An Okieism

Everyone needs to be corrected sometimes, especially when they are right, but not in the proper spirit...

Eleven Inherent Rules of Corporate Behaviour- Jerry Mander

"Technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative proportions"
Source
The following list is an attempt to articulate the obligatory rules by which corporations operate. Some of the rules overlap, but taken together they help reveal why corporations behave as they do and how they have come to dominate their environment and the human beings within it.

• The Profit Imperative: Profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community well-being, worker health, public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security. Corporations will even find ways to trade with national "enemies"—Libya, Iran, the former Soviet Union, Cuba—when public policy abhors it. The profit imperative and the growth imperative are the most fundamental corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's instinct to "live."
  
• The Growth Imperative: Corporations live or die by whether they can sustain growth. On this depends relationships to investors, to the stock market, to banks and to public perception. The growth imperative also fuels the corporate desire to find and develop scarce resources in obscure parts of the world.
  This effect is now clearly visible, as the world's few remaining pristine places are sacrificed to corporate production. The peoples who inhabit these resource-rich regions are similarly pressured to give up their traditional ways and climb on the wheel of production-consumption. Corporate planners consciously attempt to bring "less developed societies into the modem world" to create infrastructures for development, as well as new workers and new consumers. Corporations claim that they do this for altruistic reasons to raise the living standard—but corporations have no altruism.
  Theoretically, privately held corporations—those owned by individuals or families—do not have the imperative to expand. In practice, however, their behavior is the same. Such privately held giants as Bechtel Corporation have shown no propensity to moderate growth.
  
• Competition and Aggression: Corporations place every person in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone interested in a corporate career must hone his or her ability to seize the moment. This applies to gaining an edge over another company or over a colleague within the company. As an employee, you are expected to be part of the "team," but you also must be ready to climb over your own colleagues.
  Corporate ideology holds that competition improves worker incentive and corporate performances and therefore benefits society. Our society has accepted this premise utterly. Unfortunately, however, it also surfaces in personal relationships. Living by standards of competition and aggression on the job, human beings have few avenues to express softer, more personal feelings. (In politics, non-aggressive behavior is interpreted as weakness.)
  
• Amorality: Not being human, corporations do not have morals or altruistic goals. So decisions that maybe antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. In fact, corporate executives praise "non-emotionality" as a basis for "objective" decision-making.
  Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt to act as if they were altruistic. Lately, there has been a concerted effort by American industry to appear concerned with environmental cleanup, community arts or drug programs. Corporate efforts that seem altruistic are really Public relations ploys or directly self-serving projects.
  There has recently been a spurt of corporate advertising about how corporations work to clean the environment. A company that installs offshore oil rigs will run ads about how fish are thriving under the rigs. Logging companies known for their clearcutting practices will run millions of dollars' worth of ads about their "tree farms."
  It is a fair rule of thumb that corporations tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative public perceptions. When corporations say "we care," it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not have feelings or morals.
  If the benefits do not accrue, the altruistic pose is dropped. When Exxon realized that its cleanup of Alaskan shores was not easing the public rage about the oil spill, it simply dropped all pretense of altruism and ceased working.
  
• Hierarchy: Corporate laws require that corporations be structured into classes of superiors and subordinated within a centralized pyramidal structure: chairman, directors, chief executive officer, vice presidents, division managers and so on. The efficiency of this hierarchical form (which also characterizes the military, the government and most institutions in our society) is rarely questioned.
  The effect on society from adopting the hierarchical form is to make it seem natural that we have all been placed within a national pecking order. Some jobs are better than others, some lifestyles are better than others, some neighborhoods, some races, some kinds of knowledge. Men over women. Westerners over non-Westerners. Humans over nature.
  That effective, non-hierarchical modes of organization exist on the planet, and have been successful for millennia, is barely known by most Americans.
  
• Quantification, Linearity, Segmentation: Corporations require that subjective information be translated into objective form, i.e. numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of forests, for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter corporate equations. Forests are evaluated only as "board feet."
  When corporations are asked to clean up their smokestack emissions, they lobby to relax the new standards in order to contain costs. The result is that a predictable number of people are expected to become sick and die.
  The operative corporate standard is not "as safe as humanly possible," but rather, "as safe as possible commensurate with maintaining acceptable profit."
  
• Dehumanization: In the great majority of corporations, employees are viewed as ciphers, as non-managerial cogs in the wheel, replaceable by others or by machines.
  As for management employees, not subject to quite the same indignities, they nonetheless must practice a style of decision making that "does not let feelings get in the way." This applies as much to firing employees as it does to dealing with the consequences of corporate behavior in the environment or the community.
  
