[NV Greens] Fwd: Controlling Corporations

[Paul Etxeberri]

Long, but an important read. Have you seen the documentary "The 
Corporation"?  Pax, Paul Etx

>
>The People's Business
>Controlling corporations and restoring democracy
>
>By Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray
>
>In These Times February 18, 2005
>
>http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/the_peoples_business/
>
>One does not have to look far in Washington these days
>to find evidence that government policy is being
>crafted with America's biggest corporations in mind.
>
>For example, the Bush administration's 2006 budget cuts
>the enforcement budgets of almost all the major
>regulatory agencies. If the gutting of the ergonomics
>rule, power plant emissions standards and drug safety
>programs was not already enough evidence that OSHA, EPA
>and FDA are deeply compromised, the slashing of their
>enforcement budgets presents the possibility--indeed,
>probability--that these public agencies will become
>captives of the private corporations they are supposed
>to regulate.
>
>This should come as no surprise to anybody familiar
>with the streams of corporate money that flowed into
>Bush campaign coffers (as well as the Kerry campaign
>and all races for the House and Senate) in the 2004
>election. The old "follow the money" adage leads us to
>a democracy in thrall to giant corporations--a democracy
>that is a far cry from the government "of the people,
>by the people, and for the people" that Lincoln hailed
>at Gettysburg.
>
>At a time when our democracy appears to be so
>thoroughly under the sway of large corporations, it is
>tempting to give up on politics. We must resist this
>temptation. Democracy offers the best solution to
>challenging corporate power. We must engage as
>citizens, not just as consumers or investors angling
>for a share of President Bush's "ownership society."
>The problem of corporate power
>
>Unfortunately, the destructive power of large
>corporations today is not limited to the political
>sphere. The increasing domination of corporations over
>virtually every dimension of our lives--economic,
>political, cultural, even spiritual--poses a fundamental
>threat to the well-being of our society.
>
>Corporations have fostered a polarization of wealth
>that has undermined our faith in a shared sense of
>prosperity. A corporate-driven consumer culture has led
>millions of Americans into personal debt, and alienated
>millions more by convincing them that the only path to
>happiness is through the purchase and consumption of
>ever-increasing quantities of material goods. The
>damage to the earth's life-supporting systems caused by
>the accelerating extraction of natural resources and
>the continued production, use, and disposal of
>life-threatening chemicals and greenhouse gases is huge
>and, in some respects, irreversible.
>
>Today's giant corporations spend billions of dollars a
>year to project a positive, friendly and caring image,
>promoting themselves as "responsible citizens" and
>"good neighbors." They have large marketing budgets and
>public relations experts skilled at neutralizing their
>critics and diverting attention from any controversy.
>By 2004, corporate advertising expenditures were
>expected to top $250 billion, enough to bring the
>average American more than 2,000 commercial messages a
>day.
>
>The problem of the corporation is at root one of
>design. Corporations are not structured to be
>benevolent institutions; they are structured to make
>money. In the pursuit of this one goal, they will
>freely cast aside concerns about the societies and
>ecological systems in which they operate.
>
>When corporations reach the size that they have reached
>today, they begin to overwhelm the political
>institutions that can keep them in check, eroding key
>limitations on their destructive capacities.
>Internationally, of the 100 largest economies in the
>world, 51 are corporations and 49 are nations. How Big
>Business got to be so big
>
>Corporations in the United States began as
>quasi-government institutions, business organizations
>created by deliberate acts of state governments for
>distinct public purposes such as building canals or
>turnpikes. These corporations were limited in size and
>had only those rights and privileges directly written
>into their charters. As corporations grew bigger and
>more independent, their legal status changed them from
>creatures of the state to independent entities, from
>mere business organizations to "persons" with
>constitutional rights.
>
>The last three decades have represented the most
>sustained pro-business period in U.S. history.
>
>The corporate sector's game plan for fortifying its
>power in America was outlined in a memo written in
>August 1971 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis
>F. Powell Jr. at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of
>Commerce. The "Powell Memorandum," drafted in response
>to rising popular skepticism about the role of big
>business and the unprecedented growth of consumer and
>environmental protection laws, was intended as a
>catalytic plan to spur big business into action. Powell
>argued that corporate leaders should single out the
>campuses, the courts and the media as key
>battlegrounds.
>
>One of the most significant developments that followed
>Powell's memo was the formation of the Business
>Roundtable in 1972 by Frederick Borch of General
>Electric and John Harper of Alcoa. As author Ted Nace
>has explained, "The Business Roundtable ... functioned as
>a sort of senate for the corporate elite, allowing big
>business as a whole to set priorities and deploy its
>resources in a more effective way than ever before. ...
>The '70s saw the creation of institutions to support
>the corporate agenda, including foundations, think
>tanks, litigation centers, publications, and
>increasingly sophisticated public relations and
>lobbying agencies."
