We The People Vs The Business Corporations -- Who Is The
Sovereign?
by James F. Berry
It could never be clearer than it is today that our society, our government,
our nation are greatly injured by the corruption of corporation money.
That money is expended in a successful effort to control elections, write
legislation, win undeserved subsidies, gain practically free access to
water, air, forests, grazing lands, and minerals, subvert officialdom,
escape regulation and avoid punishment for harms done. In 1993 a group
of Washington DC lawyers, The Alliance for Justice, published a manual
entitled JUSTICE FOR SALE, Shortchanging the Public Interest For Private
Gain. The Executive Summary concludes that "a powerful coalition of business
groups and ideologically -compatible foundations (are) engaged in a multi-faceted,
comprehensive, and integrated campaign to elevate corporate profits and
private wealth over social justice and individual rights as the cornerstones
of our legal process." Clearer than it has ever been before is the fact
that the principal results of the work we do, is not to forward the interests
of the human community and the Earth process but to augment the wealth
and power of the already powerful wealthy. A few amass for themselves what
properly is needed for and should be used to sustain many.
Several books and other types of publication listed at the end of this
essay reveal the extent to which citizens have lost control over the government
to forces threatening its foundations. Our government and the constitution
which establishes it assign sovereignty, exercised through democratic processes,
to the people. But sovereignty, in fact, is, today, heavily weighted to
favor corporations. The fact that corporation money pays election costs
and that corporate lobbying succeeds in getting favorable legislation passed
is a nationally recognized scandal. In truth, wealth and privilege have
always prevailed in this nation. (See Howard Zinn's A People's History
of the United States). But we have now come to the stage where corporation
lawyers sit with congressional committees and lead the writing of proposed
legislation. Their drive to render ineffective all efforts to preserve
the purity of water and air make it plain that corporate interests are
directly pitted against community interests, human and non-human. We are
presented with a mystery. Corporate executives are human beings with human
concerns about the well-being of their children and the community. But
corporations demand the end to clean air and clean water protections anyway.
They fight regulations that increase production costs no matter what their
purpose. This strategy supports a conclusion that these managers are not
really managers at all but simply attendants whose decisions are pre-ordained
by the requirement that short term money profit be maximized at all costs.
When the bottom line rules from day to day and investors must realize profits
immediately, long term good sense must be ignored. Indeed, those activist
citizens who ask that society behave in such a way as to protect life and
assure the long term prosperity of Earth and its systems are called eco-terrorists
and demonized by highly paid sycophants in service to the powerful.
Corporations are the enemy of life. As I have been saying for many years,
they are committed to death . What else can be said about forces which
propose that we are better off without pure water and air, without rich
and fertile soil; without wildness and without trees; without diversity
of life, without flourishing oceans; without a healthy Earth. One asks
how this situation can be. The explanation lies in the fact that the news
media and the entertainment industry, image-makers and opinion-molders,
are the property of the same corporations which profit from sales produced
by advertising foisted on a curiously innocent and gullible public. Misleading
salesmanship pollutes and poisons every channel of communication and tragically
reaches even into the classroom. The beautiful people, athletes and movie
stars, are nothing more than billboards, money-hungry puppets.
But not only have the corporations bought the media and the entertainment
world they have abandoned the presentation of virtue as a guide for living
in favor of a materialistic, hedonistic, consuming, constantly shopping
life style. It has been truly said that good people are known by the fewness
and bad people by the multiplicity of their needs,. Salesmanship, promoting
acquisition of unneeded things augments growth in the numbers of bad people.
Maybe not so much "bad" people, but people fallen away from the virtues
of austerity and simplicity. The outcry against the current does not indict
sponsors of and profiteers from those programs but blames them. In line
with corporate practice: convict the victim of the crime.
Ecological activists (Earth First! is the best example) who lie down in
front of the bulldozers to raise public awareness of the enormous harm
being done by the giveaway of the national forests to the timber industry
do not meet with appreciation. They are portrayed as terrorists; they are
spied upon, harassed and arrested by the FBI. These activists, the finest
examples of our youth are the subject of lies; they are called saboteurs,
bums, pot-heads, drug pushers. The truth is: no parent could wish for more
admirable sons and daughters. ( I am proud to have such a granddaughter.)
The timber industry ought to be the objects of our contempt, not these
brave young people seeking to preserve the nation's richest heritage.
