Corporatocracy

2011-08-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

Polimalware

Background: Speak2Truth and TheGrandInqusitor are right-wing ideologues who recently returned to a local bulletin board, WaccoBB, where I occasionally post political articles and commentary. In the present piece, which I am reposting from WaccoBB (8/1/11), I coin and define the word polimalware. As you will read, the CORPORATOCRACY is a likely suspect in creating polimalware. Here's the article:

Could there be something else, something perhaps more sinister, going on with Speak2Truth and TheGrandInquisitor? I think most if not all of the Waccobbians have unconsciously or thoughtlessly assumed that somewhere in the actual world there was a real person churning out the screeds and bloviations of these two posters.

What if that were not true? What if Speak2Truth and TheGrandInquisitor were computer programs? What if they were worms, moles, viruses designed to infect the body politic? This kind of program is different from the standard Trojan Horse, virus, or other form of malware that first appeared as Internet Worm in 1988. The objective of these programs is to corrupt as many computers as possible and often to cause hard drives to crash.

Alan Turing demonstrated that it is impossible for a human being to determine through asking questions via a keyboard if the human is speaking to a computer or another human being.

Political malware is designed to corrupt political discourse. The objective is to install contaminating thought scripts in the brains of human beings with the purpose of immobilizing them and making them easy to control and to dominate. The Progessive mind is particularly vulnerable to Polimalware (my neologism) because it has a built in placating loop that says all discourse must be treated as sane and actual and the only way to defeat it is to prove it is wrong by argumentation.

When a Polimalware program encounters the Progressive mind, it immediately immobilizes it by planting conflicting, internally inconsistent ideas, then taunting the Progressive while appearing to be oriented just enough to doctrines of fairness and reasonableness and liberalness that the Progressive will either attempt to refute the Polimalware through rational argument or, after discovering that the Polimalware cannot be convinced, will simply stop communicating (as one WaccoBBian wrote, "I thought about responding to a couple fo them, but became overwhelmed by the sheer number of statements that were not merely false, but the mirror image of the truth.") In either case, the Polimalware has succeeded in its mission.

Polimalware is like an Internet Spider. It searches through trillions of bits of information per second looking for key phrases like "Thanks to the work from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and investigative journalists like Beau Hodai, we now know that ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a front group for major corporations, the Koch brothers and right-wing lobbying groups, actively disseminated model bills promoting its agenda to state leaders." This was the lead sentence in an article I posted from Truthout about the Koch brothers. When it finds such a key sentence, Polimalware begins its relentless corruption. I believe many programmers would find this task simple to execute. The programmer could take the commentaries of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity, scramble them up, and insert paragraphs organized randomly into a set format with pre-programmed citations.

Who might be sponsoring Polimalware? Anyone who stands to gain from corrupting the American political dialogue. Corporations are the agents of the perpetrators, and the perpetrators are most certainly the uber-rich who own the corporations. If we consider that the article about the Koch brothers that I posted was bait, then we probably have already caught our prey, for notice that Polimalware appeared almost instantly after the bait was dropped into the waters of the Internet.

There could certainly be other prospective perpetrators, the Chinese among them. Just consider that Polimalware appears to have corrupted the entire political process in Washington DC. The Tea Party embodies the insanity of Polimalware, and the Tea Party has just managed to stymie American government and to hold it hostage to what is demonstrably a nation-destroying ideology. The nation that is destroying itself is America.

Now perhaps you understand how Polimalware operates.

Star Man

2010-01-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

Obama and the Corporatocracy

Copyright, 2010 by John Omaha

Liberals and Progressives are rightfully angry that the Obama
administration has failed to deliver on promises to reform health care,
provide jobs, rein in Wall Street banksters, and end our wars of
aggression in the Middle East. For a more complete list of reasons to be
enraged with Obama, see David Michael Green's article, "Now I'm really
getting pissed off," at CounterPunch.org, 12/21/09.

