by

MFTN: Corporate Demons Possess Our Nation’s Soul

Corporations Are Not People

Image by Doran via Flickr

The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published Dec. 4, 2016
August 7, 2018

Corporate demons possess our nation’s soul. They crept in stealthily, full of trickery and deception, but now they’re lodged in place, as surely as if they had stormed our homes and halls of power with guns and tanks. Perhaps we’d recognize their coup if they had assassinated a flesh-and-blood president instead of merely stealing the souls of all our elected leaders.

A corporation is an invisible entity. It has no body to appear on television or slip into a congressional seat. It is the living, breathing human worshipers possessed by corporate greed who kill, maim, and destroy. For a lump of money, a human soul is bought and turned into the pawn of corporations. For a bribe or a salary, a human being averts their eyes and does the dirty work. For a sweet deal, a real life person decides to allow a corporation to injure and oppress, impoverish and harm.

Without us, corporations are nothing more that words written on documents. They cannot drill for oil. They cannot foreclose on homes. They cannot deliver eviction notices. They cannot pass legislation. They cannot poison water or spew toxins in the air. They cannot arrest those who rise up against them.

There are millions of people railing against corporate power in our government, and rightly so, for corporations have stolen the souls of public office holders. They have corrupted the hearts of elected leaders. They have bought the obedience of senators and representatives, judges and sheriffs and presidents. But, the struggle is far vaster than just our political power-holders. It is not just a monetized, secularized, or politicized conflict. This struggle goes straight to the heart and soul of every man, woman, and child in this country.

Who is willing to be the first to evict corporate power from their heart? Among the citizens, who will expel the twin demons of our habituated consumer conveniences and corporate greed from our lives and pocketbooks. Who will decolonize their minds from the entertainment, advertisements, logos, slogans, and ideologies of the corporations? Who will refuse to bring one more purchase of the corporate overlords into his or her house? When the early American colonists were rebelling against the British, they sacrificed the luxuries of imported British cloth, tea, and more. Young girls wore dresses of homespun cloth to the old-fashioned versions of the prom. Among the modern Americans, who is willing to sacrifice our ease, convenience, consumerism, in favor of freedom from political injustice, diversity in our economy, and economic justice?

If we want to evict corporations from Capitol Hill, we are going to have to evict them from our own lives in ways that will not be easy. We will have to sacrifice. We will have to make do and do without. We will have to pay more for the product from a local, small, or independent company that does not have the same economic advantages as mega-corporations who enjoy tax breaks and subsidies, the ability to pay unjust wages unchallenged, the luxury of externalizing the true costs of their products, the insider industry deals on shipping and bulk product purchasing, and much more.

But each time your heart balks at a sacrifice, look at the horizon of possibilities. Fix your eyes on the vision of what we’re working toward … it is far greater than the sacrifices we face. We are striving toward functional democracy that represents, cares for, nurtures and sustains the whole of the populace, not just the ruling elite and corporate profit. We are working toward economic justice and vibrant, diverse, local, small, and independent businesses that have a fair and level playing field. We are moving toward protection of our beautiful planet that keeps us all alive, renewable energy, and a world free of pollution and toxicity. We want political justice so that we can assure and maintain economic, cultural, racial, gender, and all other forms of justice. We want arts, culture, and entertainment driven not by monopoly and narrow agendas, but by the beauty and bounty of our diversity and many perspectives. The list goes on.

The possibilities on the horizon line of change are tremendous. Fix your eyes on them as we make changes in our own lives during the efforts to erode and evict corporate power and greed. Remember what we’re sacrificing for as we overthrow corporations from the halls of power of our country. We are struggling for the heart and soul of our nation … and we have a vision for which it is worth wrestling corporate demons until, at last, every man, woman, and child is free.

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:

It Starts with the Lie that We’re Free by Shawn S. Grandstaff

John Pilger: The Contamination of the Corporation Runs Right Through Our Lives

End the Occupation of the Corporate State

Corporations Are A Mixture Of Humanity’s Greatest Nightmares

Revolt Against The Shallow Deadliness Of Our Corn Syrup Nation

The Corporate State Will Kill Us–Rise Up!

Shopping as an Act of Resistance

Tis the Season To Wage Boycotts by Rivera Sun

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

How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy by Ralph Nader

The Problem is Civil Obedience by Howard Zinn

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

16 thoughts on “MFTN: Corporate Demons Possess Our Nation’s Soul”

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      • For LeftyMathProfessor… This is from Rivera’s novel, Billionaire Buddha, that looks deeper at wealth, property, domination and capitalism. This is one of my favorite quotes as it is an almost poetic rendering of one face of capitalism.

        From pg 99:

        “Dave’s expression fell into deep shadows as he grappled with the parasitical nature of capitalism. The spine-shuddering vision of a massive beast haunted his thought; he watched capitalism sink its talons into living creatures and suck their blood and sinew until the emptied sack of bones and skin collapsed. In the New World, capitalism had unleashed its seething violence to massacre a continent of civilizations that objected to its parasitic invasion. The coasts of the east, the farmlands, the Appalachia’s fell to the all-devourer. No more! the natives cried, but the Spanish conquered Mexico at sword point and sucked up the California coast. The French trappers wormed into the tall forests. The English, the Irish, the German, the Dutch: the hordes continued to advance as greedy European elites consumed wealth, food, equality, and justice, thrusting thousands more into desperation, and ultimately, onto the ships departing for the Americas. Manifest Destiny delivered divine rule to white-skinned masses; opposition was plowed under, along with the arrowheads and blood of massacres and battles….” A heartless novelist capitalized on the ill-founded myths and a well-funded foundation ensured her books were read. A thousand false premises paraded around in the psyche of a nation without a single courageous child to cry out, “Look Mommy, the Empire has no clothes!”

