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It's Time To Declare War on "Terminator (mega) Corporations"
Posted November 8, 2003 thepeoplesvoice.org

By Rob Kall OpEdNews.Com / Corporate_war.htm

There's a war in this country, between the far right's Bush Regime and republican politics and the democrats. They are attacking the middle class, workers, the environment, the nation's resources, assets, rights, freedoms, ethics, values and principles. And the main sources for the funding for this massive war, with attacks on so many fronts are the mega-corporations-- the "Terminator Corporations."

If the left, the Democrats, liberals, progressives, greens and whoever else values what the right is attacking are going to fight back, then the battle must go to the corporations... and the top tenth of the top percentage of the most wealthy Americans who are also the most greedy.

It's not only weak-willed, indecisive and bad strategy to avoid going after these enemies of  the vast majority of Americans and America's most precious rights and assets, it is crazy. Imagine being horribly attacked by some group and then going after an ugly guy in a country that has no relevance to the real attackers. That would be crazy or, quite literally, treachery, or even treason,  it would be such a failure to properly defend ourselves. Of course that's what George Bush did. But he did it as a service to those corporation that are supporting him. He attacked Iraq in a treacherous act aimed to help his corporate allies in spite of the danger it put our troops in, in spite of the weak condition it left our military forces in throughout the rest of the world, in spite of pulling resources away from the search to capture, kill and neuter Al Qaeda.

So we not only have the corporations funding the war against our nation through political funding and corruption of the political process, we also have corporations corrupting the safety of our nation.

This is consistent with the reality that corporations ARE the inventions that have come back to attack the human race. Corporations are the form the "Terminators" have taken in reality.

Now, I'm not talking about the small business corporation, nor the corporation that employs 50 or 100 workers in your local town. Those businesses are the heartblood of America. We need to support and protect them as allies in the fight against the megacorporations that register in the Bahamas to avoid paying taxes, the huge corporations that put ten thousand people out of work by outsourcing phone or data services or manufacturing to India or the Caribbean.  We need to protect our family owned and small local businesses, even local chains, like the supermarkets that are being killed by Walmart and being forced to resort to the same unconscionable employee, wage and benefit policies. WE need to protect our homegrown, local businesses from international megacorporations that seek to replace loyal employees with the lowest wages to be found on the planet, seeking out what is tantamount to slave labor in third world countries. 

This is not about communism or socialism. I'm for honest American businesses operating in the US, paying their fair share of taxes, giving Americans jobs, operating responsibly in respect to the environment and the humans they serve. There are enough ethical, responsible businesses in the US to provide us with the best quality goods and services without the abuses this article lists.

The democratic party has to build a platform that rewards these businesses-- the local contractors, plumbers, hardware stores, mom and pop groceries and video stores, the 10 store chains that treat workers with respect and dignity. We have to differentiate between the 98% of businesses who are the good guys, who treat humans right, from the "terminator" megacorporations that, without conscience or ethics, have been engaged in funding the war against humanity, against America since the Nixon era or even earlier.

We on the left are finally beginning to have some seriously funded policy promotion think tanks, like the Center for American Progress and we need to have these organizations help develop clear policies and strategies to take these corporations down. What does it mean to "take them down?"

Here's a starter list:

-Take away corporate personhood rights from corporations. They are not persons and should not have the rights of humans. This will have just about zero effect on small businesses. It will help prevent corporations from contributing to election campaigns or influencing elections. it will force them to open their secrets to government investigations since they will no longer be able to claim privacy rights.

-De-privatize some of the arenas where corporations have failed to responsibly manage, such as energy production and distribution. Enron was a monster, but also the tip of the iceberg.

-Turn around the trend towards de-regulation. While the right creates laws and punishments that send millions of people to jail for crimes that hurt no-one,  they elminate laws that prevent corporations from abusing workers, poisoning the environment, producing unsafe products or using monopolistic prices to artificially inflate prices. The mega-corporations were given a chance with a long leash. They failed to show they were worthy of our trust. We need to shorten the leash.

-Institute severe criminal penalties for corporations and their managers, including a corporate death penalty. make sure that managers do hard time if they, on their watch, allow corporations to hurt humans or the nations' assets.

-Create tax incentives that reward corporations of all sizes for treating humans and the environment with respect.

-Provide equal opportunity funding that helps small businesses to compete with megacorporations. (This is illegal now because of corporate personhood rights.)

It is essential that include small businesses as our allies as we on the left acknowledge that this war was declared by the "terminator corporations" decades ago. We must, as an alliance of individuals and small businesses,   declare that we are going to fight back We must  finally, after Enron and Tyco and Worldcom and Walmart, see that they are our Pearl Harbor, our 9-11 and we must gear up like we did in world war two and fight for our lives, for our nation.

Some right wingers will call this socialism or communism. That's to be expected. They also accuse us of engaging in class war when we complain about tax breaks to the super-rich, when they are the ones engaging in class war. So these accusations will be shrill attacks that are guaranteed to come. But the truth is the "terminator corporations" prove that capitalism unrestrained has its weaknesses, and like any process or system taken to an extreme, capitalism can be toxic. We can work within the capitalist model. It's still the best we have. We just need to add some rules, and while we're at it, declare all out war on the "terminator corporations" that have been at war with humanity and the nation we love.

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Rob Kall is editor of www.OpEdNews.Com a tough liberal news and opinion website. He also organizes the Futurehealth winter Brain, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology Meeting and the Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story. This article is copyright by Rob Kall and  originally published by OpEdNews.Com but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit paragraph is attached.