The 2012 Story

by John Major Jenkins

  And the bottom-line financial interest of the stockholder is how to make as much money as possible. Some companies do good for the community and for people, but the lingering problem is always the trajectory dictated by the bottom-line profit motive. Publicly traded companies are structured and required by legal, court-decided mandates to place growth and profit above competing interests—including the public good. Therefore, a corporation can behave against the public good, and will even be protected by law in doing so. If an environmental law prevents a corporation from polluting, it can lobby and change the law, or simply pay the fines and continue polluting, continuing to cause health problems for human beings living in the affected areas. This happens constantly in the corporate arena. If it is more cost-effective to pay fines than to reengineer its pollution controls, then the courts will agree that it is within its rights. The courts then become a type of servile legal monstrosity, in essence being paid off by Seven Macaw.

  The halcyon days for corporations were amplified by a brilliant technique for maximizing profits. All businesses have two parts of the profit equation to deal with: expenses and income. If income exceeds expenses, you have a profit. The profit motive demands as much profit as possible. If some or all of the expenses could be pushed outside of the accounting tally, in effect forcing someone else to pay them, then you’ve just made a killing and really maximized your profits. In the legal jargon of corporate accountants, this technique is much used and is called “externalizing.” It’s an effort to externalize, project, or coerce someone else to cover your costs. Corporations have learned to do this by getting in bed with politicians. Huge amounts of money now go to lobby efforts, which are able to finagle tax breaks and loopholes, financially beneficial legislative decisions, and what is referred to as “corporate welfare,” meaning the government—that is, your tax dollars—will defray costs incurred by big companies. We, the taxpayers, become the ones who pay for the externalized costs of huge corporations.

  Since the brief turmoil and human rights breakthroughs of the 1960s, the business world has increasingly moved toward megamergers and huge umbrella-like corporate entities, no longer limited to any particular nation. It’s gone transnational; national boundaries are meaningless in the modern corporate culture. And today, our world is heading toward the ultimate wet dream of the corporateer: globalization, one world government—that is, the one Mega Company that rules the world.

  And here’s the ten-trillion-dollar question: If a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it? That is the question asked by Joel Bakan in his 2005 book The Corporation, recently made into an informative documentary. Bakan decided to examine case histories in the activities of various corporations, performing an analytical diagnosis of sorts. Using specific examples, Bakan found that corporations exhibit the following personality traits:

  • A callous unconcern for the feelings of others

  • Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

  • Reckless disregard for the safety of others

  • Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning for the benefit of self-interest

  • Inability to admit and feel guilt

  • Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior

  Each one of these diagnostic traits is demonstrated by numerous examples from case histories. For example, corporations have a strategy of periodically locating to different Third World countries, tapping the human resources there until workers begin to demand better pay and working conditions. Instead of engaging in negotiations, corporations typically close down operations in that locale and relocate. This demonstrates an inability to maintain enduring relationships. As another example, corporations are willing to pay huge amounts of settlement money for damages and deaths, but do not admit guilt or release apologies to those affected. This demonstrates a callous unconcern for the feelings of others and an inability to admit and feel guilt. Corporations behave outside of social norms by willingly breaking laws and paying the fines, as long as the fines are more cost-effective than solving the problem—regardless of the deadly nature of the problem.

  The official diagnosis of such traits and behavior is: psychopath. Corporations are the type of person who cannot be trusted or relied upon, the type of person who is very, very dangerous. This psychopathology of corporations is driven by a self-centered and self-serving narcissism. The implications of this approach to understanding the diabolical nature of corporations is staggering. How did the corporation gain such power and become such a Frankenstein monster? The turning point appears to be the moment when personhood was granted to corporations, when the Promethean spark of life was injected into a formerly lifeless body.

  Thom Hartmann traced the origins of this magical moment in the history of big business and reveals that it was based on a total deception. In his book Unequal Protection (2004), Hartmann traces the first judicial decision, which later served as a precedent, to the 1886 case Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. In it, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state tax assessor, not the county assessor, had the legal right to determine the taxable value of fence posts along a railroad’s right-of-way. That’s it. Doesn’t sound too groundbreaking, does it? In the case’s summary headnote, however, the Court’s reporter wrote something that had no legal precedent and didn’t have anything to do with the case. He wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”24 That Court reporter happened to be J. C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad president. Hartmann points out that the Court ruled no such thing. The presiding chief justice wrote elsewhere that they had not discussed “the Constitutional question,” and nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.

