Follow the money - a week in sharp focus

This week Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he was nominated for after just 12 days in office. This is the commander in chief of the world’s strongest armed forces which has military bases in 63 other countries. During his brief presidency his armed forces have killed countless (because they aren’t counted as humans just “collateral damage”) innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; as well as turning a blind eye to new Israeli settlement building which is stoking a 3rd Intifada in the West Bank; while also handing more than $13 trillion in tax payers’ money to the banks that finance and profit from all these wars; and he is currently gearing up for a war with Iran. You couldn’t make this Orwellian Double-Speak up, and yet this happened, and a thousand other examples happen every day.

In my more innocent youth I stood for political office campaigning for increased power to corporations, as I then believed that through them, wealth for all would be created. I used to believe in the principal of the “Corporate Citizen”. I now understand that my youthful rose-tinted idealism was wrong. The “Corporate Citizen” is an illusion.

Corporations may do good things from time to time, and that is obviously positive. Likewise, individuals within corporations will act within their moral and ethical codes; however their actions are diluted as part of the collective corporate machine. The actions of a corporation will rarely be made for selfless reasons or for the good of man-kind, but purely for self-serving motives, done to convince consumers or investors of how warm and caring they really are.

The very same corporation with the other hand will still practice the same potentially immoral policies that they have always done to maximise return. That is their job. You cannot blame them for it, but you don’t have to be a puppet to it either.

There is nothing wrong with the profit motive when it is balanced out by a human moral compass, or if it has an independent and free democracy to hold it to account. This is not the system we currently have, and to try and believe that it is akin to King Canute attempting to hold back the tide.

All corporations by their very psychology and legal responsibilities will act the same. For a million dollars of extra sales they will influence individual politicians and media outlets; for a billion dollars of extra sales they will influence governments and the whole media system; and for a trillion dollars they control the system, as they will own the system. With trillions of dollars at stake they will move the world.

It does not matter whether it is an Australian food corporation putting known carcinogens into your food to save on raw materials costs, or a TV company not running an investigative feature if it might potentially have a negative impact on key advertisers, nor a clothing corporation using child labour to save a few bucks per T-shirt. It does not matter if it is an oil corporation ignoring an oil spill or hoping for a massive spike in prices thanks to a war, a manufacturing company moving its headquarters offshore to avoid paying compensation to the workers that its actions has poisoned, or an armaments corporation wanting a war to sell yet more weapons. Neither does it matter if it is the banking corporations that stand to make trillions more from any of those other corporations, or through a whole new sector they invented like that of carbon trading; they do, and will, all act the same way.

This system works because we choose to ignore its reality and its all pervading influence, and especially because we look at its every deed in isolation. Until you view the world through open eyes, by looking at news of the world around you in a broader context and understanding the psychology of the system, then you will merely be a puppet within it.

The first step towards freedom is to acknowledge how the system actually is. Until then you are a slave to its whims and cannot take action to change it for the better and for the sake of mankind.