"I've read this book and I highly recommend it." -- Kenneth Nero, Chief Librarian, National Labor Relations Board, Washington D.C.

This guy barbecues sacred cows for breakfast! -- Bill Kauth

Corporations are vampires, sucking our life energy -- Rich Zubaty

From the Preface:

...Vampires see no reflection in the mirror. Neither do corporations. We can track their existence on the evening news according to unintelligible numbers, we can identify properties they own but, in actuality, there's nothing there! Just a legal fiction of "corporate persons" with all the legal rights of personhood who cannot be held accountable for criminal wrong doing.

Vampires suck the life energy out of people and they don't care. So do corporations. They suck the life out of their workers, out of our land and air and water, out of our government - and they don't care. They can't care. Because they're already dead.

Vampires hate sunlight. So do corporations. They build legal, media, and military fortresses around themselves to prevent anyone from finding out what they're really up to. Corporations are like bats, always feeding in the dark.

Vampires cringe at religious artifacts. So do corporations. They openly reject religious values of love and cooperation. They advocate rabid competition (and cryptically solicit huge government hand-outs.) They care nothing for the welfare of people who can't find jobs, as they cheerfully deport our jobs overseas.

Vampires cast no shadow. Neither do corporations. They are nothing more than a figment of our imaginations. They do not really exist, yet they can kill us or turn us into one of them.

Vampires are charming shape-shifters. So are corporations. Thanks to billions spent on public relations they come at us all smiley-faced, and green-friendly on TV, then spread their dark wings and flee from the misery they cause.

Vampires bite you and you become one of them. So it is with corporations. Employees learn to shut down their hearts and sell their souls to become good company men.

Vampires hypnotize us in the guise of love and concern, then bite our necks. So do corporations. Someone buys one of their happy products, dies from using it, and the corporate vampire disappears into the fog because it cannot be held criminally responsible.

When we live in a society where 20% of the people own 94% of the wealth, and the other 80% of us are fighting over 6% of the wealth we need to ask some hard questions.

What kinds of people and systems continue to propagate the values which enlarge the rich/poor gap more every day? Are corporations cults? (Vampire cults?) Have they driven religious values underground and hypnotized all of us? Can we snap out of their trance? Can we immunize ourselves to the brainwashing they spew at us from the tube? Can we recreate a society of enlightened persons, real persons, who are beyond their Matrix-like power to utterly control our lives?…Yes we can.

Zubaty's gift may well be sticking our faces into the questions, and though he suggests some crisp and creative answers such as keeping corporations out of schools and government -- as we would any other cults -- and removing their legal status as "persons" -- his most brilliant contribution is providing a much wholer -- and holier -- context for understanding the problem. Without that we're just another cult fighting a cult.

Bill Kauth

Ashland, Oregon

June 2001

Bio:

Bill Kauth co-founder of the New Warrior Training Adventure (20,000 graduates) and The Warrior Monk Training Intensive and author of A Circle of Men: The Original Manual for Men's Support Groups (published 1992: St. Martin's Press, still in print)

"...it's a work of shining brilliance, fairly crying out to be read. -- Steven Svoboda

THE CORPORATE CULT as reviewed J. Steven Svoboda, Ph.D. Harvard, human rights lawyer and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child

The Corporate Cult: More of What Men Know that Women Don't. By Rich Zubaty. Preface by Bill Kauth. 392 pp. College Station, Texas and Kaunakakai, Hawaii: Virtualbookworm.com and Zubaty Publishing, 2001. $18 paper. $14 ebook. $14 CD. Available at www.virtualbookworm.com. 877-376-4955. And www.amazon.com

Rich Zubaty's other new book, "The Corporate Cult," is now available along with "What Men Know that Women Don't," his sizzling update of the unforgettable 1994 book "Surviving the Feminization of America." Based on its subtitle, the former book is evidently intended as a sort of sequel to "What Men Know." While I did not find "The Corporate Cult" to be nearly as phenomenal a book as "What Men Know," it nevertheless will richly reward any reader willing to sift through it for the frequent gold the author offers.

Zubaty has developed an interesting and apparently quite original theory as to the profound connections between the rise of feminism as a powerful societal force and the virtually simultaneous rise of the corporation as the dominant force in the national and world economy. (51 of the 100 largest world economies are corporations, not countries!) Feminism, Zubaty writes, destroyed religious and family values and kicked open the door for the corporate colonization of our lives. One may not normally think of corporations as a feminizing force, and yet the author sets forth a convincing case that they are just that.

Zubaty has more than his share of cool ideas and a great facility at conveying them clearly and entertainingly, as well as the guts to put out what he sees as the truth with no apologies or pulled punches. It's hard not to admire someone who, in response to complaints about government inefficiency, comes right out and states that he does not WANT a government that is run efficiently, like a corporation. He goes even further, questioning how anybody came to believe this is a good thing.

