Of course, the United States government knows this is happening. Its Labour Secretary, Robert Reich, said recently that economic expansion is occurring at the expense of the workers who are propelling it. "Ominous forces," he said, have divided the country into "an overclass" living in the safety of elite suburbs, and an underclass "quarantined in surroundings that are unspeakably bleak and often violent"; and he mentioned "a new anxious class" that is trapped in "the frenzy of effort" it takes for them to simply stand pat, to hold what they've got. The middle class, in other words, is disintegrating. As Stanford economist Paul Klugman observed in a recent article, such a split "demoralizes those at the bottom and coarsens those at the top."
The media, however, carry on as usual. Scarcely a word appears anywhere about the growing movement, now active in many states to the south of us (and, with any luck, ready to take root in Canada), designed specifically to try to rein in the corporation and bring it under the control of the public's elected representatives.
In October an impressive national teach-in was held in universities, union halls, community centres across the entire United States, where thousands of Americans discusssed the misdeeds ofcorporations, and tried to figure what's to be done. Every locality had its own particular horror story to recount about local corporations. I didn't see anything about this in the press. But then, very little, if anything, ever appears that in any way questions the corporate world-view. No one pretends that confronting the corporations is going to be easy. The timeframe, of necessity, must be long. The alternative is to simply surrender. But the idea is beginning to spread that surrender is not really an option, because the present directions we are following are heading us into a world that hardly anybody would want to live in.
4: A KAFKA-ESQUE WORLD UNDER CORPORATE DOMINANCE
That world we are heading into was described in September with clinical heartlessness by Ian Angell, professor of information systems at the London School of Economics, in an article in the British newspaper The Independent. Much of what he describes is already fact. The main problem of the future, he wrote, will be the glut of unnecessary people who will be irrelevant to the needs of corporations, and therefore will be uneducated, untrained, aging, and resentful. Corporations, unhindered by national barriers, will increasingly relocate their shareholders, executives and employees to wherever the profit is greatest and the regulation least. So they will be free to hire "elite knowledge workers, rootless economic mercenaries" from anywhere they can get them, and this elite will expect to pay little tax in return for their irreplaceable skills. Governments will have to acquiesce. The tax burden, therefore, will continue to move irrevocably from the elite on to the immobile.
Work will become increasingly casual and part-time. With no one to protect the interests of workers, wages will converge worldwide towards Third World levels. If a state maintains what Angell calls "a greedy collectivist and populist stance" the entrepreneurial and knowledge aristocracy will simply move on, leaving the abandoned country economically unviable, full of unproductive masses sliding into a vicious circle of decline.
The slow redistribution of wealth, to which we became accustomed after World War II, is already being rapidly reversed, so "the future is inequality.... We are entering an age of hopelessness, an age of resentment, an age of rage... Who will defend us?.... The world belongs to the global corporation. The nation state is now desperately sick..."
It is hard to say from his tone whether Angell approves or disapproves of this coming world. He certainly writes as though all this is pre-ordained, cast in stone, and there's nothing any of us can do to stop it.
This is the nightmare into which corporate globalization is leading us. To disapprove of this terrifying vision of the future it's not even necessary to regard the corporate bosses as bad people, or crooks, because, after all, they can't help themselves. The corporate structure that propels them on at breakneck speed is not entirely subject to human control. Rather, as author Jerry Mander has pointed out, it is "an autonomous technical structure that behaves in a system of logic uniquely well suited to its primary function: to give birth and impetus to profitable new technological forms, and to spread techno-logic around the globe." This inhuman aspect of corporations is no doubt what Eric Kierans was warning us against forty years ago. Mander's superb book In the Absence of the Sacred, should be required reading in every high school on the continent. He updates Kierans, showing how the profit and growth imperatives of corporations must take precedence over community well-being, worker and public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security. Since corporations by their very nature are amoral, he writes, they can, without misgivings, make decisions that are antithetical to community goals. In fact, "non-emotionality" is the desired attitude required for "objective" corporate decision-making. Of course, corporations seek to hide their amorality and try to act as if they were altruistic. Mander (himself a former advertising man) says they often take to advertising the very qualities they lack in order to allay negative public perceptions. "When corporations say 'We care'," writes Mander, "it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not care.... How could they?.... All acts are in service to profit. All apparent altruism is measured against possible public relations benefit."
5: THE CORPORATION: A SUBLIMELY EFFICIENT EXTERNALIZING MACHINE
A key to the huge success of the corporation is given by the perception of Robert Monk, once a Reagan-employed economist, who wrote in 1991 that the corporation is "an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine --- no malevolence, no intentional harm, just something designed with sublime efficiency for self-preservation, which it accomplishes without any capacity to factor in the consequences to others."
This drive to externalize everything irrelevant to the corporation's own welfare is virtually never examined in the media, and is never placed before the public as an issue. Corporations sit at the centre of all of the world's most serious long-term problems: they are active agents in the growing scarcity of clean water, the dwindling of forests, the diminution of topsoils, the increasing contamination of air and land by pesticides and industrial chemicals, the collapse of ocean fisheries, the decline of marine mammals, the emergence of protein shortages, the loss of species, the disappearance of indigenous human populations, and the rise throughout the world of chronic diseases, the worsening of human health. One would never guess from the media that they had any connection to this; in fact, as Mander suggests, they buy an immense amount of television time to protest that they are really innocent.
The costs to the public of this kind of corporate behaviour have seldom been calculated, because public institutions and taxpayers are expected to pick up all these external costs. Dr. Ralph Estes, professor of business administration at the American University in Washington, D.C., last year tried to do this for the United States, using official documents and standard accounting analytical techniques. He came up with the staggering figure of $2.6 trillion (in 1994 dollars) as the total public cost that corporations impose on their customers, employees, communities and society at large every year. This is almost twice the entire U.S. federal budget, and of course surpasses by many magnitudes the welfare abuses by the poor and unemployed which so exercise public opinion in North America.
In this reckoning Estes includes such things as $165 billion a year lost through disparate wage rates based on sexual and racial discrimination, $278 billion for deaths from work-induced cancers (not including a million cases a year of poisoning of agricultural workers and consumers), and $165 billion a year in corporate crime, to mention only three of twelve categories of cost that he examined. Not surprisingly, Estes' findings have appeared in academic journals, but have not been splashed over the mainstream media. (Corporate crime, incidentally, is almost a secret activity, since the media focus overwhelmingly on street crime. But the corporations are way out ahead here, too. In the United States burglary and robbery cost $4 billion a year (compare Estes' $165 billion a year for corporate crime). Some 24,000 street homicides occur every year; but 56,000 people die on the job or from occupational diseases, killed by companies which know perfectly well what they are doing, but couldn't care less. In Canada, though corporate crime is probably costing $30 billion annually, Democracy Watch of Ottawa reports that a million street criminals were prosecuted in 1988, but only 23 prosecutions were brought against companies in the two years following the passing of the 1986 Competition Act. (Corporations have really become too big to be penalized. No fine is large enough really to deter them. And their executives are not personally liable.)
Much of the drive in the last few decades to regulate environmental degradation has been, in essence, an effort to moderate the externalizing skills of corporations. Some analysts argue that corporations are not bothered by regulation, because their wealth and power enables them to take over the regulatory agencies. Nevertheless one of the first priorities of the Reagan administration was to deregulate everything, giving the green light to the present obscene skewing of wealth. In Canada we're often a bit behind the U.S. But the Harris government in Ontario, and the Chretien government have begun to catch up, making no bones about their wish to jettison environmental regulation for which generations of activists have fought so bravely. To abandon this sort of regulation is simply to legitimize the corporate externalizing function. This way we will never get them under control.
6: HITTING THEM WHERE IT HURTS: LIMITING THEIR POWERS
So what is the answer? The American initiatives I have mentioned are adopting an entirely new tack. They emphasize that corporations get their authority from State legislatures (unlike Canada, there is no federal incorporation in the United States), and it is in the State legislatures that the limits once placed on corporate behaviour have been whittled away and abandoned over the decades, often in response to court rulings made in favor of corporations. (The turning point for corporations in the United States, later followed in Canada, was 1886, when a circuit judge who was a shareholder in a corporation appearing before him declared corporations to be "persons" within the meaning of the Constitution. This opened a gate through which corporations immediately began to drive a coach and horses. Sixty years later Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said there was no history, logic, or reason to support the decision).
A new generation of activists is now suggesting that the corporations should be hit in the only place they could still be vulnerable --- that is, the charters, granted by legislatures, under which corporations do business. These activists have started a movement aimed at eventually persuading State legislatures to re-write corporate charters and impose conditions designed to limit corporate growth, and improve behaviour. These people are very serious, are working at the grassroots, and are spreading their message across the entire United States. Already there has begun some fallout into Canada, though not much.
The measures they are proposing come as a shock to anyone accustomed to the corporate-dominated political climate of the present day.
Here are two examples. The Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, of Provincetown, Mass., has created a network across the nation and is building a strategic agenda to pursue the following objectives:
Next: part 3 of 3
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