OLEAN -- I watched the interesting TV show "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO last week. Maher is the funny, smart, sometimes obscene, controversial comedian who outraged conservatives and many other Americans four years ago by suggesting the hijacking terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center towers at least needed some modicum of courage to fly a plane into a building. You may recall that a national furor ensued.
In the wake of this questionable blurt, Maher lost his well-watched network show, but now has another one featuring contentious conversations on current events by well-known guest panelists -- usually two from the left and a token talker from the right. Last Friday the conservative was Scripps Howard-syndicated columnist James K. Glassman, a resident fellow at the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute.
The conversation was supposed to focus on Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration's bungling of relief efforts to help New Orleans, where Glassman once lived and from which his daughter escaped the day before the devastating storm. But it soon turned to something else when the articulate comedian George Carlin waded into the fray by denouncing the sins of corporate America and questioning the success of capitalism as a governing philosophy.
Glassman tried to defend Corporate America and the way we now live, trade, spend, work, and select our leaders.
But the dead-serious Carlin was relentless and kept cutting him down in the one-sided debate with succinct and convincing observations that the ownership class in America is now in complete control after establishing corporate dominance over the political machinery and materialistic public. Carlin laid almost every ill in our society and culture on the doorstep of corporate greedballs.
It set me to wondering about big corporations -- and to researching why they now have such power over our prosperity or lack thereof. Despite working for one for almost four decades, I realized I knew very little about the subject. What happened? How did it come to this?
I learned the most from the September-October issue of "Sierra" magazine, the main publication of the environmentalist Sierra Club, which featured a lead article and sidebars by California writer Chris Warren. One piece sought to explain why this activist conservation organization owns significant stock in huge corporations such as Chevron, Tyson Foods and Weyerhauser -- giant firms often criticized by environmentalists and others for lack of social responsibility. (Answer: The Sierra Club has a Shareholder Action Task Force, through which share ownership allows activists to engage a company's officers and seek leverage on corporate behavior through official stockholder proposals.)
Two things impressed me greatly.
One was the mammoth nature of such dominant firms -- as reflected by a list of huge companies compiled by the Institute for Policy Studies, which compared gross business sales with the gross domestic products of the countries in this world. Result: Of the world's 100 largest economies, a majority -- 52 -- are corporations.
For instance, if Wal-Mart, which brings in almost a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, were a nation, it would be the equivalent of Belgium, which sports the 18th-largest gross domestic product on the planet. General Motors would be right up there with No. 24, Poland. ExxonMobil and its $185 billion in annual gross revenues would be ahead of Turkey, the 27th-largest national economy.
OK, so this is where the USA's real global power comes from, and maybe we should be proud of it, but the second thing that struck me was the subtle yet relentless nature of the rise of the corporate state. Corporations weren't always this powerful.
According to Warren, after the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers and leaders of the newly independent colonies were totally unlike today's presidents. The early chief executives of states and members of Congress "kept businesses on a short leash."
You couldn't obtain a corporate charter unless 1) you specifically served the public good by building a road or digging a canal or the like, and 2) gained the specific approval of your state's legislature. Your corporate status was not good forever, and unlike today, your corporation, under pain of revocation of charter:
These, of course, are all common practices today, routinely accepted by those we select to lead us and by the public at large. How far we have strayed from the original wisdom of our founders.
What changed all that? The Civil War -- and guess who? One of the faces on Mount Rushmore.
Abraham Lincoln realized, in order to win that conflict and save the Union, he had to keep a steady supply of militarily usable goods and materials flowing. Warren quotes Thom Hartmann, author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights" in describing how "Lincoln had to loosen those restrictions and restraints on corporate behavior. It was his intention to tighten them back up again after the war, but he was assassinated."
Guess what? Slavery played a role. Three years after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was approved, and it ensured due process and equal protection to every citizen under the law. Sure, it was passed to protect the slaves who had been freed, but corporations cleverly twisted that landmark amendment's meaning to give themselves "personhood."
