You bet I’m laughing at you. My friends too. And not just at you, but all your clueless contemporaries. It’s not just regular laughing either. It’s hysterical, cackling, borderline psychotic laughing. Unfortunately, you have little recourse, since we are laughing at you from 100 years in the future. Sorry.

Why such amusement? It’s because you people all thought you had to carry 4000 pounds of steel with you wherever you went. Don’t give me that puzzled look. It can be only one thing. It’s your car.

As the disruptive technology of the day, cars quickly replaced horses in the early 20th century. Since then, over two billion cars have been manufactured, worldwide.

The auto and oil industries thus had plenty of cash for lobbying and campaign contributions, thereby assuring public transportation money was directed towards automobile infrastructure. We relied on cars to get around, as transit, the cheaper safer alternative, at least for city dwellers, became an underfunded afterthought.

We came to take for granted our car-culture related problems: traffic jams, road rage, road noise, pollution, potholes, sirens, hit-and-run, jay-walkers, tailgaters, car-theft, car-jacking, construction detours, double-parked delivery trucks, way too loud motorcycles, car-alarms with minds of their own, ladders and mattresses appearing inconveniently on the freeway, the dreary search for parking. And all those dead and injured people, tens of thousands of the former and millions of the latter, every year.

Personally we paid for: car payments, gas, insurance, maintenance, repairs, parking, registration, car washes, smog checks, tolls, traffic tickets, Auto Club.

Via taxes we paid for: roads and bridges, highway patrol, traffic cops, the DMV, legislation, traffic lights, meter maids, stop signs and all those other signs, like “do not enter”, “one-way”, “dead-end”, and my favorite: “no diving from bridge.”

Then the We The People Amendment passed. That’s right. Two-thirds of both houses, and three-fourths of the state legislatures said Yes. Can’t remember the exact date, but is was closer to your time than to mine. It clarifies that when the constitution mentions people or persons, it is referring only to actual homo sapiens type people, and nothing else. Not corporations, not labor unions, not churches, not Super PACS.

The next morning was no different from mornings past. Same birds chirping, same coffee brewing, same breezy morning talk shows. But the wheel that had been frozen solid for so long gradually began to turn. Our elected representatives, local, state and federal, began to see the possibilities.

We realized that our common public information space had been colonized by corporations lying to us for the sake of money. We began to take that space back.

First to go was tobacco advertising. We had all just assumed that the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment gave tobacco companies the right to spend millions to persuade teenagers to smoke. Nothing we could do about it.

What a crock of shit that was. Collectively, our re-awakened representatives experienced a BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious).

Quickly, tobacco advertising was proscribed. Magazines, billboards, Online, point of sale, sponsorships, merch. All gone.

Early state constitutions prohibited corporations from political involvement. These restrictions weakened during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then disappeared.

With the We The People amendment in place, this principle gained new life. These days, corporations may no longer make political contributions nor be involved in political campaigns. Penalties for violators are severe, including serious jail time and eye-popping fines. Still, some try to skirt the law, you know, fools rush in. Today there are still a few ladies and gentlemen who, representing their companies, have recently been caught trying to influence their legislators with cash, and who now have their living expenses provided by the State.

Old-style lobbying with hordes of corporate advocates wandering the halls of congress was replaced.

A company desiring a word with our legislators must request a hearing. Individual citizens, of course, can approach their representatives any time with no constraints. No change from the past. That includes corporate executives, on their own time, and on their own nickel. But if a corporation or some other entity itself wants to talk to our representatives, it has to go through channels.

Permission is typically granted, and hearings scheduled. They are televised live. They are similar to congressional committee hearings, with representatives from both parties listening to and posing questions to witnesses. The press and the public are also invited, who are given plenty of time to ask their own impromptu questions, as cameras roll.

Additional unexpected benefits appeared. Without constant pressure from lobbyists, who outnumbered your representatives by around 20 to 1, and pleasing corporate donors no longer an issue, Legislators paid closer attention to actual problems. They spent more time in serious dialogue among themselves. The result: more agreement and more effective legislation.

Personal transportation was one of many re-examined issues. Somebody got the bright idea that public transit should be universal and free to all.

This notion was greeted with its own round of raucous laughter. Where are we going to get money for this? Tax-and-spend insanity some said. These people hate America, some said. They want to spend us into oblivion, they said. Lock ’em up, they said.

Then they put their heads together and did the math. Calculations revealed that transit was way, way cheaper than owning a car. Cars were the second biggest expense for most families, just behind housing. How much cheaper? About $8000 a year, per vehicle.

So the question changed from “How could we possibly pay for all of this” to “what are we going to do with all that extra money?” The nation now spends hundreds of billion of dollars per year less on personal transportation than it did at the height of the homo- automobilus era. This one change lifted many out of poverty.

Everybody came out winners, auto and oil companies excepted. You can still acquire your own car, and with our legacy highway system, which is now maintained better than ever, driving is easier, safer and more pleasant. But most people have no need and use free public transit instead, saving a fortune.

Buses, trains, trams, and some innovative specialized vehicles are always there for a safe and comfortable ride. People hating transit turned out to be fake news. If you check the boxes, they will come: accessible, reliable, frequent, safe, goes where you need to go, inexpensive.

Vastly improved sidewalks and bike paths make walking and biking good options. If you absolutely must have your own personal vehicle, you can order a robot car or SUV to appear at your doorstep. Drive it yourself, or let the robot do it. Your choice.

We took other steps to ease citizen movement from point A to point B. For example, housing with more than a minimum number of dwelling units must now include retail. Need lunch or a haircut or your nails done or your shoes repaired? A pleasant walk will get you there.

So don’t give me that hang-dog look. Take heart in knowing that your great-grandchildren will be better off than you are.

The post Hey, You Laughin’ at Me? appeared first on The DNA of Corporations.

The writer predicts that within a generation, those computers which had shrunk from the room-sized mainframes, to desktop PCs, to the contemporary version of the laptop (affectionately known at the time as “luggables”) would get smaller still, so that you could hold a computer in one hand or carry it in your pocket. They will have nice bright miniature TV screens, buttons, rechargeable batteries and be cheap enough to be available to everyone.

Super handy they will be. You can communicate with the outside world in all kinds of ways: order a pizza, call a cab, play music, even movies. It’s a pocket calculator, a flashlight, and you can play games. Compose and send little notes to your friends? Easy. Read the news or have it read to you? No problem. And to top it off, you can hold it to your ear and use it as a telephone. Heck, most people won’t even have regular phones any more. This little sucker will be all they need. The one thing the writer didn’t say is that you could browse the Internet because at the time, the Internet was barely a thing.

You are not entirely convinced of the plausibility of such a device, but are impressed by the writers imagination.

But the next part pisses you off. Being so useful and entertaining, the writer continues, people will become addicted to using their little gadgets. Folks will be playing with them non-stop, staring at the little screens and poking at them all day long, including while in line at the grocery store, eating dinner, playing cards or doing the laundry.

And worst of all, even while driving their cars. There they will become distracted, watching the little screen and playing with the device instead of paying attention to the road. Drivers will thus sometimes lose control, colliding with other vehicles, buildings and pedestrians with resulting death and destruction. This will happen frequently, with tragic news becoming normal.

You jump up and throw your magazine across the room. What ridiculous bullshit! Nobody would be stupid enough to do that. And if they did they’d be locked up. How do people get paid to write this crap?

But the writer is no less than a modern day Nostradamus. As we all now know, a prediction as described above would be 100% accurate. Those miniature computers, known as Smart Phones, have indeed appeared on the scene, and people use them everywhere, including in the car, where texting and driving don’t mix. Check out “From One Second to the Next” on YouTube by award-winning director Werner Herzog. There you can meet some of the participants in a few of those sad events. This is only one of many such hard-to-watch videos.

In a society where leaders and the citizens who choose them are thoughtful and clear-headed, such behavior would be immediately curtailed. Laws and the enforcement of them would be strict and sure. Instead, we do in fact have laws, at least in some localities, intended to limit vehicle cell phone use, but such laws are routinely ignored by citizens, seldom enforced by the police, and punishment, when it occurs, is only slightly more severe than unnoticeable.

But some countries got the memo. Americans might consider imitating friends in Ireland where the fine for texting while driving is 1000 Euros, or in Cape Town, South Africa, where cops can confiscate your phone if they catch you in the act.

Why is it so difficult to implement obvious common-sense restrictions on this dangerous behavior? It is because we live in a corporate state, defined thus:

The Corporate State is a system of government, nominally a democracy, whose executive, legislative, judicial and regulatory decision-making is conducted for the benefit of for-profit corporations through the influence of money.

As you might have guessed by observing your fellow travelers, much cell phone communication occurs in moving vehicles. Companies enriched by this behavior lobby against constraints on such usage. Its not that they want people to die in car crashes, its just that when they do, Providers aren’t liable for damages, and since no expense is incurred, it doesn’t enter into the calculation. There is no column in the spread-sheet for “dead commuters”.

This is normal behavior for big companies. Whenever they see a law or regulation either already on the books, or under consideration, that would affect its bottom line, they have effective methods of resistance.

This includes lobbying congress, and donating money strategically to individual lawmakers. Companies advertise their virtues and the truth of their policy positions. They establish so-called Think Tanks, tasked with providing academic credibility to those positions. They will endow chairs at universities to the same end, and sponsor ballot initiatives. They might even ghost write legislation, saving our representatives the trouble.

Corporations, prevented by statute from engaging in politics in the early days of our country, now do so freely. Vast wealth enables them to manipulate the economy for their own ends, at the expense of public safety, as the example above illustrates.

In response there is a proposed constitutional amendment stating that only actual human beings are “persons” in the eyes of the law, and that money is not equivalent to free speech. For those who would read the minds of the Founders, this might be closer to their original vision. There is a grass-roots organization promoting the “We the people amendment.” More details at http://www.movetoamend.org

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