Understanding Corporate Loopholes and the 401k
Executive Summary
- Corporate Loopholes
- The Loophole of the 401k
- The Leverage of The 14the Amendment
Introduction
Corporations view the legal system as a long term chess match, which they exploit to enhance their rights vs. citizens. They see themselves as apart from society, and their goal is to attain extraordinary rights at the cost of individual rights.
Their ultimate goal is to checkmate individual rights so that individuals and smaller corporations are slaves to them. Under the rare conditions that they don’t get their way, they have a particular derogatory term they like to trot out; the term is “activist judges.”
Corporate Loopholes
The issue with small loopholes of lawsuits that seem to impact only one area is once the opening is made, the dam soon breaks. I have noticed this in three different areas which resulted in very bad outcomes for the general population vs. corporations.
- The lawsuit brought by GE to patent an oil-eating microbe
- The loophole, created for executives which would allow them to have some of their income put away tax-free – called the 401k
- The 14th Amendment, that was originally designed to help slaves become truly emancipated
As soon as these decision/lawsuits were decided, companies began actively enlarging the decision. With GE, the patent decision on the oil-eating microbe, which was the first time a living thing was patented, meant the beginning of the patenting of everything living that was seen to have value. This included patenting portions of human, animal and plant DNA.
It has resulted in Monsanto suing farmers for violating their “patent” when genetically modified soybeans are found in farmers fields. This allows Monsanto to demand that the farmers destroy all of their seed, and only buy Monsanto seed, or be continually sued.
The Loophole of the 401k
The loophole on the 401k very quickly lead to the generalization of the 401k program to the majority of the population, and to the elimination of the defined pension benefits system, that was a far better system. The 401k was so beneficial to corporations that they switched plans as quickly as possible, and with no federal oversight. What had been positive for people, the defined benefit pension system has been turned into a negative with employers only contributing 4% on average compared to 8% on average for pensions. Secondly, the return on 401ks has not been good for the general population. Returns are highly dependent upon income level.
Thus the 401k were a way of greatly reducing retirement benefits for the majority of the US population. Furthermore, there is evidence that 401ks, by giving so much investment power to non-specialists help increase the size and severity of bubbles.
The Leverage of The 14the Amendment
The 14th Amendment was originally designed to benefit slaves. However, it was quickly grasped upon by corporations to give their corporate forms the status of person-hood. Companies now claim 1st Amendment rights. Thus when they get caught lying, and they are subject to a lawsuit, they declare their speech is not commercial, but the speech of an individual. In fact, a recent case against a financial advisement firm where internal memos showed that the company knew it was selling toxic investments to clients, used the 1st Amendment protection as a defense that they had the right to lie, and their right to lie was protected by the government. That is their speech could not be infringed, even if they knew it was false.
Conclusion
Corporations are permanently on the make. They are gifting, looking for any opportunity to leverage the law that was made in one area, and apply it more generally. I am not observing that courts are stopping this, it’s simply a slow ceding of power to corporations steadily increasing their rights, and decreasing the rights of individuals, and even smaller corporations.
I have noticed a strong conservative / corrupt shift in many court cases, and the courts seem to be making little effort to consider the long-term implications to their decisions. It is interesting to note that while Americans take great pride in the fact that the US gained independent from the British, and as pointed out by ReclaimDemocray.org, we not only declared independence from the government of Britain but from its corporations. However, in effect, US corporations have taken the place of the British as exploiters of individuals, both in the US and overseas. Our corporations subjugate both our domestic population, and international populations as well.
References
https://www.calicocat.com/401k.htm
https://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7110
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://reclaimdemocracy.org/pdf/primers/hidden_corporate_history.pdf