This is part II.

Note:

Any communication should be to the author, Boyce Richardson.

Boyce can be reached at the following: 

 Boyce Richardson <[log in to unmask]>

 Transnationals II

Part II

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 Chrétien 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: 

*Dismantling especially harmful corporations 

* Re-chartering corporations
for limited time periods, and subjecting them to precise restrictions 

*Reducing their size 

*Prohibiting a corporation from buying or owning
another corporation 

*Organizing referenda to strip corporations of
"personhood" 

* Ending corporate welfare --- the corporate extortion of
billions of dollars of subsidies from taxpayers 

* Establishing worker and
community control over production units of corporations, with a view to: 

        * protecting the rights of workers and communities; banning toxic
chemicals and technologies; banning the hiring of replacement workers
during strikes; establishing caps on management salaries;
   
      * Prohibiting corporations from contributing to election
campaigns, from all lobbying, and from using any money to influence public
policy.

        "...A potentially powerful consensus is emerging," write Richard
Grossman and Ward Moorhouse in a statement for the Poverty and Race
Research Action Council, "that to begin investment transitions in energy,
housing, transportation, agriculture, food, timber, finance, etc; to have
fair and democratic elections and law-making...; to create institutions of
enterprise that will not turn upon us like the sorcerer's apprentice; to
get justice in our courts, we the people will have to learn about the
sources of corporation powers, take those powers away, dismantle the worst
corporations and assert popular sovereignty over all enterprises we allow
to do business in our land."

        Though this programme may sound almost fanciful now, American
activists such as Jane Anne Morris of Democracy Unlimited of Wisconsin
Cooperative, point out that until a few decades ago, all of the suggested
limitations on corporate powers were once law in Wisconsin and many other
States. Research has turned up even today that 49 States still have
provisions under which corporate powers could be limited. Corporations once
were required to have a clear purpose; their licences could be revoked if
they exceeded or did not fulfil that purpose; corporate stockholders and
managers were legally liable for corporate law violations; directors of
corporations had to come from among shareholders; corporations had a
limited life; they were prohibited from owning other corporations; they
were also prohibited from making political contributions or charitable or
civic donations. 

In other words, there is nothing new about what is
proposed. Over the years the corporations have managed to shake free from
public control, and these activists have now placed before the American
people the need to re-impose conditions that were considered necessary by
the founding fathers, whose struggle, as the activists now point out, was
to a large extent against the unlimited power of the corporations that ran
everything in colonial America. 

Grossman and Morehouse know what they are up against: "Corporate leaders
and the politicians in their pockets will resist with vigour. They will
call upon the most manipulative advertising, public relations, media and
law corporations for help, threaten to wipe out jobs and tax payments,
(drive) wedges between workers, environmentalists and communities, between
people of colour and whites, and among people of colour. They will try to
split community against community, State against State, country against
country. 

        "...They will unleash their lawyers, bully judges, and marshal
...corporate front groups designed to look like just folks for health,
property, justice and apple pie. They will try to buy people off with
grants or negotiations or empty promises. When citizen pressure mounts,
they might even invite token representatives to join their corporate
boards.... We cannot control the tactics corporate leaders will use. But we
can end the colonization of our own minds..."

7: THE PROSPECTS FOR A COHERENT
	MOVEMENT IN CANADA

I have tried to discover who in Canada is actively working against
corporate power. Although dozens of citizen groups are busily opposing the
dismantling of the welfare state by our right-wing governments, most of
them do not have corporations, as such, in their sights. The NDP has
launched a Fair Taxes campaign, calling for a cap on allowable tax
deductions for corporate executive pay, for a closing of the loopholes that
allow $14-15 billion of profits to escape taxation every year, and for a
crackdown on lobbyists. Naturally, the press has paid little if any
attention.       

The Canadian Labour Congress has launched a campaign for "jobs, security,
equality and democracy", and is reaching out to citizen and community
groups in an effort to overcome the crippling divisions among the left.
The Congress's policy document names the right-wing business agenda as the
number one challenge for the future, along with the need to defend and
strengthen the union movement. This certainly seems a much stronger
position than the New Democratic Party has taken, and some individual
unions have gone to bat in an intelligent and courageous way to defend
worker and community interests against the corporate mania for downsizing,
lay-offs, and restructuring. For example, the Telecommunications Workers'
Union, with 11,000 members in British Columbia, when confronted by new
technology that would close down operator service in small communities,
worked with community groups and municipalities to insist that if the
phone company is taking profits out of a community, it has an obligation
to provide that community with jobs and wages. 

