The multinational companies that now abound are destroying our world. They are no longer under the control of any nation state. They dictate to every country the terms on which they will do business. If any nation state declines they simply bankrupt it. The big corporation is now man’s worst enemy.
They have usurped centuries of accumulated knowledge and secreted advances and patented all manner of things that correctly belong to the people. It is now virtually illegal to collect and plant the seeds from your own garden. The list of such criminal activities is very long indeed.
They have bought up virtually all manufacturing capability in the west and moved it to low-wage countries where they have effectively enslaved the local populations to produce consumer goods at extremely low prices. They sell these goods in western markets at very high prices and make themselves very rich indeed.
They have acquiesced in the strangling of western manufacturing by the adoption of ridiculously restrictive employment and health and safety laws whose prime purpose is to destroy highly paid jobs. This makes it relatively easy for them to transfer jobs to low paid workers abroad.
The quid pro quo they offer is an endless stream of mainly useless consumer goods that are of doubtful quality, little utility and lead the majority of the nation into mindless pursuits watching and listening to pap. The media make much use of the cornucopia of crap to provide programs that would not tax the mind of rat. They have to invent perverse ‘celebrities’ because there is no longer anyone on earth with the talent, guts or competence to perform a play, a song or a poem without a ridiculous display of flashing lights and an extremely loud accompanying cacophony. We really have reached the lowest common denominator. The whole purpose of this is to placate the masses and stop them taking to the streets. Aldous Huxley in 1984 called it ‘Soma Tablets’. We do not need soma tablets: we have television.
Around two percent of the people on earth own around 90 percent of the wealth and control 90 percent of economic activity. They have got ever richer since de-regulation of the banks and internationalisation of companies removed the formerly sensible restriction on their activities. The vast majority of citizens have been lied to and cheated and conned and ripped off by a very small number of very wealthy liars and cheats. They call themselves Vice Presidents and Chief Executive Officers.
Once upon a time people who held these offices were highly respected members of society who created great wealth which was reasonably distributed amongst all who contributed. The executives were well rewarded with salaries typically fifty to a hundred times above average. Now these leeches have salaries well over 1000 times the pittance they pay their slaves in world wide sweat shops. Their annual bonuses are double or even treble this amount.
They have set themselves above the law in at least two ways. Firstly they are so rich that no-one else on earth could possible fight them in court. Secondly, even if someone could do this in a court, they would simply move their operations elsewhere to avoid any possible sanction, award or punishment. They effective are the law. You do things their way or not at all. You pick up the scraps at their table or die.A huge number of people are now on 'zero hours' contracts. That is; you must be available for work when we say but we sill not pay you if we do not want you. Slaves had to be housed and fed, even if in terrible conditions, but the modern slaves have to house and feed themselves and still turn up when summoned. It is one of the biggest and nastiest confidence tricks ever.
The whole point of the limited company was to licence men to enable the creation of wealth in the interest of the licensor – the people. Why on earth would a people licence men to rip them off? But that is what we have done. We have created a monster in the form of the limited company and allowed it to escape from its original sensible bounds and now it utterly dominates us. The company has developed a life of its own and its only purpose is to promote and grow itself.
The limited liability which it enjoys gives it a stupendously ridiculous advantage over mere men so that no-one can ever compete with it. The individual has responsibilities as well as freedoms. The company has freedom but no responsibility except to a very small group of investors whose logical wish is to see it succeed for ever more. That is the monster we have built. Even the very highly paid executives of the monster are utterly expendable. No-one can control it as there is no mechanism by which is can be brought to heel.
The multi-national corporation is exploiting the resources of the world at such a rate as to destroy it before many years are passed. We will tame the corporation or it will destroy us. Frankenstein was a kind and friendly monster compared to this.
7th November 2011
Colin Walker
Addendum
Dear Sir,
The Giant multi-national corporations now own the world. Their transformation from benevolent friendly giants producing wealth previously unimagined to snarling self-serving Frankensteinian monsters has taken only around thirty years.
