"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
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Just how powerful are the biggest corporations? Though Corporations are usually publicly screened through the actions and statements of individuals in key positions – the overall structure of corporations seems to present a genuine threat to democratic values not to mention the environment welfare of planet earth. It isn’t the politicians jumping and down screaming of their own volition for the rights to mine the Alaskan wildness – it is rather extremely large corporations channeling in funds to effect policy change. Politicians need the dollars to stay in office – corporations need to affect policy change to increase the bottom line – end of the day the politician bends over every time but at the expense usually of the overall community.
One of the funniest / most frustrating parts of contemporary society is that many of us work in corporations and invest in other corporations – we want higher dividends on the money we invest and usually the more money they make the more damage they do. We invest in fund managers or go in direct to companies such as arms manufactures or oil companies who help drive so much of the misery in the world – yet we are not bad people. Leaders in higher positions work out ways to leverage costs – and sometimes bad calculations come into play – but once again it is unlikely that they are bad people – they don’t sit around twirling their mustaches planning world domination. We are all working to maximize our own incomes and lifestyles but our choices and investments can often play a big part in many of the world’s problems.
How do you reconcile that? Things need to change – the world is headed into absolute ecological turmoil and so few people in key positions genuinely seem to care. Worse, many defend their current position and then say nothing bad is happening – everything is denied. Frankly in the next 20 years the world is guaranteed to face significant upheaval. Economists and business people talk of the strength of Indian and China – and both are growing at impressive rates – but how sustainable is all this development. China needs hundreds of new power stations – and worse still they are planning on building more coal based stations. This presents an ecological nightmare to every human being on this planet whether they realize it or not. The number of new coal stations alone could trigger a climatic change – your typical Bush supporter in the US will ignore this until it is on their doorstep but then it will be too late.
We need to act now – not by going after Kyoto agreements but by genuinely affecting change. I hate to say it but I am quite keen to further develop nuclear energy – bring it up to speed – the wastage is bad – yes but the environmental damage is preferable to constantly burning coal. This of course puts me in conflict with most so called liberals but rather than hanging to labels we just need solutions wherever they come from (that by the way is not necessarily a solution but more a suggestion for further discussion).
The use of Oil is also an unsustainable resource – we are now headed into a climate of more wars as the world again looks to taking sides. Sure our newspapers and media don’t really focus on this – they talk about this great move to democracy across the globe but democracy in this sense is simply a word in the American’s foreign policy tool box – it is meaningless and actually offensive to what democracy is meant to stand for. (I am a firm believer in democracy as it has evolved but I see a need to rework it because it is being exploited and the masses are generally dumbed down – they voted for Bush after all and that takes stupidity on a level unparalleled in US history – at least they realised just how incompetent Ford was).
Only by organizing a strong civil society can we begin to take back the democratic values that have eroded over time; only by addressing the damage we are doing to the environment can we begin to heal the planet. Unfortunately this isn’t going to happen anytime soon – after all we all have to go and submit our new round of cost cuts – we don’t need to worry about dumping our waste in the local river stream because any fine from the government will be less than the cost of properly handling the waste, that may even get us a better bonus. We don’t need to worry about the damage we do because we are just doing our jobs and we are doing them properly – we support our families and we try to be good people but our decisions may at some point along the line create an adverse affect and whilst those decisions may not seem inappropriate – perhaps somewhere down the line we are inadvertently creating some of the troubles we spend time with families lamenting.
