The men who started corporations learned from Dickens’ lessons about Scrooge.  They realized that humans, even the most "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clinching, covetous old sinners", can, given the right circumstances, become people who "know how to keep Christmas well".  These men needed to find a way to protect their profits from such a conversion and they found the way through their lawyers.

First, business lawyers bent the 14th Amendment to establish that a corporation is, legally speaking, a "person".  The Supreme Court went along with this rational and "Corporate Personhood" was created. This "Corporation Person" is legally bound to make as much money as possible for the corporate shareholders.  A CEO is only a figure head of the Corporate Person and is therefore legally bound to the same task as the Corporate Person: make money ahead of ALL other concerns. Thus if three ghosts visited a CEO and got him to grow a heart, he’d still be legally bound to continue his Scrooge-like ways.  He cannot change corporate policies to benefit humanity. Scrooge was the sole proprietor of his business.  With his conversion came positive changes for his employee and the local charities.

Because the nature of this business model is cold and heartless, corporations saturate us with messages that make us think it is all fair and above-board. After all, there is nothing unlawful about this structure. Granted, the law is twisted upside-down and sideways, but it is the law of the land. Businessmen and a conservative Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to remove guilt from this structure. By lawfully labeling corporations "people", the government can say with a clean conscious that it works "for the people".  Good-bye guilt. Why would humans do this to themselves? For the same reason the SEC doesn’t actively police Wall Street: to help keep capitalism’s Free-Market system as free as possible. We want the answer to all ethical questions to be, "It’s nothing personal, it’s just business."

With the government supporting their every move, corporations now own all the media. The very media that should be used as a voice for the people is now a voice for corporations.  Since corporations are people, it’s all legal, but there are no Dickens’ left on the air-waves to point out the abuses. (Before long the internet will be closed to the public as well if we fail to pay attention.) Through their media the corporations stand on its head the notion of "hard work to get ahead". Fair play is for the weak. If you want to get ahead you need to sacrifice your life to the corporation. You need to be able to throw Bob Cratchit out on the street for not working on a holiday and let tiny Tim die.  As you do this, you must be able to put your arm around Cratchit and say, "It’s nothing personal, it’s just business." If you lack the constitution to do this, then you are weak and not a hard worker.  A "hard worker" is someone who gives all to the corporation and whose end reward is a pat on the head when his job is cut and sent overseas.  A hard worker leaves the company jobless and with nothing except the comfort that "it’s nothing personal, it’s just business".

We were spoon fed this load of crap with a barrel full of sugar in the movie You’ve Got Mail.  As Tom Hanks slowly kills the American dream by putting Meg Ryan’s family business out-of-business with his Barnes-and-Noble-type corporate bookstore, we are soothed with the American mantra: "It’s not personal, it’s business". "Recite that to yourself every time you feel your losing your nerve," Tom tells Meg.

"This film is a classic Dickensian tragedy, and a warning of the excesses and abuses of the 1990’s strong economy. It illustrates in plain terms how people have been sacrificed for Borders Books, Starbucks Coffee, and AOL. Just as we laugh at how the American Indians sold Manhattan Island for some strands of beads, future generations will mock us for how we sold our souls for a handful of stock options. But in the meantime it’s business as usual; it’s nothing personal." –Dr. Mangrove (http://www.movie666.com/youve-got-mail-movie-review).

-A Christmas Carol taught us to remember that people are more important than business, or at least as important as business.  Because corporations write the Christmas messages these days we are taught that sacrificing yourself for business is the ultimate Christmas gift for your family. It is hog wash. Corporate salaries are so low that both spouses have to work thus destroying the family unit. Vacations and holidays are interrupted by cell phone calls and Blackberry messages from the office.  We worry that our corporate lords might think ill of us if are not ready to "hop-to" on our own time. Corporations have taken us back to the Dickens’ era by wiping out the middle class. Now all we are left with are the super-rich corporate owners and the huddled-masses who, like serfs of old, live in fear of their corporate lord’s next move.

Corporations have taught us all to believe that government work is crap so we don’t bat an eye when some basic service is privatized. Well, what this means is that if the price of electricity goes higher than we like, or a firm like Enron initiates deliberate rolling-blackouts, we are powerless to do anything about it. If the service was in the public sector, run by government, we would have a voice, but in the private sector we have no voice. Considering that we need to have our voices heard, it seems very stupid to deliberately move things from the public sector where we have a voice to the private sector where no corporation has to give a damn what we say or think. If you buy into the corporate rhetoric you must be thinking, "but we do have a voice: we can boycott their product or service." Oh really? Ok, stop buying gas, how much damage will you do to Big Oil? Imagine if oil was owned and run by the government: at least you could vote-out your representative if you think he/she is gauging you at the pump.

We are trained to believe that we have more rights in the private sector due to our "buying power". We are trained this way because corporations run every aspect of our lives, so of course we are going to hear the corporate mantra many times, every day, till we accept it as fact that it is better to boycott than to have direct representation in all matters concerning our lives.