• Exploitation: All corporate profit is obtained by a simple formula: Profit equals the difference between the amount paid to an employee and the economic value of the employee's output, and/or the difference between the amount paid for raw materials used in production (including costs of processing), and the ultimate sales price of processed raw materials. Karl Marx was right: a worker is not compensated for full value of his or her labor—neither is the raw material supplier. The owners of capital skim off part of the value as profit. Profit is based on underpayment.
  Capitalists argue that this is a fair deal, since both workers and the people who mine or farm the resources (usually in Third World environments) get paid. But this arrangement is inherently imbalanced. The owner of the capital—the corporation or the bank always obtains additional benefit. While the worker makes a wage, the owner of capital gets the benefit of the worker's labor, plus the surplus profit the worker produces, which is then reinvested to produce yet more surplus.
  
• Ephemerality: Corporations exist beyond time and space: they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do not die a natural death; they outlive their own creators. They have no commitment to locale, employees or neighbors. Having no morality, no commitment to place and no physical nature (a factory, while being a physical entity, is not the corporation). A corporation can relocate all of its operations at the first sign of inconvenience—demanding employees, high taxes and restrictive environmental laws. The traditional ideal of community engagement is antithetical to corporation behavior.
  
• Opposition to Nature: Though individuals who work for corporations may personally love nature, corporations themselves, and corporate societies, are intrinsically committed to intervening in, altering and transforming nature. For corporations engaged in commodity manufacturing, profit comes from transmogrifying raw materials into saleable forms. Metals from the ground are converted into cars.
  Trees are converted into boards, houses, furniture and paper products. Oil is converted into energy. In all such energy, a piece of nature is taken from where it belongs and processed into a new form. All manufacturing depends upon intervention and reorganization of nature. After natural resources are used up in one part of the globe, the corporation moves on to another part.
  This transformation of nature occurs in all societies where manufacturing takes place. But in capitalist, corporate societies, the process is accelerated because capitalist societies and corporations must grow by extracting resources from nature and reprocessing them at an ever-quickening pace. Meanwhile, the consumption end of the cycle is also accelerated by corporations that have an interest in convincing people that commodities bring material satisfaction. Inner satisfaction, self-sufficiency, contentment in nature or a lack of a desire to acquire wealth are subversive to corporate goals.
  Banks finance the conversion of nature insurance companies help reduce the financial risks involved. On a finite planet, the process cannot continue indefinitely.
  
• Homogenization: American rhetoric claims that commodity society delivers greater choice and diversity than other societies. "Choice" in this context means product choice in the marketplace: many brands to choose from and diverse features on otherwise identical products. Actually, corporations have a stake in all of us living our lives in a similar manner, achieving our pleasures from things that we buy in a world where each family lives isolated in a single family home and has the same machines as every other family on the block. The "singles" phenomenon has proved even more productive than the nuclear family, since each person duplicates the consumption patterns of every other person.
  Lifestyles and economic systems that emphasize sharing commodities and work, that do not encourage commodity accumulation or that celebrate non-material values, are not good for business. People living collectively, sharing such "hard" goods as washing machines, cars and appliances (or worse, getting along without them) are outrageous to corporate commodity society.
  Native societies—which celebrate an utterly non-material relationship to life, the planet and the spirit—are regarded as backward, inferior and unenlightened. We are told that they envy the choices we have. To the degree these societies continue to exist, they represent a threat to the homogenization of worldwide markets and culture. Corporate society works hard to retrain such people in attitudes and values appropriate to corporate goals.
  In undeveloped parts of the world, satellite communication introduces Western television and advertising, while improvements in the technical infrastructure speed up the pace of development. Most of this activity is funded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as agencies such as the US Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Bank and the Asian-American Bank, all of which serve multinational corporate enterprise.
  The ultimate goal of corporate multinationals was expressed in a revealing quote by the president of Nabisco Corporation: "One world of homogeneous consumption. . . [I am] looking forward to the day when Arabs and Americans, Latinos and Scandinavians, will be munching Ritz crackers as enthusiastically as they already drink Coke or brush their teeth with Colgate." Page 31
  

In the book, Trilateralism, editor Holly Sklar wrote: "Corporations not only advertise products, they promote lifestyles rooted in consumption, patterned largely after the United States.... [They] look forward to a post-national age in which [Western] social, economic and political values are transformed into universal values... a world economy in which all national economies beat to the rhythm of transnational corporate capitalism.... The Western way is the good way; national culture is inferior."
Form Is Content Corporations are inherently bold, aggressive and competitive. Though they exist in a society that claims to operate by moral principles, they are structurally amoral. It is inevitable that they will dehumanize people who work for them and the overall society as well. They are disloyal to workers, including their own managers. Corporations can be disloyal to the communities they have been part of for many years. Corporations do not care about nations; they live beyond boundaries. They are intrinsically committed to destroying nature. And they have an inexorable, unabatable, voracious need to grow and to expand. In dominating other cultures, in digging up the Earth, corporations blindly follow the codes that have been built into them as if they were genes.
We must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves. To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism.

Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.

Excerpted from: IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED

The recipe for perpetual ignorance

"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn." -- Benjamin Franklin

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge." -- Elbert Hubbard

"Ignorance is the night of the mind, a night without moon or star." -- Confucius

"When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds." -- Will Rodgers

Doing Lunch With The Almighty

I was once told by my Grandfather, a Cherokee spiritual leader, that the beginning of developing spirituality and understanding of the spirit world and the Spirit of God is in basic gratitude and learning how to pray and with these things in mind and developing the proper relationship with what we eat- with our food. Perhaps the root connection for modern man is in fact for him to redevelop a proper relationship with his food. When we consider where our food came from, the sacrificed life that made it possible, the processes by which it was brought to us and the manner in which we consume it, all with a sense of gratitude and conscience and spirituality we will be closer to finding the right way to live.
This concept seems to be essential in discovering that equilibrium between physical reality and spiritual practice, between belief and experience. I can look around and see where the lack of this concept in the world has been devastating to our collective health and mental well being. This kind of self control, affirmation, gratitude and reverence regarding our food- that which sustains us is the key to spiritual empowerment, enlightenment and right relationship with the whole of Creation and the Spirit of God. Its really that simple.

Big Gov.?

Big government, small government- I don't really care as long as "they" are doing the RIGHT stuff and doing it well- I don't care to be locked into any monolithic, singular vision of how its supposed to be big or small or right or left... just do the right things efficiently and it'll go a long ways toward the pursuit of happiness.... pipe dream, huh?

Is President Barack Obama a Socialist?

I have been considering my thoughts about the current American political scene quite a bit lately. One reason I have been contemplating all this is that I have been sent, frequently of late, a lot of negative e-mail and video clips about President Obama's supposedly Socialist agenda. Many of the YouTube style videos out on this have the comments either cut off or moderated pending approval. This is kind of funny when the videos are often accusatory about president Obama and/or representatives of his administration being asked and supposedly tough questions and then supposedly dodging answering them sufficiently.

I observe that most of the strongest critics are not even listening to the answers- but rather are simply enjoying seeing the "tough" questions that they are obsessed about having asked be posed. When the answers come- many of these these critics simply ignore the answers they were given and insist that their questions were either ignored or that the answers were fallacious. People often see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. This is an innate feature of humanity it seems. Those that are observant will see many prime examples of this in the political discourse of nearly every single day right now.

Here is what I have seen transpire over recent years.

First, when former President George W. Bush wanted to implement his tax cuts for the wealthier American citizens and businesses, McCain opposed it and voted NO (neaux).
McCain said it would hurt the middle class and the less fortunate. Go check the voting records.

During Obama's campaign for the presidency he explained that he was seeking to essentially roll those same tax cuts that John McCain opposed back and instead give them to the middle class and less fortunate (ironically, like Joe the plumber). Suddenly Obama was labeled a socialist and commie according to the McCain- Palin campaign and right wing America. This, I thought to myself, was an insult to the intelligence of EVERYONE.

Secondly, there was this from the Constitution:

AMENDMENT XVI

Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever sources derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. The income tax is collected yearly on a percentage basis. The higher the earnings, the higher the percentage collected from them. This changes article 1 section 2.

So then, we have had a progressive income tax in America for many years. That's the way its been done for a couple of lifetimes. Considering that, these charges of socialism and the evils of wealth redistribution and revolutionary radicalism levied against now President Obama regarding his taxation plans and programs don't really have much teeth after all. Anybody that yet believes that President Obama is a total socialist/communist obviously has not really read the Communist Manifesto and does not really know what the definitions of socialism are. The best one can come up with is a few quotes by Karl Marx that seem to parallel some quotes by President Obama. I can produce quotes from any American leader in the last 200 plus years that parallel ideas by many other notorious dictators from Saddam to Stalin to Hitler. So what? Such comparisons are usually just political gamesmanship or shortcuts to actual analysis.

