Democracy, Corpocracy, Kleptocracy

[marmar]

from the Corporate Crime Reporter, via CommonDreams:


Published on Wednesday, November 7, 2007 by Corporate Crime Reporter
Democracy, Corpocracy, Kleptocracy
Corporate Crime Reporter


Democracy - government by the people.Corpocracy - government by the corporation.

Kleptocracy - government by the corporate criminals.

Now there’s a three step program Wall Street can relate to.

Brought to you by Robert Monks in his new book - Corpocracy: How CEOs and the Business Roundtable Hijacked the World’s Greatest Wealth Machine - and How to Get it Back (Wiley, 2007).

Bob Monks ain’t your wide-eyed hippy.

He’s New England WASP.

Elite private schools - St. Marks School, Harvard, Harvard Law School.

Plugged into Wall Street at a young age.

Or as he puts it - “I belonged to the meritocracy of the well-born.”

For the first forty or so years of his life, Monks was shaped by “unchallenged inherited values.”

Then Monks moved to Maine in search of a political career.

He remembers driving past the International Paper Company plants in Livermore Falls, Maine and seeing the Androscoggin River “coated with six feet of foam glistening in the sun.”

No one wanted the pollution in the river, but everyone justified it.

Public officials would say - “We know that the foam is poisonous, but the community needs the jobs.”

Company officials would say - “We’re in a competitive world, and we can’t afford expenses that our competitors don’t have to pay.”

And while the workers and town people could clearly see the threat, they couldn’t figure out a way to deal with it.

“Contemplating that foam introduced me to the unintended consequences of corporate functioning on society and led me to question for the first time whether the great corporation was a kind of Frankenstein creature,” Monks writes.

Bob Monks loves capitalism.

But hates the capitalists who abuse it. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/07/5087/

[BrklynLib at work]

1. Idiocracy....that is what it feels like

[endarkenment]

3. Only if you are at the screwn end of the funnel.

The global elites are doing just fine. In fact never in the history of the planet have they been so well off.

[BrklynLib at work]

5. Ahhhh. A return to the Dark Ages...

[tom_paine]

2. Very true. I hear a lot of condemnation of capitalism for our environmental woes

but Soviet Russia was an environmental nightmare as is Communist China today.

Whatever our problems, they cannot be solved by command-and-control economies.

The "throw the baby out with the dishwater" attitude towards capitalism pisses me off, as if people couldn't see very clearly the murderous horror that most Communist states are, such as the Old Soveit Union and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

[AndyTiedye]

4. It's Not Capitalism When Robber Barons Buy the Government

Anyone who thinks this is capitalism should try bidding against Halliburton for one of those government contracts.