[Mb-civic] On The Rampage

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-02/21mokhiber-weissman.cfm

==================================
In order to make the world a better place, we must first understand the "brutal 
facts."  Understanding and knowledge can make us more powerful IF we choose to 
share our understanding with others and act on it (instead of choosing to wring our 
hands and be depressed)  This excellent discussion of corporate power is a good 
example...


ZNet Commentary
Self Interview: On The Rampage February 24, 2005
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman 

Q: How did you come to write On the Rampage?

Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman: About seven years ago, we decided to
call a weekly column that we were planning, "Focus on the Corporation." A
conservative group gaining prominence (and more prominent now than then)
went by the name Focus on the Family, and it seemed to us that news
coverage and political discussion of social, economic and political
problems focused on just about everything but the corporation.

That seemed upside down to us. As longtime editors of Corporate Crime
Reporter (Russell) and Multinational Monitor (Robert), we have come to
believe that corporations are the driving force in the political economy,
as well as the primary shaper of the prevailing culture.

We put together a collection of our first couple year's columns in
Corporate Predators, which was published in 1999.

On the Rampage is a "best of" collection of our columns published since
Corporate Predators appeared.


Q: Why do you focus on corporations, as opposed to, say, politics more
generally?

Mokhiber and Weissman: A huge portion of the world's problems can be
traced in significant part to abuse of corporate power. Some of those
problems we hear a lot about -- like crime, or corruption -- but we hear
far too little about the corporate role in perpetuating those problems.

For example, corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on
society, whether measured in dollars or lives, than street crime.

And then there are the many corporate-related problems that we too
infrequently hear about: the re-colonization of the developing countries,
the contamination of our food supply with pesticides and genetically
engineered organisms, the routine denial of the legalized guaranteed right
to organize in the United States, not to mention the Third World.

We wanted to call attention to the role of corporations in lowering our
living standards and endangering the planet.

Not many of the world's problems just happen. There's usually a party
responsible. And in many, many cases, that party is a multinational
corporation -- or a group of multinationals.


Q: Why do you focus so much on corporate crime?

Mokhiber and Weissman: The first reason is the horrific toll taken by
corporate crime and violence. The second is that politicians and the media
focus so much on street crime -- which is a serious and frightening
problem, especially in poorer neighborhoods where most street crime is
concentrated. By contrast, with the recent exception of Enron, Martha
Stewart, and the financial fraud cases, there is little attention paid to
corporate crime and violence, and barely any of the moral outrage that
animates discussions about street crime.

Virtually never do the politicians puffing bromides like "Get tough on
crime" or "More money for crime fighting" mean that the nation should get
tough on corporate crime, that more money should be made available to the
staggeringly under funded corporate crime police in the Justice
Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration
and other corporate crime-fighting federal agencies, or that the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the Department of
Agriculture need more inspectors to crack down on corporations endangering
their employees through unsafe workplaces or imperiling consumers by
selling them dirty food.

Horrible though the toll of street crime may be, corporate crime and
violence inflicts far more damage on society. While there are
approximately 20,000 homicides in the United States attributed to street
crime a year, air pollution takes more than 50,000 lives a year in the
United States and an even greater number die annually from
workplace-related disease. Burglary and robbery cost victims approximately
$3 billion a year, while healthcare fraud takes more than $100 billion
from taxpayers and consumers.


Q: What do you mean when you talk about the spread of corporate culture?

Mokhiber and Weissman: Step by step, the corporate culture has,
unannounced, engulfed us -- we have junk food pushers in the schools, tort
deformers educating judges, oil companies cleaning up in public museums,
big companies of all stripes taking over public interest groups -- the
list is endless.

One important manifestation of corporate culture is rampant commercialism
-- now so excessive that it is difficult to parody.

But it is not just commercialism. It is the ideological framework that
large corporations are the natural way to organize an economy, and the
logical way to get things done. You can see the encroachment of the
corporate culture in areas where it hasn't previously predominated. For
example, in the United States and around the world, drinking water has
traditionally been delivered by municipal systems. 