The corporation PR effort is directed toward establishing an image of itself
as a sort of fairy Godfather, a virtual Santa Claus straining every effort
to bring good things into our lives. "We are the good guys" they tell us;
"we want you to be happy; we make big sacrifices toward that end." At the
same time they tell us that government is corrupt, forcing unneeded regulation
on them, that it is run by incompetent and dishonest bureaucracies, contemptuous
of ordinary people. Thus corporations plant in the public mind a picture
of benign and efficient business battling incompetent government bent on
cheating the public. Private enterprise, they lecture, is efficient and
trustworthy while public institutions are badly run, wasteful, and uncaring.
The truth of the matter is just the opposite. Government bureaucracy, since
the long-ago reform of the civil service, is generally pretty well run
by honest public servants while private industry has a generous complement
of criminals, cheaters, liars and incompetents. Scandal is common, fraud
is notorious. Criminal behavior is not uncommon. Consider the ongoing story
of Union Carbide; consider catastrophic oil spills; consider tobacco and
beer marketing. Who should get off who's back? It's business that rides
the backs of our children whose minds we are so foolish as to turn over
to them forty hours a week.
While comparing government performance to that of private industry let
us not neglect the question of human rights. An employee of government,
local, state and federal, has access to the Bill of Rights; his/her appeals
against the boss are listened to; job security is real. One who works for
private industry (except for those in strong unions rapidly decreasing
in number!) has no rights. If you work for a business enterprise, kiss
good-bye to free speech, freedom from search and seizure, freedom of assembly,
protection from self-incrimination, freedom from double jeopardy, the right
to due process. Industry can discharge any worker, any time for any reason
or for no reason. If workers insist on the right to free speech, for instance,
in seeking to unionize the work force, they will almost certainly be fired
the instant management finds out. And it is not at all unlikely that the
courts will support management.
A corporation is free to move with little thought for its disruption of
the local community and the suffering of its employees. Short term money
profit is the only consideration management feels obliged to recognize.
There is nothing compelling about the ethics of business behavior. After
all, business operations are conducted in a "value free" climate, i.e.,
beyond the reach of morality or ethics. But, if one were to lay out a code
to prescribe the proper obligations of the business world, it would have
to include something along these lines: The fruits of Earth are owed to
the inhabitants of Earth. These fruits are to be taken from Earth by a
collaboration of capital, management and labor for which capital, management,
labor and Earth earn remuneration in proportions that satisfy the needs
of each. But management has control. Too often they refuse labor its fair
share and nearly always dismiss as irrelevant the obligation to return
anything to Earth. Earth is an "externality" (i.e., free for the taking)
in business economics. The principle of reciprocity governs, or ought to
govern, all human activity. Give back to Earth what is needed to restore
it.
Long ago this nation decided that private enterprise was the best way through
which to actualize the production and distribution of the fruits of the
land. And that may well have been the right way to do it when business
was local and small. But modern financial business practices of giant international
conglomerates are destroying community, robbing pension funds, randomly
moving jobs, wiping out the small in favor of the giants; sending thousands
into the ranks of the unemployed often without insurance and pensions.
Altogether it must be concluded that the business world dominated by major
corporations is destroying the economic security of a huge section of our
population. Read America: What Went Wrong.
The core message of this short essay is this: The way business is practiced
in the United States by modern industrial, and financial corporations works
directly against the long range interests of the people, the animals, and
the land. The intention of the chartering and the licensing of corporations
is to secure, over the long term, public well-being and the common good.
The aim must be wise use of labor and resources for the benefit of the
entire community of life. The facts are that labor and resources are used
foolishly, even criminally, for the benefit of an elite few. If the corporations
are permitted to write our laws, strongly influence our courts, organize
and direct our work, dispose of our resources, and if they own and operate
our communications media and our entertainment industry, all in pursuit
of greater power and riches for themselves, we are lost.
We, the people, must see to it that government works for the well-being
of the life system including all its components; must see to it that our
land, our labor and our resources are used wisely in pursuit of the common
good. Wisdom is the essential ingredient, wisdom combined with a generous
portion of neighborly love, and a sense of community that includes the
entire life system. We must disempower the corporations, control our affairs
in the interests of the community we belong to on the principle that a
thing is right when it supports the integrity, stability and beauty of
the life system and its wrong otherwise. ###
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