The New Face of Slavery
THE NEW FaCE OF SLAVERY
Who Is To Blame?
“We have met the enemy and he is…”
Walt Kelly, Pogo, 1970
By: DW Foreign-Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch
Today I looked at my hometown editorial page and had my dread once again confirmed – we’re at war. I’m not referring to Iraq. I’m talking about war with each other. War in Iraq and the leaders who took us there are the subject, but we ourselves are the injured objects.
Robert Healy (a columnist writing for the High Point Enterprise) last week wrote an article calling Bush a liar and today two of his neighbors publicly labeled him a liar. We’ve got Americans hating and blaming Americans for what’s happening in New Orleans and in Iraq. We’ve got nations hating America for its aggressive (fascist) foreign policy. We seem to be coming apart at the seams.
Who is to blame?
Before I give you Walt Kelly’s punch-line answer to that question, let me lay some ground work. Robert Healy is our friend and neighbor. He fought for us in Viet Nam. One of his hateful detractors on the editorial page is another friend and neighbor who sacrificed two limbs recently in Iraq while doing his best to pursue what we all call “The American Dream”.
A hundred and fifty years ago in America, friends and brothers faced their friends and brothers over a warring fence called the American Civil War. Ninety years before that, British colonists faced their brothers and friends over another warring fence called the Revolutionary War. In Europe , twice in the last century, Americans, Europeans and Asians all faced and fought each another over a warring fence termed “fascism”. In those conflicts, where neighbors and relatives were fighting each other, ultimately over 30 million human lives were sacrificed. Who was to blame?
Today it suddenly occurred to me that the thing to blame in all wars just cited is the same. And the fact is that blaming each other, and hating each other, is just going to keep us in denial as to the true cause. Which was?… Walt Kelly told us the truth in 1970 thru a cartoon prophet named “Pogo” who told us: “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
Think you’ve heard all this before? Think this is philosophic nonsense? Before you fold your paper and move to the important part (sports section), bear with me.
There is a common denominator. In the Civil War, the northern boys we shot at were not our enemy. In our Revolutionary War it was not our British brothers who were our enemy. In WWII it was certainly not the Germans who died on the battlefields or the Japanese who died in their bunkers and beds who were the enemy. Every time, everywhere, the enemy was always the same. It was us.
What was that trait or part of us that was and remains “the enemy” I’m referring to in my indefensibly-naive pursuit of the common denominator of all wars? The “us” I am referring to of course is human kind. “Civilized” man.
In a word, it’s all been over a single human tendency, trait and intent – The desire on the part of the strong to enslave the weak. Only the face of that monster has changed. The monster is perennial and always the same, but the most monstrous thing about him is that his face is that of a chameleon…it changes and dynamically adapts to the times and the chameleon’s surroundings. Every time we see the monster, he’s wearing a different face.
In 1777, it was a King who wanted to enslave his brave subjects abroad in the New World. We were the slaves then and we called it “oppression” and “intolerable” “taxation-without-representation” tyranny. But we were still, in the process, hating and killing our neighbors abroad (and killing a few of each other in the process of deciding to declare war upon our King).
In 1861 it was an elite landed aristocracy who clearly and openly kidnapped and enslaved a race of our human brothers. Pundits will say our Civil War had other precipitating elements, but slavery was at its heart. Yankees envied the elite Charlestoninan society of the “Gentile” southern plantation owners and the South resented the hypocritical attitudes and exploitations of the yankee-dominated Federal government, protesting again the economic enslavement of taxation without representation. But the war was certainly fought on the grounds of both forms of slavery, economic and actual. The weak will endure captivity and exploitation for only so long.
In both the “German” wars, (I and II) imperialist nations endeavored openly and aggressively to enslave (by conquest and annexation) other entire nations and societies. Territorial ambition, acquisitiveness and even genocide were the surface agenda but clearly“slavery” was the generic animus of the seminal and reprised chapters of would-be world conquest by imperialists cum fascists.
The institution whereby one people, through physical supremacy and force of arms subjugate another (weaker) people to the end that the latter involuntarily surrender or forfeit their labors and/or properties to the stronger is still basically, enslavement.
In succession, then: in the Revolutionary war of American independence, the face of the enslaver was that of a European King. In the Civil War in America, the faces of the enslavers were those of Southern Landed Gentry and those of the power barons of Northern Industry. In the two “World Wars” the faces of global enslavement were, chronologically, a German Kiser, Nazi and finally a Japanese Emperor.
