I just watched a viral video about Joseph Kony. It was emotional, moving and without question inspirational. It gives me hope, but not for the reasons you might suspect. Joseph Kony is allegedly responsible for kidnapping between 60,000 and 100,000 children throughout central Africa since 1988. The children were then conscripted into the service of what is now known as the Lord's Resistance Army. The little boys were often forced to kill their parents and other family members and mutilate and murder their fellow countrymen. The little girls were used as sex slaves. There is simply no way to paint a rosy picture of this guy. He sucks, and should be captured and imprisoned for crimes against humanity. The ICC (International Criminal Court) issued a warrant for Kony in 2005 and the group "Invisible Children" helped produce the video and are calling for a world wide campaign to bring Kony to justice.
No rational human being could learn about Kony and not agree with the noble goals of this effort. We should all agree. But that is not what I was thinking about as I was watching the video. I was thinking about the TRUE criminals whose crimes exponentially dwarf the crimes of Kony many times over. When we sit back and look through an objective lense at the crimes committed by governments and people on behalf of business interests in the last 200 years, well, it makes Kony look like a petty criminal.
Look at Bayer, who was caught peddling AIDS tainted medication in the U.S., pulled that product from the market and then simply shipped the tainted drugs to markets in Europe and Asia and knowingly sold it to an unsuspecting public. What about BP or Exxon or Texaco, each of whom undertook risks that would prove to be catastrophic for the enviroment because they knew that their lawyers and lobbyists and public relations efforts could be effectively used to minimize the cost and make enviromental genocide more profitable than being a good citizen? Don't forget the weapons industries and the contractors whose entire existence depends upon never ending war and bloodshed. The pharmaceutical industry fast tracking dangerous drugs through the FDA then bribing healthcare workers to prescribe it to patients with the goal of creating a customer for life. "A customer for life" ... a patient who must maintain a steady dose of this drug for years or decades or literally for life. Is the health and well being of the patient the primary objective of this treatment? I say you would have a hard time proving that the drug companies and health care providers weren't more motivated by profits and limiting "downside risks" than they were motivated by helping the sick be healed. Automobile manufacturers who are still fighting new innovative safety measures because of cost even though the evidence clearly demonstrates that a focus on safety would cause fewer people to die. Is that really that much different than actually killing someone? I would call that a gray area at best.
There are some that estimate that over 250,000,000 humans were killed in the last century by the governments of the world. How many of those deaths can be traced to government actions taken on behalf wealthy business interests and corporations securing market share and accessing resources? I submit to you that a very large share of those deaths can be laid at the feet of corporations.
Am I saying that corporations are evil? I am, but not for the reason you probably think. Corporations MUST, by their very nature, be evil. This is not an indictment of capitalism, rather, it is an indictment of corporate personhood. Over the last 150 years the law has been re-wrtten and interpreted to give human rights to corporations. They have become "persons" under the law. What that means to the rest of the planet is that there is now a new species of being that shares our world with us. This species has no physical body. It cannot get sick or die. It can't go prison for it's crimes and it has ONE purpose, PROFIT. Aristotle talked of the "soul" as if it were determined by the "nature of the thing". Well, the nature of a corporate person is to maximize profits for it's shareholders. That's it. Seriously! That's it. There is no morality beyond that.
What I find so completely unacceptable about this is that corporations, unlike every other species of life on earth, are merely legal creations of man. We have created a "super-person" by government decree. Behind these super-persons hide natural persons who benefit from the policies and activities of the corporations, but don't let anyone fool you, in the rare instance that actual human beings are taken to task for the behavior of the corporations who employ them, the names change, but the super-person remains the same. That is why they were created in the first place. Corporations are nothing more than a cover behind which investors may hide from the consequences of their choices. For small fee, INCORPORATE!!!
Look, I am now and have always been a gung-ho supporter of free enterprise, but when business wealth and power are used to manipulate government into granting them unfair advantage or even coerced to destroy entire peoples and civilizations on their behalf, that's when it's gone too far. I submit to you that if individual human beings were left in the forefront, acting as free participants in a free market, not protected by legal creations like corporations and trusts and foundations and even governments ... a truly free market would emerge. It would grow in a complex world of voluntary contracts and moral choices for which actual human beings would held accountable.
Ok, I'm IN. Let's get Kony .... but don't stop there. With success in this effort I hope we are inspired to take on bigger and bigger fish. I promise you ... if we don't become aware of the true power of corporations we are going to wake up, sooner rather than later, and find ourselves ruled by a group of "super-persons" who are obligated by their very nature to create war and debt and suffering. These are the most profitable businesses on earth, how could it go any other way?
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