Phony Corporate Outrage Over Charlottesville

by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org - Home - Stephen Lendman)

Wall Street giants and other corporate predators are key parts of America's deep state. 

They benefit hugely from extrajudicial practices, ripping off consumers, defrauding them, underpaying workers, busting and weakening unions, co-opting their bosses, poisoning the earth, selling harmful to health products, and war-profiteering, among other deplorable practices.

They made capitalism a dirty word, profiting at the expense of the public welfare. Wall Street, IBM, and industrial firms did business with Germany during the Nazi era. Henry Ford was Hitler's favorite US industrialist. 

Corporate America supports all US wars of aggression. They helped provoke Cold War with Russia.

Morality and corporatism are world's apart, the latter part of what fascism is all about, a merger of state and corporate power, more virulent today than ever, given the power of business monopolies and oligopolies to rule the world.

The New York Times disgracefully hailed what's nonexistent - "the moral voice of corporate America," saying:

In the wake of Charlottesville violence, "a chorus of business leaders rose up this past week to condemn hate groups and espouse tolerance and inclusion" - polar opposite their business practices, exploiting the earth, communities and people for maximum profits, the only morality they know.

Lofty CEO rhetoric runs counter to what they support and practice, some of them joining the anti-Trump chorus for the wrong reasons.

They're with him on regulatory freedom, tax cuts for the rich, and other business-friendly policies, against him for image-building, pretending to be against right-wing extremism in Charlottesville while running their businesses like privatized tyrannies.

Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz lied, claiming "(n)ot every business decision is an economic one." Bottom line priorities factor into everything important. It's how big business gets bigger - the more rapacious, they more they expand, grow and prosper. 

It goes with the territory, far different from small business like the family one I was involved with through most of my formal working life. 

We found a way to be profitable by providing beneficial public service - helping people, not ripping them off or otherwise exploiting them.

We observed rules predator giants ignore. In the late 1950s, Wharton didn't teach me to be a crook.

The Times: "(M)any big companies…pulled out of" apartheid South Africa.

Fact: The same ones do business with apartheid Israel, exploiting Palestinians viciously. They operate in despotic monarchies.

Milton Friedman once said "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." Anything goes is OK. They take full advantage, why giants consolidated to behemoth size, dominating industries, creating oligopolies and monopolies.

When CEOs say Black lives matter, they mean to exploit with poverty wages and poor or no benefits, largely in rotten part-time or temp jobs - millions of high-pay good ones offshored to low wage countries.

No one in America and most other societies become CEOs and other top corporate officials by being good guys. 

They rise in prominence and power at the expense of others, serving bottom line interests, no others except on their own in their private non-business lives.

The corporate exodus from Trump's business advisory councils was an exercise in duplicity - criticizing his comments on Charlottesville unfairly, running their business operations like tyrants, money-making their sole concern, whatever it takes to accomplish corporate objectives, including maximum expansion by mergers and acquisitions, along with eliminating competition.

Big business is inherently immoral and unethical, circumventing rules for maximum gains, taking full advantage of workers, customers, communities and planet earth.

The bigger they get, the more irresponsible they become because super-size lets them get away with almost anything - partnered with Washington's bipartisan criminal class.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home - Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.