Changing the Current Corporate Paradigm Will Help America Thrive

The corporation is an artificial construct originated centuries ago to give investors and workers legal protections that balanced risk taking with entrepreneurial rewards. This construct propelled national economies to new heights, which would not otherwise have been achieved. Corporations and derivatives such as LLCs to this day provide America with the best balance for entrepreneurial growth. Yet, with the creation of the corporation, a new life form began that has now evolved to test the very nations that gave it life. Like Frankenstein, the corporation has loosened its legal bindings at the economic frontier and now has the potential to become the corporate-state master of its nation-state creator.

This imposition by corporate-states upon nation-states is appalling. Our government institutions have been rotted from the inside to their skin and their innards have been replaced with government zombies that dutifully perform functions set upon them by their corporate masters. It is a ghastly phenomenon centuries in the making, visible to the naked eye for at least a hundred years, formed from the initial character of corporations. Yet, we humans are caught in our original paradigm of corporations as servants of the nation and are unable to see a new corporate threat evolving.

We call the newest corporate form transnational or multinational. Yet these terms merely define the world’s current paradigm of the frontier edge of corporatism. They name this static moment in the development of the corporation, and not what it is becoming. “Anational” refers to the transforming paradigm of the corporation that has loosened its host nation’s bindings and that is no longer attracted to any nation except in terms of what it might gain from that nation, similarly to how the term “asexual” refers to a human that is not attracted to any gender sexually except for how that contact might produce its offspring.

We mistakenly attempt to label anationals’ evolving perverse power as having a human form, AKA Citizens United. Yet the only way we can continue to call corporations people having citizen power is to also label their behavior humanly perverse, almost psychopathic. Our problem is that we attempt to give human characteristics to all life forms. We would rather call a great white shark a man-eating monster than to swim in its skin, defining its repeatable patterns meant to enhance its sustainability on this planet. If instead of calling corporations people, we could understand how corporate-states consistently act to sustain their lives, we would not have to denigrate corporate existence with human behavioral terms but rather celebrate corporate life form, as we should any other on this planet.

Celebrating a life form does not mean approaching it cavalierly. At their evolving frontier boundary, corporations are gaining enormous capacity to bend nations to their will, in ways that do not help our citizens. In an effort to stave off the inevitable, scholars like Michael Porter write of co-opting corporations toward patriotism, citizenship, or perhaps more precisely corporate responsibility to host nations, or at least including nation states in the list of corporate stakeholders. Yet these attempts to persuade corporations to take on human characteristics are only stop gaps to the evolving threat.

Just as the U.S. can coax China to participate as partners at this stage of our empire’s shifting power sharing, the U.S. can still coerce corporations to participate as national citizens to some extent, even those as powerful as corporate-states. Yet, just as the power struggle between China and the U.S. will ultimately intensify, our ability to co-opt the growing power of corporate states is also waning.

The time will come when corporate states gain a plurality of world power and work together for the betterment of the metropolis of corporate states. By then, nation states by necessity will also have evolved to retain our maximum power. We will then no longer see corporations as people with the rights of citizens. Instead they will finally be correctly defined from the nation-state perspective as a means to an end and will be measured and rewarded for what they can add to the nation-state.

The idea that corporations are people with citizens’ rights will be replaced by the idea that corporations are self-sustaining life forms that live amongst us just as bacteria and bears do. We will acknowledge that corporations perform vital functions in the advancement of humanity but that they can kill us if we do not respect their limitations. Nations will pursue the harnessing of anationals’ positive aspects and will intensify efforts to corral their negative ones. We will understand that corporations are not wild horses that can be contained in national regulatory pens and ridden rodeo style.

Most nations today are nowhere near large enough to contain anationals’ eventual strengths with only national regulatory and legal tools. Nations will by necessity have to cooperatively combine efforts. Unfortunately, the world will also destabilize as smaller nations attempt to consume one another to find scale large enough to survive the next millennium. The very existence of corporate-states will cause tribes to devalue regional differences that have defined current national boundaries formed to combat external threats. China is not a single tribe nor is India or the United States. Others will follow.