>
>For example, beer magnate Joseph Coors, moved by
>Powell's memo, donated a quarter of a million dollars
>to the Analysis and Research Association, the
>forerunner of the massive font of pro-business and
>conservative propaganda known today as the Heritage
>Foundation. Meanwhile, existing but tiny conservative
>think tanks, like the Hoover Institute and the American
>Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, grew
>dramatically in the '70s. Today, they are key players
>in the pro-business policy apparatus that dominates
>state and federal policymaking.
>
>According to a 2004 study by the National Committee for
>Responsive Philanthropy, between 1999 and 2001, 79
>conservative foundations made more than $252 million in
>grants to 350 "archconservative policy nonprofit
>organizations." By contrast, the few timid foundations
>that have funded liberal causes often seem to act as a
>"drag anchor" on the progressive movement, moving from
>issue to issue like trust fund children with a serious
>case of attention-deficit disorder. From analysis to
>action
>
>The vast majority of people, when asked, believe that
>corporations have too much power and are too focused on
>making a profit. "Business has gained too much power
>over too many aspects of American life," agreed 82
>percent of respondents in a June 2000 Business Week
>poll, a year and a half before Enron's collapse. A 2004
>Harris poll found that three-quarters of respondents
>said that the image of large corporations was either
>"not good" or "terrible."
>
>Corporations have achieved their dominant role in
>society through a complex power grab that spans the
>economic, political, legal and cultural spheres. Any
>attempt to challenge their power must take all these
>areas into account.
>
>There is a great need to develop a domestic strategy
>for challenging corporate power in the United States,
>where 185 of the world's 500 largest corporations are
>headquartered. Although any efforts to challenge
>corporations are inevitably bound up in the global
>justice movement, there is much to do here in the
>United States that can have a profoundly important
>effect on the global situation.
>
>By understanding the origin of the corporation as a
>creature of the state, we can better understand how we,
>as citizens with sovereignty over our government,
>ultimately can and must assert our right to hold
>corporations accountable. The task is to understand how
>we can begin to reestablish true citizen sovereignty in
>a country where corporations currently have almost all
>the power. Developing the movement
>
>To free our economy, culture and politics from the grip
>of giant corporations, we will have to develop a large,
>diverse and well-organized movement. But at what level
>should we focus our efforts: local, state, national or
>global? The answer, we believe, is a balance of all
>four.
>
>Across the country, many local communities continue to
>organize in resistance to giant chain stores like
>Wal-Mart, predatory lenders, factory farms, private
>prisons, incinerators and landfills, the planting of
>genetically modified organisms, and nuclear power
>plants. Local communities are continuously organizing
>to strengthen local businesses, raise the living wage,
>resist predatory marketing in schools, cut off
>corporate welfare and protect essential services such
>as water from privatization. Local struggles are
>crucial for recruiting citizens to the broader struggle
>against corporate rule.
>
>Unfortunately, examples of grassroots movements that
>have succeeded in placing structural restraints on
>corporations are not as common as they should be. One
>of the ways we can accelerate the process is by
>organizing a large-scale national network of state and
>local lawmakers who are interested in enacting policies
>that address specific issues or place broader
>restraints on corporate power.
>
>Just as the corporations have the powerful American
>Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to distribute and
>support model legislation in the states, so we need our
>own networks to experiment with and advance different
>policies that can curb and limit corporate power. The
>National Caucus of Environmental Legislators--a
>low-budget coalition of state lawmakers established in
>1996 in response to the Republican takeover of Congress
>and several state legislatures--is a model that could be
>used to introduce and advance innovative legislative
>ideas at the state level. The New Rules Project has
>also begun to analyze and compile information on these
>kinds of laws. Additionally, the U.S. PIRG network of
>state public interest research groups and the Center
>for Policy Alternatives have worked to promote model
>progressive legislation, as has the newly founded
>American Legislative Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE).
>Moving the movement
>
>Despite their many strengths, many major movements of
>the past few decades (labor, environmental, consumer)
>have all suffered from internal fractures and a lack of
>connection to the broader society. The result is that
>they have been increasingly boxed into "special
>interest" roles, despite the fact that the policies
>they advocate generally benefit the vast majority of
>people.
>
>Cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it this way:
>"Coalitions with different interest-based messages for
>different voting blocks [are] without a general moral
>vision. Movements, on the other hand, are based on
>shared values, values that define who we are. They have
>a better chance of being broad-based and lasting. In
>short, progressives need to be thinking in terms of a
>broad-based progressive-values movement, not in terms
>of issue coalitions."
>
>If there is one group at the center of the struggle to
>challenge corporate power, it is organized labor. As a
>Century Foundation Task Force Report on the Future of
>Unions concluded, "Labor unions have been the single
>most important agent for social justice in the United
>States."
