The Corporation [Track 08]

  

The Corporation is a song about exposing the economic model that the corporation functions from. The information and inspiration comes largely from the international award winning documentary called “The Corporation” (www.thecorporatoin.com). In the documentary they outline that (thanks to the supreme court and the 14th Amendment) corporations have become legal persons.

The only difference is that these “persons” have immense influence, control, and power but cannot be held responsible for their actions.Share holders hold no liability and financial fines are capped so the corporation (effectively) gets away with following a detrimental economic model that manifests itself as environmental degradation.

It is my firm conviction that our economic model is a sham for the super-rich! We have designed an economic function to attain capital that supports rampant consumption and infinite expansion in a finite world. A goal of an overall increase in per capita GDP by 3% each year is still exponential growth! In order to legitimize what most with common sense would call an irrational model, those in power highlight, promote, and place individuals in positions of power that are sympathetic to the current power structure. Some examples would be Ben Bernanke, Thomas Friedman and Milton Freidman.

In 2005 Thomas Friedman wrote a book call "The World is Flat" which received a lot of support by the establishment. The book’s premise is that (due to social movements and other ‘flatteners’) there is a level playing field for all nations to participate competitively in a (seemingly and inherently) equal market. The book was criticized by the Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz by saying “but the world is not flat, not only is the world not flat: in many ways it has been getting less flat.” Still, the book won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2005. This is the same year that the BCC published an article about how global inequality has been rising over the last decade. (Click Here to read the article)

This divulgement explains one of the most obscure lyrics in the whole album; “spit it phat bout Jill a and jack, the hill is flat, like the world is cracked, heed the fact that, Friedman wack.” This lyric is about the common citizen (Jill and Jack) and how the hill they have to climb is flat... like the word has a crack in it. (Which it doesn’t) So, in effect, I am saying “The Friedman-type ideology is wack and the world is not flat.”

Corporations have the privileges of a human but conform to a model, that when followed, is clinically (e.g. DSM-IV) psychotic!  Due to greed, bank malfeasance, an electorate entrenched in the military-industrial-complex, market protectionism, and corporate impunity; the corporation--which people used to “pray to be incorporated”--is a self-serving system that promotes axioms of inequality.