  Nevertheless, corporate attorneys quickly adopted the language of the head note and began to quote it as legal precedent. Hartmann writes: “Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate about the issue), was quoting Davis’s headnote in subsequent cases. While Davis’s Santa Clara headnote didn’t have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions its new doctrine of corporate personhood became the law.”25

  And such is the artifice by which Frankensteins are created. This all happened very quickly, under the cloak of deception. Even the president of the United States was aghast and perplexed at the growing power of the big companies. In his annual address to Congress in December 1888, President Grover Cleveland observed, “As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”26

  Exxon/Mobil, Monsanto, Microsoft, Nike, Pfizer, Telecom, and the AIG are just a few of the megacorporations that now rule the world, monopolize the resources of small countries, act with impunity, influence political process, broadcast propaganda, manufacture consent, and by law can live forever. Their birth certificates were forged. They and their Seven Macaw managers and governmental policy-makers are the fulfillment of the Maya prophecy for 2012.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ending the War on Us

  If you’re lucky you’ll come to a crossroads and see that the path to the left leads to hell, that the path to the right leads to hell, that the road straight ahead leads to hell and that if you try to turn around you’ll end up in complete and utter hell…. Then, if you’re ready, you’ll start to discover inside yourself what you always longed for but were never able to find.1

  —PETER KINGSLEY, In the Dark Places of Wisdom

  The co
rporation and the government have an intimate relationship. They need each other, and are as interconnected as light and shadow. One tells you to open your pocket, while other picks it. Government, which in a democracy is supposed to represent the people’s interest, is getting fat by charging the people interest. The absurd equation of representative democracy says we told government to do that to us. As for the corporation, its diagnosis as a pathological entity is now clear. Joel Bakan asked the reasonable question, and the case histories gave him the answer. Given that we can now understand the personhood of the corporation to have a diagnosis of narcissistic pathology, what kind of relationship does it have with government?

  THE CODEPENDENT CORPORATION

  Psychotherapist and social commentator Anne Wilson Schaef examined the relationship between addictive behavior and larger social institutions in her book When Society Becomes an Addict. This approach is relevant to the question because the biggest corporations in the world are addicted to oil. Her previous book, CoDependence, laid the groundwork for understanding codependent and addictive behaviors in a larger context, tracing the convoluted ways that dysfunctional people tend to create dysfunctional corporations.

  Based on Dr. Schaef’s work, I suggest the following: An institution or corporation is composed of its internal units, no matter what unassailable abstract identity it is granted by the courts or adopts as its mission statement. In others words, a corporation will in practice be a reflection of the mind-set of its internal units. In this real world, a corporation will express the basic dynamic of its constituent parts. Schaef found that the behavior and inter-relationships of workers in many companies follow a pattern. Rather than the objective professionalism that we might expect, workers were instead found to create, experience, and sustain extremely dysfunctional and codependent workplace relationships.

  Very few people are mature enough to maintain a completely professional and objective workplace ethic. A veneer of professionalism may exist, but it usually hides deeper dysfunction. Workplaces, in fact, often serve as the stages on which we unconsciously try to work out deep-set personal issues and problems. The hierarchical structure of companies allows and reinforces a dysfunctional tendency, as the corporate environment encourages and offers status, power, control, and advancement within the constantly shifting possibilities of the modern work world. Typical Pavlovian strategies of reward-stimulation-gratification are routinely employed by the upper management, confusingly combined with poorly concealed favoritism and nepotism. The end result is a type of employee-employer relationship that is untrusting and codependent.

  The employee’s job is to enable the corporation in its vices and distorted self-image, and vice versa. The employee may be charged with the responsibility of facilitating the corporation’s vices, such as its need to externalize its costs so as to maintain high profits, setting up an ethical dilemma if the employee has any conscience. The employer enables the employee’s vices in providing opportunities for power plays and personal gain at the expense of others, or perhaps merely in providing money for addictions. Apart from vice fulfillment, the employer at least promises to fulfill the employee’s need for money, security, vacation time, fair treatment, health benefits, and so on. Thus, the employee expects the employer to take care of his or her basic needs. After all, that’s the deal, that’s why a person sought the position in the first place.

  For the corporation, an employee’s needs are costly. They are on the “expenses” side of the profit equation, and it’s a cost that many corporations have learned how to externalize. Wal-Mart, for example, grew fatter by encouraging its employees to apply for Medicaid rather than providing a decent health program. The corporation will always try to squeeze more out of its workers, provide for them less, while the employee feels its long-term loyalty should be increasingly rewarded with time. Corporations are essentially duplicitous, with the mouth assuaging employees’ insecurities while the hand is picking their pockets. To make this metaphor even more tortured, the duplicitous corporation that picks your pocket is made up precisely of you and others like you. It’s no wonder that doctors are prescribing more antidepressant drugs than ever.

  This entire structure is unhealthy, dysfunctional, and codependent. My interpretation begs the question: If a company is seen as an aggregate of its components, and the people within it are basically codependent, then what is the company codependent with? The corporation, as an aggregate of dysfunctional and codependent persons, needs someone or something outside of it to take care of its projected garbage, its externalized costs. In practice, a whole spectrum of targets have been used—entire groups of people, Third World countries, minorities, and so on—but there is one well-known entity that has become the primary codependent partner for corporations. That is government. Through their huge lobby efforts, corporations coerce governmental policy-makers into legislating tax breaks, loosening environmental laws, and creating other benefits so that profits can be maximized and costs can be covered by someone else. This externalizing technique requires an intimate connection between corporations and the government. In what is known as corporate welfare, government covertly arranges for someone else to cover the externalized cost of big business. That someone else is, ultimately, you, the taxpayer.