What troubles me is the difficulty American Liberals and Progressives
have understanding Obama's actions.

Today's American Left appears to believe that we live in a democracy in
which there should be a tight correspondence between government action
and the will and needs of the people as mediated by the Congress,
Executive, and Judiciary and laid out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Within this world-view, Obama is apotheosized as the elected President of
an authentic democracy. Accepting this world-view, Obama's maddening
failures to address firmly the issues he campaigned to resolve (war, civil
rights, health reform, equality, etc.) are believed to result from his personal
defects.

The belief that we live in an authentic democracy is delusional.

When we accept that America has become a corporatocracy, then
Obama's passive, whiney, ineffectuality becomes completely
comprehensible. He is doing the job he was "hired" to do. His job was to
sell the nation on a new product line that turned out to be no different than
the old product line of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama is no
different than the auto manufacturers whining that they can't improve fuel
efficiency or the military whining that it can't do without landmines, all the
while making profits selling gas-guzzlers and Claymores.

American is no longer a democracy. America is a corporatocracy. the date
of the emergence of corporatocracy from its antecedents is 1886, the year
that a clerk for the Supreme Court, acting on his own, inserted language
into a decision that gave personhood to corporations. No law was ever
passed by the Congress and tested in the Judiciary giving personhood to
corporations. This event constitutes the mutation of America's political
genome that loosed the corporate cancer on the nation and now the
planet.

Once loosed, the corporate cancer raced through American society,
invading every organ of the national body. The corporate mestastasis
invaded the bureaucracies of federal, state, county, and local government,
so that today it is impossible to differentiate between corporate suppliers
and bureaucratic consumers. As the cancer spread, the needs of the
people quickly disappeared from the social equation. The apparatus of
democratic government created by the Founding Fathers that had been
designed to serve the People, was co-opted to serve the needs of the
Corporation.

The People became the crop, the product, the raw material necessary for
the functioning of the corporate system. No longer individual laborers, they
became the "work force." Under the corporatocracy, citizens became mere
numbers. The compassion and empathy for the plight of human beings
that illuminated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were eaten away as
the cancer spread, replaced by the robotic calculations of corporate and
bureaucratic bottom lines.

The corporate metastasis invaded the military. As Eisenhower warned, the
corporate disorder took over defense, becoming the military-industrial
complex. The M-I complex is the central business of the United States and
has been since it consolidated its position during Vietnam. The U.S.
invades defenseless, innocent countries for business purposes. Working
together the elements of the corporatocracy create false justifications for
these invasions. Assuring the flow of dollars to the M-I complex absolutely
requires of succession of defenseless, innocent countries to invade. It also
requires covert operations to demonize the countries (e.g., Bush's Axis of
Evil) through false flag operations (e.g., Gulf of Tonkin incident or Iraq's
non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)

The corporation has consumed every vital organ of American life: real
estate, religion, health, banking, insurance, entertainment, recreation,
communication, agriculture. Corporate control became complete when it
finally metastasized into the political system, replacing the healthy political
biochemistry of the democracy with the putrid, diseased corporate
metabolism. Every organ of society was finally corrupted. With the
invasion of the political system, American became a fully realized
corporatocracy.

Under corporatocracy, America does not exist "of, by, and for the People."
America now exists of, by, and for the Corporations. The current challenge
of health care reform illustrates perfectly how corporate needs have
supplanted people's needs in the political cancerous corporate physiology.
The People would be served best by universal, single-payer health care.
The will of the People for universal, single-payer health care has been
expressed in polls.

However, the People will not get what they want and deserve. Because
America is a corporatocracy, the insurance and health industry
corporations were able to buy the legislative outcome most favorable to
their profit margins. Universal, single-payer health care would have
amounted to legislative chemotherapy for the American body politic, and it
would have sent at least a portion of the corporate metastasis into
remission. But, because universal, single-payer health care would deny
maximum profits to the insurance and health industries, the corporatocrats
determined that American citizens will get what's good for the
Corporations, not what's good for the People.

