The Masters of Mankind

Corporate Takeover

Introduction

Humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Modern civilization started about 6,000 years ago. Now, imagine if an alien was observing the world today, what do you think they would see? That alien would see an extremely intelligent species, that is racing to catastrophe. A species that is on the verge of nuclear war and neglecting the health of their planet, arguably the gravest threat of our time. People that will stop at nothing to make money, even if that means exploiting others because they don't matter. A species that has lost sight of the decency that they were born with. People that have adopted the mentality of gain wealth, forgetting all but self. We are at a critical point in time where we could destroy ourselves if we don't reverse this destructive trend.

I'm writing this because I believe if we as humans are not wary of the greed that has succumbed most of us, we are swiftly running to our demise. Specifically, corporate greed has run amuck; they don't care about the citizenry's needs. They have bought off governments across the globe, including ours. They have given people terrible inhumane wages around the world. In the third world, they have people working in sweatshops making a few cents an hour, no breaks, and long hours. Which isn't very different than chattel slavery. They've been polluting our environment, with fracking and the use of other fossil fuels, without regulation. They have also flooded the media with propaganda; they own all the major news networks that we get our news from. In whole, corporations have taken over our political process and media for their selfish agenda. Which are the ground pillars of any democracy.

Corporate Influence on politics

In this chapter, will be tackling the issue of money in politics. This includes the oil and gas industry, military industrial complex, and Wall Street is an influence on our government.

The oil and gas industry:

Oil Money has had a great deal of influence in Washington. Democrats and Republicans alike have been corrupted by oil money. One example is when republicans deny climate change, even though almost all scientist agree that it's happening, and democrats say that it's happening, but promote things like fracking and the construction of pipelines, which are catastrophic to the environment. Well per Opensecrets.org, a center for responsive politics, state that, house republicans so far in 2016 have taken $13,295,213 and house democrats have taken $1,647,800 from the oil and gas industry. Senate republicans have taken $6,342,185 and the senate democrats have taken $616,248 from the oil and gas industry. This clearly shows that whoever takes the most money, in this case, republicans, deny climate change. Since democrats acknowledge that climate change is taking place they still take money, so they must push the agenda in a so-called "environmental friendly" way. This kind of thing takes place on a plethora of issues.

We have also overthrown and sometimes assassinated democratically elected governments for oil. One instance is in 1953 where we overthrew Mohamed Mossadegh of Iran. He was overthrown by the Iranian military, organized and financed by the US and British. He defied APOC/AIOC now BP corporation. He wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. This infuriated the British and US, so they conducted a coup where they had the Iranian military and some hired officials who were dressed as Iranian citizen's insight riots. The coup worked and the US installed the shah government, they accepted the Washington consensus. This coup was devastating to the Iranian people and they lived under tyranny for almost 26 years. When in 1979 the Iranian people overthrew the puppet.

Another case of the US overthrowing governments for oil is in 2003 when the US conducted a preemptive war against Iraq. This time the culprit was Saddam Hussein, he, unlike Mossadegh, was a brutal tyrant. Although, this didn't justify the Iraq war because we have supported countless dictators because they were doing what we wanted. Saddam wanted the oil revenue to strictly benefit Iraq, The US couldn't have this so we strangled their economy first in the 90s, under the Clinton administration. Then, under the Bush II administration, when he was still giving US oil interest the middle finger, Bush being the war-hawk that he is, invaded Iraq. Now, you're probably asking yourself why didn't we just try to conduct a coup like we did with Mossadegh? Well, Iraq wasn't just going to benefit big oil, it was going to benefit everyone, except the Iraqi people. Iraq has the Tigris and Euphrates river flowing through it. Which meant that the US corporations could control the water systems in the region. Iraq also borders our enemies and potential enemies, so it was a great place to plant military bases and missile sites.

The two examples that I gave are ones that the US governments themselves admitted to. There have been countless instances where there has been substantial evidence that the US overthrew a government for Oil, other resources, or sometimes just pure imperialism.

The military industrial complex:

The US is spending the most money on defense in the world, and because of that, we have the largest and most powerful country on earth. Corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin are the beneficiaries of this kind of lucrative spending. We are also the largest exporter of arms in the world. We give arms to brutal regimes because it benefits these corporations. Brutal regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Israel that are killing innocent civilians. In Saudi Arabia's case, killing innocent people in Yemen and executing their own people for minor crimes. In Israel's case, their brutal occupation of the West bank. These corporations don't care if their weapons are being used for mass killings. All they care about is the revenue that's coming from these deals. Our government is the middleman in all of this. To put it more bluntly, they're the face of the operation.

Wall Street Interest:

Wall street has been busy with the Democrats, who were supposed to be the party of the people. Hillary Clinton herself was paid $200,000 for one speech by Goldman Saches in 2014. In 2013 alone, Clinton made $3.15 million from Wall Street altogether. Recently, Clinton was running for the presidency which she lost to Donald Trump, the so-called anti-establishment candidate. The corporate media's been telling us that Clinton lost because only white racists voted for Trump, which is completely ignorant. Clinton lost because Trump hammered on her corruption and the TPP which devastated states like Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio. States that got devastated by bad trade deals. Corruption is the democratic party's image now. Even our current president hasn't been free from corporate money. Obama raised $15.8 million in the 2008 campaign, from Wall Street. $7.8 million in the 2012 campaign. The results of this money, goes to looking the other way when fraud is committed, subsidies to big corporations and financial institutions, and weak legislation that is supposed to "regulate" the banks. Until Democrats realize this they'll keep losing elections to the more corrupt republicans. Republicans are just the party who can't be "blamed" right now, because they weren't in serious power for six years. So, let the next two-four years play out. Maybe, we'll have a populist democrat in 2020, who just doesn't speak to the pain, but who also does something significant about it.