When I read anything that assigns altruistic notions to the U.S. Government, or the governments of other countries, for that matter, I often find myself awake at night, thinking about corporations, their agendas and peoples' often collective and erroneous tendencies to place human characteristics within an entity that is anything but human.

I grew up hearing the buzz words 'corporate America' and 'corporate agenda.' While I had some idea what they were, I wasn't able to articulate the bad taste left in my mouth when I heard them and I noticed that often others weren't able to either.

Until I ran into an author ( Jerry Mander ) who made a few succinct statements that knocked me on my butt in one of the biggest ah-ha moments of my life.


These are the thoughts that run through my mind when I think of corporations:

A corporation is an identity (nothing more concrete) that belongs to an organization, consisting of a number of people. The people are nameless, or more to the point, interchangeable, as is the location (and the identity for that matter). The corporation receives the same legal protections that an individual does, but it does not have the same accountability that individuals have. (example: 'organization' can sue individual, individual's actions are separated from 'organization' in order to escape fault by entire company, despite individual's connection or affiliation, or even motivation)

Corporations spend a lot of money on advertising. They advertise precisely that which they wish to give the appearance of having or having more of; that which they lack (hence the need to advertise), often creating half-truths and outright lies that go largely unnoticed by the public. GE has never brought good things to life. A woman screaming about her ineffective laundry detergent has never shouted loud enough to make a washing machine burst through the roof of her house and land on the street (nor does Tide really get things that clean.. notice the 'simulation' clause). Time/Warner is not our friend and certainly doesn't believe that the term 'Rush Hour' is a misleading term. Their advertising leg decided it would be a catchy phrase that would get the attention of their target audience, the ones they think will buy their product/service. It's as simple as that. GM was never our friend, but they'd have you think so.

You're aware of this already? Funny, the advertisements seem to be working.

The Government..

Our government is a corporation. So many people either don't realize this, never take the time to think about it, have their heads buried in the sand, are unable to articulate it in these terms or simply are too indoctrinated to see it for what it really is. It is a corporation. That's the all of it. Our military is the executor of this corporation (ig-zek-yuh-ter) or (ek-si-kyoo-ter), take your pick. And it operates as a corporation. The government does business as a corporation and enjoys all the protection of a corporation without having to accept the accountability that individuals have with regard to their actions and decisions. (think of any gov scandal that's ever broken lose and how it was handled, or rather the damage control employed)

Corporations have only one mission. To grow. Expansion, forward movement, manifest destiny, whatever one wishes to call it, that's the mission. Stagnation and backward movement are the enemy. There are mouths to feed. More importantly, their are heads-of-corporations' mouths to feed. There are profits to be made, money to be gained, acquisitions, opportunities, etc. etc. etc. This is where it gets a little fuzzy for most folks..

'I doubt that the point of our government is to get bigger.'

Really? Explain the gaping hole that is our deficit. By the way, the 'deficit' is merely what we call the additional amount of money we overspend compared to what we actually have; the amount we are in debt... to ourselves. It doesn't even address the amount spent each year. The government budget and deficit are testaments to their over involvement and ever-expanding agenda. But many people just don't want to think about it, don't want to consider a problem involving numbers too big for us to wrap our heads around or are comfortable enough to swallow that song and dance about how much better our lives are with our government's assistance. (it's someone else's problem)

I sound like a Libertarian. Or maybe even a member of some mountain-side, anti-government ex-militia group..

I'm not. I declare no affiliation, save my own.

Our government makes decisions based on what's good for our government. It has nothing to do with us. We are as expendable as the students in Tienanmen square in 1989. And this isn't even necessarily about the current regime, of which approximately 70% of the nation disproves. This goes back way before them. Every decision made by the U.S. government has a money trail. We didn't enter WWII in order to liberate the Jews from concentration camps. Sorry, folks. We didn't. We entered that war at the point and time of our government's choosing and for reasons that had nothing to do with stopping the naughty little totalitarian regime. The same can be said for every war we've ever fought (outside the civil war).

Blowing off that fact is accepting the lie, that our government does make decisions based on what's good for Americans, and has a humanitarian streak to boot.

People who question the established authority of the U.S. government get quickly labeled conspiracy theorists, extremists or unpatriotic. There's so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to begin. But I do know that anyone who swallows the idea that our government is here to help us, or anyone else, for that matter, isn't seeing the government for what it is: a corporation. We can talk about what corporations should be doing until we're blue in the face, but corporations were never designed to do anything but expand and preserve themselves, so it's kind of pointless. Would be like arguing that oranges should cure malaria; robots should be nicer to people.

The president is not a king, despite how he acts and thinks (or how he's treated by his lackeys). We are not his subjects, despite how they act and think (or don't act and don't think). The president is a public servant. This country belongs to the people who live in it (*cue V for Vendetta music, I guess*). As it stands, the government is not here to help or protect us. The moment a program becomes a big money loser, they'll pull the plug on it (think: social security).

Despite what many see as a generous country with a large portion of funding being diverted to foreign aid, in fact, we're embarrassingly stingy. We're at the bottom of the barrel. The government would throw out some big number to the masses (think: advertising), like sixteen billion dollars, contributed to foreign aid. In actuality, it ends up being something like between six and ten cents per capita as compared with 33 cents in the UK, well over a dollar in Norway.. that phrase, 'we should be taking care of our own before we try to help others...' - I'll leave the ignorance of that comment alone and merely concentrate on it's falsehood. We do put ourselves before others.

I won't bore you with a lot of refs and sources, here's a simple table I lifted from infoplease.com that puts it in perspective. Most sources vary, but typically calculate foreign aid per capita and we generally find ourselves in about the same spot.. somewhere toward the bottom.




Among ourselves, as private citizens, Americans are generous. Just look at the numbers. It's our government that's stingy.

Foreign aid isn't a money making program, and therefore, receives far less of our funding. The appallingly small amount we do give is often ear marked for military spending or political leaders with agendas that suit the purpose of.. the American peop-er, government.

Government=corporation. Corporation=money. Still want to keep your head in the sand?