Reference:
From Boyce Richardson
I wrote this article for the Canadian Forum magazine about what might be done to bring multinationals back under some form of public control, but, after pondering it for five months, they rejected it on what I consider to be the entirely frivolous grounds that "everybody knows the multinationals run the world." (If everybody knows it, why is it being allowed to happen?) The point of my article was that it could be useful to circulate the idea that some serious thinking is going on, (mostly in the US, very little in Canada) about what can or might be done, and it could do no harm to ventilate the issue, and might possibly stimulate public debate, if such an article were published.
Rather than waste my work, I thought I would send the article to people who might be interested. Of course, I'd welcome any comments you might make. (Apart from anything else, if the Forum won't publish something like this, who will?)
For those of you who don't know me, I am a writer-filmmaker in Ottawa, formerly a daily journalist (many years ago) and have some 50 years of experience in media.
CORPORATIONS: HOW DO WE CURB THEIR OBSCENE POWER?
by Boyce Richardson
The future, says a British professor coolly, is inequality. The total dominance established by corporations over political and economic life almost everywhere is plunging us into a dysfunctional world of haves and have-nots, a world of rage, resentment and hopelessness. This article examines the power of corporations, and some newly-launched popular movements that aim to bring them under public control in an effort to reverse our headlong rush towards an insane, corporate-dictated future.
Many years ago when I was young and impressionable I was assigned by my newspaper in Montreal to cover a luncheon speech by Eric Kierans. This was the late fifties, before he became a prominent figure in Quebec's Quiet Revolution. He was at the time, I think, head of the Stock Exchange, a businessman who had successfully revived many struggling companies. I expected from him the customary business rhetoric lauding the wonders of capitalism, but I didn't know my Eric Kierans. What he delivered instead was a solemn warning against corporations. They had only two objectives, he said: to maximize their profits, and to ensure their own continued growth. In pursuit of these aims they were accountable to no one except their shareholders, and, he said, (as I remember it) if something were not done to make them accountable to the public, they would eventually take overeverything, and all of us.
Well, we can't say we weren't warned. But I doubt if even Kierans can have imagined the day when governments composed of businessmen, elected on a business agenda, would be free to so obediently trample underfoot every interest except that of their corporate masters. Under such "leaders" as Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, we have begun a collective journey that a few short years ago seemed unimaginable --- back to the bad old days of unregulated capitalism. "Them that's got, will get," sang the immortal Billie Holliday in the 1930s (or words to that effect). And she wasn't kidding. Today them that's got are getting, in a big way.
1: GLOBAL DOMINANCE
Each year wealth becomes ever more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Small, locally-owned firms give way before the invasion of giant conglomerates. Profits soar. The sales of Mitsubishi, the world's biggest company, are greater than the gross domestic product of Indonesia, the world's fourth largest country. General Motors is bigger than Denmark. Ford bigger than South Africa. Of the world's 100 richest economies, 51 are corporations. The sales of the top 200 firms in the world are now equivalent to nearly 30 per cent of global gross domestic product. In fact, if you subtract the GDP of the nine major national economies, the top 200 corporations sell more products ($7.1 trillion) than the combined GDP of the remaining 182 countries ($6.9 trillion). As was reported some time ago, the combined wealth of 358 billionaires is now equivalent to the wealth held by the poorest 45 per cent of the world's population.
The drive for exports, supposed to be so essential to our futures, redounds almost entirely to the benefit of corporations. In 1993 one-third of all exports was simply a transfer between different branches of the same firm.
Corporations control huge areas of the globe --- 80 per cent of all land used for export agriculture, for example --- and can now shape the futures not only of people and communities, but whole ecosystems. As Richard Grossman, of the Council on International and Public Affairs, New York, writes, corporations enter and leave communities at will, destroy local institutions and decision-making, imperil cultural traditions, undermine regional self-sufficiencies. They choose which products and technologies are researched and created, how workers are employed and discarded.
Adds Peter Montague, Environmental Research Foundation, Annapolis, Maryland: "The corporation pretty much determines all the basics of modern life, just as the Church did in the Middle Ages.... Small corporate elites determine what most of us will read; what we will see in theatres and on TV; what subjects will become public issues permissable for discussion and debate; what ideas our children will absorb in the classroom; what modes of transportation will be available to us; how our food and fibre will be grown, processed and marketed; what consumer products will be made by what technologies using what raw materials and which manufacturing techniques; whether we will have widely-available, affordable health care; how work will be defined, organized, and compensated; how war will be waged (and, generally, against whom); what forms of energy will be available to us; how much toxic contamination will be present in our air, water, soil and food; who will have enough money to run an election campaign and who will not."
2: NATIONAL DOMINANCE
What is true at the global scale is true also at the national. Some 99 per cent, virtually all, of Canada's gain in net wealth in the 1980s went to the top 20 per cent of wealth-owners. One in every ten jobs in Canada today is temporary. In place of the leisure and regular holidays promised a few years ago, many workers now find they have to work longer hours than ever: one in every five male workers, seven per cent of women workers is on the job more than 50 hours a week. Workers' take-home pay has stalled at the levels of 16 years ago (in the United States it has actually fallen, in real terms). What used to be considered a normal aspiration for a worker--- a full-time, full-year job paying $30,000 a year --- is now available to only one in three Canadian workers.
For growing numbers of Canadians life has become a nightmare of insecurity. Once, layoffs were caused by hard times. Now the firms that are earning the biggest profits are also laying off tens of thousands of workers, thus demolishing the idea --- an idea struggled for by committed activists for most of this century until it became widely shared by Canadians --- that working people have a right to a fair share of the fruits of their labour, and that their employers have a responsibility to them and their communities.
