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End the Occupation of the Corporate State

Fascism is not an economic policy

Image by Peg Hunter via Flickr

The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
January 31, 2018

It happened so subtly, we missed the corporate coup. Like shadows, corporations surrounded our country and slowly strangled it. They crept into Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the FDA, the military, the Department of the Interior: everywhere you look, a corporation controls the decisions of this nation. We have become the occupied territory of brand names, corporate logos, monopolistic power, and corporate greed.

It would be easier to understand what has happened if they wore red armbands and goose-stepped. But no, the minions of corporate power wear false smiles, carry empty promises, and fly in private jets. The less-powerful rank-and-file of the corporate state look like our neighbors, relatives, friends. They are not our enemy. It is the destructive behaviors of the corporate state, and its occupation of our government, culture, and society that we must rebel against.

Every aspect of our lives has become an extraction zone for the insatiable hunger of corporate greed. They take our labor, sweat, and time. They steal our work, ideas, inventions, even thoughts. Their extortionist prices devour our earnings. They supplant our culture with theirs. They replace education with corporate programming. They broadcast propaganda and advertisements instead of news. They pass policies and legislation that maximize profits instead of protecting people and planet. They privatize the public assets built by collective investment. They take the resources of the land and dump the costs of destruction onto future generations. They tax our earnings to fund police and military that guard their interests. They suck up our life savings through health costs that come from the toxic side effects of their greed.

The corporate state gives us back mere illusions of freedom. Behind the smoke and mirrors, empty rhetoric and false words, lies a clenching fist of control. The moment you step out of line or dare to dissent, you run smack into the invisible electric fences of their laws and police. If you stay within their boundaries, they reward you by allowing you to think you have consumer choices. Each option funds their stockpiles of wealth, but you’re permitted to fantasize that you can vote with your dollars for the lesser of two evils.

We are occupied territory from sea to shining sea, from urban to rural region, from our outer edges to our inner souls. The corporate state extracts profits from every angle of our lives. To win independence requires inner, outer, and utter revolution. It demands that we put the tools of nonviolent struggle to work toward changing every aspect of our lives – social, economic, political, spiritual, cultural, mental. If we wish to end the occupation of the corporate state, we must turn our lives inside out and upside down until they serve us, and not the other way around.

Rise up. Rebel. Throw the occupiers out.

Author/Actress Rivera Sun syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and has just launched the sequel, The Roots of Resistance, and is the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio. Website: http://www.riverasun.com

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection and the sequel, The Roots of Resistance. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here.

From the archives:

Corporations Are A Mixture Of Humanity’s Greatest Nightmares

Rivera Sun’s The Roots of Resistance, reviewed by Guadamour

Paul Street: We Live In An Abject Authoritarian Plutocracy

What Would Happen If We All Refused To Go Quietly To The Slaughterhouse? + The Roots of Resistance

Corporate Demons Possess Our Nation’s Soul

Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader: History of The Corporate Coup d’etat

Chris Hedges: We Have Undergone A Corporate Coup D’état In Slow Motion

21 thoughts on “End the Occupation of the Corporate State”

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  11. I’ve been thinking about why it is that the American public has made peace with corporate control. We know that corporations control our economy and our political system, and yet we don’t care. Why? So best as I can tell it’s perhaps our delusion that as consumers we can control corporations via the “vote” we make with our dollars. It’s as if our status and power as consumers is more important to us than our status as citizens and our democratic power at the ballot.

  12. “The corporate state gives us back mere illusions of freedom.” If you think that is new, then you have things backwards. The USA was never a democracy. It was a plutocracy, with illusions of democracy, ever since its “founding.” If anything has recently changed, it is that an increasing number of people are seeing through the illusion. An increasing number of people are agreeing that the emperor has no clothes.

    Chomsky has spoken about this. In a brute-force dictatorship, everyone sees where the whip is. But in an illusory “democracy” such as ours, the people are misled by lies, and they believe themselves to be in charge, and then brute force is used only rarely. Of course, it is still used on occasion to silence those who try to dispel the lies. For instance, Chelsea Manning spent several years in prison, part of it in torture.

    The word “occupation” suggests that the nation used to belong to us. I don’t think that is the case. Are we asking for a return to some past era, such as the 1950s, when the middle class was slightly larger? I grew up watching “Leave it to Beaver,” when all appeared to be right with the world, and the father had an explanation for everything. It was an illusion then too.

    Most people don’t see what the problem really is. They want to go back to the 1950s, when the alligators in the swimming pool were small. They don’t understand that, if you don’t want big alligators in the swimming pool, you have to ban the small ones too.

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