Toxic Entities

An infection is sweeping the globe as you read this

RADIO FAR SIDE

The Paper Golem

If you’ve read my book, Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood & the Legal Fiction, then you are already aware of today’s topic, and you have more than 100 footnotes and 50 citations for further research. If you haven’t read it, you are unaware of the means by which our world is being transformed, while protecting the perpetrators.

With the shameless plug out of the way, let’s dive in.

I am of the opinion that corporations are the most insidious and pervasive societal ills we face right now. My book explores the origins and evolution of corporate persons, from ancient Sumer to the upcoming off-world entities. They are the product and embodiment of fascism, and they don’t care a whit about us.

Corporations are soulless immortal beings of our own creation that are eating the life out of our civilization and our species. They have infiltrated and infected every aspect of our lives. They sit in our living rooms, hide in the cabinet under our sinks, and control nearly every morsel of food and drop of water we take in.

Corporations provide near-impenetrable protection for the people who operate them. They thrive by eating each other, growing larger and more powerful with each meal. They are nearly impossible to kill and governments will hand over the wealth of nations to attract and feed these beasts. They are there at our births, and bury us when we die, and they infest every aspect of our lives in between.

Yet, anyone who cares about freedom and liberty is laser-focused on government as the culprit, ignoring the fact that corporations own the governments, dictating which laws to pass, how they are to be enforced and against whom they are intended.

Let’s back up a moment and look at this concept called “fascism”. The term comes from “fascis,” an ancient Roman symbol denoting power through collectivism. The symbol is the well-known bundle of twigs bound together with an axe-head protruding from them. The US House of Representatives has two large fasces adorning the dais. As Benito Musolinni noted, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

So, we dig into “corporatism” and find: Corporatism is a collectivist political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, on the basis of their common interests.

As it turns out, all this lumping together of people into “communities” according to characteristics and interests is…well, fascism. If you consider yourself part of some far-flung community of, say, wine lovers, you are a fascist by definition.

This is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with collectivism - up to a point. Certainly much of human achievement has only been possible by the banding together of humans into collective effort. No major public works could be possible with collective effort. However, elevating the collective as more valuable than the individual leads to a very dangerous place, one which we are all witnessing before our eyes.

In the past century, corporations (collectives) have been granted “personhood,” giving them existance and power beyond that of the humans inside them. In fact, through a concept called the “corporate veil,” the humans running these organizations can act with impunity, with only their paper golems being held responsible for their actions.

Furthermore, corporations have acquired extra-national status and the ability to influence governments through power of the purse (the Royal Fisc) and political donations to favored candidates. They formulate policies, dictate laws and reward compliance by virtue of their collective power and influence.

These “persons” have rights and privileges tradtionally associated with natural human beings. They are also endowd with effective immortality, since the entities can and do operate in perpetuity apart from the lives of their founders. They accrue wealth, property and power far beyond the ability of natural humans, because they do not die except as an act of will.

An analogy for the way corporations work is as follows:

You buy a car. The car runs forever and has its own bank accounts, lines of credit and a group of owners behind it. If you mishandle the car and kill someone, you are completely immune from liability and the survivors are forced to sue the car. At worst, the car’s insurance will be forced to pay any settlement, but there are no consequnces for you. If the car decides to disassemble itself, you will likely be hired as driver for another car, with an enormous salary and bonuses if your car makes money for itself. Furthermore, your car can make unlimited donations to political parties, candidates and causes to get legistlation and regulations favorable to itself passed into law.

If we humans have any chance of winning the battle against neo-feudalism and - by definition - fascism, there are several things we need to focus on. As Henry David Thoreau famously said, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

1. No political activities. Ban all political contributions to candidates, parties and causes and maintain strict political neutrality.

2. Remove the corporate veil in all criminal cases. All officers and board members are personally and directly liable for organizational criminal activities.

3. Create a corporate death penalty. If the corporation (officers and boards) are found guilty of crimes, there is an option to pull the corporation’s charter and disban the organization forever.

These paper golems are out of control and taking over the world through M&A, acquiring land, criminal and fraudulent practices, political activism, and NGOs. There is literally very little time left before they have completely consumed all organic human activity.

There is a lot of value to be gained from collective efforts, but once these organizations started acquiring rights and legal status, they began to grow beyond our capacity to control them.

These parasites have given us ESG and DIE. They dictate policy for entire nations. They hold all of us for ransom in a thousand different ways, and yet we have exactly zero control or say in how they are operated.

By buying controlling interest and placing their hand-picked people on the boards, massive golems like BlackRock and Vanguard have taken over a significant portion of the world’s entire output, and their annual revenues are larger than the GDPs of most nations. And most dangerously of all, they have infiltrated the most intimate parts of our lives and control nearly every aspect of our existance.

And they do it with impunity and without any limits on their actions.

Governments are not our biggest problem. Anymore, they are nothing but corporate divisions that enforce corporate policy on us rubes. There are no choices - in anything - but those selected for us. The candidates and parties are just drones placed before us to complete the illusion of freedom and choice, but the corporations benefit from any winners because they own the drones and control their every move.

We are quickly running out of time to strike at the root of these beasts. We are the Sorcerer’s Apprentice hacking up the magic broom, only to make hundreds more. We must remove their power while we still have any ourselves, or soon we will have none and will simply be assets on a ledger of a paper golem that literally owns the entire planet. Our one advantage is that paper still burns.

Hyperbole? Hardly.

Source: RadioFarSide