Forum Post: For those who don't understand the hatred against big corporations and their friendliness with the government

Guess what? Part of the reason why the rest of the world stays poor is because of corporations.

Example -> Corporate interests get CIA to install a dictator in Congo in 1961: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/29/as_congo_marks_50th_anniversary_of

"Well, the story really begins, in the modern era, in 1885, when — or 1884 to '85, when all the major countries of Europe led — preceded by the United States, actually; we were the very first — recognized the Congo not as a Belgian colony, but as the private, personally owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, a very greedy, ambitious man who wanted a colony of his own. At that point, Belgium was not sure that it wanted a colony. Leopold ruled this place for 23 years, made an enormous fortune, estimated at over a billion in today's American dollars. Finally, in 1908, he was forced to give it up to become a Belgian colony, and then he died the following year. And the Belgians ran it for the next half-century, extracting an enormous amount of wealth, initially in ivory and rubber, then in diamonds, gold, copper, timber, palm oil, all sorts of other minerals. And as with almost all European colonies in Africa, this wealth flowed back to Europe. It benefited the Europeans much more than the Africans.

"And the hope that many people had when independence came all over Africa, for the most part, you know, within a few years on either side of 1960, people had the hope that at last African countries would begin to control their own destiny and that they would be the ones who would reap the profits from the mines and the plantations and so on. Lumumba put that hope into words. And for that reason, he was immediately considered a very dangerous figure by the United States and Belgium. The CIA issued this assassination order with White House approval. And as was said at the beginning, they couldn’t get close enough to him to actually poison him, but they got money under the table to Congolese politicians who did see that he was assassinated, with Belgian help. It was a Belgian pilot who flew the plane to where he was killed, a Belgian officer who commanded the firing squad.

"And then, the really disastrous thing that followed was this enthusiastic United States backing for the dictatorial regime of Mobutu, who seized total power a couple years later and ran a 32-year dictatorship, enriched himself by about $4 billion, and really ran his country into the ground, was greeted by every American president, with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter, who was in office during those 32 years. And he left the country a wreck, from which it has still not recovered."

TL;DR Belgium & US wanted their corporations to control Congo's natural resources so killed a democratically elected president who aimed to take control of their own resources

Note that this was in the middle of the cold war, when the US jumped at any mention of socialism

Example 2: CIA installed dictator in Iran for similar reasons Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax

"The 1953 Iranian coup d'état (known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup[3]) was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States under the name TPAJAX Project.[4] The coup saw the transition of Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi from a constitutional monarch to an authoritarian one who relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power until his own overthrow in February 1979.[5]

"In 1951, Iran's oil industry was nationalized with near-unanimous support of Iran's parliament in a bill introduced by Mossadegh who led the nationalist parliamentarian faction. Iran's oil had been controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).[6] Popular discontent with the AIOC began in the late 1940s, a large segment of Iran's public and a number of politicians saw the company as exploitative and a vestige of British imperialism.[7] . . . Initially, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the Abadan oil refinery, the world's largest, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee opted instead to tighten the economic boycott[9] while using Iranian agents to undermine Mosaddegh's government.[10] With a change to more conservative governments in both Britain and the United States, Churchill and the U.S. Eisenhower administration decided to overthrow Iran's government though the predecessor U.S. Truman administration had opposed a coup.[11]"

TL;DR Overthrew Iranian president because he tried to claim the country's resources for the country's benefit but the oil companies intervened.

As much as I hate and disapprove of terrorism, I can kinda understand their anger, to be honest with you . . . and these are just the declassified ones! Who knows what's happening today.

TL;DR our lives are good because our (and other European) corporations siphon off the country's resources and its profits away from the people who live there.

GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS!