A Prayer to the Global Corporate Gods:

O mighty global corporations, we are helpless without you. Please bring your menial jobs here to our nation and town. Though we have little control over these arbitrary and tedious jobs that create wealth for stockholders rather than us, they are all that we lowly workers deserve. Grant us your x dollars per hour so that we might have hope of purchasing your fine plastic products that bestow lasting contentment. Forgive us when we question your authority or do not work fast enough, for we are but wretched servants, and please oh pretty please do not cast us onto the street where there is much weeping and knashing of teeth.

Drive us to serve you ever more diligently until our decrepit bodies and minds break down, then patch us up in your hospitals and with your anti-depressants as much as necessary to return to your service. And when you have used us up completely, secure us in your nursing homes so that we do not annoy you or your still-faithful devotees further.

O corporate one big happy family Fathers, some of us are so worthless that our skills do not match your product plans, and our resultant poverty has led us astray to where we have broken the righteous commandments that protect your bountiful property from us. Other backsliders have foolishly attempted to escape the indoctrination of your dollars through the use of mind altering substances. We accept that the only rightful place for these shameful sinners among us is in a cold cell of thick concrete deep within your prisons, where you will still mercifully grace these human by-products with a few quarters per hour to manufacture your office furniture.

For those few hours when we are not in your service, thank you for blessing us all with the security of predictable name brand products, and for their copious packaging that assures that no heathens have laid their unclean hands on the wondrous gifts within. Continue to spew your intelligent poisons into our farmland and food to protect us from the sinister insects and microorganisms. Prepare our food and even serve it to us, that we may have more time to serve you. We will gladly consume whatever you hand down to us, for you are all-knowing.

Please pacify us with a plethora of prefabricated entertainment, as we have forgotten how to entertain each other. Reveal to us through your inspired media what we are to believe, for surely we cannot trust our own feeble judgement. Similarly commodify any remaining life activities, so that our angst-ridden existence is no more challenging than a series of multiple-choice questions.

Most important, guide your wise politicians financially as they strive to make this region of the planet more cost-effective for you by abolishing the evil worker rights laws, corporate taxation, and environmental protections that offend you deeply and drive you away from us. Help them enlighten the more backward cultures by dropping your holy bombs on the people of those demonic nation-states that still refuse to bow down before you. And thank you for undercutting the pitifully small local businesses that would dare defy your divine dominance and threaten the sacred homogenous culture in which you have safely wrapped us. Truly all resources belong to you, and we are but humble stewards of them. Continue to devour the land and excrete into the rivers --- the Earth is your banquet and your toilet. For thine is the empire, the power, and the planet, until you destroy it.

Amen.

Copyright 1996 BiggerTheyCome (TM) Enterprises, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GlobalGobble Corporation. Just try and steal this intellectual property, you peasant, and see what happens!

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

/s/ Mike Dolan, Field Director, Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen mdolan@citizen.org http://www.tradewatch.org 202.546.4996 fax:547.7392

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