Illegal Tax Scheme Nets $140 Billion More For Biggest US Banks

Thanks Politisite,

Unfortunately GROW, dominate, and increase profitability in whatever way possible is the core in corporation!  The fight has always been the same since the first corporation and the inception and enactment of rules that gave corporations legal status that supersedes that of the individual.  Corporations take whatever steps they can to monopolize their own marketplaces, so they can control both the supply and demand sides, as well as the prices they charge, the cost of materials and labor through complete domination, but unlike individual directors and officers are shielded from bearing legal responsibility for what the corporation does.

The Public would all be slaves in work camps if corporations were given free reign, and that's exactly the way it was in America, Canada, England, and the industrialized world until people fought tooth and nail for the cause, demanding their so called democratic governments enact laws that forced corporations to control their excesses, and finally grudgingly give way allowing for a standard of living to occur that supports our modern lifestyle.

" You load sixteen tons, and what da ya get?

Another day older an' deeper in debt.

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I cain't go!

I owe my soul to the company store!"

Remember this song?

Unfortunately that was the grisly reality for all workers before and during the long battle, littered with the corpses of many, taking 150 years, fought by ordinary people in the streets and factories of the US,  for their basic human rights in the face of usurious, rapacious corporations to which people, including children, were both a cheap disposable labor pool to be used and controlled, and customers forever indebted to the same companies they worked for, forced to pay the exorbitant prices the company demanded for goods.  Hundreds of thousands of US workers lived short brutal lives working six or seven days a week, up to sixteen hours a day in terrible dangerous factories, living in filthy unheated workhouses, where they squatted without running water or toilets and watched their children die wretchedly from disease, starvation and malnutrition, and cold, with no schools or doctors, all of them gripped in the brutal fist of corporate America.

Only through an unyielding fight demanding their democratic rights under the Constitution to the Congress, and with the assistance of populist Presidents like Theodore Roosevelt did the people finally achieve a stand-off with corporations which gave us good jobs, in safe workplaces, with a living wage, and protections from the worst practices of the corporate past.  But the corporations never, ever stop and continue to undermine and wangle and lobby and lie and buy support.  They even spend fortunes lulling us with the lie that they are nice, socially responsible, caring institutions, who given the chance will have us all living well and comfortably taken care of.  Did you buy into that PR selling job?  Ask yourself that.  Most of us bought it lock stock and barrel.

Our constant vigilance and struggle to maintain our status, to force our legislators to speak for us rather than cozying up to the corporate elite, while corporations do everything they can to wrest control from us is the dynamic at the very foundation of our society.  It only works while the tense and fragile equilibrium is maintained.

Corporations never rest when it comes to this battle for control, and when an observer who is aware of this struggle looks around today he can see that the corporations are clawing back the control as they have always done given even the smallest opening by a lazy, uneducated, inactive or disinterested population.  It is, after all, their mandate.

Ours responsibility is to make sure they don't get away with it so we can maintain a healthy equilibrium, and thus our standard of living.  Have you noticed your standard of living has been going down steadily?  It's not bad luck, or some invention like THE Economy's fault.  The banks and corporations control the economy, and know exactly what they are doing.

What we are all witnessing is a coup. In several bold and brilliant strokes the unholy alliance of big banks, transnational corporations and governments that no longer speak for their constituents, are wiping out the gains paid for in blood, sweat and tears and the broken dreams of millions of Americans who went before and fought for our right to have what we are losing inexorably today, and when these greedy men and their organizations are done we, or at least our children will all be back in the sweatshops, or shall we say a Walmart uniform, back in 'the company store'.

Our only chance is to take the fight to them through our democratic institutions; to demand our legislators do what we bid them to or face the consequences, and their is little time left.  The gains of 150 years of uphill human struggle will be wiped out within the decade.  Will we let that happen?

politisite,

Man did the first comment of yours ever get me going!  Sometimes I have no idea what is waiting inside to be said until something cues it up.  Thanks!

Paschen,

VanCity in Vancouver, the lower mainland and Victoria is still awesome and has strict social standard that it maintains, and a high level of community and charitable involvement.  It even has a promissory statement it requires new companies to sign that obligate them to a high level of honesty and social responsibility.  My wife had to sign it for her new business before she could open a business account.