  So we have a vicious circle in which corporations, including one that you may work at, is designed to be in a codependent relationship with another entity, the government, who manages your tax dollars and hands them over to your employer. In time you can only give less to your employer. This results in a certain prospect of diminishing returns for the corporation, otherwise known as sucking you dry. The corporation is a huge cannibalizing virus, feeding on itself until it is dead. This vicious circle lies at the heart of the flawed thinking that drives Western civilization: We are killing ourselves in order to thrive. The result is short-term profit for some and inevitable impoverishment for all. The holistic nature of the system has been disregarded, and the efficacy of the system can be maintained only with lies and deception. Eventually, the charade must end.

  Our economic system is failing because it is built upon faulty premises. The circularity of supply-and-demand economics would be hilarious if its consequences weren’t so tragic. Note the unfortunate paradox of the “Coal Miner’s Riddle,” which is being played out time and again in so many parts of the world:

  Daughter: “Daddy, I’m cold.”

  Coal miner: “That’s ’cause we ain’t got no coal.”

  Daughter: “Why not?”

  Coal miner: “’Cause I’m broke, can’t afford it.”

  Daughter: “How come?”

  Coal miner: “They let me go at the coal mine.”

  Daughter: “Why?”

  Coal miner: “Because there’s too much coal.”

  We in the modern world live in a global crisis at a crossroads. Despite the illusion of security created by temporary bursts of wealth driven by resource control, our behavioral choices have set up institutions that are destroying the world and making it uninhabitable. Why is it that human beings are manifesting this self-destructive drive to dominate and consume the world at any cost?

  THE WAR AGAINST NATURE

  Divisive self-serving politics driven by egoism has created a schism in the collective psyche. The artificial construct called the ego has its uses, but to organize an entire civilization around its gratification has led us to a precipice. One of the many ways in which this manifests is a destructive attitude toward nature. Territorial expansion, land parceling, habitat destruction and species extinction, resource drainage—all of this reveals the impact of Western civilization. And to be clear, this attitude is particularly rampant in the brand of Western civilization practiced by American policy makers and corporations. All of the Americas. North America, including Canada, has more regulatory laws in place than do Central and South America, where pollution and wilderness eradication is rampant, but North American companies exploit loopholes such as energy and pollution credits, whic
h they trade among themselves like baseball cards.

  With Seven Macaw running the show, nature itself is a threatening and dangerous “other.” Worse than that, philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr observed that for modern man,

  nature has become like a prostitute—to be benefited from without any sense of obligation and responsibility toward her…. It is precisely the “domination of nature” that has caused the problem of overpopulation, the lack of “breathing space,” the coagulation and congestion of city life, the exhaustion of natural resources of all kinds, the destruction of natural beauty, the marring of the living environment by means of the machine and its products, the abnormal rise in mental illness and a thousand and one other difficulties.2

  Like an addict compulsively seeking the next fix, running unconsciously on automatic pilot, the Seven Macaw system tries to bring everything under its dominion and control. But this is a monster of our own creation, a direct consequence of deputizing ego as the sole sovereign of All Reality. We feed and enable Seven Macaw. WE have been waging a war on nature, on life itself, and therefore, without even knowing it, on ourselves.

  As the old saying goes, “You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will speedily return.” This anecdote from the Middle Ages has two readings. It’s like one of those magic diagrams in which the eye perceives either a candlestick or two faces looking at each other. The first, literal level, is that of a typical householder trying to keep their yard tidy. Mowing and weeding and trimming branches is a constant task, for nature will always encroach into the little domain of order that you try to maintain. This approach to nature assumes a separation of the human being out of nature, a particularly acute development among societies where the individual ego is accentuated. In this process, the human being is artificially abstracted from nature, as if it is not part of it. To the extent that the artificial ego is the fulcrum of the identity, this is true. The ego doesn’t belong to nature, it is an artificial construct. This situation is not “normal” in two senses: One, it leads to the problems sketched above, and two, traditional cultures (meaning virtually every culture apart from those that embrace the values of Western civilization) have had a more integrated relationship with nature. World history as seen through the lens of Western scholarship diminishes this fact, preferring to emphasize the demands of survival and the products of material culture. Here modern historians are attentive to the lowest common denominator, a reductionist approach that wouldn’t dream of even trying to identify the “highest common factor” spoken of by Huxley and the Perennial Philosophers. As a result, ancient people are turned into struggling parodies of our own materialist agenda who couldn’t manipulate the environment in the superior way that the modern world can. We developed out of them and are in all ways better, and better off. This is, in its essence, the myth of progress. And it is a myth in the sense that the modern mind sees a myth, as a lie, a fiction, an untruth.