Servando Gonzales

Big mega corporations are a new form of slavery.

People who see corporations as something normal have exactly the same mindset as the people in the 19th Century who saw slavery as a normal, legitimate and just “peculiar” institution, far different from the very harsh slave systems existing in other countries, and that southern slavery had no impact on those living in northern states.

Nevertheless, even perfunctory analyses of the way corporations operate and how they affect society show that corporations should be banned for the same reason slavery was banned. Actually, corporations have become nothing but a modern, more efficient form of slavery.

Though, as the result of some legal chicanery, for some purposes they are considered people, corporations have no soul. Moreover, they have no ethics, principles or morals. Despite claims on the contrary they usually make in their institutional advertising, the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize the profits of its shareholders — at any cost.[1]

A film based on Joel Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, [2] shows that most corporations exhibit many of the traits of psychopathic behavior, such as:

  • – Callous unconcern for the feelings of others;
  • – Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
  • – Reckless disregard for the safety of others; [3]
  • – Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning of others for profit;
  • – Incapacity to experience guilt;
  • – Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.

Corporations have created a particular sort of mirage. You look around and are tricked to believe that you see hospitals, colleges, department stores, hardware stores, drug factories, airlines, etc., but that is part of the illusion. Ultimately, corporations do not care about the products they make — be it cars, drugs, electronic gadgets, food, books, gas, or airplanes —, much less about their workers or the customers who buy their products. Their only goal is to persuade you to buy their products, disregarding whether or not their products are safe, negatively affect your health or create an addiction. To reach their goals they resort to any type of mind manipulation through advertising that includes falsehood, fabrications, deception, and outright lies, in order to maximize their profits.

Proof that corporations do not care less about their customers is the fact that, to maximize profits, they have outsourced most of the manufacture of their products. But, having solved a short-term problem, they have created a long-term one: they have destroyed the way of living of their own consumers. The direct result of moving production overseas to Mexico, China, and other countries to profit from quasi-slave labor, is that they have deprived most of their working-class customers of their source of income. Currently, 9 out of every 10 products sold by the Walmart corporation are made in China, and 9 out of every 10 Walmart customers is a worker who lost his well-paid job because, to maximize its profits, Walmart does not buy American-made products.

But that is not the only problem corporations pose. Once they become economically powerful they aim for political power as well. Their ultimate goal is to take control of the state, a political system Benito Mussolini called “lo stato corporativo” — the corporate state— another name for Fascism.

Like most things wrong on this planet, the modern corporation is a Rockefeller baby — initially they called it a trust. No wonder critics called the Rockefellers one of the families that have done more damage to the people of the world.

Moreover, contrary to the commonly accepted myth, corporations are anticapitalist. They hate competition — probably the best characteristic of capitalism —, and their goal is to completely eliminate it. It was John D. Rockefeller — not Marx, Lenin or Mao — who said, “Competition is a sin.”

I don’t have any doubts that the owners and executives of some successful companies initially had good intentions. But, once they became powerful corporations, all sense of social conscience vanished. In modern times, transnational corporations have become the most useful cover to commit crimes against humanity. Corporations such as I.G. Farben, Monsanto and BP are not the exception, but the rule. The worst part of it is that they are committing these crimes with total impunity, and they know it.

While some activities (research, development, marketing, advertising) are still kept at home, 75% of manufacturing activities of most of high tech “American” products have been moved overseas.[4] This has effectively reduced the production costs and enormously raised the profit margin of these corporations.

Some politicians keep repeating the mantra that we need to create conditions to entice corporations to bring back manufacturing jobs to America. In the Washington parlance politicians talk, this means lowering even more the taxes paid by the corporations. But, as General Electric, Amazon and Apple have shown in recent years, big corporations use all the loopholes they have paid the politicians to create in order not to pay taxes. So, there is no way you can lower their taxes even more.

There is, however, a simple, time-tested way to persuade corporations to manufacture their products here: it is called tariffs. That is, imposing import tariffs on products manufactured abroad by American corporations that could have been manufactured here because traditionally they were manufactured in America. This is called economic protectionism and the globalist conspirators at the Council on Foreign Relations hate it.

But, one may argue that here in America we have an economic policy called “Free Trade.” Yes, we do. But the problem with the so-called Free Trade (a good example of semantic deception) policy is that it is not free trade at all.

For example, in 1994 the U.S. signed a Free Trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. It was called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to this agreement, Mexican, Canadian and U.S. merchants can freely trade goods across the borders.

Well, I discovered some years ago that exactly the same prescription drugs that sell for $80 – $90 dollars in the U.S. you could get in Mexico for less than ten bucks. However, if you buy some in Mexico and try to sell then in the U.S. for profit, U.S. Customs officers will confiscate them and may toss you in jail. Obviously, the free trade agreement does not apply equally for everybody. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm, all animals were equal, but some were more equal than others. So, instead of NAFTA, the agreement should have been called NAFTAFCO: North American Free Trade Agreement For Corporations Only.

Outsourcing manufacturing jobs overseas has only slightly lowered the price of some products. It has, though, enormously increased the profit margin for the outsourcing corporations.[5]

If one is to believe U.S. history textbooks, the main cause for the Civil War was slavery: the good, honest, kind, Northerners fighting the evil, dishonest, unkind slave masters in the South. It is difficult to understand, however, how the descendants of the anti-slavery crowd are now passionately helping to maintain slavery around the world. It is even more difficult to understand why so many descendants of slaves now happily have become slaves of the government, the largest U.S. corporation of them all.

Do we need a second Civil War to force the nice, kind, politically-correct American corporations such as Apple to stop using slave workers abroad? Actually we don’t. The solution is peaceful, and is very simple: just stop giving our business to big, monopolistic American-based corporations[6] that manufacture abroad products that traditionally have been made in the U.S.

Boycotting big corporations is not only moral, but also economically advantageous.[7]. For example, if we stop buying Chinese products at Walmart, COSTCO, Kmart and Home Depot, as well as Apple iPhones made by slave workers in China or Nike sneakers made in Vietnam, just to mention the most notorious offenders, either they will be forced to offer products Made in U.S.A. or go out of business.

This option is the best, not only because it doesn’t require any violent revolt, but also because these 800-pound gorillas have made local stores to go out of business. Small stores are owned by local people who spend their money locally, quite contrary to the big stores owned by absentee stockholders of corporations who spend their money in he French Riviera.

The bottom line is that currently America’s worst enemy is not terrorists abroad, much less Russia, but its own mega corporations.

© 2019 Servando Gonzales – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Servando Gonzales: servandoglez05@yahoo.com

Footnotes:

  1. Corporation bylaws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make the largest profits possible for shareholders. If you doubt it, just read about the true causes of Boeing’s ongoing problem with its 737 Max.
  2. Joel Balkan, writer, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Canada,
  3. If you doubt this, just read about Boeing’s ongoing problem with its 737 Max.
  4. The in-flight safety instructions brochure of Boeings 737-700 and 800 informs that the planes had been “assembled in the United States.”
  5. Most of them keep most their operations abroad, don’t pay U.S. taxes, and are American only in name. Moreover, corporations don’t care about the governments they del with. Proof of it is that many American corporations that cover themselves behind a façade of progressivism and liberalism happily deal with China, whose government is one of the most repressive, anti-liberal regime in the world.
  6. A widespread myth used as a pretext for cities to give tax incentives to big corporations is that they create jobs, but that is simply a lie. Less than a year after Ikea opened its huge store in Emeryville, California, most furniture stores in the East Bay went out of business.