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Critical Thinking Is Anathema To The Global Corporatists
By Jim Mooney
April 17, 2001—Many politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are not really conservatives or liberals.
For instance, I do not regard Bush as a conservative. He's certainly not a liberal, but neither is he a conservative. It is clear that he is a Global Corporatist (or what I call a Geecee). His main aim is to do what global corporations want. These corporations may pretend to be conservative, and some of their aims are, largely to get the party in power to do their bidding. However, many of their aims are totally at odds with traditional conservatism. For one thing, they would like to see the sovereignty of the United States weakened by things like GATT and the WTO, in order to increase their own power over nation-states. Conversely, most conservatives consider national sovereignty sacred. Another point is that, although persons under the law, corporations have no true loyalties or sentiments or morality, and their actions thus conflict with traditional conservative morality.
Some of our major "conservative" corporations, for instance, also own porno operations under other names, since they are a profitable business. Other of "our" corporations have regularly dealt with enemy nations, even when we were at war with them. So global corporations, and people like Bush who support them, are neither conservative nor liberal, but make a pretense to be one or the other to divert us from their true aim: global corporate hegemony under the New World Order that GW's "poppy" thought such a good idea.
To be fair, many Democrats are also Geecees. The Democratic Governor of California, Gray Davis, seems much more interested in pleasing the energy and investment corporations than in taking strong action against the gougers. He'd rather see thousands of small California businesses die, and citizens suffer, than dare to speak out sharply about the mess or do anything substantive against it. But then, he's the biggest political money-raiser in all of California history, and you don't get bulk millions from regular citizens—they only come from corporations. He's been making Democrat-smiles at the citizens of California while millions of Geecee dollars pour into his back pocket. The citizens are finally finding out who his true masters are, as he hems and haws them into bankruptcy.
The destruction of California small-business is one of many examples that show global corporatism is not what you think. You might think it is pro-business, but it actually destroys most other businesses and can wreck local economies. When a Wal-Mart moves into town, hundreds of smaller concerns will perish. Yes, Wal-Mart's prices are cheaper, but their wages are lower than what the business-owners made and, most importantly, what those local owners spent in their hometowns. Instead, a large part of the community cash is dredged out to go to Wal-Mart stockholders in faraway states or nations. In the end, the community may be economically poorer, and the guy who raves he gets cheaper prices in Wal-Mart may end up working there for half what he used to make—or in a low-rent job somewhere else.
It's the same in Congress. Although a lot of Republicans are Geecees, a surprising number of Democrats are also. And again, I do not regard the members of either group as actually being conservatives or liberals; they betray the principles for which people elected them in order to serve pure corporatism. They do this for the same reason as Grey Davis—they need those huge "contributions" to get elected. And multiple millions don't come from private citizens, only from corporate coffers. Spin artists often like to cite "special interests" on both sides, and talk of union or environmental group donations, etc—but from a financial standpoint that is just plain silly. Those groups can only afford a small percentage of what corporations can give.
Heck, if I was running a Geecee website instead of doing it as a citizen activist, I'd be getting a huge salary and have a big promotion budget and ten times the visitors; because promotion, very simply, costs a lot of money. As a Geecee webmaster, I'd very cleverly slant things, pretending to be on the side of the voters while I readied the knife to stab them in the back, and most people would buy my line. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would see the corporatist view through my phony site, the newspapers, magazines, or TV. One might accidentally find a site that tells the truth. And we can only hope he or she will become an activist, to help make up for the glaring disparity of coverage. We do not have the money or the numbers, so we must have the energy.
This media disparity is the other awful danger. Besides owning Congress and your state legislature, Geecees also own the media. And people are very easy to fool—most have no critical standards or logical ability, I am afraid. They dropped those from the schools long ago, largely in the rush to foster only technical education. You can be a computer genius and a social moron. For one thing, it was in advanced literature classes that I was taught critical reading and how to sift an article for lies, bad statistics, slant and spin, not in science classes. They don't even give how-to-read-between-the-lines classes in most schools any more, and they certainly aren't required. When rarely offered, they are sparsely attended.
On the other hand, a nursing student was telling me how she had to struggle through a required calculus course. Now this is absurd. I like math, but for the rest of her career she will never use calculus. Heck, I enjoyed calculus and had some tech jobs, but I don't recall ever actually using it.
A course in ethics and critical thinking, especially geared toward medical decisions and the doctor/nurse relationship, would have made a lot more sense. I know, these are the sorts of courses everyone wants to bypass, which is exactly why schools should enforce them. They are needed by society, not the individual, since they keep individuals from falling prey to the demagogues and liars who would destroy society. Instead, we end up with hordes of semi-literate and mindless techno-reactionaries, who are easy puppets to the Geecees. The reactionaries run to make trouble as soon as they get the word from the corporate PR men and lawyers who are masquerading as citizens. These reactionaries are usually very young, easily fooled, and puerile corporate activists who think they are conservative activists, but who are ignorant of the real source of their marching orders.
The reactionaries, lacking in critical thinking, have no idea who they are really working for, or what they are "accomplishing" with their usually mindless and destructive acts. Some of them may start to get the message as the NASDAQ tanks and the cozy tech-jobs which insulate them from real life and the lack of a social safety-net, crumble; but it is too little, too late.
Unfortunately, most schools are still turning out techno-morons. Remember all the schooling there was in the '60s, with classes heavy in social-responsibility subjects. Everyone seemed to be in school. That's why there was a burst of social progress. But that was soon retrenched as Geecees mandated the watering-down or actual replacement of all "liberal arts" programs with tech courses. We all used to read articles that decried this trend on a theoretical basis; but with the hegemony of the Bush-backers, and the rapid regression of nearly everything, we now see the practical danger.
Under pressure from Geecees who want technicians, not citizens, schools slash critical-thinking budgets for tech-toy courses. And this, of course, makes their graduates easy prey to the spin and lies of the global corporate media. It's a vicious circle. Aided and abetted by Geecee politicians, pretending to be liberals or conservatives, playing to the crowd when they could really care less what happens to the benighted populace.
Actually, it's worse than a vicious circle, it's a spiral—a downward spiral that is destroying democracy and citizenship, as the corporatist forces get us so easily confused that we are at each others throats, while they march onward to their domination of the planet and of our minds.
Jim Mooney is an activist and the webmaster of BushBoyZ Stole the Vote (http://www.bushboyzstolethevote.com/) and Allstate Insurance Ethics Complaints (http://www.insurancejustice.com/)
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