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The author is: 

 Boyce Richardson <[log in to unmask]>

	Boyce is a film maker (National Film Board) author, and former 
newspaper reporter.  He has written a number of books on social and 
economic conditions.


Subject: Transnationals I

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 over
everything, 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 Chrétien 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. 

Then one reads of a poll conducted by the Preamble movement in the
United States (you'll never see its spokesmen on television!) which
suggests that discontent may be boiling away under the surface. Though
Americans have been persuaded to distrust their government, seven out of
ten of them, it seems, are not exactly in love with the corporations,
either. They believe that "corporate greed" --- as demonstrated by
layoffs, downsizing, reductions in benefits and relocation of jobs abroad
--- is an equal or more important cause of the economic problems facing
families than is government. Circulated so widely around the Internet that
it even squeaked into the back pages of some newspapers, this poll
suggests a completely different public opinion from the one pedalled day
after day by the media: the middle class is angry, stalled on the success
ladder, fearful about the future, and, given the option, eight of every
ten persons would favor a policy of setting wage, job, pollution and other
standards for corporations, and offering lower tax rates to those that
meet the standards. One in three favor government action to make
corporations act more responsibly. 

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 of corporations, 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. 

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." 

More to come in the second and final part....