The giant corporation used to promote research and development and secure patents that would shortly benefit all. They created jobs and wealth that benefited many. They were a superb addition to the tools of social engineering.
Now they look only to their own survival. They have secured to themselves laws that exempt them from any responsibility in society. They have relocated themselves in whichever country will give them maximum freedom and minimum restriction. They ignore national laws with impunity.
They have helped institute draconian health and safety and employment laws in their home counties which lead to the arrest and criminalisation of ordinary people for doing their job. Their purpose is to destroy the competition that they have left behind when they move to another country without those laws. The laws of most countries have now been perverted to suit the corporation. They have moved resources to wherever they wished in order to gain an advantage from low wage rates. They have instituted slavery a method of production. This is called 'zero hours' contracts.
They subsidise politics to the extent that no politician can be considered immune to their blandishments and demands. There is no longer any such thing as an independent politician. No politician can successfully campaign without the massive funds provided by the big corporations.
The rights of the individual have been destroyed. Rights for the people now are only what the big corporations allow. The Rights of man took a long time to formulate and it was not until 1776 and the Declaration of Independence that a truly useful formulation took place. That Bill of Rights has now been utterly perverted and bypassed by the mega corporation. All other western countries have been similarly diminished. The third world never stood a chance.
There are around fifty corporations that now command more annual turnover than all but the six biggest countries on earth.
They have used the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank to ensure every country on earth has borrowed money to subsidise the setting up of plants which use local labour at slave wage rates to rape local land and resources to produce products to sell for the benefit of the company, not the people whose land they have appropriated. Many of the products are useless tat sold only through mega advertising campaigns that seek to persuade people that they need them
They have deliberately bought other companies and sacked huge numbers of people to create temporary profits on the bottom line which line the pockets of their Chief Executive Officers.
They have downsized their own companies by sacking loyal employees and substituting computers and automation with the sole purpose of aggrandising the bottom line. The companies are getting wealthier while reducing employees so that ultimately they will operate with virtually no employees. This is effectively robots taking over production.
The nineteenth century philosophers foresaw this process as providing huge leisure time for the benefit of the people. What is actually happening is that people are being disposed of and made so poor they must hold down several jobs in order to earn a very basic living. They are essentially scavenging. The big companies are getting obscenely rich with the benefits going to very few people.
Companies have used their huge wealth to secure endless patents that protect their “inventions” in the fields of genetics that are effectively destroying the ability of ordinary people to grow food. They have reduced the living standards even of the “rich” western countries.
Those companies that happen to be called banks have perverted the financial system to serve only the bottom line. The function of the financial system used to be to finance the creation of wealth within industry. Now 99 percent of the financial system is designed to extract wealth from the productive system and put it into the pockets of a very small elite.
The extractive system is pure gambling but is guaranteed by the average punter who has had his standard of living decimated by the big corporations. The amount of money gambled in the financial system exceeds that invested in production by a factor of several thousand and possibly several billion times. The factor could be trillions but nobody can possibly know. The computers deal so fast that the factor could be trillions of trillions. And every deal is aimed at extracting wealth from the relatively tiny real economy. And if they lose this obscene gamble the honest taxpayers, with a millionth of their income, pick up their tab.
And the ordinary people are supposed to act as to guarantor to this farce. Do you wonder that the system is collapsing?
There seems no reason why the big corporations cannot buy back their shares so that they have no accountability and no responsibility and can do whatever they want whenever and wherever they want and with complete impunity. They will be run by robots for robots. Who will stop them?
The big corporations – including banks – are monster life forms that we have given very special privileges and no responsibilities, a diet upon which they thrive, and let loose amongst us. We will tame them or they will kill us.
Do not bother with Greece or the Euro. The giant banks and corporations are the problem.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Walker.
4th November 2011