Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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Great question Toro...
I don't hate corporations, but I see them as very dangerous to a democratic society, the commons and our environment. Here is a liberal I admire and agree with on almost every issue, including corporations.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Speech at the Sierra Summit, September 10, 2005
Excerpt:
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.
And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.
This (Bush) White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined; they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction.
The only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy. You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny, where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but, over the long term, the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number-one issue for all of us: to try to restore American democracy, because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.
Whole speech
"My hero is St. Francis of Assisi because he understood the connection between spirituality and the environment. He understood the way God communicates to us most forcefully is through the fish, the birds and the trees and that it is a sin to destroy those things."
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
