Thanks I agree, Corporations are parasites. They "SELL' their name as a franchise and forever take a cut of YOUR hard work. They make you a paid 'chump' employee instead of the owner operator.

Will it end? Not until people stop shopping at Autozone, Carx, Walmart, Kmart,Target,Pizza hut, McDonalds, Hiltons, Starbucks, 7-11, Quick-Trip etc etc etc etc etc. Go to a family owned restaurant or gas station instead of a corporate owned one. Hell, even local realtors have been put out of business by Coldwell Baker or Remax. Will you people stop feeding the beast? Doubt it.

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Sounds like a movie script. Giant parasites stalk the American landscape disguised as benign upstanding participants in the “free market.”

The dictionary defines parasite as:

“An organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.”

In fact, there are a number of major corporations in America who do very little productive work — never making products or delivering services that benefit their consumers. Instead, the profits they earn and the big CEO salaries they pay are derived by sucking or skimming a portion of the dollars they have convinced the Government to send through their corporate accounts — generally to perform a function that is or ought to be an inherently governmental function.

Ironically, many of these corporate parasites are the loudest defenders of “free markets” and the most vociferous opponents of “government takeovers,” when in fact they exist by feeding off the taxpayers.

Three examples have been in the news of late:

1). Banks that provide government guaranteed student loans. The house voted yesterday to end its four-decade practice of subsidizing private lenders to make student loans. Since the 1960s, the government has subsidized banks to lend students money and guaranteed lenders against loss if students defaulted.

But since the early 1990s the government itself has done direct lending for many student loans and avoided paying the subsidy to the banks. Why, after all, should banks take a percentage of every dollar to generate loans if the taxpayers guarantee the loan in full? In fact, it turns out that the government - which, after all, has a responsibility to provide higher education to its citizenry — can provide loans directly at a much cheaper price than it can through the banks.

In fact it’s estimated that eliminating the subsidy to the banks will save $40 billion that can be transferred into the Pell Grant program that provides college grants to moderate and low income students.

2). Private military contractors that provide security services. One of the things that defines civilized society is that the government has a monopoly on the use of lethal force. Yet over the last decade private military security firms have exploded. They have been hired with increasing frequency to do essentially governmental security functions. We’ve seen the results in the murders of civilians by Blackwater operatives in Iraq. And the growth of free-standing, mercenary armies that are available for hire by governments around the world is a danger to international security.

But these contractors are also economic parasites, since they charge a great deal more to do functions that could otherwise be performed by the government. In fact, most of their personnel are trained by the American military. After they leave the service and go to work making much more than they would if they re-enlisted for another turn with the Army or Marines. Then, the Blackwaters of the world turn around and bill their people out at huge markups so that the taxpayers — who paid for their training in the first place — have to pay a corporation for the privilege of hiring them back at much higher rates.

3). Private health insurance companies. These are the granddaddy of all parasitic operations. Remember that every other industrial society has long since decided that financing the health care of its citizens is an inherently governmental function — that it is cheaper and much more consistent with our values — to provide health care to all as a right.