A new crime

Shucking past taboos, corporate marketeers hard sell directly to children bypassing or undermining parental authority. What they sell is obesity, diabetes, promiscuity, dangerous addictions and violence in their merciless ‘entertainment programs’ and narratives about armed force, however illegal it may be.

In terms of sheer time, range of exposure, and planned peer group pressures, corporations are raising our children day and night.

Big companies do strategic planning about everything affecting our children. There are no longer adequate limits and boundaries on corporatism or protections of commercial-free zones.

It's getting worse. Eyewear for ‘augmented reality’ from Facebook and rapidly expanding ‘artificial intelligence’ induce dependency and more sedentary living. People from Bill Joy to Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have strongly warned about these emerging technologies and the consequential loss of freedom and democracy.

I'd like to invite some open-minded educators to consider a six-hour curricula for late middle school through high school students on the modern global corporation. Hour One could be called ‘Big Corporations are Different from You and Me’ illuminating this fast-dominating ‘artificial person’ with all the rights of real humans yet structurally escaping from responsibility, a status of ‘privileges and immunities’ under corporate law[lessness].

Hour Two could be devoted to the history of corporate power so heavily characterized by the costs of their amassing wealth – costs to workers, communities, small businesses, voters, consumers, patients, our governing ways, and, yes, students. Having been told repeatedly about how companies ‘built America,’ students should learn about all the ‘Nos.’ Corporations were operationally entrenched against the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, union organizing, the minimum wage, universal health insurance, early solar energy, mass transit, public campaign financing, and governmental institutions accountable to the citizenry. The most recent big ‘NOs' are against consumer, labor, and environmental justice and, of course, waging peace instead of forever wars of mayhem and profit have filled volumes of documentation.

Hour Three might run students through all the attempts and reforms by the American people to reign in the destructive, unjust excesses of large companies and their controlling ideology of corporatism. What were the results from all those widespread protests, regulatory actions, prosecutions, and electoral reforms? What are the successes of the peace movement, environmental groups and initiatives by workers, consumers, creators, and defenders of The Commons, (such as the public lands and public airwaves), investors and savers for justice and the common good? What happened to the corporate tax system, the drive for shareholder rights and corporate democracy and, most importantly, the rule of law over corporate power?

Hour Four, Hour Five, and Hour Six – well, to be continued. That is, if we hear from people interested enough in having this proposal described further.

Excerpted: ‘Please Teach Your Children About Corporate Criminals’

Commondreams.org