Now private water companies are trying to gain control of these systems.
Central to their rationale for why they should be in control is claim they
are more efficient. They make this claim through simple assertion, drawing
on a culture that posits corporations are efficient and government is not.
In fact, the government record in this area is mixed -- but in many cases
municipal systems have been extremely efficient -- but the corporate
record is one of almost unmitigated failure and inefficiency. And that is
not even to bring up the issue of guarantees for low-income groups, and
guarantees that the human right to water, one of life's essentials, is not
undermined.


Q: Commercialism may sometimes be a bit distasteful, but does it really
matter?

Mokhiber and Weissman: We think so. It degrades our public space and
displaces non-commercial values such as cooperation, community, altruism.
And, in ways we do not realize, it constricts our sense of the politically
possible and the politically unpalatable.

Corporations routinely sponsor community events and community institutions
-- from softball tournaments to chili cook-offs, from schools to public
beaches -- to advertise their products, including to captive audiences of
schoolchildren. They also seek by their sponsorships to gain a reputation
as a responsible member of the community -- it is important for their
political positioning that, to the extent possible, people see the
companies as "one of us," not an intrusive outsider.

Thus, one outgrowth of the colonization of public space is the
colonization of our minds. Ways of arranging life that do not involve
corporations or do not serve corporate interests -- whether in the
traditional economy, provision of public services, entertainment -- become
harder and harder to conceptualize.

Corporate sponsorships may also undermine public institutions themselves,
stripping them of their essential public character, or at least putting
their mission at risk. The creeping corporate takeover of the Smithsonian
is a case in point.


Q: Why do you focus on the concept of corporate form?

Mokhiber and Weissman: Although the law often treats corporations as if
they were actual human beings, and despite corporate efforts to portray
themselves as part of the community (every community), corporations are
fundamentally different than real, live people.

For example:

* Corporations have perpetual life.

* Corporations can be in two or more places at the same time.

* Corporations cannot be jailed.

* Corporations have no conscience or sense of shame.

* Corporations pursue a single-minded goal, profit, and are typically
legally prohibited from seeking other ends.

* There are no limits, natural or otherwise, to corporations' potential
size.

* Because of their political power, they are able to define or at very
least substantially affect, the civil and criminal regulations that define
the boundaries of permissible behavior. Virtually no individual criminal
has such abilities.

* Corporations can combine with each other, into bigger and more powerful
entities.

These unique attributes give corporations extraordinary power, and makes
the challenge of checking their power all the more difficult. The
institutions are much more powerful than individuals, which makes all the
more frightening their single-minded profit-maximizing efforts.
Compounding the problem, many of the sanctions we impose on individuals --
not just imprisonment, but the more important social norms of shame and
community disapproval -- have limited relevance to or impact on
corporations.

Highlighting the corporate form is important in identifying the sources of
corporate power, and also in articulating why corporations should not be
provided the same rights as real persons.

For example, corporations have managed to escape a lot of sound regulation
on advertising -- related to tobacco, pharmaceuticals, or just excessive
advertising -- by claiming that sensible advertising restrictions violate
their First Amendment rights. We don't think corporations should be able
to claim First Amendment rights for advertising. If you think of a
corporation as just a group of people, our position may not make sense. If
you recognize the unique attributes of corporations, then it may seem more
logical.


Q: How is economic globalization affecting efforts to constrain corporate
power?

Mokhiber and Weissman: Corporate globalization is driven in considerable
part by corporate efforts to escape limits imposed on their activities.

Working people in industrialized countries have organized for and won a
certain wage floor: corporations want to move to developing countries
where they will not face such wage obligations.

Just as important, they want to use the threat of moving offshore to hold
down wages and break unions or stop organizing drives. Cornell University
researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner has found that in more than two-thirds of
U.S. union organizing drives in mobile industries -- consisting of
manufacturing and other companies that can credibly threaten to shift
production abroad -- companies threaten to close their plants if workers
vote to join a union.