I have discovered in my own studies and research that President Obama is not a socialist if you ask a socialist; Greg Pason, National Secretary of the Socialist Party USA and David Schaich, Socialist Party Campaign Clearinghouse Coordinator both say he's ...definitely not. Schaich says: “The idea that Barack Obama is socialist, or quasi-socialist, or semi-socialist, or socialist-light, or anything of the sort, is far-right nonsense. Barack Obama, like John McCain, is very much a ‘politician as usual,’fully committed to the continuation of the capitalist system and the expansion of its empire.” A socialist agenda (even a reformist one) would not prop up capitalism and capitalist economies or companies when they fail, but rather sieze upon the opportunity to radically transform the economy. None of President Obama's proposals or programs offer any perceptible threat to capitalism. These quotes and many others were easily found in cursory research of the actual question of whether president Obama is a socialist- rather than a blind acceptance of the precept that he is or a search for evidence to prove a pre determined premise.

I will also say that it is kind of hollow to be complaining about socialism and/or communism or using words like "liberal", "socialist" or "communist" as pejoratives when our homes and store shelves are jampacked with goods made in COMMUNIST China and nearly every dollar we spend at places like Wal-Mart fattens up China with its terrible human rights record and its RED, NUCLEAR CAPABLE ARMY. Unless you do not buy, sell, trade, consume or own anything from China you simply cannot gripe about socialism and/or communism without being a hypocrite.

Now, communism or capitalism are both worldly systems flawed by fallible humanity and self interests and vested interests of the wealthy and/or powerful. Neither system is really, intrinsically more or less evil than the other. I have seen no convincing evidence that God is a capitalist. In fact, as As C.S. Lewis pointed out in "Mere Christianity", a great deal of what is condemned nowadays as leftist or subversive is found in the teachings of Christ as in the Sermon on the Mount and also in the New Testament as written by Paul- like sharing, concern for fellow man, love of enemies, the peaceable as opposed to militaristic nature, the humility and meekness as opposed to crassness, the aversion to worry and fear, etc. The "religious right" which is participant in much of this cant and fear mongering and worry about the evils of socialism would do well to remember some of that. Now get this straight, I am neither capitalist or communist- both systems are worldly and ultimately doomed to failure by human factors- not to mention the natural cycles of history and/or God's intervention and plan for human history, if one believes in that sort of thing (I do).

With all of this hullabaloo about wealth redistribution, many "conservatives" seem to have forgotten what Sarah Palin did in Alaska:
Palin’s criticisms of President Obama’s “spread the wealth” remarks are ironic to put it nicely and plain old campaign Bull in the street vernacular. She recently characterized Alaska’s tax code in a very similar way. Just last month, in an interview with Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, Palin explained the windfall profits tax that she imposed on the oil industry in Alaska as a mechanism for ensuring that Alaskans “share in the wealth” generated by oil companies:

And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.

In fact, Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share (ACES) program, which manages the redistribution of oil wealth in Alaska, brings in so much money that the state needs no income or sales tax. In addition, this year ACES will provide every Alaskan with a check for an estimated $3,200.
Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it?
Perhaps the McCain- Palin supporters or "conservatives" see some important distinction between what Obama is talking about and what Palin has done to redistribute wealth in Alaska that I am missing it and I need a far greater intellect to tell the difference? I submit, though, that it is at least possible, if not very likely, that just as McCain and Palin were trying to win a campaign, many "conservatives" and/or "conservative" politicians are now simply trying to cost the current President some political capital so as to increase their chances at regaining seats of power and they are in fact self contradictory and just don't know it or don't care. I submit that ascertaining that really only only requires the analytic skills of say... a sincere fifth grader with a speck of curiosity, objectivity or self critical analysis.
It seems to me that the American system has long been a sort of hybrid of capitalism and so called socialist ideas, what with things like Social Security, Medicare, corporate subsidies and bailouts, welfare, and all sorts of other programs designed to make our system work more smoothly and not implode upon itself due to imbalances in it. "Liberals" certainly seem to idealize and overestimate the amount of actual good and prosperity that can be achieved by way of good intentions and throwing money at problems. Conversely, "liberals" tend to underestimate how much the flaws of human nature can be suppressed using these same means. In the end, both "conservatives" and "liberals" both seem to have Utopian ideas about the perfectibility of human nature and how good things could be if they could just convert or eliminate each other or the "others" they fancy as "them". I myself am an idealist- but not as much of one as those who proudly wear the labels of "conservative" or "liberal.... I do try to stay grounded in a reality based world view.