Consumer Underground

An Activist Counterpart to the Occupy Movement

If there is a lesson to be learned again, these past thirty years in America, it is this:  Corporations can be every bit as oppressive to people as governments.

The Right would have us all believe that freedom is simply the absence of government in our lives. True freedom however is the absence of any barrier that exists, which interferes with an individual’s quest for fulfillment.  The barriers proving to be the most destructive to our freedoms, in these last three decades, come NOT from government, but from CORPORATIONS and their influence on government to do its bidding–at the expense of everyone else.

The corporate plot against Americans is epic in its insidiousness.  The right’s perpetuation of the spectre of “socialism” with its enduring insinuation of an “overreach of government,” has worked for years as a con on the struggling middle and lower classes.  In fact, Tea Party activists, who are either not bright enough or educated enough to know who to be mad at, have fallen for this fraudulent interpretation of what ails America, socially.  While obsessively distracted by their focus on government, what Tea Partiers fail to see is the growing curtailment of their freedoms by for-profit entities, which have grown so powerful that they now preside over this country as a shadow government.

Some of the most oppressive aspects of corporate dominance in the lives of Americans are:

• The credit bureaus and their proprietary credit reporting methods
• Increasingly monopolistic behavior and the centralization of industry
• Control of our political system
• Interference in public education
• Propaganda through advertising, product misinformation
• Erosion of the rights and wages of employees
• Victimization of consumers through unfair trade practices
• Hoarding of resources and externalization of costs to taxpayers
• Excessive advantage in lawsuits and abuse of the court system

More and more, our fates are in the hands of for-profit entities that care nothing of the foundational American promise of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”–the principal cornerstone of our nation’s culture.  Through tactics that would be immediately identified as “Orwellian,” should the government employ them, corporations distort our media, corrupt public policy, dictate class structure, determine economic conditions and create barriers in the lives of people that are in every respect a reduction of our freedoms.

All the while, for-profit entities attempt to have us believe that THEY are actually “individuals” with the same rights as human beings.  They brand us all with a FICO score and assign us our class status within the very “Aristocracy of Wealth” that Thomas Jefferson warned about, should the moneyed classes become too powerful.

The Occupy Movement has finally brought about a focus that correctly identifies what ails America–The untenable powerlessness of consumers in today’s marketplace and the equally untenable oppression of working class Americans, by corporations.

Frustrations are now reaching a boiling point as the greed and corruption of corporations and their agents in government transitions from discreet manipulation of consumers to overt and brazen exploitation. Activists are spilling out onto the streets to demand that government reform itself and return to its proper role as protector of citizens against aggressive forces that threaten our right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Today, those forces are not foreign invaders or Old World tyrants, but the “Aristocracy of Wealth” that Thomas Jefferson warned against:  Billionaires, multi-millionaires and corporations that care nothing for the egalitarian society that America exists to preserve.

Activism on the streets of America is one way to combat the malignant forces of excessive wealth and corporate dominance.  The Consumer Underground movement is the other.  One requires showing up at demonstrations, the other requires individuals to change their daily behavior as consumers.  Together, these two forms of activism can bring down our oppressors.