The 2012 Story

achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control…. The emergence of a large dominant party… could accelerate the trend toward such technological managerialism.”¹⁷

This future plutocratic world of elites omnisciently controlling the world’s population is eerily similar to the scenario in George Orwell’s famous book 1984. Thomas More’s classic Utopia derived the term “utopian” from the Greek for “nowhere,” underscoring the irony of Brzezinski’s ideal all-seeing future Big Brother state, surely a dystopia to the average human, reaching its tentacles everywhere. The grand chess game he sees himself playing reveals a Machiavellian mastermind, and now, in his new role as foreign adviser to Obama, he is perhaps positioning himself for checkmate.

These facts may seem surprising to many who voted for Obama. His influences, however, have been a matter of public record. Politicians influenced by the Chicago School of Economics, the so-called Chicago boys, are allied with a neoliberal economic strategy. It is neoliberal because it advocates a free (liberal) global marketplace. As such, its proponents recommend the kind of unregulated business practices that have gotten us into trouble. Milton Friedman, a neoliberal strategist and patriarch of the Chicago School of Economics, believed that free markets are the best way to design a world economy. Obama lived in Chicago and launched his career within the pressure cooker of hard-boiled Chicago politics, and his economic values, not surprisingly, resemble those taught in the Chicago School of Economics. For example, in a press conference of June 17, 2009, Obama shared his policy toward oversight and regulation of big business, the absence of which led to the banking and subprime-mortgage crisis: “I believe that our role is not to disparage wealth, but to expand its reach. Not to stifle the market but to strengthen its ability to unleash the creativity and the innovation that still makes this nation the envy of the world.”¹⁸

Even if Obama was 100 percent committed to everything he promised during his campaign, he’d have as much chance of changing the course of globalization as a tugboat would have of saving the Titanic three minutes before it was impaled by the iceberg. Historian and political activist Howard Zinn wrote: “Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does. Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.”¹⁹ And to do that we have to get to the root causes of why things happen the way they do. Why is health care failing? Why are our banks bankrupt? Obama himself once said, “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mind-set that led us into Iraq.” Yes, that’s true; we need to identify and deal with the psychological or ideological source of the problem. But Zinn rightly asked, “What happened to that Obama?”²⁰

THE PATHOLOGICAL HEART OF THE HYDRA

An unresolved and festering dark side poisons American politics. Bush is no longer president, but there is a larger Seven Macaw threat at loose in the world today. Seven Macaw is a many-headed hydra, and removing one head will not do him in. The stated intentions of Obama have so far proven ineffective against a much more deeply rooted systemic problem. He is morphing before our eyes into yet another political figurehead molded by Big Money and the military-industrial-informational complex. He either had this up his sleeve all along (since when can politicians ever be trusted?) or he has been taken hostage by the forces of globalization. The Hero Twins had it easy; we have a more difficult task. We must speak truth to power and identify the entity that lies behind all Seven Macaws, one that has its tentacles embedded in our own lives.

The heart of the many-headed monster is that strange nonhuman institution that has been granted immortality: the corporation. The corporation is today’s dominant institution. We can’t pass a day without interfacing with corporations; they are deeply interfused in our lives, from schools to banks to news sources to jobs, gas stations—they are literally impossible to avoid. Mythologist Joseph Campbell noted that the highest buildings in a town reveal the priorities and dominant institutions of a culture. In the Middle Ages, it was the high steeple of the Church.²¹ Today, it is the high skyscraper of the corporate banking institutions that runs the world.

Corporations can be traced back to 1712, to a community-held water pump in England designed to pump water out of a coal mine and thereby increase productivity. With the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century and the mechanizing of the textile industry, the corporation became an idea whose time had come. But early corporations had a very narrow legal mandate. There were limits placed in a corporation’s charter, and its owners and shareholders were liable should anything go wrong. The corporation was basically seen to be in service to a public good, a temporary gift granted by the government. Local and national governments gave very little actual power to the corporation, and extensive licensing and oversight was required. Corporations had certain privileges but no rights.

Then came the railroads. People moved west by the thousands, and banks saw they could capitalize on funding the dream of a transcontinental railway. Corporations grew in size. And they grew hungrier. The societal changes wrought by the Civil War were craftily utilized by corporate lawyers to give undue power to corporations. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment granted freedom to slaves. A lingering conception of slaves as property made it seem odd to grant freedom, human rights, to property. After a co-opted court case in 1886, this murky conceptual shift was applied to the idea that a corporation was the property of its shareholders, and some deft and illegal maneuvering in the courts between 1886 and 1895 set up a series of decisions and precedents that resulted in corporations being given all the rights of a human being but none of the responsibilities.²² You can’t throw a corporation in jail, and it can live forever. It became a “legal person” that could buy and sell property, borrow money, sue and be sued in court.

As the twentieth century dawned, the first millionaires began to appear. J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, and the huge megacorporations such as the railroads and steel manufacturers started to muscle into the political arena. Big industry could wield power in a democratically elected Congress. Lightning had been shot into Frankenstein’s monster. Along with big corporate industry came the Big Wars, engines that fed on and drove industry. Early observers of these events, such as social philosopher John Dewey, were largely marginalized or reviled as socialists. Meanwhile, in the 1920s a flush of illusory wealth flowed through American culture and lulled people securely under Seven Macaw’s spell. This was due not to the inherent sustainability of the corporate industrial model but to the perfection of techniques for extracting, refining, and utilizing resources in the New World—mainly oil and iron. The stock market crash of 1929 was a temporary wake-up call. FDR’s liberal social reforms were effective solutions to the Depression of the 1930s and promised a more egalitarian style of culture, but were quickly superseded by World War II, Korea, more temporary wealth and big cars in the 1950s, Vietnam, and the continuing feeding frenzy of the corporate monster.

The legal status and rights of corporations were now well established. What was the abiding purpose of these person-corporations? Noam Chomsky stated that “corporations were given the rights of immortal persons, but special kinds of persons—persons who had no moral conscience. You expect a human being to care about others but corporations are designed by law to be concerned only with the financial interests of its stockholders.”²³

And the bottom-line financial interest of the stockholder is how to make as much money as possible. Some companies do good for the community and for people, but the lingering problem is always the trajectory dictated by the bottom-line profit motive. Publicly traded companies are structured and required by legal, court-decided mandates to place growth and profit above competing interests—including the public good. Therefore, a corporation can behave against the public good, and will even be protected by law in doing so. If an environmental law prevents a corporation from polluting, it can lobby and change the law, or simply pay the fines and continue polluting, continuing to cause health problems for human beings living in the affected areas. This happens constantly in the corporate arena. If it is more cost-effective to pay fines than to reengineer its pollution controls, then the courts will agree that it is within its rights. The courts then become a type of servile legal monstrosity, in essence being paid off by Seven Macaw.