A Citizen without a Soul: Corporations Unleash Zombie King Ted Stevens to Prey on the Living

Kodiak, Alaska

You can see it in his eyes. A dark shiny ruthlessness that I have seen in the eyes of surfacing salmon sharks. Yes, Senator Ted Stevens has been turned into a creature of darkness. His son, Ben, a noble born, has been scorching newspaper photographs for years with his pitiless glare. They are the zombie kings. They suck the lifeblood from Alaska by siphoning off the value of our fish and oil.

Still, I do not blame the Stevens'. I blame their master, a citizen without a soul, the modern corporation.

Sometimes I miss crab fishing in the winter.

Shoulder slamming thousand pound crab pots one into the other, with icicles on your chin and jellyfish in your eyes, all wrapped in the howling blackness of the Bering Sea in winter: it centers you. Your faintly flickering brain flooded with the crawling bee headrush of cold hard reality. The snap of salt water in your face, blue air biting your lungs, the friction in your veins of caffeinated blood chasing its own tail back to your hammering heart, legs levering under you waiting for the next big wave to boost your leap onto the stack: That's when you feel it: the bleeding razor cut of reality. The red flush of freedom. And you understand what is really important: your food, your feet, your family.

On deck you see people as they really are, stripped clean by the acetone of fear and fatigue. Eyes glowing with the fire of humanity. Ready to do what needs to be done. That's why I like fishermen. They are real people, with very little time for pretending. The pretense has been bleached out of them.

Personally, I think we are too eager to retreat to the plush pillowed prisons we make for ourselves, where everybody loves Raymond, the flowers smell like a new car, and we kill online, with a tap on the back of a plastic mouse. We have traded real life for a MySpace account. We have become soft but callous, stupid from too much information.

Still, I do not blame us. I blame our master, the modern corporation. The citizen without a soul.

Have you seen "The Corporation"? Highly recommended. The DVD is available at Blockbuster, or better yet your public library. (You will never look at milk the same way again- buy organic!) The movie shows how a corporation has most of the legal rights of a citizen without the bothersome humanity. The law school at Cornell describes it as a "legal 'person' that has standing to sue and be sued, distinct from its stockholders. The legal independence of a corporation prevents shareholders from being personally liable.The legal 'person' status of corporations gives the business perpetual life; deaths of officials or stockholders do not alter the corporation's structure."

So a corporation is the picture of Dorian Gray. This Oscar Wilde story was made into a very creepy 1945 movie, also available at your local library (hopefully). Dorian Gray has a portrait painted of himself that absorbs the results of every evil he perpetrates, on himself and the world. He stays beautiful as the painting becomes more and more hideous. Likewise, the stockholders and officers of corporations are protected from liability, protected from responsibility, by deathless creatures created in a laboratory of laws. But our monsters have leapt from the picture and grown strong. These things, freed from morality, and answering only to their own bylaws, have surpassed whole countries in wealth and power. And like most monsters they have turned on their masters. They have become the masters. Their agents, the legislators and the lobbyists, leap to their bidding.

Eisenhower saw it coming. As he left office he gave a prophetic warning about the "military industrial complex" that was poised to grab our nation by the throat. His point was that an amoral arms industry could easily corrupt our government, make our public servants into their private servants and make a business out of death and destruction.

We have certainly seen that happen in Iraq. The Carlyle Group, represented by the Bush family, and Halliburton, represented by the Dick, have done very well. As a result of the war multinational corporations have made billions of dollars selling crude oil, bombs, hamburgers, and "security" since we invaded. A half a million Iraqis are dead and thousands of Americans are killed and limbless. The Middle East has become a bonfire of rage. Meanwhile, here in America we slump in our loveseats and watch it on TV and click to Seinfeld when it gets too real.

Iraq was a dysfunctional family, whose abusive father at least kept his three hateful children from killing each other. We threw the sadistic father in jail, but forgot to provide a foster parent for the kids. That's because our leaders have become zombie kings. Their true allegiance is to their soulless masters, whose only faith is in profit. As our President tells us to gird for endless war, we see Eisenhower's prophecy come to pass. Citizen Halliburton sees little profit in peace.

Here in Alaska we dare to hope for the future. The governor's race is currently led by Sarah Palin, a woman with a soul. She is a real independent who has repeatedly refused to be bitten by the corporate living dead. My last column was typically subtle, and I sure hope I did not offend future Governor Palin. I meant to scorch the ground at her feet, but not to singe her toes. Corporate zombies, attracted by the light in her eyes, were gathering around her during her visit to Kodiak. They want to sell her their Iraq, fisheries privatization and market control. The corporations who will reap the vast rewards from privatization already own the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council. Through the NPFMC these companies, largely Japanese with the notable exception of Trident Corporation, have already driven through the community destroying Crab Rationalization scheme by handing it directly to Uncle Ted Stevens (the Witch King of Angmar) who kicked a sputtering John McCain in the head and attached it as an earmark on a Federal spending bill. The governor's power to appoint members of the Council is surely on the mind of the lobbyists who are starting to swarm around Sarah Palin.

It might be interesting to note here that the leading candidate for appointment to the open seat on the NPFMC is a close associate of Prowler Fisheries Inc.'s John Winther. Prowler Fisheries was recently awarded millions of dollars in disputed black cod quota despite losing their case in every court whose docket they could clog up with the thing. For some reason Ted Stevens (that guy is everywhere) crafted a brand new law just for him and earmarked another bill with it. It was taken down before passage under pressure from PVOA and FVO and many others. It is unlikely the seat will be filled by anyone other than a shill for the soulless citizens.

As I write this the Council meets in Dutch Harbor, the secret lair of the Japanese fish buyers. They will remove the vessel caps on Crab Rat boats during this meeting, meaning a few Trident owned boats will be able to grind away endlessly on Trident owned crab and deliver to the Trident owned cannery in Akutan. And every Japanese owned company in the cartel can do the same. After taking away 75% of their crewshare, many of these boats reported having trouble finding fishermen to harvest the "deadliest catch". That's odd.

Recently a harvest boat sold its share of the king crab harvest. After cashing out of the resource they then signed a contract to harvest Co-Op quota to use the boat to harvest part of their quota. And why not? Who can blame them for making an obvious business decision?

So as towns like King Cove dry up for lack of access to a resource right out their back door, the NPFMC continues to drive the square peg that is Gulf of Alaska Groundfish privatization into our round hole. This is the kind of thing that gives capitalism a bad name.

I was reading a piece by Clive Crook in which he wrote "What best serves a nation's economic interests is competition- it's why markets work, when they do. But competition hurts individual businesses and most CEOs hate it. Don't look there for intellectual enlightenment."

I'll finish with an excerpt from a slim volume of me poems:

Frozen Footed Fisherman
Stepping on the shore
Wondering why it's rational
That he can fish no more
Slipping slowly sideways
To the BnB
Sitting on a sticky stool
Sitting next to me
We have a glass of Sunshine
And then we have another
The Sunshine is so very fine
We drink until we're brothers
Flat footed fisherman
Shuffling out the door
Anger fills his clutching hands
Emptiness his core

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