The developmental economic model of Western societies is based on the continued growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and ascendancy up the corporate ladder. This model is now exposed to be ecologically and economically unsustainable. The exploitation of Earth and corporate investment in war to obtain and assert control over global resources are undoing societies and corrupting them from within, whether in Western capitalist societies or whether in former communist societies now emulating the Western model. Western Capitalism may have won out over Communism, but is it making losers of everybody?
Strong arm state control (Communism) and corporation-vested control are philosophical inheritances of GWF Hegel. Under Communist control slavery was real and mostly unvarnished. Corporate control varnishes its form of slavery. The American corporate model can be characterized as a morphed form of Hegelian feudalism. The farm and laboring public are in fact indentured to a corporate oligarchy which dominates economically and politically. American Republicanism in recent years has unvarnished its intentions of dominion by selling its soul to corporate interests.
Karl Rove and the Republican Party capitalized on Hegel’s model by which the one-man/one-vote policy could be manipulated and circumvented. Their political strategy was not to appeal to the whole public but to engage ideological interest groups and play on their fears and special interests, thus dividing the electorate over special interests. Hegel eschewed the one-man/one-vote approach to democracy and preferred a republicanism in which the individual vote mattered less than group allegiance.
Not before has American governance been so overwhelmingly and crassly surrendered to corporate control as it is now. Unfortunately, the lobby control of corporations is so strong that democrats and republicans alike give themselves over to corporate money interests. It’s time for a change. Who of the presidential candidates is less beholden to corporations and more likely to adopt real cultural change away from the corporate feudalist model? The answer to this question should influence our voting decision.
Ecological spoliation is radically aggravated by global corporate feudalism. Aggravated environmental pollution and climate warming are direct consequences of corporate exploitation and disregard for ecological necessities. The paradigm of corporate dominion is mortally destructive. A new worldview and political paradigm is needed which seeks first to sustain global ecologies and to avail public resources justly, recognizing the equal dignity and rights of every human being.
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Comments: 4
We can't live without corporations but we can certainly work to make them better.
As creations of human imagination, corporations take on the purposes and designs of the human imagination, some good and some bad. So, as evil exists in the designs and purposes of human doing, so it exists in the purposes and doing of corporations.
Neither human beings nor corporations are free to run rough-shod over people and nature. Both must be held accountable for the abuses they inflict on others.
In the last four Administrations, a kind of libertarianism has been awarded corporations as though they are ends unto themselves. The open license of corporate imagination to profiteering has resulted in conspiratorial liberties that have hurt a lot of trusting people; there was Enron and the likes, now its money lenders defrauding homeowners.
Corporate globalization, e.g., NAFTA, is profoundly and fatally flawed by the dissolution of corporate ethics. Religious fundamentalism, not to its credit, has hitched its wagon to corporate absolutism and has been party to republican overreach. Corporate profiteering on war and weapons of war by the U.S. is a world scandal doing incalculable hurt to the American people.
The social ethic of another era, which held employers accountable to their employees and to the public, has been ravaged by an anti-social (religious "right") republicanism which abides arrogance, ignorance and obsession to control and plunder. Such corporate libertarianism defeats fundamental civility and moral rationality.
SYLvester
"Not sure why you posted this critique to this group... "
My response to "Gather's" inquiry:
This posting, "American Corporate Feudalism", is about eco-social sustainability. Modern plundering of weblife is a continuing iteration of "original sin". The consumption of the "tree of life", life's ecological webs upon which all life depends, threatens all cultures and the future of life on Earth.
The feudalism of Europe's imperial culture imposed centuries of wasting on European people that culminated in social desperation and two World Wars. The colonial expansion of European feudalism from the 1400s has brought global waste to indigenous peoples and resources. Modern global corporatism, driven by sheer profiteering, is bringing about the plundering of Earth's remaining resources and is increasing global distress.
Natural sustainability is organic and dependent on symbiotic accommodation which itself gave rise to the diversity of life on Earth. Feudalism is the antithesis to symbiosis. In all its forms, feudalism corrupts nature's paradigm of symbiosis from within and has put humankind on a course toward self-extinction.
Unbridled corporate profiteering is unsustainable, is contrary to the moral sense of authentic religion and is antithetical to common sense. Morphed Hegelian feudalism, as practiced by American (global) Corporatism, is unsustainable and antithetical to common sense.