on megacorps, the gop, and the future, or how mega corps are the greatest threat

if you look at some of my prior posts, you know i have no love for the megacorps. its not that i dont like corporations, i just dont like it when they grow so large and have so much power that they can ignore the laws of a country, or twist them.

many sci-fi writers have projected that in the future there will be no govs, just megacorps. you live, work, and die for the corp. they make the laws. you have no rights. how many of your "rights" are curtained by your employer? no free speech, no second amendment, no right to privacy. it even extends to your private life should you do something that the corp thinks makes it look bad.

we have seen this in the past. america was founded by business, not christians or puritans or anything else. it was business. the east india company to be exact. the laws against corps were very rigid when our founders were around. a corp could only exist for a certain time. it was restricted to doing specific things. using a modern corp as example, walmart could only sell clothes, or electronics, or food, but not all of them.

from a forbes article: "Thom Hartman writes in his book, Unequal Protection,

“Trade-dominance by the East India Company aroused the greatest passions of America’s Founders – every schoolboy knows how they dumped the Company’s tea into Boston Harbor. At the time in Britain virtually all members of parliament were stockholders, a tenth had made their fortunes through the Company, and the Company funded parliamentary elections generously.” www.forbes.com...

hsbc admitted to laundering money for the drug cartels. you would spend the rest of your life in jail for this. they paid a fine of 10%. www.nytimes.com...

now look at this clip from "the daily show" theweek.com...

some say that we have the highest corp tax rate in the world. on paper thats true, but what is the effective tax rate? for the big boys its far less than what you pay. www.vox.com...

why did i include the gop in the title? "House Republicans, who fervently pound the podium against the deficit, didn't blink Friday at passing a whopping $287 billion business tax cut measure with no effort to pay for or offset that amount.

"GOP lawmakers argued the bill helps the economy, but budget-watching organizations outside Congress proclaimed it an irresponsible move." www.cnn.com... they cant pay for veterans, or highways, but they can give the rich even more money.

corps must be regulated and reigned in. the corporate "person" is now above the law and needs to be put in its place.

many cons say we need to go back to the fifties, when times were good. what made them good were corp regulations and strong unions.

why has your ceo gotten raise after raise, millions in compensation, when your wage has remained stagnant? (but the board decides what he gets paid. the board is made up of ceos from other companies that your boss sits on the board of.) why can your boss run the company into the ground, get fired, and then gets millions to go away?

corps are not people. if i build a motorcycle its not a person, but if i build a company it is?

want to improve the economy? increase tariffs on imported goods, regardless on if its made by an american company or not. make it too expensive to build overseas, then they will have to move the manufacturing plants back here.

increase taxes on the rich. then they will be forced to give workers more pay. it worked from the end of wwii till raygun. if workers make more, they spend more, increasing the corps profit. (but if you raise their taxes, they will stop working and producing, you say. bs i say. they stopped working for money after they first 10 million. with 10 mill, if youre smart, youre set for life. they work because they work, its their life. they didnt stop working when taxes were over 70% before, why would they stop now?)

for you free market people, where/when has there ever been a free market? there will never be a free market because its run by people that are greedy. the guys at the top will always rig the game for themselves. "You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments."

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i could go on, but i want to see some of your responses first.

Not much 2 add but i agree with you 110percent. America is being destroyed in part by big mega corps. It is sad i made more money in my twenties then i do now in my 40s.

a reply to: stormson

America has ceased to be a democratic republic where the citizens have input into the operation of government.
We are now a corporate oligarchy; it's not going to change. Now that corporations are "people" they have all the power.

It's a brave new world!!!

a reply to: stormson

The general thrust of your post is spot on correct. Unfortunately, you've wrapped so many problems into one post that I can't even respond intelligently except to say that your absolutely right that the problem with the Corps is that they've been given way too many rights and are far too unregulated. That said, I don't know how to fix this problem without blowing up the economy. An even bigger problem is the undoing of the regulations put in place after the Great Depression that curtailed the power of the big banks. The result has been that as unregulated entities, the banks can engage in a multiplicity of activities that were once limited to only certain types of banks. Another result has been the huge concentration in banks with only 6 or 7 major national banks left in business.

The US faced a similar problem at the turn of the 19th/20th century with the big Trusts. So...Teddy Roosevelt broke up the big "Trusts" and became known as the "Trust Buster". It may be time to reign in the Mega Corps by changing the nature of their charters and forcing them to divest non-core businesses.