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Richard Stallman on Companies That Are “Only Pretending to be American Companies”

Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation's founder, speaks about US politics being captured and dominated by large and multinational corporations in pursuit of just money and power

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Direct download as Ogg (00:01:54, 6.2 MB)



Transcript:

[00:00]

(intro music)

Roy: ... the system in the United States. I know that lobbying plays a great role in just about any country and one of the corporate welfare methodologies is to try to get subsidies from the public, from the taxpayers for all sorts of reasons and essentially extract the money from the taxpayers and assure you are too big to jail or that the state perceives you as something that is not allowed to fail.

[00:30]

To what degree is this true in the United States?

RMS: Oh, it's tremendously true and in many different areas of policy you can see that the government does what the big companies that are interested in that area demand. So for instance, in copyright the US government does what the big media companies demand. In banking, it does what the big banks demand. In regard to fossil fuels, it does what the fossil fuel companies demand. And ...

[01:00]

Roy: Agriculture as well.

RMS: Yeah, that's true. It does what the big agribusiness companies demand. I'm sure you could think of a few more. The point is that these are examples of a plutocratic system. We need to tell all of those companies to take a flying leap and that we don't care whether they continue to exist or not. And that they are only pretending to be American companies.

[01:30]

When they say, if I say this is my country it means in a sense I belong to it. But when they say this is our country it means they think they own it.

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