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Follow the money - a week in sharp focus

By James Fairbairn - posted Friday, 16 October 2009


If there was ever a week where following the news brought into crystal sharp focus the real nature of our society and its penchant for greed and avarice over simple humanity, then this was it. Never in the two years of running Open Your Eyes News has the elephant in the room been so clear for all to see. And yet, the vast majority choose to ignore it or simply cannot see what it is, because we are programmed as a society to view every story in splendid isolation without ever looking at the jigsaw around us as a whole.

The elephant I refer to is the single biggest driving force in our entire civilisation. It feeds our greed and avarice, it controls every aspect of our entire lives, and yet, despite its protestations, it is completely devoid of all human emotion, reason and compassion. It is the limited liability corporation, the public listed company, and it is the cornerstone of everything we see around us.

It can be argued that by channeling the aspiring profit motive in a mutually serving (for the shareholders) structure run by a professional management class, that mankind has achieved its greatest technological and lifestyle leaps forward. In some ways that is the case; at least for the lucky half of the human population who reap its benefits. It has also led to our civilisation’s darkest actions. According to its legal obligations a corporation has but one function in life; to maximise return on investment for its shareholders; nothing more, nothing less. As a result, the corporation is singularly self interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context. If it means that human beings will suffer, so be it; as long as the corporation remains unharmed.

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For the last five months every media outlet and every government on the planet has warned you of the terrible impending danger of swine flu. The World Health Organisation declared a “Pandemic Level 6” the highest category there is. In modern parlance it is “Black Death 2.0”. And yet, where are the bodies lying in the streets or the black crosses on the doors of the infected? In reality the incidence of flu deaths in the southern hemisphere’s 2009 flu season was below average, while incidence and virulence rates in the northern hemisphere are also falling. How and why could this happen?

One very large clue could be in GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) financial results announced this week, which showed that, so far, they have sold swine flu vaccines worth some £2.2 billion since the panic began. The Australian Government alone has spent AU$200 million of taxpayers’ money on buying enough vaccine for every man, woman and child in the country, and yet the annual flu season is over, and infection rates are dropping like a stone. And let us not forget that GSK are just one of a number of massive pharmaceutical corporations to profit from this pandemic.

So if money is the motive, how could they pull this off, despite the evidence you can see with your own two eyes? Well Adolf Hitler explains this a little in Mein Kampf when he said “The broad mass of a nation … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one”.

Every corporation strives to make extra sales. That is its job. Fear is the easiest sales tool there is. By dint of a thousand press releases, hundreds of lobbyists, employing professional bloggers and “opinion formers”, and by multi-million dollar public relations campaigns, they can, and do, sway the tide in their direction.

When you also appreciate that corporations are not just individual structures, but are inextricably linked through a web of cross ownership, multi-board directorships, bank loans and advertising budgets, you realise that in all their self serving desires, logic, humanity and compassion will get trampled underfoot for the taste of a quick buck. Imagine how much leverage you will seek to exert for £2.2 billion of extra sales? Then imagine that this is only one small cog in a big wheel, and you will gain a greater understanding of how the system around you operates.

The politicians you elect are supposed to be your insurance policy against what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address to the nation in 1961. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

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Eisenhower may have been referring solely to the rising power of the USA’s armaments industry, however, that industry operates no differently to any other, and is merely a part of the corporate web.

How easily this vast influence can corrupt was clearly demonstrated by the actions of Australia’s Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, this week when he spoke on the subject of the now eight-week ongoing Montara oil spill off the north west coast of Australia. Here was a man who, as lead singer of the band Midnight Oil, used to be Australia’s most vocal campaigner against uranium mining (which he now signs off on), Tasmanian logging (which he now signs off on) and all environmental destruction by corporations. Yet this week, in virtually the only media coverage this week for Australia’s worst ever oil spill, he actually said that the spill has had “minimal environmental impact” and “only killed some 13 birds”.

This is an oil spill that is 15,000 square kilometres in size and can be seen from space! So how could a once principled man betray all he stood for so dramatically? Potential investment into Australia’s multi-billion dollar North West Shelf oil and gas sector probably had considerable influence over his, and the general media’s lack of reporting.

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.

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About the Author

James Fairbairn, "The Historian", is co-Founder and editor of www.openyoureyesnews.com and is also Vice-President of The Humanist Society of Western Australia. A historian by training, prior to emigrating to Australia he was a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party in the UK (2005 General Election).

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