By definition “psychopaths” are:
predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse
Changing the wording a bit to read “satisfy their own selfish needs for profit” this is also a workable definition of a modern corporation.
It is clear that these “persons” are what matters to our elected representatives. They own the Republican party completely and most of the Democratic party. They have been given rights – squeezed from the 14th amendment by a court reporter and former corporate president – that should only belong to living, breathing citizens. They don’t need to breathe clean air, drink clean water. They don’t feel pain. They don’t need to eat healthy food. They don’t need medical care. They can’t be put in prison. And, worst of all, they live forever.
Since they care nothing about anything but profit, even though they can be (as psychopaths are) glib and charming mimics of human feelings, they are the greatest danger facing the planet today. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be shamed. They cannot be voted out of office.
Economists have a term to describe what happens to those who are left behind after these great machines of capitalism devour some natural resource - they call it an "externality." They talk about corporations "externalizing their costs." In other words, after extracting the maximum profit possible from a resource and showing little concern for how that extraction process affects those who must live with the consequences, the profits are deposited in the bank and they are off for other greener pastures to exploit. It is only with a huge amount of organizing, lawyer fees and public outcry that these corporations grudgingly agree to bear any of the costs for cleaning up their mess.
A corporation can "externalize" its costs of production by fouling the common air, water and land which they do not have to pay to clean up. But they also “externalize” by taking advantage of a “race to the bottom” whereby local and state governments compete with each other to give away their tax base in order to make attractive packages for building new factories, headquarters and other job generating facilities in their areas. What then happens is that all of the neighboring residents must pick up the tab for the impacts of those new facilities, even though they make in one year what those "externalizing" corporations spend in less than a minute for a Superbowl ad.
Many have spent a lot of time and energy attempting to add all these externalities up and find out just how much we all pay to subsidize the generation of corporate profits. A general estimate is that every year corporations externalize roughly 5 times the amount of their yearly corporate profits. What this all means is that we are impoverishing our communities, degrading our air, land and water and consuming the natural resources around us in order to subsidize the generation of corporate profits which amount to one fifth of the price we pay to enable those profits to be generated. This is like paying twenty dollars to set up a lemonade stand in our front yard and to clean it up afterwards so some wealthy stranger's kid can show up, sell his lemonade, earn four dollars and leave.
Yes, we are that stupid. We do it for "jobs" and "progress" and the American Dream which is skillfully sold to us by the best propagandists money can buy. It is woven into the most intimate and personal parts of our lives and colors our perceptions on levels we are often only dimly aware of. We reside in a vast image induced coma.
When I first moved here, in the 80's, I was in the quiet of the countryside - I could, every once in a while, hear that unmistakable whooshing hum of tires on the road as one of my neighbors returned from work or an errand, but it was only for a minute and the silence always returned. Over the years, as development progressed, those whooshing hums became more and more frequent and I began to make out a distant, and constant, roar, like a far away river. The city was extending its grasp.
Cars belonging to the people who moved into all the new subdivisions being built upon the old pastures and farms whose owners capitalized on the huge prices developers were paying for their land brought their sounds of growth and progress to my quiet neighborhood. The schools became overcrowded, the police understaffed, the roads clogged and the developers left town to enjoy their profits in their fine homes in quiet unsullied countrysides, helicoptering over the traffic jams to their downtown offices far above the consequences of their profit generating activities.
Then, way off on Wall Street, a bunch of geniuses brought it tumbling down. The new subdivisions became ghost towns in various stages of development; weird vacant places with plotted squares of gravel roads and pipes sticking up in odd places. The developers sold their helicopters and banks began to fail. And the noise quieted down a bit.
Like the frog in a gradually warming pot, people were getting squeezed. Money started getting tighter and tighter. It was a delicate balance – a seized transmission or an unforeseen medical expense could easily tip them over into bankruptcy. Some got angry, some depressed, some drank. It was clear that no one powerful gave a shit about them. Just a bunch of fancy lies. Lying corporate advertising was no different than lying campaign ads.
The phrase “of the people, for the people, by the people” was one of the most infuriating lies. Just a sales pitch.
“Few people realize that the marvelous advances in technology made during recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well.” - Aldo Leopold
Dollars are the “water” the pump extracts. These bills are our connection with the earth. Instead of working directly with the earth to get what we need, we use these bills to buy what we need. As of 2008 the pump was extracting about 60 trillion of these bills every year (the GDP of all the nations on earth.)
Economic crises are problems with the pump.
But what's bad for the pump is good for the well. And it all gets pretty complicated when the well starts running dry.
Wall street geniuses have to make shit up: for example, many Credit Default Swaps were, ultimately, based upon mortgages. A mortgage ("death pledge") is a financial contract between you and a bank which enables you to buy a house without having to actually possess 500,000 dollar bills. It used to be that your local bank determined if you were credit worthy and, if they decided you were, took the risk of lending you money. Your local bank held your mortgage and you paid them principle and interest until the contract was fulfilled and you became sole owner of your home.
Then some pump technician discovered securitization. Your bank no longer had to worry about your creditworthiness. They could sell your mortgage to some fancy Wall Street type and get their money up front. No waiting.
Clever MBA's on Wall Street then bundled your mortgage with other, less sweet smelling ones and sliced them all up into things called "tranches." Some tranches had higher risks (like NINJA loans) and some had lower risks. Then they came up with new and fancier ways to avoid risk - like Credit Default Swaps. Cedit default swaps are derivatives that “insure” securitized mortgage tranches. Credit default swaps at the end of 2008 totaled $63 trillion - more than the GDP of all the countries on earth (but only a small percentage of the more than $500 trillion derivatives market.)
The pump was whining away like crazy.
Then something went wrong. Different people have different theories about this but, unquestionably, something went seriously wrong with the pump. There was a "liquidity crisis." The market for CDS's fell into a hole.
The failing market for credit default swaps was leveraged speculation on securitized tranches, which were leveraged speculation upon failing mortgages, which were failing because of falling home values, which were valued in those bills we carry in our wallets, which are pieces of paper used to buy wood and other house-building materials, which come from the earth.
And now no one, nobody, knows how much those CDS's are worth. And if they did know they would never tell. It would start another panic. Congress is a willing co-conspirator letting the banks pursue another of their "free market" hypocritical lies. If their books reflected what these things were really worth - "Mark to Market" - they'd be bankrupt. This is basically legal lying with statistics - "free market" propaganda is only for fleecing their marks. They drop it and immediately run screaming for government welfare when they face any real harm. Privatize gains, socialize losses.
Only a few genius MBA's doing fancy risk assessment at places like Goldman Sachs really understand how the upper reaches of the derivatives market work. Conservatives who wax lyrical about the marvelous constitutional gifts of freedom and liberty and the workings of "free market competition" are mistaking the tentacles of a squid for Adam Smith's marvelous "invisible hand."
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. - Matt Taibbi
As I said before what's bad for the pump is good for the well. The pump has been draining the well much faster than it is refilling. And now the pump is beyond fixing. Yet that "vampire squid" is still frantically looking for fresh blood.
When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity." - David Korten "When Corporations Rule the World"