What does John Murtha’s defeat by Steny Hoyer for House Majority Leader have to do with global warming, peak oil, the war in Iraq, global corporatism, and general political failure to deal effectively with all of these variables—all of which lead to imminent catastrophe?

To answer this question, I must first digress to discuss the nature of corporations and their role in the overall human political economy. This section is necessarily a bit technical. However, I know that as a reader of my blog, you are someone who actually thinks and looks forward to thinking. I cover these concepts in much greater depth in my book, Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.

Markets and trade appear to be innate in human nature itself. Markets have existed since long before history began, and they have existed throughout human history, as have organized trading and group profit-making enterprises of which modern corporations are an example.

As large-scale human communities have emerged during the past 6,000 or so years, government and a system of laws to regulate human interactions have been formalized as well. All business activities and all entities engaging in business activities require legal sanction. Within the context of a political economy, the types of business entities and the rules by which they must interact with the rest of the political economy are specified by government.

And of course, business activities shape the overall economy, and the politics, of the society in which they are embedded. Thus a political economy comes into existence for each society.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a corporation, which is a legal fiction of a separately existing business entity. This fictional entity was created in order to limit investors’ liability in a business enterprise solely to their investment in the enterprise itself, while shielding all of their other assets from liabilities incurred by the business enterprise. Since the corporation is legally a separate entity, its debts are separate and distinct from those of its investors.

Viewed in this context, simply creating a legal niche for fictional business entities, in order to encourage entrepreneurs and investors to contribute capital to a commercial enterprise, does not seem either radical or inappropriate. Nor does this creation superficially appear to be a world-threatening one.

That the corporation would have access to the global commercial market seems a natural consequence of its creation. But unlike governments, corporations exist for one purpose only: To achieve the maximum possible profit for their investors in the shortest possible time. And in order to do so, they have subordinated all other organized human systems, such as governments and regulatory agencies, which were standing in their way. Multi-national corporations have now become the dominant entity for organizing and controlling our early 21^st century world.

With the subordination of all other human systems by unfettered global corporations, not only have humanity’s institutions of market and government—our global political economy—been subverted, but our entire biosphere itself is facing imminent catastrophe.

How to explain this?

In our contemporary world, the scope of the political economy is global, while the scope of political authority—nation-states—is geographically bounded. Global corporations operating outside of the effective control of any nation-state have subordinated the governing systems of the planet’s most powerful nation-states in general, and that of the USA in particular, simply because these other systems stood in the way of their profit maximization. And profit maximization is their sole goal.

In the Epilogue to my book, Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization, I state that:

…corporate entities represent a type of complex adaptive system which organizes the individual abilities of numerous humans towards a collective goal. Since these entities exist only to produce short-term profits for their investors, that goal has been the creation of wealth as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible. This means that externalities such as the effects of wealth extraction upon the earth’s biosphere are disregarded to the maximum extent legally possible.

Since governmental regulation is the only check upon what is legal for these corporate entities, it follows that corporate profit maximization requires the subordination of this other human system—government. Human laws that stood in the way of corporate profit maximization have been subverted, as corporations gained power over governments…

Corporations were supposed to be constrained by human laws that were enacted by human governments, and designed to maximize overall human welfare. Having slipped free of these constraints, it is as if Frankenstein’s monster is running amuck. Another metaphor is with what happens when constraints on cell growth fail and cells proliferate without constraint—cancer. Corporations constrained by law are fine. Unconstrained corporatism, however, is effectively a metastasized cancer eating away at the entire biosphere.

This process of subversion takes place not as the result of some kind of grand secret conspiracy. Rather, individual corporate leaders and all those who partake of corporate wealth, acting on the basis of local information as to what is in their best interest, use whatever means are at their disposal to intervene into the political system to benefit themselves and maximize their profits. The sum total of these interventions acts as if it were a Smithian “invisible hand” constraining the political process to act in the short-term best interests of corporations rather than in the long-term interests of the people and our biosphere.

This intervention is now increasingly unchecked because corporations, unlike any other artificial collective human entity such as labor unions, political parties, etc., have the same legal status as do actual flesh and blood human beings; while those other entities have significant limitations that the corporations do not have. Corporations can muster millions of times greater resources than can actual humans. And so slowly, methodically, over time, these artificial entities, the corporations, have slipped the bonds of human control and have, in turn, placed all human systems under their control. Consequently, corporate decision-making determines political decision-making. The state has become a tool for this purpose.

Yet, for the tool to retain its effectiveness it must retain its legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry. This is accomplished in many ways—too many to be able to fully discuss in this post. However, one method is to ensure that compliant political stooges are strategically placed throughout the government.

Which brings us back to the Murtha-Hoyer leadership race.

Admittedly, Murtha was corrupt in the classical sense: He worked hard to deliver pork for his constituents. When he was approached in 1978 by FBI agents who were targeting him in a bribery sting, Murtha refused their bribe money but he sought their investment in his District.

However, in addition to seeking to directly benefit his constituents, Murtha believes that the national interests are also in the citizen’s interest. He is an opponent of continuing the Iraq war, whose purpose is geopolitical and geo-strategic control over oil resources by western oil companies that are being protected by their associated governments. Clearly, Murtha’s ascension to Majority Leader would not have been in the interest of our ruling corporate elites, who stand to profit immensely from control of Middle East oil. And from the geopolitical power that comes from that.

Hoyer, by way of contrast, is an unabashed corporate whore. See, for example, David Sirota’s blog at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/hoyers-campaign-to-under_b_11848.html for much more substantiation for this assertion. Hoyer has been a firm “stay the course” supporter of the Iraq war; and therefore, Hoyer, a card-carrying member of the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council was the ideal candidate for the corporatists. So how to ensure that Hoyer won?

In the run-up to the vote, Murtha actually announced that he had the voted needed to be elected. And then something—or someone—intervened. As investigative reporter Wayne Madsen recounts it:

November 17/18/19, 2006 -- Questions remain about where the right-wing American Spectator obtained a copy of the John Murtha videotape made of the FBI's attempted ABSCAM sting of the congressman conducted some twenty-five years ago. Since Murtha was never indicted for any wrongdoing, such a videotape was at the very least secret grand jury evidence and should have been kept sealed or destroyed after the statute of limitations expired. Since Robert Gates is a good friend of the American Spectator's publisher, the Senate should ask Gates about the origins of the Murtha videotape during his confirmation hearings.

The reappearance of the Murtha tape after the recent election campaign was used by Murtha's opposition to sink his election as House Majority Leader in a swiftboat-type attack campaign.

The url for the above quote is http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/.

Once again the public’s interest was efficiently and silently subverted to that of the mega-corporations. Consequently, despite the clearly expressed will of the citizens in this month’s mid-term elections,  we can expect all of the by-products of continued corporate rule to continue unabated: Global warming, hydrocarbon resource depletion, subversion of democracy, and continuing war…

Only unrestrained profit-making, with no concern for the effects upon our biosphere, remains as the goal of our human political economy under its avaricious new masters.

Do not be deceived: Hoyer’s victory is an integral part of this metastasizing corporatist cancer’s proliferation. The time for all of us to act decisively to take back control over our country, indeed over our planet, is NOW.

Tomorrow will be too late.

My forthcoming book The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow will deal with strategies for accomplishing this goal in detail…