Forum Post: Separating corportion from state - an end to the 'Church of Capitalism'

Centuries ago, the challenge was to separate church from state. Some argue it was never truly achieved but at least there were structures put in place in many nations to wrest power from religious institutions and restrict them from dictating a country's affairs. It revolutionized human expression, ended the dark ages and brought about freedom from oppression, and the dawn of new nations based on emerging democratic models.

We now need a similar revolution. So many comments reflect a shock as to how we have reached a point where most have nothing and a few have everything. We've been hoodwinked into believing that perpetual growth, a capital model that pits everyone against everyone else, everyone for themselves, so that the one who steps on the most gets to the top, is the holy grail of governing systems. But remember that capitalism was never meant as a governing system but an economic model, a tool to serve society, never to demand subservience from it.

We have blurred the line between capitalism and democracy. To challenge capitalism makes you somehow undemocratic, a pariah of society, To question unsustainable, unmitigated growth to the benefit of an elite corporate few is to be a commie or leftist. This narrow-minded and bigoted approach - closed-thinking to change and innovation for a better model - is the ever-present historical failing of humankind.

If not, why have we used the same broken economic model that is proven flawed beyond repair and our politicians and corporate elite imply treason and radicalism if anyone speaks of changing it?

To coin a phrase right from the corporate handbook 101, Change or Die. Any business that doesn't reinvent itself to survive the capitalist's Darwinism will perish, Why should we be any less committed to the very structures that governs all of our lives? If the infrastructure put in place to serve society fails society as a whole, society should replace it with something better, or at the least address its failing to better serve society's needs.

To prevail, and to become a better place to live in for all of us, we must accept the need to separate corporation from state, to eliminate the ability of any corporation to influence the decision-making of the state, a system supposedly designed to serve the people of a nation.

Corporations are not breathing entities with mouths to feed; they are tools to serve people, be that the owners, the employees or the goods and services they provide. But they should never be privileged above people, or even to the least of the living, with rights as though people. It is the new religion, dictated by faith and ideologies and not by hard realities and facts, the communion of pen to an article of corporation somehow breathing physical life and into an entity as from that point forward alive, and to be revered.

To allow this nonsense to proliferate is to accept collusion above democracy, corporatism above individualism, and fascism above freedom.

Occupy Wall Street, or where ever your voice can be heard. If democracy matters to you, if you feel that you and your family, your freedoms and your nation have become of little importance in contrast to profits and power, then it is your duty as a citizen of a democracy to stand up and be heard. Anything less is an insult to those who founded your freedoms.