Nowadays unemployment is deliberately created by government policy to combat inflation (a primary objective of the corporate sector), and the real number of those who cannot find work is calculated by Andrew Jackson, senior economist of the Canadian Labour Congress, at around 20 per cent of the work force. The story is stark: profits higher, productivity higher, wages stagnant, corporate income taxes down to a mere seven per cent of the total, individual taxpayers' share up to 48 per cent. One could fill a whole page with statistics that show the growing power of the rich, the declining power of the average Canadian, the marginalization of community.
To put it bluntly, the governments we elect have ceased to concern themselves with the welfare and security of their citizens. No matter which parties are elected, they dance to the corporate tune, eliminating or reducing programmes designed to enable people to live a decent life because the corporations say that these social costs undermine their competitive position in the new, globalized world of free trade. So let's hack away the excess: slash unemployment insurance (just when it's most needed); fire nurses and teachers; close hospitals; enlarge classes; restructure universities to meet corporate objectives (maybe even privatize them all!); increase student fees; jettison all those pesky environmental regulations, throwing the air and water open once again as waste disposal dumps in perpetuity; privatize parks; reduce library budgets and hours; slash legal aid to the young, poor, sick and elderly; cut bus subsidies, increasing fares for students and the elderly; make ailing pensioners pay the going rate for their care, or get out (never mind that these are the people who have built the country); close group homes for the disabled; shut down shelters for battered women; eliminate support for the treatment of addictions.
Name your own decency: it is being thrown on the scrapheap. The guilty parties are on our television screens every day, rejoicing.
3: MASSAGING THE IMAGE, CHANGING THE LANGUAGE, COLONIZING THE MINDS
How did corporations attain this immense power? Why have we allowed it to happen? Well, for one thing, corporations have spent a huge fortune in carefully nurturing the public's perception of corporate behaviour. They have become expert at what Edward Said calls "ideological pacification", the colonizing of the public mind, the manufacturing, as Noam Chomsky calls it, of consent.
Thus, the TINA syndrome (There is No Alternative) has become an unspoken assumption that informs virtually every issue of every newspaper, every public affairs programme on television or radio. It has insinuated itself into the very sentence structure and body language of the journalists, commentators and so-called experts who are permitted to enlighten us with their views on the affairs of the nation, among whom the idea that there might possibly be an alternative to the corporate world-view seldom raises its ugly head.
"The sheer power of corporate capital," says American writer Cornel West, "makes it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic society would be like (or how it would operate) if there were publicly accountable mechanisms to alleviate the vast disparities in resources, wealth and income..."
Certainly at the level of formal politics, the corporations have swept aside all opposition. The TINA assumptions have become so pervasive that to gain a hearing from the corporate-owned mass media every political party has to pay some obeisance to the right-wing gods of deficit-reduction, privatization, shrinking government, cost-cutting, productivity and global competitiveness. In such circumstances the four-yearly vote has become almost irrelevant. The Americans are offered so little choice that they hardly bother to vote. Candidates who espouse a real alternative (such as Ralph Nader in the presidential elections) are simply ignored by the media. And as for Canadians: many are already asking whether we really need to hold the next election, it seems so cut and dried. There is really no opposition. Yet, no electorate anywhere has ever reacted so decisively as did Canadians when they turfed out Kim Campbell and (as they thought) everything the hated Mulroney gang stood for.. Even that brought no change, but simply earned the voters a continuation of the same policies under different millionaire-leaders. Is there, however, lurking out there, spreading its insights across the continent, the beginning of a backlash, the first stirrings of a public reaction against the plutocracy that has taken over our decision-making functions?
The answer would be no, of course, if you depended for your information on the mainstream media. For them, everything still is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Opposition to the corporate agenda has been utterly vanquished. The left is in disarray. Protest is now divided between many disparate groups, separated by gender, race, focus and cause. Divide-and-rule has reached its apogee. The citizenry is under control. The holy crusade against government and its evil powers proceeds apace, to the applause of the opinion-formers. The silent majority seem so preoccupied adjusting to the painful changes forced by global restructuring, that they have little energy left to think about things they might do.
It has become tough to pick one's way through the bewildering reversals of language that the skilled public relations operatives of the corporate agenda have forced on all of us. The "vested interests" of yesteryear (for whom one could read "big business") have mysteriously disappeared as businesses have become even bigger. In their place now stand the "special interests", unions, environmentalists, nurses, public servants, natives, anyone who raises a voice of protest. They are now portrayed as sinister forces, somehow mysteriously powerful in spite of the comparative paucity of their resources, and dedicated --- so unlike the altruistic owners of capital! --- to a greedy defence of their personal interests and hobby-horses. Even the NDP Premier of British Columbia, a union man himself, has caught the habit, dismissing his government employees' union as "an interest group."
Policies that we used to think guaranteed equal opportunity and economic and emotional security for working people --- minimum wages, enforceable employment standards, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, retirement and disability pensions, bus subsidies, student grants, marketing boards, environmental and health regulations, and so on and on --- have all been redefined in the contemporary language of corporatism as "rigidities" which have to be reduced or abandoned, in the name of holy profit, sacred competitiveness. What a travesty of language!
Occasionally, of course, some dissent is so obvious that news of it cannot be ignored. Scores of thousands of people march in Ontario cities to protest the Harris onslaught on education and health, women march across the country for jobs and justice, nurses fight to defend the health system in Alberta, vigils, demos, workshops involve thousands of people from coast to coast in protest against the heartlessness of the new economics. Maybe people are not so happy, after all, with the brave new corporate world.
Next: part 2 of 3
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