Now for Obama. Obama is acting on behalf of his true constituency, the
corporations and bureaucracies. Obama lied to get elected. Just like an
auto industry campaign touting the fuel efficiency and low emissions for
the same huge, gas-guzzling SUVs that have polluted America, Obama
promised true health care (the "public option"), an end to war, reform of
Wall Street, closing Guantanamo, government transparency, etc. These
were all lies, an ad campaign to get him elected so that the corporations
could continue in business unimpeded. Obama is the President of the
greatest Corporatocracy on earth. Obama is not, and never was a liberal
or a reformer or a progressive. He's the CEO. The ad campaign worked.
The nation bought the product, and the corporatocracy consolidated its
power while the Republicans and Democrats, corporatocrats all, put on a
sham, the illusion of democratic government.

The argument that America has become a corporatocracy is important,
because it tells us we will never have meaningful climate change or health
care reform or an end to our terrorist attacks on defenseless, innocent
nations until we expose the root cause of the problems: The corporate
cancer that has metastasized throughout the body of America. Voting
Republican or Democrat is a vote for the corporatocracy. We need a
politics that articulates a vision of America freed from the corporate cancer
that is destroying her.

2007-11-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

Collapse of the American Empire
by John Omaha
Copyright, 2007 by John Omaha

America is failing, and its collapse will be ugly and violent. America will disappear into the abyss of history like the Babylonian, Roman, Mongol, British, and Ottoman empires that preceded it. The collapse of the American Empire will be accompanied by devastation exceeding anything that has gone before and may well, if the collapse goes nuclear, destroy humanity, relegating human beings to the ranks of extinct species.

If we are to avoid our extinction, we humans, as a species, must collectively achieve a higher order consciousness about the processes that have shaped human societies for the last 10,000 years. The seeds of this higher order consciousness can be found in the work of Ernest Becker and in particular his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Denial of Death," published in 1973 by Free Press.

The collapse of the American Empire has been accelerated by the current administration that has seized control of the United States. I feel certain that the architects of the hostile takeover of America have read Becker's book, although they failed to understand its arguments. Karl Rove must have, but he saw only a means to gain power and failed to grasp that seizing power entailed the destruction of the nation.

Simplifying an elegant argument, Becker suggested that history is the record of our various defenses against the knowledge of our mortality. Other writers have called these "world-view defenses" and have codified Becker's approach as Terror Management Theory.

Becker's most important concepts have been empirically tested, and the data support the theory. One experiment investigated the length of sentences given by judges. The judges were divided into two cohorts and were given a hypothetical case of a prostitute seeking bond. One cohort was place in what the authors called the "mortality salience" condition. They were asked to respond to two items: 1. Describe the emotions that your own death elicits in you; 2. Describe what will happen physically as you die and when you're dead. Judges who were not reminded of their own mortality set bond at $50. Judges in the mortality salience condition set bond at $455.

Another experiment showed that Christian students who were not reminded of their own mortality showed no preference for a Jewish or a Christian student in an assessment, while Christians reminded of their own mortality were much more favorable to a Christian student and especially negative toward a Jew. Additional studies demonstrate that mortality salience enhances negative reaction to criticism of America.

Mortality salience studies have been replicated in Germany, Israel, Holland, Canada, and Italy. Mortality salience has also been shown to "lead to distancing from and aggression against those who are different."

The pattern is obvious. Rove, Bush, and Cheney have demonstrated that heightening Americans' mortality salience allowed them to take over the U.S. government. Enhancing Americans' mortality salience (9/11, color-coded threat levels, "mushroom cloud" and "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" talk, etc.) has placed American citizens firmly in the mortality salience condition. As a result America shows "intensified positive reactions to those who validate [their] cherished beliefs and intensified negative reactions to those who threaten such beliefs." This is the world-view defense. It is a human response that can be observed not only in Americans, but also in Iraqis, Albanians, Turks, etc.

