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War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers, intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception management.” And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
If the sledgehammer of moral purity is to be the criteria for stone throwing, then the only people who qualify are those who have been silenced already.
Given that the World Bank has more or less directed the economic policies of the Third World, coercing and cracking open the market of country after country for global finance, you could say that corporate philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary business of all time.
There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.
Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format.
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.
It would be interesting to research how many of the aggressive strategic experts and defense analysts on our TV screens have an interest in the defense and weapons industry. They don’t even need war. They just need a warlike climate in which military spending remains on an upward graph.