Today, the face of the would-be enslaver of the world is neither Bush nor bin Laden, and certainly not an imprisoned Saddam. Today we are all desperately seeking to unmask the face of the enemy enslaver and cannot do it because we are looking everywhere but where we should be looking…in the mirror. We are blaming our neighbors for their “stupidity”; we are blaming invisible and ubiquitous “terrorists” when every rational fiber in our systematically-frightened brains screams to us that terrorism is a tactic and not an army or foreign country. We are blaming the religion of Islam because most of the terrorist acts have been committed by Islamic zealots and most in the name and cause of their putative god, Allah. We are blaming the politicians and intelligence agencies that didn’t foresee and build hedges against the dangers of terrorist (and hurricane) threats.
The new face of “the enslaver” today is hard to see because it’s a product of global modernity, and like a lot of modern things, it’s “artificial”. Unlike all the former “enslavers”, the enslaver of today is not altogether “human”. Accordingly it has no human face. It has no human persona. More importantly and ominously, it has therefore no human responsibility and no human accountability.
The face of the enslaver today is a cyborg….like the “alien” villains of todays Sci-Fi films and comic book sagas…part human and part machine. The enslaver today is what we call a “corporation”.
The only problem is, ol’ Pogo would remind us, our corporations are…in virtual and moral reality…us. And there are…thousands upon thousands of them, and their numbers are expanding with the swiftness and silent stealth of a computer’s mouse click. Any American citizen can synthesize and bring into legal being one of these paper legal entities with a five-dollar form and a hundred-dollar filing fee.
Once alive (legally “de jure”), Corporations are treated like people. They can contract with living human people, hire and fire them, transact any business that humans do (except funny business and there are some exotic—“digitalized”– corporate websites that would argue with that), file, pay (but mostly avoid) income tax, go bankrupt and even die (suffer corporate “dissolution”) …just as though they had a beating heart and soul like any flesh- and-blood American citizen. Unlike “we the (human) people”, however, they have no heart and they have no soul, and they have no flesh and they have no blood. But with our creation, investment in and deployment of them we have imbued in them almost unlimited power today, and this power is capable of causing incalculable losses in terms of actual human flesh and blood. Look to Iraq. Think how and why we got there and what we’re doing there. If you can’t think of why and how, think a little about a little artificial corporate critter named…”Halliburton.”
Corporations of course have human components at the top, bottom and middle. From the promoters and founders who sell their patented ideas to a set of lawyers who transmogrify the idea into a Delaware “corporation” and a public stock offering, to the board of directors appointed to be its policy organ (conscience or “super ego”), its executive officers to be its “brain” and its middle management and labor force its lieutenants and foot soldiers respectively. In our corporations we have created…quite innocently, a Frankenstein monster of galactic proportions, which is now, like the “automatons” of the recent movie “I Robot”, enslaving and quite cannibalistically devouring the civilized human world. And the process of enslavement and conquest may well be terminal.
The dangerous element of a mob is its anonymity. Individual faces—and inhibitions–disappear (the mobsters think and feel) in the crowd. It’s the same with corporations—from the stock-optioned robber barons at top to the mutual-funded shareholders on bottom. The most dangerous thing about creating a corporation is that, although there is theoretically at its head a board of directors charged with the duty of drafting and policing policies that make the corporation’s conduct socially efficacious and symbiotic with global humanity, there is in corporate constitution an inherent and insidiously- dangerous flaw.
Viewing the corporation as a humanly-synthesized machine (which it is), a physicist might contend that the machine’s flaw is one naturally inherent in all machines – entropy. Entropy in physics is that little quantum of heat or inertia energy which is somehow lost any time a machine is utilized to accomplish work. But “entropy” in another sense is defined as “homogeneity” or “lacking diversity or differentiation”. In other words, the problem with mobs and corporations is that, as individuals and humans, we can “disappear” in the masses and machines and when we don’t carefully watch ourselves, “our crowd”, “our guys” “our team” ,—yes, even our “All-American Team” can become and act as a mob.
The seminal model for the U.S. Corporation (the “Delaware Corporation”) was created for the expressed purpose of permitting humans to operate behind what is in law termed “the corporate veil”. If the corporation has sufficient assets and insurance (and the required $5 corporate charter), its creators and owners cannot be held personally responsible (sued) as individuals. By virtue of the corporation’s existence, only the paper construction (and its money and other assets) are accountable for corporate conduct…and catastrophe.
In other words, if you made a contract with Disney or Halliburton, and you get either cheated or killed by virtue of Disney’s or Halliburton’s breach of that contract, you can bring suit against Disney or Halliburton, but the guys who called the shots that resulted in your getting sorely cheated or killed (Mike Eisner or Dick Cheney), are totally immune from responsibility. And so are their shareholders. If, as with Enron, the boys at the top have run away with all the toys (money), and you’re left holding the bag, then it’s the paper bag you wind up with in place of the money it once held. And sending a police posse after the corporate insider criminals won’t change that paper bag to money and sooner than we can restore the peace and sovereignty to the people of Iraq. With Ken Lay and Saddam Hussein in jail, and Cheney not even under arrest, we still have a bankrupt Enron and a civil war in Iraq.