Even today, even with people's nascent sense of their place in the world ecosystem, Zubaty is of course right that we miss the forest for the trees, concerning ourselves with $40 billion in welfare for people and ignoring the $400 billion in corporate welfare, installing new copper pipes in our house without a thought about the South American miners whose farmland was torn up to create the open pit in which they toiled in slave-like conditions to make those pipes possible. He sets forth the four defining characteristics of a cult (control of behavior, of thoughts, of information, and of emotions) and then proceeds to demonstrate that corporations aptly satisfy all four criteria.

Zubaty reminds us that in school we learn not a whit about corporate power or corporate welfare, let alone regarding the fact (according to Zubaty) that democracy has become a de facto religion. So it is that we are able to blind ourselves to the benefits corporations derive from such policies as equal employment opportunity, relaxed immigration policies, and reduced welfare rolls, all of which increase the pool of workers willing to work for lower wages without agitating for unions. It is hard not to be intrigued by Zubaty's assertion -- which I found credible, though I don't recall seeing any substantial documentation of the claim -- that today 80% of all "civil rights" litigation involves corporations, not people.

The result, according to the author, is that "all of us are seething with a perpetual, subliminal level of stress, and we're not even aware of it." Meanwhile, men's ideas, men's worldview, are being increasingly discredited. Most ironically, corporations are not even succeeding on their own terms. If forced to pay for all the environmental degradation and faulty products they produce, the net worth of the Dow Jones industrials would be less than zero.

Zubaty lays out the relevance of gender issues to these problems. Modern culture's soul sickness derives from the fact that men and women have unwittingly swapped roles, with men handling material affairs and women handling spiritual affairs, and neither doing a very good job of it. Corporations have been legally defined as "persons" for over a century, a development the author repeatedly lampoons. Women ally themselves with corporations by seeking (and receiving) privilege (whether it be corporate welfare or the vote) without responsibility (the REQUIREMENT to risk their lives to defend the country). "Women are not nobler nor kinder nor more compassionate. They've just developed a better smokescreen to conceal their personal agendas." As Zubaty acerbically notes, "Feminists don't care if corporations ship our jobs overseas and build Third World sweatshops. They only care if there are equal numbers of women on the boards of directors."

Zubaty intersperses his political discussions with extended tales of various fishing expeditions and other adventures drawn from his itinerant life. The stories are certainly entertaining and sometimes tellingly connect up to his analysis. One example is when he discusses how Peruvian men telling a story may pause mid-sentence and allow their mind to drift away for an uninterrupted minute or two before resuming their narrative. Males in this culture, he concludes, permit each other a certain psychic space that is rarely acknowledged in our culture.

Zubaty is a big fan of spirituality and a big opponent of the evils of organized religion. He poses the intriguing question: Was the church the first corporation? The author announces a little over a third of the way through the book, "I have come to think of myself as God's mirror," and proceeds to devote a couple pages to grandiosely advising the readers (who are addressed as his children) of the wonders of prayer. "When your life is moving too fast, pray. And when your life is moving too slow, pray.... Don't take my word for it -- though you should, because I'm your dad -- just do it." To say the least, this is Rich Zubaty at his most idiosyncratic.

Yet, the bottom line is, you'll be glad you read this book. As you sit there scratching your head and disagreeing with him, you will still be impressed by a man gutsy enough to write, "Women are sexually active all year [s]o they can screw around on their husbands.... Women are never satisfied. They always want more. They always want someone to 'love' them and desire them more."

Objecting to the laws forbidding Mormons from having more than one wife, Zubaty astutely points out that we have done a great job keeping religion out of government but a terrible job keeping government out of religion. Zubaty's research turned up the gem that in order to facilitate the government's taking over of regulation of marriage and divorce, previously an ecclesiastical matter, US courts imported sections of British church law into American jurisprudence.

I found the book upsetting at times, but this is the nature of Zubaty's messages. You have to love a guy capable of such pithy statements as, "You need a woman who puts God first, you second, her kids third, and her job fourth." Or: "We send diplomats to Japan and Israel. We should be sending diplomats to General Electric and Archer Daniels Midland to find out what the hell they're doing on our soil and if we like it or not." Or a guy capable of some pointed juxtapositions: "Corporations spend $138 billion per year on advertising -- more than the total salaries we pay for all of our public elementary and secondary schoolteachers and administrators. One and a half times what we spend on institutions of higher learning." We are reminded (or learn for the first time) that, even excluding the chronically unemployed, one in four men is out of work. Between 1972 and 1994, real wages fell 19%, the longest slide in our nation's history. "If someone robs a bank and accidentally shoots someone are we content if the guy gives back part of the money? That's what corporations get away with every day."

The bottom line? Buy both of Zubaty's new offerings. Read "What Men Know" first and then read this one. While it may not be a perfect book, it's a work of shining brilliance, fairly crying out to be read.

click here to email Rich Zubaty: richzubaty@hotmail.com

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