Who Owns Ya, Baby?

By Vi Ransel

10/28/09

Corporations are "inhuman entities" (Jon Faulkner) whose single, and legally mandated purpose, is to turn the Earth, and all its resources, including human resources, into profit for its shareholders – as long as they stay within the law (that they have written). Ask Milton Friedman.

And when human beings surround themselves with the mantle of these entities, 3-pound cheeseburger in hand as they talk into a Blue Tooth while driving an SUV; when human beings are owned by them by reason of debt for resin gnomes made in China, for McMansions made of pressed sawdust patties, for education that mis-educates, for healthcare/insurance that "lives" off the diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancers created by the producers of food-like products polluted with the same poisonous organophosphates developed to gas soldiers in World War I and refined for use on Jews in World War II and mainline its media like junkies; when human beings prostrate themselves before these entities, willing to call the choice from among thousands of shiny, branded commodities freedom, they trade their identity, their soul, their "selves" for these poisonous, quality-less "products," which are nothing more than a means to relieve them of the money they received for the work of creating all the wealth that made the production of those tawdry trinkets possible in the first place.



Because industrial/manufacturing corporations wanted cheaper labor costs, they shipped US manufacturing out of the country in order to raise their profits. Now American workers, whose jobs they've downsized, outsourced, and contracted-out, no longer have the money to buy what those corporations have manufactured offshore. The finance corporations rode to their fellow corporations' rescue by stepping in with debt in the form of a plastic I.O.U. card/slave chain to be waved whenever the purchase of those resin gnomes, sawdust homes, mis-education, poisonous food-like products, gas for SUVs, electronic distractions or healthcare is desired. The Treadmill of Endless Purchase, itself a church, goes on. The offshored manufacturing corporations are paid by the finance corporations who hold our I.O.U.s and we continue to ride the destinationless merry-go-round of debt slavery with an occasional stop by an ever-increasing number of us in Poverty Land.

The less individual thought, the less knowledge available, the more profit created. The more we THINK about a purchase, the less likely we are to make it, and the more time we might use to think about who's in charge here, the majority of the American people or just the few behind the corporate cloaking device. And besides, if you don't use your time to think, you can use it to by more stuff. And buying stuff is more fun than participatory democracy. Ignorance is easier than thinking. And, no, "we" can't have thinking.

Knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge creates doubt. Knowledge is power. That's why we're not allowed to have it. That's why it's missing in our mis-education and corporate "entertainews." That's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. That's what pissed off the Church about the printing press. And that's why knowledge (of good and evil) was given the rap of original sin.

The less you know, the more of everything the Rich or the Church - or insert your choice of tyrant here - gets to keep without your even questioning it. You have no information on which to base a question. All you have is what's fed to you by the corporations who own 80% of the media. And they have answered all the questions that need to be asked, in their opinion, that is. That's the way things are, the way they were and the way they always will be. I learned that in catechism. Or was that "God always was, always will be and always remains the same?" Or perhaps, TINA - There is no alternative. Ask Margaret Thatcher. Or corporate capitalism is the logical and benevolent end of history. Ask Francis Fukiyama. Or, the common people don't need to know nuthin'. We'll tell them what they think. Leo Strauss.

When we willingly surrender our identity, our free will, our ability to make meaningful choices, we become truly one of the herd, a follower allowed only the facade of choice. The choices that matter will be made FOR us. What a relief. Thinking is hard work. Morality is too much responsibility. Drink the Kool-Aid. Swallow the pill. Shut your eyes. Relax into the waterboard of consumerism’s faux-individuality, based entirely on repetitive and addictive choices from among thousands of meaningless choices proffered by the masters behind the corporate curtain, whose only actual product is slavery, both mental and financial.

Vi Ransel, TPC’s Senior Editor of Anti-Capitalism, is a researcher and poet of exceptional caliber. Very little is known about her.

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