GARDONE RIVIERA, Italy July 15, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– Global corporatism has created the concept of contraception and
abortion and the brutal limiting of family size as a “civic virtue” in
order to reduce large sections of the human population to units of
production, as workers and consumers, an American Catholic lawyer told LifeSiteNews.com last week.
This has the result, he said, of separating work from the home and
family members from each other and creates an economic requirement for
smaller families.
The pro-life movement mainly focuses their efforts on the actions of
courts and governments, but Christopher Ferrara, author and head of the
American Catholic Lawyer’s Association, spoke last week of the enormous
influence of corporations, whose priority has become the ever-increasing
commodification and control of individuals and the family in service to
the bottom line.
These immensely powerful transnational entities, he said, are major
pushers of the “contraceptive culture” and indeed the whole Culture of
Death that has “in a psychopathic manner, destroyed a large part of our
civilization.”
Many corporations, or the charitable foundations built with the wealth
derived from such corporations, such as the Ford, Gates, and Hewlett
Packard Foundations, routinely donate billions of dollars to
pro-contraception and pro-abortion initiatives and organizations. In the
United States alone, hundreds of the leading corporations donate large sums to Planned Parenthood, the country's leading abortion provider.
These corporations are more successful pushing the Culture of Death,
said Ferrara, "through the consumer mentality, through the marketplace,
than government, which is something that people don’t really
understand.”
Ferrara warned the pro-life movement that while they have correctly
identified the anti-life ideologies driving certain streams in
government, there has perhaps not yet been a serious critique of the
influence of global corporatism in the push to control human population.
Corporations, like Communist governments, have a direct interest “in
controlling the family, limiting its size because the size of the family
imposes obligations that would compete with and interfere with work,”
he said.
“And so, effectively contraception has become a civic virtue. People
are frowned upon if they do not limit family size because this would
limit the freedom of the family to go out in the marketplace and
participate in economic transactions, especially the freedom of the
woman, who has to liberate herself from the shackles of childbirth.
“It’s considered unseemly to have a large family today, because, unlike
through the centuries of Christendom, today the woman’s role is in the
marketplace, to have a job, to work in an office, to go to her duly
appointed cubicle and insert herself into the corporate matrix. Then she
can go home for a brief period of quality time, cook a meal, go to bed,
get up and do it all over again the next day."
Ferrara was a featured speaker at the annual Roman Forum conference in
Gardone Riviera in northern Italy, where he sat down with
LifeSiteNews.com to explain how the life issues have been affected by
the growth of corporations with “state-like powers.” Such entities, he
said, are not restricted by the legislation of individual countries, and
indeed are often in a position to dictate legislative policy to
governments.
Corporations enjoy what Ferarra calls “infinite scalability;” in other
words, “they can replicate their activities all over the world on a
gigantic scale.” And as with any “person” with nearly limitless power,
the corporate “personality” has become corrupt. He quoted the writing of
University of British Columbia legal philosopher, Joel Bakan, who
described the transnational corporate personality “in the terms of a
psychopath.”
Bakan “consulted a leading expert on psychopathy who went over the
checklist for human psychopaths, and agreed with him that the corporate
personality exhibits the traits of a psychopath. Namely, [it is]
singularly self-interested, lacking in empathy, irresponsible,
manipulative, grandiose, unable to feel remorse, unable to accept
responsibility for its actions, superficial in its relations with others
and afflicted by a tendency to asocial behaviour.”
(Read the complete interview with Ferrara here)
The key to controlling both their workforce and their customers, to
effectively reducing whole populations to units of production, has been
the separation of families from the “locus of production” and from each
other. The trend of removing the breadwinners from the family home, of
separating family members for large portions of the day, started with
the removal of the main part of the population from their work on the
land and in skilled trades in small communities at the start of the
Industrial Revolution.
This system has a built-in interest in eradicating the differences
between men and women, he said. “Radical libertarian thought,” the
driving philosophy of global corporatism, “reduces labour to a
production factor, and it doesn’t matter whether that production factor
happens to have male or female characteristics.”
Ferrara gave a list of recommendations on how individuals can extricate
themselves from corporate entanglements. He called it “a blueprint for
practical distributism,” and emphasized that it is possible to radically
reduce one’s dependence on the global corporate system simply by making
different choices:
- Refuse to patronise the big box stores. Find another place to
purchase your goods. Shop at flea markets, swap meets and garage sales.
Teach yourself to think of consumer items for their practical,
functional value, rather than the prestige of the label.
- If you can, create your own job. Telecommuting is making it possible
to at least create the functional equivalent of one’s own job. Even if
you’re an outsource for a corporation, you’re at least working from
home. Or join with others to create cooperative or worker-owned
businesses.
- Try to turn your part-time employment for wages, into a consultancy.
This will create some independence from the company you’re working
with.
- Keep your day job, but start developing multiple income streams with
little things you can do. So when it comes time to leave that job,
you’ll have enough income streams to keep you alive.
- Bank with a credit union, not a ‘big-box bank’.
- Don’t partake of corporation debt. Tear up your credit cards. If you
don’t have one, don’t get one. You do not need them. I repeat, you do
not need them. If you can’t afford something, do not buy it.
- Patronize, any way you can, any locally owned business. Whether it’s a
hardware store, a microenterprise of some kind, a cooperative, a
worker-owned business.
- Grow some of your own food, if you can’t grow all of it. Or else get
together with neighbours and create a little neighbourhood garden, and
all of you grow some of your food together.
- Homeschool your children.
- Start, in any way you can, moving towards alternative, non-centrally
generated power. Look into solar panels or other innovative domestic
power sources.
- Get rid of your TV. Throw it out the window. Avoid commodotised
entertainment. Make your own entertainment. Have your children learn to
play musical instruments. Tell stories. Read books. Have plays in your
home.
- Learn to cook real, whole, fresh foods and wean yourself and your
children away from processed, packaged or fast foods that contribute to
obesity and other diseases. Make your own bread.
- Breastfeed your children. “Breastfeeding in and of itself can bring
down the corporate enterprise. Because if a woman has to breastfeed her
child, either she can’t go to work, or the corporation will be forced to
change to allow for breastfeeding mothers. And maybe from that will
follow some flextime employment which is at least a chink in the
corporate armour.”
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“And here is possibly the most important way to detach yourself from
the transnational, mega-corporate matrix: bring forth life abundantly,
trusting in God. Large families have a dynamic that takes them out of
this whole mad operation,” he said.
“The biggest suggestion of all: practise the theological virtues,
faith, hope and charity; the cardinal virtues, prudence, justice,
fortitude and temperance. And self-discipline, respect, cooperation,
responsibility, honesty, motivation, friendship, courage, non-violence …
live a good life and you will eventually acquire the practice of
virtue, and God will reward you for it.
“It all basically involves living a decent, Christian life, centred
around having many children and looking for a way to support the family
in the home.”
Read the full transcript of the interview here.