The same story holds for environmental protections.

In developing countries, which are desperately striving to attract foreign
investment, the story is far worse. Wages are miniscule, working
conditions are brutal, disrespect for the environment is abysmal. When
citizens in those countries try to do something to remedy the conditions,
just as in the United States, they are told the companies will simply move
elsewhere. And they do.

The other key component of corporate globalization is the
institutionalization of unaccountable global governance systems that deny
democracies the option of raising living standards. The rules of the World
Trade Organization, as well as a long list of bilateral and regional
investment and trade agreements, are basically designed to prevent
countries from adopting worker, environmental or consumer protections that
go beyond what corporations are willing to accept. 

Thus WTO rules can be used against national food safety laws for being too
protective of consumer interests. They can be used against environmental
measures that attempt to deal with the way multinational corporations
manufacture products. They can be used against countries for not providing
strong enough patent protection -- even if the result is poor people are
denied access to AIDS and other essential medicines. They can even be used
against national efforts to regulate gambling, according to a recent WTO
ruling. It is never the case under WTO rules that a country can be found
to be doing too little for consumers, the environment, public health or
worker protection.

As bad as this democratic constraint is for rich countries, it is far
worse for poor ones. They face not only the impositions of the WTO and
trade agreements, but the structural adjustment policies of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which impose
cookie-cutter market fundamentalist policies on developing countries,
without apparent regard to their abysmal record.

These are life-and-death matters. When the World Bank encourages countries
to charge fees for access to basic healthcare, people in poor countries go
without care. When the IMF's shock therapy sends the Russian economy into
a tailspin, the number of Russians in poverty rises from two million to
more than 50 million. When the IMF demands countries allocate aid money to
pay off foreign debt or acquire foreign currency rather than invest in
public health and education, people suffer.


Q: You paint a gloomy picture. Do you think there is there hope?

Mokhiber and Weissman: For all the amassed power of Big Business, it has
never been the case that a docile citizenry has uniformly accepted the
corporate hegemonic project. And that's why we remain hopeful.

Communities across the United States, and the world, have resisted efforts
to use their lands for garbage dumps, to rip out their natural resources
without due compensation or respect for the environment, to gouge them in
the provision of essential goods and services. Workers have stood up to
demands for givebacks, strikebreaking and union-busting schemes, and
management efforts to skirt safe practices. In some countries, popular
movements have contested for, and occasionally won, political power.
Global solidarity campaigns have supported citizen movements in flashpoint
conflicts:

sweatshop workers in Indonesia or Nicaragua, producing for companies like
Nike, Wal-Mart and Kohl's, indigenous groups in the Amazon resisting
encroachment on the forest, a Bolivian town resisting a water
privatization scheme designed by Bechtel and the World Bank, health
workers in poor countries trying to deliver essential medicines to sick
people, U.S. workers striking against UPS, French farmers who refuse to
allow McDonald's and the corporate food industry to homogenize the world's
food supply.

But always the issue is the scope of the resistance, and its level of
organization.

The November-December 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade
Organization appear to have ushered in a new and impressive worldwide
level of resistance. Seattle was followed by an April 2000 demonstration
against the IMF and World Bank in Washington, D.C., protests at the
Republican and Democratic conventions, a September 2000 mobilization in
Melbourne against the World Business Forum, the September 2000 protests in
Prague at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings, plus many similar, smaller
mobilizations.

The protests were colorful, creative, dynamic and filled with youthful
enthusiasm and energy. They seem the manifestation of a growing rejection
of a corporatized economy, politics and culture.

The future of the disparate movement against corporate power is unsure.
Certainly, it has a long way to go before reversing the corporate
stranglehold over society. But it our best hope to rescue our lives, and
our planet, from the corporate grip.





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   ---   George Orwell


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