But now you say, "But the private sector doesn’t use taxpayer money". True, but it costs you in so many other ways chiefly your health, is your health so easily sacrificed? Are not your health and representation worth paying a price to maintain? If your healthcare was supplied by the government at least you would never have to worry where to get healthcare if you lose your job. As it is now your healthcare is tied to your company, if you are laid off in a "down-size" you not only lose your job you lose your healthcare. You’re doubly screwed. And now with "bail-outs" it turns out the private sector does need your tax money, now you’re triple screwed!

We used to be told to fear "Big Brother" and we all assumed Big Bother was the government. Corporations preyed on that fear and we willing gave up our rights to the real big brother: the corporation. Now they keep us afraid of change and afraid of socialism, but socialism isn’t needed to combat corporations, representation is needed. But representation needs a public that is aware and paying attention. Corporations keep us all insanely busy so that we have no free time to seek good representation. Instead we just hope that corporations will do what is best for us even though they are bound to an economic system that is designed to do just the opposite.

Look at what happened in Chicago to Republic Windows and Doors: the workers were able to use the government bailout as leverage to negotiate a severance package. The only reason the workers received anything at all was due to the bail-out and the fact that, as taxpayers, this gave the workers a say in the matter. Without the government connection, the workers would have legally received nothing. In the public sector no CEO, owner or elite board member gets to make-off like a bandit when a business goes under. Look no farther than AIG for how it works in the private sector.

With such clear examples across this country of private sector melt-downs while government run businesses function without financial issue, it is almost unbelievable that our collective idea of "fixing" the problem is to bolster a broken system that will in time fail us again.  With such clear evidence before us that "We the People" have real power outside of the private sector will we ever stop selling-off our power to the rich?  Heaven forbid! Every last cent of our taxes is used to ensure that the welfare system for the rich continues along with the myth of the free-market system.   

We cannot hold ourselves in a position of hoping that our corporate lords have a Scrooge-like conversion and re-write the laws in our favor.  We are on the verge of having a president who will (may) listen to us. Question him, question his cabinet, question Congress: ask why they have sold out the republic to the corporations. How is it that the bullshit happening on Wall Street is not a clear sign that corporate America needs to be shattered into a thousand pieces?  Laws need to be re-written.  Incorporation needs to become illegal, except in limited capacity as originally intended; corporate lobbyists must be banned from Congress; we need to over-turn the ruling that corporations are people.  Let the middle class rise again through individually owned small businesses. We have separation of church and State, now let us have separation of corporations and state.  It’s OUR republic not the corporation’s republic.

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent," Gore Vidal.

If you believe what the talk show hosts and others say in the media that "we cannot survive without corporations," remember that a talk-show-host’s paycheck comes from a corporation.

Some Excellent Quotes:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country," Thomas Jefferson.

 

"They (corporations) have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate." Baron Thurlow (English).

"Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces," Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), Swiss-born scientist and physician.

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless," President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864.

This is from Thom Hartmann:

Thomas Jefferson pointed out, in an 1816 letter to William H. Crawford, "Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association." He also pointed out in that letter that some people - and businesses - would prefer that government not play referee to the game of business, not fix rules that protect labor or provide for the protection of the commons and the public good. We must, Jefferson wrote to Crawford, "...say to all [such] individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens [like corporations], on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease."

Most of the Founders advocated - and all ultimately passed - tariffs to protect domestic industries and workers. Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln actively stood up for the right for labor to organize, intervening in several strikes to stop corporations and local governments from using hired goon squads to beat and murder strikers. But conservative economics - the return of ancient feudalism - rose up after Lincoln's death and reigned through the Gilded Age, creating both great wealth and a huge population of what today we call the "working poor." American reaction to these disparities gave birth to the Populist, Progressive, and modern Labor movements. Two generations later, Franklin Roosevelt brought us out of Herbert Hoover's conservative-economics-produced Great Depression and bequeathed us with more than a half-century of prosperity.

But now [2004] the conservatives are back in the driver's seat, and heading us back toward feudalism and serfdom (and possibly another Great Depression). Only a return to liberal economic policies - a return to We the People again setting and enforcing the rules of the game of business - will reverse this dangerous trend. We've done it before, with tariffs, anti-trust legislation, and worker protections ranging from enforcing the rights of organized labor to restricting American companies' access to cheap foreign labor through visas and tariffs. The result was the production of something never before seen in history: a strong and vibrant middle class. If the remnants of that modern middle class are to survive - and grow - we must learn the lessons of the past and return to the policies that in the 1780s and the late 1930s brought this nation back from the brink of economic disaster. -Thom Hartmann from 2004.

"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men," Plato

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves," Edward R. Murrow

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public," Theodore Roosevelt.

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority," Ben Franklin.