        "Profitable corporations should not be allowed to improve their
financial performance by casting off workers and degrading their quality of
service," said the union president Rod Hiebert, reporting to an
international congress in Costa Rica. He said at first the union had a
devil of a job getting the NDP government of Glen Clark to accept that the
workers who operate the system know what they are talking about. Eventually
the government gave them a grant with which, after another social action
campaign in the communities, they drew up a plan that was eventually
adopted by all parties, designed to provide citizens with affordable access
to the BC Information Highway. 

More recently the Canadian Auto Workers rejected the government and
corporate attempt to restructure Canadian Airlines on the backs of its
workers (of whom wage reductions were demanded for the fourth time). And
then they did a very interesting thing: they began to argue the political
case against the whole direction of national policy, and called for the
re-regulation of the industry. By doing so they expanded the issue beyond
the limited question of their own members' pay packets, stepping into
political space that was once occupied by the NDP. 

Another interesting initiative in Canada was that of the University of
Victoria economics students who last March denounced their curriculum as,
in effect, the handmaiden of global capitalism, in that it encourages
ecological despoliation, ignores the disintegration of communities
resulting from consumerism, takes no account of such work as food
preparation, raising children, minding households, and the cashless
economies of indigenous peoples, hides its implicit values, and
camouflages its ideology. The students called for a reformed curriculum
that would take into account "the Earth, equity, the needs of the South,
women, indigenous peoples, minorities, community, ethics and the informal
economy." 

Three extra-parliamentary organizations, the Council of Canadians, the
Public Accountability Alliance, and Democracy Watch are clearly interested
in approaching the question of corporate power, but so far have skirted
around it. The Accountability Alliance proposes that all governing bodies,
private and public, should report regularly on how they serve the public
interest, broadly interpreted. The Alliance's basic document does say that
if corporations fail to make such reports "all corporate charters now
embedded in the law be re-opened for public debate" so that the broad
public interest can be installed as a charter requirement of corporations.
In fact, however, the Alliance acts as an organization in support of
whistle-blowers, and in its public persona so far has talked only of the
need to hold civil servants to account. 

Democracy Watch wants to reform elections, empower citizens, restrict
lobbyists, and does want to exclude corporations from the protection of
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, under which the tobacco companies have
successfully argued in court that to restrict their advertising restricts
their freedom of speech. 

All of these are certainly a beginning towards confronting the now-obscene
power of corporations. 

But social activist Tony Clarke, the only Canadian I have been able
to track down who has proposed a coherent programme to confront corporate
power, as such, has so far found it tough sledding and slow going. In 1995
Clarke, working with a committee of the International Forum on
Globalization, proposed a five-year project to challenge the power of the
Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), the 160 corporations and banks
that comprise its membership, and its agencies and supporters, such as the
C.D. Howe and Fraser Institutes, the Reform Party, the National Citizens'
Coalition, and so on. His plan is to persuade popular movements --- labour,
women, aboriginal, farm, nationalist, religious and cultural movements ---
to make a priority of "dismantling corporate rule." Clarke points out that
the major corporations in Europe, the United States and Canada have banded
together into enormously powerful lobbying organizations. 

"In Canada the BCNI has virtually set itself up as a shadow cabinet of the
federal government, with CEOs heading up task forces on major public
policy issues," he writes. "Once policy consensus is reached...massive
lobbying and advertising campaigns are mounted around key...issues, and
aggressively promoted by networks of trade associations." 

        This is how government policy is decided in Canada, so it is little
wonder that in the revamping of the Competitions Act now underway within
the federal government, virtually the only opinion consulted has been that
of big business. The changes being contemplated are merely technical. None
of the basic questions raised by Tony Clarke or the U.S. activists is even
being considered in this major update of government policy, and I am not
aware that NDP MP's have intervened in that sense. 

Tony Clarke has proposed that popular movements should coalesce around a
five-year programme which he calls " the five Ds": 

        First, Define corporate rule, analyze its power, mechanisms,
management and government, and how corporations dictate public policy in
key areas of the national life.

        Second, Dissect corporate rule, examining in detail the workings of
the economy, the finance, production, property and food systems, the
resource, services, and consumption regimes, and so on. A massive
educational programme.

        Third, Denounce corporate rule by publicly asserting the
fundamental human right of communities and citizens to democratic control
over corporate activities, evoking a revived nationalism, and drawing up a
citizens' agenda to demand that corporations meet stringent economic,
social and environmental conditions.

