Guaranteed to fail.

Editor,

Suppose we Americans were Ogoni people living in the Niger Delta, or Aguinda or Jota people living in Ecuador, or even Chilean workers when the Nixon administration installed Augusto Pinochet.

In each of these cases horrible circumstances would have been visited on us as they were on those victims of American capitalism, but -- my point -- the banks and the corporations made billions upon billions of dollars.

It doesn't bother corporations in the least to make their money surrounded by a sea of human misery, and the ruling class have no problem spending a billion dollars of taxpayers' money to unleash their police thugs on people who dislike this model, as they did the other day on G20 protesters in Toronto.

Appeals to morality and conscience do not penetrate the corporate mind. In certain cases a corporation will green-wash or otherwise pretty up their PR image, but the story doesn't change: multinational corporations do not care about the citizens of the U.S.A.

We had a middle class in this country after WWII because the corporations needed us to buy their products. Now they make money without even having to bother making products (see "No Logo" by Naomi Klein).

Appealing to the better angels of the corporate oligarchy (and their paid lackeys in government) to be fair to us is a strategy for change that is guaranteed to fail.

Re: "Wrong Track Distress" (6/29/2010)