Becker observed that "primitives" do not appear bothered by their mortality. He also observed that children who had a "favorable" upbringing seem less bothered by the fear of death. Becker was committed to a psychoanalytic (Freudian) approach, and thus he missed an opportunity for a much deeper understanding of the development of fear of death and the reasons why some people deal with it better than others. Being a committed psychoanalytically oriented theorist, he asserted that a "favorable" upbringing provided the child with better repressive tools. I disagree. The "primitive" does not fear death, because in Margaret Mahler's psychodynamic language, he lives in a state of symbiosis with his own mother, a symbiosis that he has not developed out of. As a species, we did not begin to develop out of that symbiotic state until about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapiens began to eradicate them systematically. I believe that beginning about 10,000 years ago, language had developed to the point where tenses developed. As soon as the idea of the future developed, man, the symbol-carrier, could reason that in the future he would not exist. Existential mortality anxiety emerged, and with it the "human insanity" that is destroying the planet. The first case study of the human insanity can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

If we have enough time before we annihilate ourselves, we can survive. The answer appears to me to provide the quality of maternal care that produces children of so-called favorable upbringing. As a psychologist, theoretician, and author, I believe the answer lies in improving our children's early experience and specifically transmitting to them the skills of emotion regulation. You can find the skills and the theory in my professional book "Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Emotion Regulation." I will soon publish a trade book, "The Power to Feel," that teaches these skills to lay people.

2007-11-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

The Holy Business Empire

Business Enterprise has become the new religion, spanning the globe. Our civilization has conflated religion and economics. As a civilization, our purchase against Death has become "the economy." People measure their worthiness by the size of their paycheck, not by their pious acts. The transgressions of the pedophile priests has been dealt with exactly as the society dealt with the transgressions of Enron's economic rapists: trials were held and penalties were levied. These were business transactions. Nowhere that I am aware of was the subject of the consequences for the priests' souls or the victims' discussed.

The only difference between Republicans and Democrats concerns where to set the "burdensome bar." Both worship Business, but like the early Christian sects they disagree as to the details of the contract between the Deity and the People. No one dares question the "holiness" of Business Enterprise or the "godliness" of The Economy. Money, The Economy, and Business Enterprise are respectively, the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost of the new religion. All discussions of whatever kind are carried out in the context of the new religion. Brazilian officials complain that efforts to stop burning the Amazon Rain Forest will slow the nation's economic growth. Bush says expanding health care for children would be bad for business.

The prayers of people, usually men, who utterly devote their wills and their lives to worshipping the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost of Business Enterprise sometimes are heard and rewarded. These people are called hedge fund managers, CEOs, arbitragers, and bankers. The reward, in the form of stock options, cash, and arcane monetary manipulations understandable only by the high priests of Business Enterprise, provides both a medical and a psychological defense against death. The wealthy can afford the best health care, which is the medical defense. Securing the favor of Business Enterprise can delay physical death by a score of years over the national statistics. The psychological defense against death consists of endowing an academic chair in one's name or financing a university building or a museum in one's own honor. The illusion of life after death is supplied by having the title "CEO and Founder" after one's name in the history of the corporation that gained the favor of Business Enterprise. The illusion is perpetuated in the engraved marble or the wrought bronze letters proclaiming the Louise M. Davies Hall, or the Rockerfeller Medical Center.

The Corporatocracy comprises the high priests of the Holy Business Empire and the vast interlocking religio-economic structure that has seized control of the planet. Fanning out from the Bildenburg Group and Trilateral Commission to the World Bank and the neuronal network of banks, corporations, governments, NGOs, and bureaucracies in every nation of the world, the Corporatocracy has ruthlessly enforced global control. Europe, China, the U.S. & U.K., and South America are far less independent, competing regional power centers than they are business bishoprics controlled by satraps who owe their primary allegiance to Business Enterprise. The Corporatocracy can be understood by the metaphor of the Catholic Church. The Bilderburg Group is analagous to the College of Cardinals. The various "business bishops" from around the globe compete for the highest position, which is analagous to election as Pope, the President of the Bilderburg Group.