        Fourth, Disrupt corporate rule through popular resistance,
developing global solidarity, maintaining economic leverage through
boycotts and political and legal pressure, and through use of non-violent
protest where necessary.

        Fifth, Dismantle corporate rule by advocating policy alternatives,
revoking corporation charters, decentralizing corporate power, abolishing
corporate welfare, destabilizing corporate politics, renegotiating trade
deals and restructuring global institutions.

On the surface Clarke's programme would appear to be tailor-made for the
Council of Canadians, but Clarke put it to them, and they rejected it.
Maude Barlow has been quoted as saying that she would like to take on
corporations, but she needs the support of the Council's members, and her
board has advised her that they should walk before they run.

        Ed Finn, whose remarkable articles exposing corporate rule have
been a feature of the Canadian Forum for some years, says the Council is
"skirting around the issue". If they made a central challenge to the
corporate takeover of the political system and the economy, it would give
them a framework or context for their work that they now lack. 

In both the United States and Canada it has been noted that the weakness
of the left has been caused by their disintegration into many separate,
protesting groups, each following its own agenda. Traditionally the
industrial working class, organized into a powerful union movement,
provided the impetus for an alternative politics that challenged the
corporate ethos, and kept governments more accountable.  That organized
working class has declined in step with blue-collar manufacturing, and so
far the many populist movements that have sprung up in the last thirty
years have preferred to follow their own causes, rather than to coalesce
into one solid and coherent movement of opposition. 

Still, although Canadian activists are lagging behind Americans in their
analyses of corporate power, Canadians are probably in a better position
than Americans to actually force changes through the political structure.
The Americans who are urgent for change realize they can expect nothing
from the two major political parties, which both now occupy the right.
Therefore, American activists have recently begun --- not for the first
time --- to form new parties, always a tough sell in the United States. At
least in Canada we have the New Democrats still active, although weak, and
well placed to step into this issue as the political voice that will be
needed if opposition to corporate power is ever to be carried to fruition.

To confront corporations is a daunting task. But as American writer Howard
Zinn wrote in a recent book, apparently overwhelming power has again and
again proved vulnerable "to human qualities less measurable than bombs and
dollars: moral fervour, ingenuity, courage and patience... No cold
calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded
that their cause is just." 

It seems that nothing less is at stake than the quality of life that will
be available to our descendants. 

===================

(Boyce Richardson is an Ottawa writer and filmaker, author of Time to
Change, a 1990 book on global challenges.).

Most of the information about the challenges being mounted to corporate
governance is not available in mainstream media, but is available on the
Internet, and I have drawn liberally from it. Here are some of the main
sources of information on the subject:

Canada:

Public Accountability Alliance, 13 Pentry Lane, Ottawa, K1S 0X1, 613-731-6392.
Democracy Watch, PO Box 821, Station B, Ottawa, K1P 5P9, 613-241-5179, fax
613-241-4758.

Canadian Labour Congress, 2841 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, K1V 8X7,
613-521-3400, fax 613-521-4655, e-mail: [log in to unmask]

United States:

Citizen's Alliance, PO Box 1011, North Cambridge MA 02140, 617-491-4221,
fax 617-354-0176. e-mail: [log in to unmask]

Council on International and Public Affairs 777 United Nations Plaza #3C,
New York, NY 10017, 212-972-9877, fax 212-972-9878, e-mail:
[log in to unmask] (Ward Morehouse)

Democracy Unlimited, 29 E. Wilson #201, Madison, WI 53703, 608-255-6629.
(Jane Anne Morris) Electronic Policy Network: http://www.epn.org

Ending Corporate Governance: http://ratical.com/corporations

Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403,
410-263-1584, e-mail [log in to unmask] This is the source of the
amazing Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly which offers about 800
downloadable articles on its e-mail or web sites. Rachel's web site:
gopher://ftp.std.com.70/11/periodicals/rachel 

International Forum on Globalizing/Dismantling Corporate Rule, PO Box
12218, San Francisco CA 94112, 415-771-3394, e-mail: [log in to unmask]

Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, 211.5 Bradford street,
Provincetown, MA 02657, 508-487-3151. (Richard Grossman.) 

Public Information Network, PO Box 95316, Seattle WA 98145-2316,
206-723-7417, e-mail: [log in to unmask],org. Web-site:
http://violet.berkeley.edu/~orourke/PIN.html.