Good Morning Friends,

At what price, Immortality? That is what we've been discussing.

You know, late in the nineteenth century, with industrialization of the United States corporations went from temporary, project-based entities to permanent concentrations of oligarchical power, or "private tyrannies," and so forth. Corporations became personalized, they became almost like people, as the expression goes. Perhaps both more than people because they are "immortal" and have limited liability. But this development was viewed with dismay by conservative legal scholars, who viewed the very existence of corporations, themselves, as an attack on market principles (1).

Let me just say, here, that corporations are, by definition, vampiric entities. We'll come back to that later.

Remember, "immortality" is not possible without robbing life-force from others. Mario Puzo opened his novel, The Godfather, with a quote from Balzac: "Behind every great fortune lies a crime." Indeed, Don Vito Corleone told his son, Santino: "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." In Puzo's novel, The Last Don, Don Clericuzio told his oldest son, Giorgio, that he would be attending the Wharton School of Business, where he with the expressed purpose of learning how to steal money while staying within the law.

It was reported, in the late nineties, that over half the U.S. trade with Mexico, had been intrafirm, trade happening by companies - the movement of goods across borders, with themselves! This was up fifteen percent since the passage of NAFTA. In 1989 U.S.-owned plants in northern Mexico, employing few workers and with virtually no linkages to the Mexican economy (in other words, taking resources and subsidies but giving nothing to the host country), produced more than 33 percent of engine blocks used in U.S. cars and 75 percent of other essential components (2).

The post-NAFTA collapse of the Mexican economy in 1994 led to the increase of U.S.- Mexico "trade" and the subordination of Mexico into a service role for the U.S. economy, as a provider of very cheap manufactured goods, with industrial wages at one-tenth those in the U.S. (3). As a result, poverty increased almost as fast as the number of billionaires increased, and in 1999 up to half the population could not get enough food to eat; and yet the man who controlled the corn market remained on the list of Mexico's billionaires (4).

In the early WW II period, George Kennan, one of the most influential stategic planners, assigned each sector of the world its function. Africa was to be exploited by Europe for its reconstruction. A year earlier, a high-level planning study had urged '"that cooperative development of the cheap foodstuffs and raw materials of northern Africa could help forge Europen unity and create an economic base for continental recovery (5)."' Europe was to be reinvigorated by draining more life-force from Africa. Vampires are powerful, mysterious beings, and long-lived, potentially immortal. But they cannot survive in that form without drinking the blood of lowly mortals.

From 1945 on, the United States used Brazil as a '"testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development based solidly on capitalism."' The experiment, as it was conceived, was carried out with the '"best of intentions."' Foreign investors benefitted but planners '"sincerely believed"' that the people of Brazil would benefit as well. According to the business press, Brazil became '"the Latin American darling of the international business community" under military rule, while the World Bank reported that two-thirds of the population did not have enough food for normal physical activity. 1989 was a golden year for the business world, with profits having tripled over 1988, while industrial wages in Brazil, already among the lowest in the world, had declined another twenty percent (6).

Corporations are, by their nature, structurally vampiric on public resources. As you know, it was not the New Deal but World War Two, which pulled America out of the Great Depression.

The big worry of the business community was what were they going to do after the war. It was agreed generally, that without state intervention, the economy would head right back into depression. Industry, especially, aircraft could not exist in a pure, competitive, unsubsidized, actually free enterprise environment. Harry Truman's Air Force secretary said that the word to use was not 'subsidy' but 'security' (7). The Pentagon was thought to be a good way to socialize risk and transfer cost to the public. The same holds true for just about every dynamic sector of the economy: computers and electronics, automation, biotechnology, and communications (8).

One last illustration of "really existing free market theory." Two economists, Rob van Tulder and Winfried Ruigrock did a technical study which found that '"virtually all of the world's largest core firms have experienced a decisive influence from government policies and/or trade barriers on their strategy and competitive position"' and '"at least twenty companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies, if they had not been saved by their respective governments,"' through bailouts and state takeover (9). These were "zombie" organizations. Zombies are undead creatures as well, that persist unnaturally by eating Brains! Brains! Brains!, don't they?

One such organization was Lockheed, which was saved from collapse by massive goverment by massive loan guarantees. The same study pointed out that government intervention, which has "been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries... has played a key role in the development and diffusion of many products and process innovations - particularly in aerospace, electronics, modern agriculture, materials technologies, energy, and transportation technology,"' as well as telecommunications and information technologies generally, and in earlier periods, textiles, steel, and energy. Government policies '"have been an overwhelming force in shaping the strategies and competitiveness of the world's largest firms."' Other technical studies reached the same conclusions (10).

All references came from Profits Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Noam Chomsky. Seven Stories Press. New York, Toronto, London, 1999.

1) p.97

2) p.110

3) p.110

4) pp. 27-28

5) p.113

6) p.27

7) pp.36-37

8) p.37

9) p.38

10) p.38

I'll continue a little later on.

wingedcentaur