2007-08-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

CORPORATOCRACY IN ACTION: REPORT ON PRIVATE CONTRACTORS IN IRAQ

Here's the URL for Matt Taibbi's piece for Rolling Stone on how private contractors colluded with the Bush-led corporatocracy to steal billions from the US Treasury: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

MORE CORPORATOCRACY IN ACTION: MONBIOT SHOWS HOW CORPORATIONS MANIPULATE THROUGH THINK TANKS

Here's the URL for George Monbiot's piece reprinted by Truthout showing how corporations channel money through charitable trusts that then manipulate public opinion in ways that favor the corporatocracy: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083007H.shtml

2007-08-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

Corporatocracy and the North American Competitiveness Council

Brenda Norrell has written an excellent article, "Bush's House of Snakes" in today's Counterpunch , in which she discusses Bush administration goals to unite Canada, Mexico, and America in promoting the interests of corporations while restricting the freedoms of citizens. The corporations, acting through Bush's North American Competitivenss Council, are being opposed by Indigenous Peoples. Here are the comments I offered in support of Norrell's article.

I support your awareness of the distinction between corporations and citizens made by the U.S. government. Many people do not realize that America is no longer a democracy. It is a corporatocracy. The USA has been the target of a successful, covert, hostile take-over by the corporatocracy and the nation now exists of, by, and for the entities that comprise the corporatocracy.

The corporatocracy consists of Big Military, Big Energy, Big Finance, Big Media, Big Politics (both republican and democratic parties), Big Religion, Big Government (all the bureaucracies at local, county, state, and federal levels), Big Ag, Big Pharm, and Big Government (all three branches of government). Citizens elected Al Gore in 2000, but the corporatocracy voided the election and installed its own CEO (Bush) and COO (Cheney).

Business enterprise has become the state religion of America. Everything is commodified, most egregiously the trading in pollution credits. All decisions at all levels of society are rendered in economic terms. How will global warming affect the economy? Democrats and Republicans and liberals all worship the state religion. This is why none of the candidates can be trusted. They make speeches praising values of democracy and then vote the state religion, as evidenced by a Democrat-controlled Congress giving Bush almost $500 billion for defense. The war in Iraq is a religious war between Islam and Business Enterprise, not between Islam and Christianity.

I favor a return to the language of the Declaration of Independence. The purpose of the nation is "Life, LIberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." The goals of the Declaration are antithetical to the goals of the corporatocracy and of Business Enterprise. Commerce should serve Life, it should serve Liberty, and it should promote the Pursuit of Happiness. In fact it is the other way around, and Americans have given their lives and their liberties and surrendered all possibility of true happiness to commerce.

These are the messages our nation needs to hear. If we frame our argument in these terms, we address the true problems, not the false issues the corporatocracy uses to distract us.

For a return to the Declaration,

2007-06-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

Bush Veto of Stem Cell Bill Favors Big Pharm

Bush's veto of federally funded stem cell research is a classic example of the Corporatocracy in action. The veto shows Bush acting on behalf of Big Pharm to eliminate competition so Big Pharm can drive up the price on its own stem cell products.

By vetoing federally funded stem cell research, Bush ensures that corporate stem cell research will go forward without competition. The results of federally funded research would be available to the public world-wide, and anyone, whether in India or in California, could exploit it. Federally funded research has spun off thousands of start-ups. Big Pharm has spent millions buying these start-ups.

