Body Counts | Critical Analysis |Axisoflogic.com

“We know the predator.
We see them feed on us.
We are aware to starve the beast is our destiny.”

- John Trudell

They say “Money is the root of all evil” but that’s a half-truth because money is just a colored piece of paper with an enforced value, so it is not the money itself that is evil; the enforced value is the evil. “Pay to play” is the name of the game called survival in the realm of empire. The enforced value ranges from paramilitary and mercenary armies protecting the corporate loot, to electricity turned off and accounts closed if you don’t pay on time.

In the so-called land of opportunity aka life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (that last bit sounding like a mantra for the new age self-help industry), the goodies are an ever-dangling carrot.

The first official dangling carrot corporation was known as the Dutch East India Company.

“The East India Company was founded by a group of London businesses and chartered in 1600. Its original mission was to trade for spices... The company conquered and governed India, shipped slaves from East Africa and traded Indian opium for Chinese tea. And, of course, the East India Company encountered struggles in the tea market in America.”[1]

“It is often considered to have been the first multinational corporation in the world, and it was the first company to issue stock.”[2]

From the beginnings, the corporation abused fellow human beings with “shipped slaves” equating to torture and literal body counts. The word-root of “corporation” from “corporeal” sums up the agenda: “Body or form” from “corpus.” From slaves of yore to sweatshop labor and wage-slaves to oil corporations' pollution of the Amazon, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Alaskan coast, the body counts – which include natural habitats and the beings living there – have piled up.

Perhaps the biggest scam going is how populations are primed and baited to be nationalistic aka patriotic while the actual country has sold out to the corporations; multinational aka trans-national corporations have no allegiance to countries, only to maximizing profit and market share with banks typically behind the scenes. When those various sectors align, Global Corporate Empire (GCE) dominates.

A subtler form of the corporate body has to do with the massive mix of money, media, and societal fixation on physical appearance aka outer form. Add to that a mere botox stretch of the imagination to include the “body politic... a metaphor that regards a nation as a corporate entity...,”[3] or in other words, the fusion of corporate and state aka fascism.

While consumers were knee-deep in gift-wrap and maxed-out credit card receipts (instead of on their knees praying for less weaponry), on the Friday before Xboxmas, “Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which authorizes $611 billion for the military in 2017.”[4] 

Never mind the already existing debt which has become ingrained in military-industrial-complex business as usual. In the USEmpire (USE), the Federal Reserve was a debt machine from the 1913 get-go, but who cares because “Geico could save you 15% or more on car insurance” and Victoria Secret has more variety of on-sale underwear aka panties colors than Van Gogh's palette drenched in absinthe. And that sums up the struggling American status quo, where a better deal softens the sting, where as long as the underbelly of society gets tickled, then the seamy side gets overlooked.

Yet Standing Rock, where Native Peoples and allies have refused to back down, has exposed the corporate and theo-fascist underbelly of the USE/GCE. The Sámi (Indigenous People of Norway) got DNB (Norway's largest bank) to divest from the Dakota Access Pipeline, showing that trans-national Indigenous Peoples and allies solidarity can begin to starve the corporate beast.

Yet there's always fine print to keep track of:

“Niillas, Cook, Jensen and Scott all believe that this first divestment is only the beginning of financial institutions pulling out of the pipeline project. They are planning to keep working together to keep the pressure on DNB and other Nordic banks that are invested in the pipeline and to force them to pull their lines of credit as well.”[5]

Body image
In Mark Curtis' book “Secret Affairs: British Collusion with Radical Islam,” he cites“Divide et impera [divide and rule]” as the ancient Roman trick of all trades, Curtis writes: “This view pervaded and became a cornerstone of British rule in India. Secretary of State Wood wrote in a letter to Lord Elgin, governor general of India in 1862-3, that ‘we have maintained our power in India by playing off one part against the other and we must continue to do so. Do all you can, therefore, to prevent all having a common feeling.”[6] Not exactly the kind of gents you want to invite to your next party.

The word-root of “corporate” further shows: “early 15c., “united in one body, form into a body.” That's the psychological trick in a nutshell! Corporations want everyone to be “one body” wearing the same clothes advertised in the same magazines sold at the same gas station... yet the wide variety of styles gives people the illusion of choice, tricking them into celebrating their so-called individuality. Hypocritically, corporations will do anything they can get away with – including war, poisoning food, pharmaceuticals and Mother Earth – so as to divide and rule peacefully co-existing religious sects, so as to keep any people from having a “common feeling,” (except maybe, as advertised, a four-hour erection).

With body/pleasure fixation, the corporate madness to the method promotes a religiosity of things, where God is in some distant Heaven and all is right with the physical world (apologies to Robert Browning) IF you can get all the stuff you want, which includes clean drinking water.

It's no surprise to see that seven of the top ten corporations are in the oil & gas, and automobile business, with Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (powered by the USE-China sector of GCE) topping the list.[7] If, as the advertising slogan goes, “America runs on Dunkin,” then the corporate body runs on petroleum.

Age of the Paradigm Shift
The corporate-media tentacles reach far and wide with “television screens playing at all times in many corporate office waiting rooms, lobbies, elevators, and taxi cabs.” As the title of the article, from which that quote is from, aptly warns: “Corporate America is colonizing your mind. And you're letting them.”[8]

It's little wonder that Standing Rock is inspiring so many, what with Native People's having 500-plus years battling colonization. While much of the history has been battle-bloodied, we have entered an Age of the Paradigm Shift. The system being so entrenched, it is unreasonable to expect or even want a revolution where everything suddenly changes, rather a shift from one way of being-and-doing to another; this takes time and effort with perhaps a tipping point (for example, solar panels/energy so cheap that it makes fossil fuels virtually obsolete) ushering in a truly new Age.

In a world of identity politics and endless self-help at the expense of others, one of my role models is Bugs Bunny; rather than chasing the carrot he already has one (but let's say that carrot symbolizes consciousness, activism, and growing your own food), so he can't be seduced by the dangling. Bugs (to continue the metaphor), with all manner of costumes, accents and antics dares to question (“Eh, what's up, Doc?”) and outwit the corporate, gun-toting Elmer Fudds, who, though often seemingly goofy, have a long history of being “despicable” – as Daffy Duck, likes to say.

We can learn from Standing Rock and any community that is saying 'no' to mere worship of the body, that there is true power with prayer, peacefulness, holistic ways, working together with good feelings, sustainable energies, and things that stand the tests of time. It is worth remembering that Standing Rock is receiving support and solidarity from more than 300 Native Nations; for it is by learning to feed each other that we may keep our bodies from becoming food for the corporate beast.

NOTES:
1. “The first corporations — way back — had social purpose” 

2. Dutch East India Company

3. Body politic

4. “Obama signs bill to create Ministry of Truth”

5. “How Indigenous Activists in Norway Got the First Bank to Pull Out of the Dakota Access Pipeline”

6. Serpent's Tail an imprint of Profile Books Ltd., 2010, 2012, p4.

7. List of largest companies by revenue

8. See here.

Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is an essayist and resident poet on Axis of Logic. In addition to his work as a writer, he is a small press publisher and Turtle Islander. His new book of genre-bending poetic-nonfiction is “Musings With The Golden Sparrow.” You can contact him via his literary website.

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