems are insurmountable with the huge resources we have at our disposal in the ‘developed’ nations. The profits from one oil giant Shell last year of $10 billion, would have sorted out several African nations. But we are prepared to line our pockets and look the other way when it comes to the suffering of others. So while Shell is busy paying off the military to kill local protesters in Nigerian oil fields , we take the dividends and happily go off to church on Sundays, confessing to some petty sin, while the gross public sin is never confessed. It’s all out of sync now and this situation has become self perpetuating. More people died of starvation on the 9/11, than in the towers, but because they did so in countries where we exploit rather than rejoice in our ‘good’ fortune, we ignored that fact. We concentrate on the ‘media’ outrage and give the military a good excuse to push on in their efforts to find other countries to drain, like Afghanistan and soon Iraq.
We should be looking for a world where everybody has the same basic human rights and privileges and then an incident like 9/11 may never have happened. America is the focal point of the Capitalist Dream but it is equally represented in the European Union, just more quietly. Typically the Americans are brasher about it, but most developed nations are taking part in the military coupe in Afghanistan.
How can it be that people would rather get fat on the starvation of others. Do they not feel the terrible weight of injustice, when they see pictures of starving or AIDS children. We have become immune to those images these days, preferring to profit form the oil, diamond and lumber companies exploiting rather than seeing the real crime of not caring.
When I see the local people of Africa and South America I see a reason and that reason is us. For hundreds of years we have exploited and oppressed the people of these regions, through religion, slavery, colonialism and now capitalism. We are responsible for the Earth now and we owe it to the human race to manage resources responsibly for the greater good of mankind, for all our brothers and sisters.
OneWorld !
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