Some might label my corporate musings as conspiratorial paranoia. Yet conspiracy is simply another human trait that would attempt to contain the evolution of anationals within our human boundaries. Conspiracy by definition suggests that anationals are somehow more aware of the global shift taking place than nation-states and thus are light years ahead in their planning and efforts. Along the bell curve, some nations such as China are able by their historical circumstances to have a much longer planning horizon than others. Similarly, some anationals are much more aware of their future posterity than others and are acutely acting on their global economic advantages. As a whole however, nation-states and corporate-states are adrift in this sea of evolution, making short-term sustenance moves, as they are able.

Great white sharks instinctively know that they must sometimes migrate throughout the entirety of the ocean, but like humans they give their greatest weight of thought to their next meal rather than where they will be during mating season. Yet, somehow the world aligns to bring them home again, and it will also align to reposition the power of anationals higher in the hierarchy of states. Thought to how nation-states must react to this realignment is warranted.

What this realignment means for humanity is unclear. The role of the nation-state to serve its people, economically and otherwise, providing a balance along the life wheel of work and play, protection and freedom, stability and exploration, sustenance and opportunity is becoming increasingly threatened. People’s allegiances to corporate-states will strengthen as realignment intensifies, threatening national allegiances and humanity’s balance further unless we learn to coexist. Shifting our current paradigm of the corporation will serve us well in that effort.

Are Corporate States Alien Life Forms Here to Destroy or to Help the Human Race

For forty years, lobbyists have multiplied, as has their power to write and financially support changing laws of our country for their benefit. Sensing lobbyists growing power, politicians have enacted laws to limit corporate impact, but at every turn, other laws are passed that pat corporations on their backs for their ardent support of political clients.

For forty years, corporations have been nurtured in the womb of America’s heartland as inhuman zygotes preparing for eventual world competition. Yet, even as these multinational corporations grew stronger suckling on our country’s teat, their MBA mantra of short-term gains began to separate these new life forms from their motherland.

Citizens United was a celebration of the birth of the anational corporate state, corporations large enough to exist on their own outside of the reach of any one nation. Yet having broken free of inconvenient national bindings, corporate states could not just remain stagnant babies in our world. They must now evolve and commune together for their species’ survival.

Just as mankind grew from hunters and gatherers to city-states and finally nation states; just as nation states developed from mercantilist competitors to a league of earth’s cohabitants; corporate states must also now evolve. It is natural for these corporate states to want their own legislative bodies to form compromises in the shaping of bills that minimize intercorporate conflicts and that allow each to flourish like weeds in the gardens of their host nation-states.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is one such advance in their evolution. It continues their path of lobbyist democracy that has defined America for the past 40 years, yet it takes corporations to their next stage of evolution of feasting on nation state’s legislative bodies for corporate gains. Unless citizens of nation states learn that their conduit of representation has been usurped, and unless we finally agree to co-opt our corporate citizens into recognizing human citizens as stakeholders in corporate successes, America will ultimately become fodder in the new world order.

As a pragmatic nationalist, I favor learning to live amongst this new life form, the anational corporate state, and to harness it, even to domesticate it as we would a farm animal if possible for the betterment of mankind.

Humans evolved from living in caves to the nation states we see today. Along the way, we formed governments. Then these governments formed alliances and finally several world bodies. It was an evolution interspersed with several revolutions.

Corporations are another life form, incorrectly identified by our supreme court as people. That is why our supreme court is a legal entity, not one paid to do biological work. But as any life form, corporations too will evolve and, similarly to people, will most likely be involved in revolutions as well along the way.

They first appeared hundreds of years ago, well before the founding of America. At first, nation states thought they could be domesticated, even house broken, like little pot-bellied pigs. Over the years, America nurtured our cute little corporations and we wrote rules for their existence, which they seemed to follow for the most part. Sure, during the big wars, they exhibited wild like tendencies, often seeming to harm their nation state keepers in the process but we thought we had a handle on how to keep them tame.

