Corporations don't make us an empire.

[Ozymanithrax]

People are saying that corporate interests in the US, Canada, England, Iceland, Germany, Japan, Guam and other nations where the US has bases are there because Corporations control elections in those countries (and ours). If people in those countries just had a fair election (uninfluenced by corporations) they would kick us out. That is bull.

People in most of those respective countries vote in elections almost always in a higher proportion than the those of us in the US. Their country's relationship to the US is well known. They have not sought to put governments in power that would end those agreements. It is not corporations that make it so.

I'm not saying that corporate interests don't have influence. But we can't blame corporate influence for everything for everything.

Take the US, for instance. At this point in time, people in the South are generally Republican and Conservative. It is part of their culture, as much as being Democrats and being conservative was a part of Southern Culture until 1948 when the Democratic Party voted to allow black people into the party. (That was when Strom Thrumond bolted the party and ran on a Segregationist ticket.) Between 1948 and Nixon's run for the White House, the South was Conservative while the regional party identification became less sure. Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act made Nixon's Southern Strategy possible. The South switched to Republican and remained Republican except for a few Swing States such as Florida, until Obama's victory. Corporate interests don't make it that way. Those are regional cultural concepts. The same forces have tended to make the Northwest liberal, in a modern sense, going back to before the Civil War.

Corporations have a disproportionate interest in our system, but they are only an influence, not the determiner of who wins. People in the South don't buy into the idea that Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim because Corporations tell them too. More accurately, their ideas about the ideal relationship between a people and their government, gun rights, abortion, the Culture wars, and most of the Partisan ideas are determined by culture, by what they learned at their Mother's breast (or at the bottle if they weren't breast fed).

Corporations serve the Empire's interests, and the empire protects corporate interests for the Imperial purposes. Once the US became an Empire everything but name after WWII, Corporations tied their interests to the Empire. That is why what was good for GM was good for America. No Party is going to divest the US of its empire. Those politicians that claim a desire to do so, like Ron Paul or Denis Kucinich are marginalized.

An empire does what an empire does. An empire falls when history makes its further existence impossible. Corporate influence means exactly dick.

[Democrats_win]

1. Corporations are a part of Grover Norquist's coalition.

Norquist brought together differing conservative groups to work together against the American people. These groups included the Right wing false "christians." The george w. bush presidency is the "child" of that marriage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist

The comments that you make are largely true until you get to this point in history. Just because of the fact that history shows that corporations were not the major cause of empires in the past, does not mean that they aren't the cause of our "empire of fools" today.

You can't deny that corporations are responsible for the bush presidency disasters. Corporations and false religion simply did not want to pay for Katrina but they did want to be a part of the pillaging of Iraq. Then there's the bush depression. It has corporate fingerprints all over it.

[Ozymanithrax]

2. A couple of items...

Right wing Christians are not false Christians. They differ from "left wing" Christians on very small points of doctrine and huge points of public policy. They are as much a part of the Christian tradition as any other denomination. Christians throughout history, at least since Constantine the Great fought at Malvin Bridge under the sing "in hoc signo vinces" (Conquer by this), have been violent, often murderous, regularly intolerant, and purposefully ignorant. If Christians really want to put history behind them, then they need recognize the dark side of their belief system. Then they would need to create a new religion. This, of course, makes them no different from any other religion.

Our Empire dates specifically to Bretton Woods Conference where the economic underpinnings were forged. National governments did that, not corporations. Corporations have certainly hitched their wagon to the empire in spite of Eisenhower's warning against that. But they did not make it, and they won't break it. Economics will break the empire and someone else will take its place (probably China and India).

Bush was Responsible for the Bush Presidency. We Americans, who elected him in questionable elections and then simply allowed him to become Emperor for his eight years, are to blame. When the SCOTUS decided who would be President in 2000, we could have gone on a national strike and demanded that the Senate refuse Florida's tainted election and elect the President as is allowed in our Constitution. But no one could find two Senators to call the election into question because Americans did not care enough to let them know.

In 2004, after another questionable election, we continued to play whipped dog.

The problem is not in corporations, it is in Americans who lost the concept of Civil Responsibility and Civil Disobedience sometime after 1970. (I blame consumerism for that.)

Of course Norquist invited Corporations into his Cabal. He needed funding. In his vision of pure Capitalism, governments are unnecessary. Capitalism is the perfect democratic system, and we all vote every time we buy cell phone, a computer, or a loaf of bread. I blame Americans for buying into that idea. (Consumerism gets us there, too.)

The British developed their Imperial colonial economy that brought in cheap, commodities from their colonies and required those colonies to buy expensive finished products, keeping them impoverished. Corporations were a tool of that system, too. Benjamin Franklin offered to repay the East India Company out of his own pocket after the Boston Tea Party. Corporations were an important tool to our founding fathers.

[Democracyinkind]

3. Hobson missed the same thing.

You draw distinct lines where on close inspection only blurriness is discernible. While corporations might not MAKE an empire (the EIC did f.e., but that can become a long discussion...) the revolving door pretty much does. And "good" for America means something different depending on the perspective - while booze and maficking may be considered a blessing for society by those who have more refined spoils to consume it doesn't hold up to the kind of life that could be lived without the (eternal?) imperial folly.

[Ozymanithrax]

4. I agree that the empire should end.

But no President from any party will end it.

All empires end, however. Ours is not excpetion.