The powerful railroads of the day soon peppered the Supreme Court with cases claiming corporations were covered by the 14th Amendment just the same as citizens -- that restrictive regulations such as those listed above amounted to discrimination.
That may sound foolish to you and me, but the Supreme Court bought it. And that protection as "persons" under the law has been expanded for Big Business ever since. That's how we got where we are. That's how corporations can now run our lives, while we don't even realize they're doing it. Big firms are routinely nullifying citizen-protective state laws without much effort.
Warren, the "Sierra" article's author, provides some scary examples.
On Cape Cod, the small harbor town of Wellfleet was proud of its historic church steeple in the center of the village. Seven years ago, a cell phone outfit called Omnipoint Communications -- later folded into T-Mobile -- coveted the steeple as a high place within which to install a wireless transmission tower. Most of the 2,500 townsfolk considered this a civic sacrilege, and the tiny community's planning board quickly nixed the cell phone firm's idea, refusing approval.
The Omnipoint legal beagles were undeterred. They threatened to sue the town, claiming the planning board decision violated the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996. This law was a remarkable piece of ramrod legislation of which most Americans are still unaware, but which allowed powerful and previously regulated Big Media firms to basically expand without limit, and Big Communication firms to basically do anything they pleased if it triggered "growth."
Further, Omnipoint claimed denial of permit violated its corporate "civil rights" under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark law most Americans thought applied only to individual citizens, not big companies, in protecting against discrimination because of race, gender, or religion.
Most Americans were wrong. Federal judges had previously backed Omnipoint in a similar case in historic Chadds Ford Township in Pennsylvania. The town simply gave up. It did not have the funds to fight a $700 million corporation. The Wellfleet selectmen reversed the planning board decision.
A second example used by Chris Warren involved the giant trash hauler Waste Management Corp. Yes, the same Waste Management Corp. that has Niagara County residents enraged over its subsidiary's plan to extend and expand a patently illegal hazardous waste repository in the towns of Porter and Lewiston. (Search the Niagara Falls Reporter archives to see colleague David Staba's excellent story in this newspaper's May 11, 2004 issue.)
Four years ago in Virginia, where I lived at the time, the state passed a reasonable law that restricted the dumping of trash from other states (including New York) in Virginia landfills. Waste Management Corp. -- which had big plans for Virginia landfills -- immediately took the commonwealth to court.
WMC cited commerce clauses in the Constitution designed to stop local governments, including state legislatures, from impeding the national flow of goods. WMC won. Federal judges tossed the state landfill law out the window.
I've been pondering this whole subject, and it seems to me two other things are at work here.
I'm no commie, and I've always touted capitalism as a basically admirable system.
Yet, like it or not, in reality, our whole economy is now based on the stock market. President Dubya wants to intensify that connection by making our retirement funds slave to the stock market, too.
Corporations (and mutual funds) will not prosper unless they "grow" their revenues and boost their share prices reliably and steadily over certain periods of time. It is not enough to make a handsome profit and provide admirable goods and services.
In these times, if a business does not keep growing, and growing by frequently unrealistic market expectations and percentages, it will die. This is, of course, impossible on a universal basis, yet businesses are trapped into using extreme -- and often unethical -- lengths to accomplish this growth.
Thus, globalization.
Thus, the export of good jobs to work-for-peanuts nations.
Thus, routine cost-cutting and downsizing despite the fired individual's worth or need for employment.
Thus, widespread (and even unrecognized) abandonment of the founding principles, core products, and even profitable practices by businesses and corporations across America at the hands of shortsighted money-mongers who manage by panic.
Thus, the disastrous switch from a nation that actually produced things tangible to one now basically selling services and information.
How to fix this? No one seems to know. And that's what's scary.
I leave you with two quotes.
One is from Chris Warren's article in "Sierra." He references Ambrose Bierce, the famous wit who compiled "Devil's Dictionary" and defined a corporation as an "ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
The other pertains to the rabid defenders of the status quo, and is from Carlin himself: "Those who can dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
And it's not a pretty song.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Sept. 13 2005 |