>
>Labor is at the forefront of efforts to challenge
>excessive CEO pay, corporate attempts to move their
>headquarters offshore to avoid paying their fair share
>of taxes, and the outsourcing of jobs. Labor also has
>played a leading role in opposing the war in Iraq and
>exposing war profiteers benefiting from Iraq
>reconstruction contracts.
>
>As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has written, unions
>need to start "building social movements that reach
>beyond the workplace into the entire community and
>offer working people beyond our ranks the opportunity
>to improve their lives and livelihood." This is
>beginning to occur more frequently. Union locals and
>national labor support groups like Jobs With Justice
>have been a key force in building cross-town alliances
>around economic justice battles such as living wage
>campaigns and the new Fair Taxes for All campaign.
>
>These union-led, cross-community alliances have in turn
>supported some of the strongest union organizing
>campaigns, including the nearly two-decades-old Justice
>for Janitors campaign that the Service Employees
>International Union (SEIU) and its allies successfully
>organized in Los Angeles and other cities across the
>country.
>
>Clearly, labor unions, along with community-based
>organizations and churches, will be central to the
>construction of lasting local coalitions that can serve
>as organizing clearinghouses to challenge corporate
>rule. Constructing a new politics
>
>To challenge corporate power we must also value and
>rebuild the public sphere, and draw clear lines of
>resistance against the expansion of corporate power,
>such as the current push by Bush to convert Social
>Security into individual investment accounts that will
>allow Wall Street to rake off billions of dollars in
>annual brokerage fees. Most importantly, we must work
>to change the rules instead of agreeing to play with a
>stacked deck.
>
>In our hyper-commercialized culture, we spend far more
>time and energy thinking about what products we want to
>buy next instead of thinking about how we can change
>our local communities for the better, or affect the
>latest debates in Washington, D.C. or the state
>capitol. And when so much energy is spent on commercial
>and material pursuits instead of on collective and
>political pursuits, we begin to think of ourselves as
>consumers, not citizens, with little understanding of
>how or why we are so disempowered.
>
>The restoration of democracy requires us to address the
>backstory behind this process of psychological
>colonization. It requires us to address the public
>policies and judicial doctrines that treat advertising
>as a public good--a tax-deductible business expense and
>a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. It's
>been so long since we have seriously addressed such
>fundamental questions that, as a result, the average
>American is now exposed to more than 100 commercial
>messages per waking hour. As of October 2003, there
>were 46,438 shopping malls in the United States,
>covering 5.8 billion square feet of space, or about
>20.2 square feet for every man, woman and child in the
>United States. As economist Juliet Schor reports,
>"Americans spend three to four times as many hours a
>year shopping as their counterparts in Western European
>countries. Once a purely utilitarian chore, shopping
>has been elevated to the status of a national passion."
>
>A consequence of the hyper-commercialization of our
>culture is that instead of organizing collectively, we
>often buy into the market-based ideology of individual
>choice and responsibility and assume that we can change
>the world by changing our personal habits of
>consumption. The politics of recycling offers a minor
>but telling example of how corporations manage to
>escape blame by utilizing the politics of personal
>responsibility. Although recycling is a decent habit,
>the message conveyed is that the onus for environmental
>sustainability largely rests upon the individual, and
>that the solutions to pollution are not to be found
>further upstream in the industrial system.
>
>The personal choices we make are important. But we
>shouldn't assume that's the best we can do. We need to
>understand that it can't truly be a matter of choice
>until we get some more say in what our choices are.
>True power still resides in the ability to write,
>enforce and judge the laws of the land, no matter what
>the corporations and their personal-choice,
>market-centered view of the world instruct us to
>believe. Rebuilding the public sphere
>
>With increased corporate encroachment upon our schools
>and universities, our arts institutions, our houses of
>worship and even our elections, we are losing the
>independent institutions that once nurtured and
>developed the values and beliefs necessary to challenge
>the corporate worldview. These and other institutions
>and public assets should be considered valuable parts
>of a public "commons" of our collective heritage and
>therefore off limits to for-profit corporations.
>
>"The idea of the commons helps us identify and describe
>the common values that lie beyond the marketplace,"
>writes author David Bollier. "We can begin to develop a
>more textured appreciation for the importance of civic
>commitment, democratic norms, social equity, cultural
>and aesthetic concerns, and ecological needs. . . . A
>language of the commons also serves to restore
>humanistic, democratic concerns to their proper place
>in public policy-making. It insists that citizenship
>trumps ownership, that the democratic tradition be
>given an equal or superior footing vis-a-vis the
>economic categories of the market." Changing the rules
>
>Much citizen organizing today focuses on influencing
>administrative, legislative and judicial processes that
>are set up to favor large corporations from the very
>start. Put simply, many of the rules are not fair, and
>until we can begin to collectively challenge this
>fundamental unfairness, we will continue to fight with
>one hand tied behind our backs. Instead of providing
>opportunities for people to organize collectively to
>demand real political solutions and start asking tough
>questions about how harmful policies become law in the
>first place, many community-based organizations seem
>content to merely clean up the mess left behind by
>failed economic policies and declining social services.
