19-09-18 03:58:00,
“Corporations should not be involved in any aspect of the democratic process. They should not be involved in education at any level. They should not be involved in health care. They should not be involved in the administration of social services. They should not be involved in the administration of justice. WHY? Because they are incapable of understanding and conforming to higher human aspirations and needs. Better to leave these areas to government, and to non-profit organizations, both of which are administered by humans in the human interest…The corporation is sociopathic in its disregard for human goals and values; in fact its behavior fits the World Health Organization’s criteria for defining the psychopath.” – Wade Rowland, author of Greed, Inc. Why Corporations Rule the World. (Roland’s book was written 5 years before the 2010 US Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling that gave greedy, super-wealthy, sociopathic corporations the same rights as normal citizens with regard to spending unlimited amounts of money on election campaigns.)
I have a heavily-underlined book in my library that was written in 1995 by David C. Korten. It was titled “When Corporations Rule the World”. Around the time that the book was published, I was a small-town family practitioner still trying mightily to follow the Hippocratic Oath, which I took back in 1968. I was also still trying to honor my patient’s inalienable right to be fully informed about the risks and benefits of any drug I was considering prescribing before he or she consented to the prescription. It was time-consuming to follow those ethical principles.
Korten followed up with a sequel in 1999. He titled that book “The Post-Corporate World”. Here is an excerpt from page 7 of the sequel that nicely summarizes what he was warning his readers about:
“’When Corporations Rule the World’ told the new story as I had come to understand it:
“Our relentless pursuit of economic growth is accelerating the break-down of the planet’s life support systems, intensifying resource competition, widening the gap between rich and poor, and undermining the values and relationships of family and community. The growing concentration of power in global corporations and financial institutions is stripping governments – democratic and otherwise – of their ability to set economic,