Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings

[Joanne98]

By Joe Bageant, AlterNet
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/

A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:



"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.



"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."



My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.



I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.



For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.



The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.



For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.



Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.





DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"



"I am the Son of God."



"Grab a cross on the way out."



On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...



Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?



Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.



The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.



With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.



At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.



Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

continued>>>
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141668/consciousness_capitalism%3A_corporations_are_now_after_our_very_beings/

[Teaser]

1. eh, I used to feel that way

but I grew tired of the constant sense of outrage.

[bos1]

2. please explain nt

[crikkett]

5. As someone who grew tired of my own constant outrage,

I'll try to explain.

A constant sense of outrage over a long enough period of time drives away good people, and leads to loneliness, illness and death.

For longevity and good health, one needs to know peace in their lives and in their hearts.
One needs to feel useful and one needs to find beauty and positive meaning to life.

This sometimes means learning to live within 'a system', learning to live with certain evils, knowing that it's not bad enough, yet, for a real change to happen. Real change happens gradually, over time, not instantaneously.

[Teaser]

7. yeah, what you said

.

[irislake]

9. That's why I am going to adopt two six week old beagle

puppies tomorrow. I had to have my 14 year companions put to sleep a month apart this spring and have been frothing at the mouth about corporate corruption and hyper-capitalism ever since. At least I will have puppies to cuddle and prove to myself that the entire world is not completely rotten!

[crikkett]

15. I'm sorry for your loss, but you should have your puppies by now

I know they'll make your home a happy place. Me, I can't train a puppy to save my life, so I'm better spoiling rescues.

[irislake]

17. I'm exhausted

but it's worth it. Thanks!

[tiny elvis]

11. oh

you're talking about Prozac

[crikkett]

16. laugh,

but one day you may mature enough to understand what I wrote.

OBTW I'm told by people who know that prozac and other depression drugs don't make you happy but they make you feel nothing. My source said she felt like she had a lobotomy/didn't care about anything.

That's not the kind of peace I was trying to describe.

[Teaser]

6. meaning

I'm married, with kids, I work a lot, I'm often tired, and only have the energy to fight certain battles.

This isn't one of them anymore.

[RandomThoughts]

3. That is much of the intent.

The only way for a group to maintain control, is for them to try and show they have complete control so that people despair and do not challenge their illusion of control.

They have to create an illusion of control to maintain control.

And it does not have to make you angry, see it for dishonesty when their is distortions, and do not be a part of it, and explain why to people.


There is a story,

Your walking down the road, and a guy in a uniform walks up to you and says you can't walk where you are. You go to other side of the street.

You are walking on another day, and a clown comes up and tells you that you can't walk where you are. You laugh at him.

What is the difference? The difference is your perception of the power of the two people, not the power they have.

That is why there is certain distortions of unjust power, like shredding of Constitution. They add to the illusion of power of some groups. If they follow the Constitution they tell the people they are just like them, if they blatantly lie and steal, they say they can do those things. The very acts of illegalities are there to support the illusions that they can do what they want.

Every report of theft supports the power of the thief.
Every report of justice, fair and accurate, lowers the power of the thief.

That is why they are so adamant about no prosecutions. It is to maintain their illusion.

[girl gone mad]

4. happy, happy...

joy, joy.

[rantormusing]

8. I hear ya bro i hear ya

:hug:



I feel the same at times, and constantly shake my head at what constitutes news, radio, newspapers, and especially tv. At times i fear we're so doomed, we may never recover, but then i realize maybe that's what we need so we can start over.


But, there's still hope, love, and commonsense, we need to help, hope, inform, and share with those who bring us joy and to those we give our love to on a daily basis.

[snake in the grass]

10. This is worthy of memorization. n/t

[Grinchie]

12. The interconnectedness of Corporate Control is overwhelming at times

But in the end, life is what you make of it.

I choose to avoid the Corporation the best I can, and that means moving back towards a more primitvie, simple life, yet armed with the awesome knowledge and Wisdom earned by many years in the trenches.

I find it very easy to live with the ethical challenge of not supporting the Corporate machine any more than is absolutely necessary.

You can't quit cold turkey, because the amount of knowledge that is hidden from us, through the destruction of culture, the doping up and discarding of our elderly, and the focus on the Corporate way of doing things, such as building furniture, growing food, staying healthy or providing for our own water and waste facilities. These things take time to re learn, but it is doable.

Sadly, nearly 85% of the earth is living in an Urban environment, which is totally unsustainable without the infrastructure and resources to support them, so these people are going to have a very difficult time if the Corporations put any pressure to bear.

I don't doubt that the Corporations are already in a position to put enormous pressure on the Government and force the Lawmakers to do their bidding, or cause a collapse of infrastructure.

The Government has no faith in the people to withstand any outages, nor can they stomach the thought of the well polished Image and marketing hype about America being the greatest country on earth, shattered in an instant of collusion by Corporations Too Big to Fail. They will bring down the Country, and happily retreat offshore to wait out the carnage.

[zoff]

13. They are capitalists ...

that exist on both sides of the aisle. Profit is the common motive. The Dems are true corporatists, the reich wingers, the imperialists. Both are advocates of expanding corporate influence globally but through different means. Clinton did through free-trade and free-markets. Some, not all, of their more vicious conservative counterparts would rather do it by taking advantage of the fact that America is the only remaining superpower (but for how much longer, who knows). Bush 1 rejected PNAC and paid the price. Bush 2 initially rejected Cheney's overtures but acquiesced after 9/11, when a nationalist fervor existed to support the Machiavellian agenda. The Imperialists are the war mongers who will make an example of any country, say Iraq, if they see profit at the end of the escapade. It doesn't look like history is on their side.

When profit is at stake, corporations behave predictably. The giant Bechtel, who saw endless moola in rebuilding the country, called it quits when 49 of their employees were killed and when contract moneys were shifted from construction to security. I wonder which of the two carried more weight. Halliburton is, obviously, the biggest fan of war. While the motive is still profit, repuglicans and neocooks would rather profit AND guarantee economic dominance by flexing military muscle. That's the difference between the two.

If they want to expand corporate influence globally, that's fine with me, but only to the extent that social justices i.e. environment, children, poverty, are not sacrificed, and if they have any heart in them, to make the world a truly better place to live in. But to do it at home, and cause grief and pain to the American worker and people, the way Healthcare corporatists are doing, is downright wrong.

[fasttense]

14. I for one welcome our new (and maybe not so new) corporate overlords. n/t

:yoiks: