They Were Obeying Orders
Where: A bus tunnel in Seattle
When: Recently
Who: Three security guards, a 15-year-old girl, a gang of teen thugs, immobile bystanders.
What: The girl, frightened and pursued by the gang of thugs, asks the three guards to protect her. They refuse. The gang of thugs advances and proceeds to beat the bejesus out of the girl. No one moves to her aid. One of the security people calls police.
How: How could this happen? That’s what I’d like to know.
Why: They, the security guards, were obeying corporate orders to do nothing, to "observe." The orders are uniform in virtually every security company in the United States. Obey the rules or be fired. And, good luck finding another job.
Mere human beings no longer have the right to make moral decisions. Mere human beings are no longer free to determine what is right and what is wrong.
Mere human beings in the United States are, by and large, owned by corporations.
Corporations determine where the mere human beings shall live, how well they shall live, what they shall eat, what they shall work at and how much their wages will be.
Corporations have very successfully outsourced millions of good-paying American jobs so that they will have a pliant population of mere human beings in danger of being unemployed, in danger of starving and losing shelter. We mere human beings are constantly reminded of this whenever we see the hordes of hungry and homeless mere human beings who have arisen since the time of the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Corporations do not have morals. Corporations do not exist as a moral entity. Corporations exist to make money, to create profits, to constantly keep an eye on the bottom line.
And, the bottom line is that mere human beings are expendable.
And, unfortunately, these amoral entities, corporations, now rule the United States of America. Our corporate Supreme Court has ruled that it is so.
Our corporate Supreme Court has ruled that the unnatural person of the corporation shall have all of the rights guaranteed by our nation’s founders to natural persons, mere human beings.
Our nation’s founders were good men who wrote the Declaration of Independence on behalf of mere human beings.
Our nation’s founders were good men who argued and pondered over the wording of the Constitution for the new nation they were founding, all of this on behalf of natural persons, mere human beings.
Unfortunately, they forgot to use the term "natural person," and the corporate Supreme Court leaped upon the lack of this singular word to grant to unnatural persons, corporations, all of the rights, freedoms and liberties granted to natural persons, mere human beings.
But mere human beings and corporations are not equal.
Mere human beings are mortal. They fall ill. They can experience pain and physical injury, they die, they are not immortal as corporations can be.
They do not have the collective power of corporations to amass power and money and the money and wealth of a single mere human being will never be the equal of the money and wealth held by many major corporations.
And the pure, raw power and wealth of these unnatural persons, corporations – immortality, the collective ability to amass huge amounts of power and wealth, to wield that power, to influence the laws of mere human beings, to meddle in the lives of mere human beings, to rule their existence – has been enormously magnified by the recent decision of the corporate Supreme Court.
We have just witnessed how that decision will fall out on our society in the recent incident in a bus tunnel, in Seattle, a small group of actors, the leads played by a frightened 15-year-old girl, three security guards, immobile bystanders, a collection of mere human beings who have lost the will to be moral – because corporate will has prised this most basic and valued mere human quality out of the mere humans they now own.