But in reality, they were learning how to tame us. They were aliens, living in our world, like little terrorists cells do today, learning our ways. Somehow, they grew big enough to control the nerve centers of nation states, our political structures. They grew powerful enough to send nation states to wars on their behalf and to enforce and install puppet governments in other nation states. And when they became too large to exist within one nation state under its monopoly regulations, they finally learned how to split cells and to pass from one body to the next just as parasites leave their hosts.

As these new life forms continued to evolve, they mutated, each learning to live as one being with cells in multiple nation state bodies, hearts in one nation state, brains in another, still more organs and muscles in others. And they thrived and grew into corporate states, not tied to any nation, anational if you will. Yet at this stage, their existence was similar to the human stage of evolution perhaps in the feudal period.
It was merely another stage of their evolution however to want to commune together eventually. Certainly, corporate states have fought each other as well as worked together complementary. Yet they have had to find their ways individually and to seek each other out as they grew and developed needs. Communing together in associations helped to identify one to another more easily. And ALEC was a natural step in their evolution. With ALEC, they could form a modest “Governmental Function” of working together to identify how nation-state laws could best be constructed to mutually help this burgeoning society of corporate states.

Now if corporate states coexisted symbiotically with humans, say as trees providing us oxygen and wood without too much harm, they would be no cause for concern. But they do not. They have learned to mutate and grow within our systems and to cause harm. One needs to merely draw a timeline out into the future a few decades to understand that the trajectory does not bode well for nation states. Therefore, obviously something must be done for the human race to coexist harmoniously with the corporate state.

Anationals are amorphous beings and that even as laws are passed to contain them, they simply shapeshift to skirt the flimflam. Of course, I do not support the silliness of such flimsy cover for obvious lobbying that creates loopholes as large as trucks to drive home democracy splintering corporatism. This needs to be uncovered and bureaucratically defended even as they shapeshift to a new attack on our Republic.

Yet they are a life form that will not be snuffed out and they will grow as a cancer to consume the lifeblood of America unless we can co-opt them in some symbiotic fashion. So rather than beat my head against the wall that has been built between anational corporate states and our access to our own politicians, my intellectual effort will be to understand how we might harness their emerging strengths for the good of America.

After the 2012 Campaign, Will America Admonish the Supreme Court?

Having watched the political fireworks between Gingrich and Romney, Americans are questioning the wisdom of our Supreme Court’s “Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission” ruling. As a result of a proxy purchased justice system, America’s candidates now have the financial gloves to politically pound their opponents into the proverbial pavement. The price was merely holding onto the power of the presidency until the court could be packed and persuaded on the virtues of globalization.

Without Super PAC money to sling political arrows at each other, the candidates might have focused their remaining precious few dollars on the critical issues of our time. Instead, they now have the finances of a few elite to direct the public’s attention to the mud of swines. And if that display of nauseousness weren’t enough, President Obama’s PACs promise to spend a full billion dollars toward convincing America that Congress is evil and that he should be re-elected as a result.

The Roberts Court’s decision on Citizen’s United will ultimately be found a breach of justice and will be overturned by a future court forever marring our current court’s posterity just as Brown v. Board of Education exposed for all time the 1896 Supreme Court’s lack of judicial purity and impropriety exercised in Plessy v. Ferguson. But does an obviously incorrect court decision imply that the third branch of our Federal Government no longer functions as it was designed, or that its original design was flawed beyond its imperfect ability to correct its breaches and ultimately act in favor of its true citizens?

The Constitution’s framers intended Congress to act within its legislative boundaries in setting new laws and for the Supreme Court to act as a deterrent forcing Congress to stay within those boundaries. The Constitution set sticky limits on the Federal Government that could only be changed by super majorities of the States and, as such, was a promise backed by militia force for our nation not to deteriorate into tyranny. To keep the legislature from somehow circumventing this contractual guarantee bound in perpetuity by the acquiescence of the original 13 states, the power, authority, and responsibility to strike down Congress’s passage of laws that ignore our Constitution’s original meaning or those gained through a tortured path of amendments rests in the Supreme Court.

