The 2012 Story

The halcyon days for corporations were amplified by a brilliant technique for maximizing profits. All businesses have two parts of the profit equation to deal with: expenses and income. If income exceeds expenses, you have a profit. The profit motive demands as much profit as possible. If some or all of the expenses could be pushed outside of the accounting tally, in effect forcing someone else to pay them, then you’ve just made a killing and really maximized your profits. In the legal jargon of corporate accountants, this technique is much used and is called “externalizing.” It’s an effort to externalize, project, or coerce someone else to cover your costs. Corporations have learned to do this by getting in bed with politicians. Huge amounts of money now go to lobby efforts, which are able to finagle tax breaks and loopholes, financially beneficial legislative decisions, and what is referred to as “corporate welfare,” meaning the government—that is, your tax dollars—will defray costs incurred by big companies. We, the taxpayers, become the ones who pay for the externalized costs of huge corporations.

Since the brief turmoil and human rights breakthroughs of the 1960s, the business world has increasingly moved toward megamergers and huge umbrella-like corporate entities, no longer limited to any particular nation. It’s gone transnational; national boundaries are meaningless in the modern corporate culture. And today, our world is heading toward the ultimate wet dream of the corporateer: globalization, one world government—that is, the one Mega Company that rules the world.

And here’s the ten-trillion-dollar question: If a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it? That is the question asked by Joel Bakan in his 2005 book The Corporation, recently made into an informative documentary. Bakan decided to examine case histories in the activities of various corporations, performing an analytical diagnosis of sorts. Using specific examples, Bakan found that corporations exhibit the following personality traits:

• A callous unconcern for the feelings of others

• Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

• Reckless disregard for the safety of others

• Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning for the benefit of self-interest

• Inability to admit and feel guilt

• Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior

Each one of these diagnostic traits is demonstrated by numerous examples from case histories. For example, corporations have a strategy of periodically locating to different Third World countries, tapping the human resources there until workers begin to demand better pay and working conditions. Instead of engaging in negotiations, corporations typically close down operations in that locale and relocate. This demonstrates an inability to maintain enduring relationships. As another example, corporations are willing to pay huge amounts of settlement money for damages and deaths, but do not admit guilt or release apologies to those affected. This demonstrates a callous unconcern for the feelings of others and an inability to admit and feel guilt. Corporations behave outside of social norms by willingly breaking laws and paying the fines, as long as the fines are more cost-effective than solving the problem—regardless of the deadly nature of the problem.

The official diagnosis of such traits and behavior is: psychopath. Corporations are the type of person who cannot be trusted or relied upon, the type of person who is very, very dangerous. This psychopathology of corporations is driven by a self-centered and self-serving narcissism. The implications of this approach to understanding the diabolical nature of corporations is staggering. How did the corporation gain such power and become such a Frankenstein monster? The turning point appears to be the moment when personhood was granted to corporations, when the Promethean spark of life was injected into a formerly lifeless body.

Thom Hartmann traced the origins of this magical moment in the history of big business and reveals that it was based on a total deception. In his book Unequal Protection (2004), Hartmann traces the first judicial decision, which later served as a precedent, to the 1886 case Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. In it, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state tax assessor, not the county assessor, had the legal right to determine the taxable value of fence posts along a railroad’s right-of-way. That’s it. Doesn’t sound too groundbreaking, does it? In the case’s summary headnote, however, the Court’s reporter wrote something that had no legal precedent and didn’t have anything to do with the case. He wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”²⁴ That Court reporter happened to be J. C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad president. Hartmann points out that the Court ruled no such thing. The presiding chief justice wrote elsewhere that they had not discussed “the Constitutional question,” and nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.

Nevertheless, corporate attorneys quickly adopted the language of the head note and began to quote it as legal precedent. Hartmann writes: “Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate about the issue), was quoting Davis’s headnote in subsequent cases. While Davis’s Santa Clara headnote didn’t have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions its new doctrine of corporate personhood became the law.”²⁵

And such is the artifice by which Frankensteins are created. This all happened very quickly, under the cloak of deception. Even the president of the United States was aghast and perplexed at the growing power of the big companies. In his annual address to Congress in December 1888, President Grover Cleveland observed, “As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”²⁶

Exxon/Mobil, Monsanto, Microsoft, Nike, Pfizer, Telecom, and the AIG are just a few of the megacorporations that now rule the world, monopolize the resources of small countries, act with impunity, influence political process, broadcast propaganda, manufacture consent, and by law can live forever. Their birth certificates were forged. They and their Seven Macaw managers and governmental policy-makers are the fulfillment of the Maya prophecy for 2012.

CHAPTER TEN Ending the War on Us

If you’re lucky you’ll come to a crossroads and see that the path to the left leads to hell, that the path to the right leads to hell, that the road straight ahead leads to hell and that if you try to turn around you’ll end up in complete and utter hell…. Then, if you’re ready, you’ll start to discover inside yourself what you always longed for but were never able to find.¹

—PETER KINGSLEY, In the Dark Places of Wisdom

The corporation and the government have an intimate relationship. They need each other, and are as interconnected as light and shadow. One tells you to open your pocket, while other picks it. Government, which in a democracy is supposed to represent the people’s interest, is getting fat by charging the people interest. The absurd equation of representative democracy says we told government to do that to us. As for the corporation, its diagnosis as a pathological entity is now clear. Joel Bakan asked the reasonable question, and the case histories gave him the answer. Given that we can now understand the personhood of the corporation to have a diagnosis of narcissistic pathology, what kind of relationship does it have with government?

THE CODEPENDENT CORPORATION