        It had no clothes, no heart, no decency, no shame, no foundation in truth, no reality. Capitalism was Greed unleashed like Satan’s right hand man, justified by convenient misinterpretations of the Bible, and rationalized by sciences that failed to account for the reality of the world.”

        • Dariel — This passage, and the “Poisoned Apple Pie” link you posted earlier, are both great. I’m sure I’ll be linking to “Poisoned Apple Pie” many times in my various online conversations in the future. My complaints about “coup” and “small and independent businesses” were only intended as complaints about those terms, not about everything Rivera Sun has written.

          I suppose I have been feeling defensive lately, because I find myself to the left of so many self-described “anti-capitalists” in ways that I see as significant and many of them do not. Many of the self-described “socialists” in the USA today would probably be called “market socialists,” but to me that sounds like an oxymoron. They think “Mom and Pop stores” are okay. But I do not, and so I guess I have been picking fights with people who would have expected to be my friends. It may be partly because of my contrarian temperament, but I think I also have another and better reason: We have at most one chance (if it is not already too late) to get our revolution right, to change to a way of life that will not be rapidly extinguished by ecocide. Seemingly small mistakes in ideology can be the basis for a counter-revolution that will kill us all. Little baobab trees grow into big ones, as the Little Prince explained. And that’s why I argue with Mom and Pop. Actually, I think they’d agree with me — they’d rather turn their store into a socialist redistribution center, and worry more about satisfying people’s needs and less about getting their money. But Mom and Pop were driven out of business last year by Walmart and Amazon. Mom died when she couldn’t afford her meds. Pop, last I heard, is living in a homeless camp on the west side of town, and the cops keep trying to drive them out. “But where?” the campers ask. “Not here,” the cops reply. Pop doesn’t say much. Sorry, I seem to be rambling.

  9. I am sure the author has her eyes open. This is her take on the American nonviolent revolution, the counter-coup and simultaneous war with England that eventually led to the still birth of a fantasma of democracy…from 4 years ago. http://www.riverasun.com/oligarchy-as-american-as-poisoned-apple-pie/ Dandelion Salads published this article but it seems hidden from Google search .
    Note to Lo …The link in your comment goes to a WordPress sign in page
    Thanks Lo

  10. MFTN is in favor of “small and independent businesses,” but not “corporations.” Is this like saying we’ll allow small, tame alligators in the swimming pool, as long as they promise to behave themselves and not grow large? Is this like saying that we want only a small, healthy amount of cancer in our bodies, and not a lethal amount? MFTN seems to me a bourgeois revolutionary. Am I missing something here?

    The revolutionaries of 1776 and 1789 (France) believed in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness/property” or “liberty, equality, fraternity,” respectively. They thought it would be brought to them by the new economic system, capitalism. Every merchant wanted to be free to compete, to put self-interest ahead of community, to be as self-interested as any monarch of old. It really wasn’t about “fraternity,” and without that ingredient the “equality” and “happiness” won’t last either. And the “liberty” turns out to be just liberty for the rich.

    Their revolutions were bourgeois, and merely replaced monarchy with a slightly broader, self-perpetuating plutocracy. Charles Dickens wrote of how powerfully crushing the poverty was. Karl Marx asked why the revolutions had not brought “liberty etc.” and decided that capitalism was not the panacea it had earlier been imagined to be. It turns out that any kind of commerce — even honest, voluntary trade — increases inequality and creates plutocracy. But that understanding was suppressed in the USA, suppressed by the rich who wanted to maintain control. And so the general public’s concept of “revolution” and “liberty” did not advance past the notions of 1776 and 1789. I feel a little bitter when I see someone calling themselves progressive and advocating a new bourgeois revolution.

    Today the petit bourgeoisie see their charming little businesses being swallowed up by the giant corporations, and they want to go back to the good old days when the plutocracy was a little broader, when they themselves were among the plutocrats, when the alligators were young. But you can’t go back.

    Chris Hedges has popularized the word “coup” in this context. He often uses the phrase “corporate coup d’etat in slow motion.” I think he attributes that phrase to someone else; I forget who. But the word “coup” is used in a fashion that suggests the arrival of plutocracy is something recent. It is not. The USA was “founded” by a few rich white men, stealing land from red men and labor from brown men. It has always been controlled by a few white men. During a few decades after the New Deal, those few white men permitted other white people to have a slightly improved standard of living, and thus gave an illusion of democracy, but it was always an illusion; the nation continued to be ruled by a handful of rich white men. How often has anyone else been a president or a senator? And even the presidents and senators do not hold the real power.

    Now the illusion is fading. Now the “progressives” want to go back to the good old days when they had an illusion of democracy. Make America Great Again. The “progressives” have their own version of Trump’s slogan.

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