How the corpocrats are killing our culture as well as our economy

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2015 - It's becoming more widely understood that America's corpocracy has badly damaged the middle class, greatly weakened the labor unions that helped create it, grossly diverted wealth to the top of society, overpaid its executives and underpaid its employees, hidden its profits in tax free offshore havens, transferred large number of jobs to other countries, and convinced the Supreme Court to let it buy our elections.

But that's just the financial side of the story. Allowing corporate greedsters to take over our society has affected every aspect of our culture, and not in a happy way. Here are some examples

Values such as integrity, kindness, cooperation and community no longer lead the list. Instead profit, dominance, branding, marketing and control have replaced them. Image has taken over from actual achievement, public relations has assumed the place of logical argument, status is more significant than substance, and a good pivot is more admirable than a good principle.

Our language has dramatically changed as we adopt more of the clichés of corporations, their lawyers and business schools. This language does not reflect reality, but only the abstractions of advertising, legalese and selling. It is enough to use trite words and phrases such as best practices, comprehensive approach, due diligence, entrepreneur,   iconic, optic, pivot, proactive, rigor, robust, silo, stakeholder, strategic, synergy and transparency to give the illusion that you're actually talking about something. One sad indication of how fully corporate gibberish has invaded our language is to see how often it is used by non-profits wanting to prove how financially skilled they are -  to an extent that starts to conceal their actual purpose.

Our educational system - at every level - is being badly damaged by the corpocracy. As Jackson Lear noted in Commonweal:

One consequence of this seismic cultural shift is the train wreck of contemporary higher education. Nothing better exemplifies the catastrophe than President Barack Obama's plan to publish the average incomes earned by graduates from various colleges, so parents and students can know which diplomas are worth the most in the marketplace, and choose accordingly. In higher education as in health care, market utility has become the sole criterion of worth. The monetary standard of value has reinforced the American distrust of intellect unharnessed to practical purposes: the result is an atmosphere toxic to the humanities.

Our military, aka foreign, policy has long been overwhelmingly driven by the desires of the defense industry rather than the best interests our country. We're talking about a country that could cut its military budget by a third and still have one twice as large as China. A country that since the Cold War has deployed its military five times more often than in the preceding 19 decades. It is the largest misappropriation of government funds in human history - welfare for the defense industry.

Not content with its massive profits from the conventional military, the corpocracy has gone on to militarize our police departments with grim results. No small part of the profit comes from defining the weakest segments of our citizenry as the enemy.  It inspired the war on drugs,  private prisons and the corporate gold mine of a war on terror.

Our health care system has been incredibly distorted by a desire for continued domination by private insurance companies.

The media, which should be telling us things like the aforementioned, has become a loyal partner of other large corporations and the politicians who support them. Major media are now some of the largest corporations in America and act like the rest while pretending to be something different. Among the consequences: you don't hear about the virtues of cooperatives, union involvement in corporate management, the assault on unions or how to protect small business from the mega-corpocracy.. Further, probably the most powerful educational institution in America today is the advertising industry. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach well at all.