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Another Bad Word
Corporation. Nuts. I can’t use it anymore. It’s a word I always liked too. I don’t mean the legal babble about "an association of individuals, created by law and existing as an entity with powers and liabilities independent of those of its members," as the dictionary states its major definition. I mean "any group of persons united or regarded as united in one body," which the dictionary treats as its minor definition. Under the latter definition, a shopping mall, a cruise ship, a hotel, a proprietary city, or any other "multiple tenant income property" is a corporation, whether incorporated legally or not (see Spencer MacCallum’s Art of Community). The difference between the concepts is important. The State’s spin masters will appropriate any important word in the common language for its own purposes sooner or later. The word "liberate" had a noble and honorable purpose attached to it after WWII, for example, while today it signifies invasion, theft, and tyranny. The word "corporation" was popularly associated with companies that provided us with goods and services that we chose to buy until the word was co-opted by the State to represent bureaucracies that ruled us without our choice at all. Thus the central banking insurance fraud was declared a corporation so people would confuse it with real insurance companies, such as they were in the Thirties. Thus the national postal monopoly was declared a corporation so people would confuse it with real delivery services. Do employees of the FDIC and the USPS work for private profit-seeking corporations, or do they work for the State? That question becomes confusing when asked of private insurance companies that contract their services to Medicare. Employees of the so-called third-party-payers receive their paychecks from the company, but where does the company get the money? Or ask Haliburton employees where their money comes from? Or ask the merchants in the small town next to a military base whose money they depend on? These questions are too confusing for me to sort out any kind of sensible answers; we have a mixed economy, they say. Yeah, mixed-up. Socialists rant about the evil of private corporate monopoly that doesn’t exist, and never has existed, without the guns of the State to enforce it. Exactly how did PG&E manage to monopolize energy production and distribution in California? By legislation. PG&E imitates a private corporation while its operation is wholly controlled by bureaucrats employed directly by the State. The notion of a private corporation acts as the fall-guy when things go wrong; never blame the legislators or the bureaucrats for their criminal rules, regulations, and directives, and always blame the corporations for their criminal greed. Who do we blame when the lights go out? Such "private" corporations got a lot of bad publicity before war took over the headlines. Without becoming too explicit about whose corporate hand was in whose State pocket, and vice versa, we were led to believe that phony accounting practices were to blame. Nobody mentioned that accounting practices are deduced from IRS code that nobody can understand. The blind bureaucrats lead the blind public down a blind alley, and the courts play blind-man’s bluff to find a scapegoat. Why do we put up with this nonsense? It’s the law. Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce. Why, pray tell, did commerce need regulating all of the sudden after nearly a decade of unregulated financial growth and prosperity? Because the long and sordid history of mercantilism had proved beyond dispute that whoever controlled commerce by force, controlled the people, and controlled their wealth. The boys who wrote that were not country patriots, they were city lawyers, and they knew where power and money came from. They still do. The District of Criminals is infested with them. The legal corporation is a fraud, compromised as it must be by the legal use of force, and sustained by legal transfers of tax money, and by revolving doors between the rich and powerful at the top. Meanwhile, the rest of us pay for it all, as intended. Call it a trickle-up effect, as a percentage of what we earn with the effort of our lives trickles up to fund the rich and powerful in many mysterious ways, to fund their rule over us. It has always been so. It is the nature of political government, the rulers and the ruled. It’s a shame. If only I could find one decent, honest, proprietary insurance company that would insure me against coercion, I would be happy to put up with the rest. But in the absence of that, I can still refuse to play their game by their rules, within the limits of what they call legal. I refuse to vote in political contests. I refuse to respect them. I refuse to fear them. The only response I have to their pretentious threats and promises is laughter; the DOJ in particular has the best standup comics in the county. Futile gestures. Maybe. But I am not alone. There is another kind of corporation in the world, a loose assembly of like-minded people who refuse to submit to tyranny, who speak out against it, and who laugh at it as well. We are a group of people united in principle, if not organized or recognized as a corpus of political influence. But we are a corporation, still. The good kind. I would like to live in a society of such corporations. It’s too bad I can no longer use the word.
Robert Klassen [send him mail] is a retired med tech and writer. Here's his web site. Copyright © 2003 Robert Klassen
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July 1, 2003