Not a single shareholder, director or officer of R.J.R., Liggett and Myers or any other tobacco company will ever pay the first dollar of damages to the families of the millions of people their corporate product has sickened and killed.
If power (as Henry Kissinger claims) provides “the ultimate aphrodisiac, then certainly absolute anonymity provides the power holders the ultimate corruption. It is the anonymity of the mob (including the corporate mob) that lends the mob its lethal potential and propensities. Of course the face of the corporation is chameleonic and hard to spot. But as the frighteningSchwartzenagger “Predator” of recent cinema fame, corporate anonymity translates functionally to predatory “invisibility”…such that…although we cannot physically “see” Dick Cheney trading human American blood for oil in the sands about Baghdad, and converting it in Dubai to gold stored in his bank vaults back home in the U.S. (or maybe Zurich) he is doing precisely that through Halliburton Corporation. Of course stealthy lawyers have made the “paper trail” connecting blood, oil and money wholly invisible and untraceable, this arch-evil criminal alchemy is being performed as your eyes scan these line with the silent stealth of his CPA’s computer mouse.
Here are some of the facts: Halliburton machinated the political ascendancy of their executive cyborg puppet, Dick Cheney. Corporations, through unregulated lobbying now control Congress by contributing huge capital to the campaigns which funds are used to control media programming content and spin and thereby get senators, representatives and presidents elected. American and internationally-conglomerated corporations presently control the Republican Party and through the Party-dominated Congress , American Evangelically-dominated Christian television and Supreme Court have so effectively eroded walls constitutionally erected to separate Church and State and the State’s three branches of governance, that there is today, in the U.S. a de-facto government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. As a result of this, Cheney’s corporate, cyborg self was granted the billion-dollar war and oil contracts in Iraq without even a pretense of a competitive (honesty-insuring) bid. Presently the only question that remains in this conundrum of corporate complicity is – how much of what the Halliburton corporation stole from America did the criminals inside Halliburton in turn steal from Halliburton? As Ken Lay and Cheney will ultimately attest, the corruption inspired by corporate anonymity is systemic, and the corporations are, ipso facto, rotten to the cores.
Because the same corporations presently control the media (the mouth of “Big Brother” in “1984” Orwellian terms) and through the media the sermons on the pulpits of evangelical, fundamentalist Red-State, middle America, out-right lies are told and sold through repetition , spin and propaganda-prowess as truth. To mention only a few fabricated “Big-Brother Big Lies”: “WMD’s” , “Saddam/bin Laden connections” , “We thought there was an exit strategy from Iraq even though daddy disagreed,” “We didn’t wage war for oil.” , “We’re staying in Iraq for other reasons than oil. We want to establish a democracy…” (in this country we just enslaved). “ Clinton didn’t warn us of bin Laden or give us a blueprint of terrorism-prevention strategies.” “And Cheney is no longer associated with Halliburton and Halliburton is not stealing billions from America”… “Hansen says there is a ‘scientifically-questionable possibility’ of global warming” …etc. ad infinitum….)
As we are heading towards November’s national crisis at the polls, where we decide whether to let these corporate-machinated Republican liars keep their seats, we will be casting our votes on electronic (computer-designed) voting machines manufactured by Republican-dominated (Diebold) corporations. Bell-ringing former agents of those corporations are shouting to us from the media wilderness that they have been asked by Republican politicians how to rig the machines to control the outcome of the election and they have confessed the fact that the machines can be rigged to do just that. All of us who can read and reason know that the only way to prevent another Florida or Ohio-type tainted election outcome is to resort to paper ballots, and yet we also know that the only way this could happen is for Congress and/or State Legislatures controlled by Republicans to volunteer to give up that unfair advantage (plan for another corrupt election), which is the equivalent of putting a pulled tooth under an Afghani’s pillow in a Guantanamo prison cell and praying for the tooth fairy.
So why did I suggest at the beginning of this rant that Pogo’s words are true…that “We have met the enemy and he is us”, and that we need to look into the mirror to find the “enslaver” of today’s war-ridden world?
Because it’s true. The enslaver IS the endless stream of part-human and part-robot corporations running all the capital shows in America and the rest of the industrialized globe. And just because we humans have gone to bed with an inhuman creature like a “corporate entity” and symbiotically become co-progenitors of the sinister system of corporate tyranny that has criminally and fraudulently installed an American President—TWICE IN A ROW—and managed to send America into three foreign wars in the past 13 years (Gulf I, Afghanistan, Iraq) to insure its vital flow of self-sustaining energy… are we doomed and bound to find the face of today’s enslaving monster in our mirror?
Yes. And yes.
O.K. I have looked for the enemy and it’s….us. But it’s us genetically mutated into this corporate monster that’s cannibalistically eating its own (by exporting labor and manufacturing industry to foreign enslavers of cheaper labor). And it’s us holding shares in a Wallymart corporation that’s now employing Americans (and illegal aliens) at slave labor rates so they can sell TV’s and toasters made by Chinese slaves…and ultimately it’s us buying the slave-made TV’s and toasters.
It’s us. And we need to quit throwing rocks at each other and start E. Pluibus Unum all over again. All corporations–from Disney to Enron–have evolved into a-morally-corrupt entities. A-moral because they are motivated no longer by the idealistic dreams and desires of their corporate constituents (innovators, shareholders and labor) but by the dollar-skimming, golden-parachuting, self-serving good-old-cyborg boys at the top, who’ll out-source and cannibalize everything from their service departments to your retirement and your children’s health insurance to justify their stock-optioned, expense-account padded, golden-parachuted landings in Maui and Dubai when everything but the brand name is shipped to New Delhi or Peking, including your job, and your family’s equity holdings in the corporations which now have the value of the gas that just exploded from the latest “deflated” corporate balloon…and finally blame it all on an international phenomenon called “the world’s globalizing economy”.
If it’s us, what can we do about it?
First, we can scream for a paper ballot that will at least allow us to accurately count the number of “us” who exist. As a democratic people we exist only because of and at the voting polls.
Second, we can voluntarily, both individually and collectively, work in every way to divest the corporate enslavers of their plenary and unchecked power. Let’s sell our stock in Walmart to protest the sell-out to China and to slave labor in general. Let’s seek out and disassociate ourselves, our consumer patronage and our investment dollars from those corporations conspiring with the genocidal rulers of slave nations such as Sudan and Darfur. I’ll excerpt a paragraph from an earlier essay (“America…the Beautiful Glass House, DW, Sept. 27)…
“The world is faulting America primarily now for failing to intervene in Sudan and Darfur to stop the genocide. Soon the world will recognize the fact that corporate-dominated America is funding that war, furnishing arms and aid to the terrorist regime in Khartoum. Our oil companies are buying oil (giving Dollars in exchange) from those terrorists. Our pension companies (including 33 in N.C.) invest dollars in corporate partnership with those terrorists. These realities alone would justify any nation in the world’s condemnation (and/or invasion) of America under Bush’s bully doctrine that is still the only excuse for our being in Iraq and Afghanistan. .. (read the rest of this at DW, Sept. 27, “America the Beautiful…Glass House”).
When conservative legislators in Delaware conceived of the “corporation”, they created unknowingly the Frankenstein monster that would one day dominate its creators. Eventually, I fear, kill them. Corporations lobbying legislators and orchestrating the messages of the “free” press (e.g. Fox network) have enabled a mental dwarf to obtain the most important office on the globe. He’s a pathetic puppet of petrochemical and military industry who’s probably blind to most of the strings pulling him this way and that. He “thinks” it was his decision to enter Afghanistan and Iraq. He never had a clue. A man with no intellect, no true ideals, no sense or knowledge of history became a tool for corporate fascists. (read the rest of this at … DW March 7, “Neo-Contentions, Including the Neo-Con Corporate Frankenstein Monster”.
What We (the enemy) Can Do to
Change the Things We Blame….
Watch what you buy. Be aware that buying shampoo at Walmart and chilli atWendy’s is contributing to the Republican party and thereby to the war in Iraq. Watch who contributes to the campaigns of those you vote for. Watch out and make sure your voting polls have exit polls that might discourage the Republicans and their voting machine manufacturers from stealing another election. Write and call your Congressmen and demand they pass legislation outlawing (not simply limiting) campaign contributions by any corporation or person lobbying a U.S. Congressman. Both limited contributions and lobbying should be allowed and regulated, but in no case should any entity, corporate or human be permitted to do both. Otherwise what the hell is the meaning of “bribery”? How can it be sanely said that campaign contributions are not bribery when enough contributions (and purchased TV hype) land candidates in the plushest jobs on the planet?
Look in the mirror and admit that the person you’re gazing at is among those who fell asleep at the switch and didn’t do enough to prevent America’s being overrun by the most dangerous enslavers in the history of the world: the all-mighty war-mongering, ocean-polluting, global-warming dollar-driven American Corporations, which if allowed to control the outcome of one more Congressional election could easily ensconce on the U.S. Dollar their new national motto: “In Gold We Trust”.
Dusty, Oct. 7, 2006
War is the only enemy.
And corporations sponsor them.
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