Bush's veto of the stem cell bill should be seen in the context of Corporatocracy, not religious fundamentalism or rightwing conservatism. Bush is the president of a Corporatocracy, not a Democracy. His veto favors Big Pharm, which is an integral part of the corporatocracy that operates America for its own benefit. I believe it is a certainty that the labs of Big Pharm are busy with secret stem cell research, and when they roll out the eventual product they will have control of the market and can charge whatever they please.

2006-09-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

"THE PATH TO 9/11"

The movie, the events of 911, and the uses the Bush Administration have made of those events illustrates the extent to which America has become a Corporatocracy.

The qualities of the corporation have become the qualities of government.

The issue is not the Republicans, and it is also not the Democrats. The issue is not Iger or Eisner. These parties and these people have succumbed to the ideals and operating principles of the corporation.

All the commentators act as if persons should experience shame or guilt at their atrocious lying. If these were persons and not corporate lickspittles, we might reasonably expect admissions of responsibility and displays of shame. You will not ever see Cheney's face redden with the shame-display or his eyes look down and his shoulders hunch.

"The Path to 9/11" and the events it was based on illustrate principles of corporatism. Only individuals who are true human beings can feel shame. The elegance of the corporation and its relative the bureaucracy is that they create a fictional entity that does not feel disgust, shame, or guilt. When Cheney speaks for the Corporatocracy he feels no revulsion over his role in murdering tens of thousands of human beings.

I urge you commentators to widen your perspective. Democrats won't help the nation, because Democrats (Lamont is a perfect example) are Corporatocrats. I want a political party that celebrates people, not corporations. Our Constitution says only human beings have inalienable rights, not corporations and bureaucracies. Among the rights of human beings are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These rights have been seized by corporations, and they're being denied to us human beings.

2006-09-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

Confusion About What's Become of America

Many people seem confused about what has happened to democracy in America. Conservatives do not question the progression of our country toward corporatocracy. Although they do not understand the progression, they accept it, because it is consonant with their values. Radicals, liberals, and the left appear to believe that we continue to live in a Jeffersonian Democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Liberals and the Left have not grasped the fundamental alteration in the organization of the nation. We no longer live in a Democracy. We live in a Corporatocracy. In a Democracy, individual citizens matter. In a Corporatocracy, they do not matter. On the Left, people descry the loss of freedoms, intrusion by the government, economic inequality, lack of health care, and destruction of the environment. In a Corporatocracy, it is expected that only corporations and bureaucracies will have freedom of action and freedom of expression. In a Corporatocracy, only the economic health of corporations matters. "Health care" is a marketing scam designed by the cadres of the Corporatocracy to secure the largest amount of profit for the least amount of expenditure. Corporations destroy environments, because they do not require a healthy environment to sustain themselves as humans do.

For example, Liberals and the Left continue to ask the system to provide universal health care and environmental protection. They fail to understand that a Corporatocracy exists to promote the livelihood of corporations and bureaucracies, not human beings. There are now so many human beings in America -- nearly 300 million -- that replacements can be found at any level. The search for a cure for AIDS, for example, is motivated by Big Pharm's desire to increase its profits, not by any concern for people dying of the disease. As the Corporatocracy has metastasized, it has taken over the EPA and replaced laws that once were intended to protect citizens and the fragile biosphere of which we are a part. The new directives that have supplanted laws are designed to assure the health of corporations and bureaucracies. For example, increasing the limits for arsenic in the water supply promotes the health of corporations because they do not have to alter their practices, which would cost them money.

In the future, I will post regular essays laying out a theoretical critique of the Corporatocracy. I will also describe the forces that have shaped its evolution. I invite comments. I will also analyze current events from the perspective of the theory of the Corporatocracy. Periodically, I will post essays describing what citizens must do to dismantle the Corporatocracy and to redesign the nation so it meets the needs of citizens. Along the way I will advance the cause of The Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness Party. You will read essays on overpopulation, machinificaton, what it means to be human, immigration, religion as a tool of the Corporatocracy, and other topics that will change how you think about America and the world we live in.