Some in our country suggest that the court’s actions have defacto attempted to usurp the Constitution by making laws instead of interpreting them. To imply such legislative capacity to the Supreme Court is however merely applying a broad brush of political spin to the fine line and minute edge of controversial deliberation of whether a law having been passed by Congress attempts to nudge its way past the terra firma of Constitution. Of course, controversial rulings have blurred this line somewhat and rulings cannot help but be swayed by the political biases of the men and women that inhabit the benches of our greatest judicial body. Yet, their actions are held to the light of millions of Americans and cannot fall too far from the true intent of the Constitution without one day being reversed by a very slowly evolving make up of changing justices who will oblige to smite the offending justices’ posterity with a reversal of law.

Lest we forget, if the upcoming political free for all of the campaigns of 2012 happen to turn American’s stomachs beyond the pale, we do not have to wait for the decades it will eventually take to reverse the Roberts Court’s decision on Citizens United. By virtue of our votes, we can force an amendment to the Constitution which defines what entails a Citizen of the United States to be, and this citizen’s amendment will then be the new bright line from which the Court will be admonished to interpret. All in favor shout Aye!

Without Economic Security, America Has No National Security

A corporation’s mission is to provide profit to their shareholders. Other stakeholders must be satisfied so that they support the corporation, yet America has no law against maximizing profit to the detriment of other stakeholders.

When China opened its doors after 150 years and created special economic zones in which American companies could set up shop as long as they brought their trade secrets and intellectual capital, 40,000 did just that without reprisal from the United States. It certainly was not illegal to do so, and of course, the American consumer was rewarded with somewhat lower prices.

Another stakeholder, Congress, got enormous campaign contributions by China bound corporations, and there certainly isn’t a law against that. In fact, America turns a blind eye to average senate races costing 10 million dollars that have been paid for by our corporations and banks, more than 90 percent of campaign donations. We do not fault our Congress for passing laws to help their corporate constituents nor do we fault our Supreme Court, whose recent ruling on Citizens United gave corporations the unique status of having citizen rights without citizen responsibilities.

By paying the $150 dollar fee to become a corporation, businesses gain property rights that are sacrosanct in America. Corporations can sell property even if it harms others, in most cases. In a very few, such as that is being raised with GE, when a corporation attempts to sell a trade secret or intellectual property that could put our fighting men and women in harm’s way, we stop the sale in the interests of national security. But when 40,000 companies took their intellectual property to China, America did not claim national security.

And why would we have when the China gold rush began in 1979? Our industrial belt had been rusted by international competition and we were told that globalization would bring millions of jobs to America. It did but it took tens of millions more away. We were also told that imported goods would be cheaper than American ones and they are. But the cost of lost jobs, lost wages, less taxes, fewer factories, transferred intellectual property, future GDP growth, trade imbalances, and greater interest on trillions of borrowed debt was way costlier than the savings from Chinese trinkets.

By moving millions of jobs off shore, we gutted regions of collaborating industries like Detroit, Youngstown and Pittsburgh, whose workers, engineers, scientists, and businessmen intermingled to create next generation developments that would grow America’s future prosperity. But can we fault our corporations just because their collective actions cost America millions of future jobs and GDP? No, we cannot for our laws do not even suggest that American corporations should consider our citizenry as stakeholders. And in 2011, America has not yet even considered that our economic security is directly tied to our national security.

Without yet considering how we will support a future war of attrition without domestic factories, our nation has not yet debated our financial security. America now has bulged her budget to 3.4 trillion dollar budget yet collects only 2.2 trillion in federal taxes. We are forced to borrow from the Chinese the very dollars we give them for their trinkets, while keeping 30 million of our citizens underemployed. Our credit rating has finally been lowered because of this folly, and now our Congress is faced with making deep cuts to our budget which may include substantially reducing our military capability.

We have not connected our past decisions to allow our corporations to give millions of intellectual properties to the Chinese in trade for access to their markets and to their cheap labor to our national security. Yet these decisions have in fact lessened our national security, because without economic security, we have no national security.