>
>The most successful organizing happens when it is
>focused on specific demands. Two crucial reforms have
>great potential to aid the movement's ability to grow:
>fundamental campaign finance reform and media reform.
>Together, these could serve as a compelling foundation
>for a mass movement that challenges corporate power
>more broadly.
>
>The movement for citizen-controlled elections,
>organized at the local level with support from national
>groups such as the Center for Voting and Democracy and
>Public Campaign, provides a useful framework for action
>for the broad spectrum of people who currently feel
>shut out of politics.
>
>Media reform is also essential. With growing government
>secrecy and a corporate-dominated two-party political
>system, the role of independent media is more critical
>than ever. As Bill Moyers suggested in his keynote
>address at the National Conference on Media Reform in
>2003, "If free and independent journalism committed to
>telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated,
>the oxygen goes out of democracy."
>
>The media have always been and will continue to be the
>most important tool for communicating ideas and
>educating the public about ongoing problems. Thomas
>Paine wrote more than 200 years ago:
>
>There is nothing that obtains so general an influence
>over the manners and morals of a people as the press;
>from that as from a fountain the streams of vice or
>virtue are poured forth over a nation."
>
>History is replete with examples that show how critical
>the media's role has been in addressing the injustices
>of our society. For instance, many Progressive Era
>reforms came only in response to the investigative
>exposes of corporate abuses by muckraking journalists
>like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. Writing in popular
>magazines like Collier's and McClure's, these writers
>provided a powerful public challenge to the corruption
>of the Gilded Age.
>
>Because of increased corporate consolidation of the
>media, coverage of all levels of government has been
>greatly reduced. When people are kept ignorant of what
>is happening in their communities, in their states, in
>Washington, D.C. and in the world, it becomes much
>easier for large corporations to overwhelm the
>political process and control the economy without
>citizens understanding what is happening. Though media
>reform is a complex subject, one approach bears
>mentioning--establishing and strengthening nonprofit
>media outlets. The long-term vision
>
>Though campaign finance reform and media reform offer
>useful starting points, ultimately, there is much more
>to be done. We need to get tough on corporate crime. We
>need to make sure markets are properly competitive by
>breaking up the giant corporate monopolies and
>oligarchies. We need to make corporations more
>accountable to all stakeholders and less focused on
>maximizing shareholder profit above all. We need to
>stop allowing corporations to claim Bill of Rights
>protections to undermine citizen-enacted laws.
>
>Ultimately, we need to restore the understanding that
>in a democracy the rights of citizens to govern
>themselves are more important than the rights of
>corporations to make money. Since their charters and
>licenses are granted by citizen governments, it should
>be up to the people to decide how corporations can
>serve the public good and what should be done when they
>don't. As Justices Byron White, William Brennan and
>Thurgood Marshall noted in 1978: "Corporations are
>artificial entities created by law for the purpose of
>furthering certain economic goals. . . . The State need
>not permit its own creation to consume it." The
>people's business
>
>The many constituencies concerned with the consequences
>of corporate power are indeed a diverse group, and
>although this diversity can be a source of strength, it
>also makes it difficult to clearly articulate a vision
>for the struggle. What principles, then, can unite us?
>
>One abiding faith that almost all of us share is that
>of citizen democracy: that citizens should be able to
>decide how they wish to live through democratic
>processes and that big corporations should not be able
>to tell citizens how to live their lives and run their
>communities. The most effective way to control
>corporations will be to restore citizen democracy and
>to reclaim the once widely accepted principle that
>corporations are but creatures of the state, chartered
>under the premise that they will serve the public good,
>and entitled to only those rights and privileges
>granted by citizen-controlled governments. Only by
>doing so will we be able to create the just and
>sustainable economy that we seek, an economy driven by
>the values of human life and community and democracy
>instead of the current suicide economy driven only by
>the relentless pursuit of financial profit at any cost.
>
>Therefore, we must work assiduously to challenge the
>dominant role of the corporation in our lives and in
>our politics. We must reestablish citizen sovereignty,
>and we must restore the corporations to their proper
>role as the servants of the people, not our masters.
>This is the people's business.
>
>Lee Drutman is the communications director of Citizen
>Works; and Charlie Cray is the director of the Center
>for Corporate Policy. They are co-authors of The
>People's Business: Controlling Corporations and
>Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler), from which this
>essay was adapted.
>_______________________________________________________
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand