Corporations remain repositories of enormous authoritarian power

How did they manage? They bought up everything, from the heavy to the light industry, arms, oil, chemical, to the people in Congress who are supposed to protect us from abuse of power by applying the rules set down in the Constitution. But, above all, they bought up the media. There is no objective source for authentic news in the U.S. any more, other than the Internet.

Robert Murdoch and his equally power-hungry fellow media moguls have seen to it that we just get pre-cooked baby-formula infotainment. People are dumbed down by the non-stop stream of meaningless chatter and unceasing propaganda.

Two major disasters

Among all the outrageous and inhuman crimes that plague the world today, there are two all-consuming current disasters which tie into all the other dictatorial abuses of power, from the executive to the lobbies that have bought up the government in all its forms.

There is first of all world hunger and, on the same level of emergency, the phenomenon of global warming – both those enormous problems having to be seen as the disasters that must be dealt with in the most urgent way possible. And today, there is virtually no urgency displayed in the way those disasters are dealt with – or not dealt with.

And yet, those two huge problems have to be solved if the world is going to continue in a shape even vaguely like the world as we know it.

Why the lack of action?

So the real rulers of the world, the Big Corporations, are condemning us to a life of increased poverty and hunger in third-world countries, a general increase in insecurity and joblessness for middle class people in the western world and increased pollution in the emerging economies in Asia, where the standard of living is actually rising – for the rich. And of course, alongside all these disasters, we are seeing the lives of steadily increasing luxury for the people who are reaping the profits of the plunder. The Corporations see to it that the so-called governments, their obedient front men, cut back the taxes on the top levels of income, on capital gains and on inheritance.

Ethanol is NOT the solution

Production of grazing land for cattle

Land is also being taken over for production of grazing land for cattle who are the heaviest consumers of grain and who, when converted to meat offer far less nourishment than they have consumed during their growing process.

One goal for corporations – maximum profit

In other words, the two problems of poverty and hunger and the problem of climate change are deeply intertwined. Both problems could be dealt with rationally, certainly to a somewhat satisfactory extent. But the corporations are not making money off a policy of improving the situation for the starving people in the world or on the urgent need to limit global warming and the disastrous consequences the planet will be undergoing in a near future. We have already begun to see the effects of climate change, but since the corporations own the governments, there is little chance that anything radical will get done very soon.

Renewable energy

In short, the world has been taken over by the Big Corporations hand-in-hand with the Main Stream Media and they are all busy shredding our human rights and making our planet into a sterile desert. As long as wildfire capitalism is ruling the world, we are doomed.

was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y. and traveled extensively throughout the U.S, Europe, and other continents, including several trips to India. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France for 30 years, first in Paris and now Lyon. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and she also feels that ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’.

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*Addendum on Ethanol:

Ethanol And Biodiesel From Crops Not Worth The Energy
ScienceDaily (Jul. 6, 2005) – ITHACA, N.Y. – Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:
* soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
* sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Footnote:

[1] “Recent research has shown that the Amazon rain forest is not a stable mature forest with growth and decay in balance but is in fact an expanding forest that is being fertilised by the excess atmospheric CO2. The trees are getting bigger and there is a net take up of 5000 kg of carbon per hectare per year ( 1 hectare = 100 x 100 metres ). The total area of forest is 400 million hectares so the whole forest could be absorbing 2 billion tons of carbon per year.”

“If the Amazon rainforest burns and releases billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in a short period then this will be a further boost to global warming that will result in significantly higher end of century temperatures.”

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BONUS ADDENDUM BY TGP EDITORS:

Corporate Power Facts and Stats

Author And Page Information

• by Anup ShahThis Page Last Updated Tuesday, May 15, 2001

• This page:http://www.globalissues.org/article/59/corporate-power-facts-and-stats.
• To print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print version:
  • http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/59

The following are collected from a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. The report is called Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power. Over time, additonal facts and stats will be added from other sources as well.

1. Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4 percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4 percent.
2. U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
3. Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200 made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to 46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued deregulation.