Today's Topics:
Historical perspective on corporations
JOB AVAILABLE: City of Fairfield Recycling Coordinator
Recycled frisbees (3 msgs)
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Loop-Detect: GreenYes:98/95
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Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 16:04:26 EDT
From: C2ALTS <C2ALTS@aol.com>
Subject: Historical perspective on corporations
This was just forwarded to me. Hope others will find it as I did a
beautifully written analysis of the inherent problems in our corporation-
dominated economy.
Corporate Power vs. A People's Agenda
A Position Paper of the Alliance for Democracy
By Phil and Sue Wheaton
The Reality of Corporate Power
In August 1995, Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy,
sounded a call for citizens and "real populists" to "please stand up" and
retake control of our country from the mega-corporations that have come
to dominate society. In an historic article in The Nation he declared:
We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid
hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular government
in the United States. The big corporations and the centimillionaires and
billionaires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing,
our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public
lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government. It's as if
American democracy has been bombed.(1)
Dugger pointed to a reality that increasing numbers of engaged citizens
are coming to understand: a people's agenda - a fairness agenda - is
unlikely to be realized as long as those who control the huge corporations
are calling the shots based on maximization of profits over the needs and
rights of workers, ordinary people, and the welfare of the planet itself.
As anti-MAI crusader Tony Clarke of Canada stated at the 1997 Alliance
convention, "It doesn't matter whom you elect if the tools of corporate
power remain in place."
The goal of these transnational corporations is world control. David
Korten, in his ground-breaking book When Corporations Rule the World,
points out that through the international financial organizations which
serve corporate and market interests, the corporations dictate to nation
states. He declares that "Globalization has rendered many of the political
roles of government obsolete...." Even more disturbing, he warns:
The architects of the corporate global vision seek a world in
which universalized symbols created and owned by the world's most powerful
corporations replace the distinctive cultural symbols that link people to
particular places, values and human communities. When control of our
cultural symbols passes to corporations, we are essentially yielding to
them the power to define who we are.(2)
Jim Hightower correctly labels this corporate rule and global domination
"class warfare" with the corporate giants and investor elites making out
like bandits. There is, he says, a winner-take-all attitude built into
the corporate mentality that commands top managers to produce as much money
as possible, and as quickly as possible, no matter who is eliminated or run
down in the process.
Is there no alternative to this takeover by huge corporations? Dugger,
Korten and Hightower all believe there is if we pool our efforts and work
together for the common good. Hightower explains what this means by
underscoring his Dad's philosophy: "Everyone does better when everyone
does better."
The Growth of Corporate Power in the U.S.
Corporations have not always had the enormous power they have today.
Richard Grossman and Frank T. Adams point out in their excellent booklet
"Taking Care of Business" (Charter Ink, 1995, Cambridge, MA) that in the
early years of our country, state legislators granted corporate charters
to build turnpikes, canals and bridges. Corporate charters were usually
restricted to a set number of years, and legislatures often decided not
to renew them. Incorporated businesses were prohibited from taking any
action which legislators did not specifically allow.
So how did these corporations gain the incredible power they have today?
As far back as 1819 in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the Supreme Court
began to strip states of their ability to control corporate charters. Many
citizens then believed that exceeded the high court's authority. But it
was the Civil War that provided the enormous funding that enabled
corporations to amass their first fortunes. They were chartered to supply
the Union Army and many of them delivered shoddily-made shoes,
malfunctioning guns, and rotten meat. Abraham Lincoln viewed the rise of
corporations as a disaster, writing to a friend in 1864:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me
and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of
the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in
high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor
to prolong its reign... until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands,
and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for
the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.(3)
Historian Howard Zinn describes how, during the last quarter of the 19th
century, in industry after industry,
...shrewd and efficient businessmen were building empires,
choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low,
using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries
of the "welfare state." The banks had so many of these monopolies as
to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each
of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations."(4)
Then, in the 1886 Santa Clara case, "the Supreme Court decided, insanely,
that corporations are 'persons' with the rights our forbears meant only
for people." (Dugger, "Real Populists Please Stand Up," p. 160.) After
that, of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court
between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with Negroes, 288 dealt with
corporations.
(Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pp. 254-255.)
With the Spanish-American War, U.S. corporations began to move abroad,
backed up by the U.S. Marines. The goal was not to drive colonial Spain
out of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but to gain control over the Caribbean and
use Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam as stepping-stones to the markets
of the Orient. Zinn says this was "a natural development of the twin
drives of capitalism and nationalism." A Washington Post editorial
declared in 1898:
A new consciousness seems to have come upon us - the
consciousness of strength.... Ambition, interest, land, hunger, pride,
the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new
sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of
Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the
jungle....(5)
Strange destiny indeed! These are the more distant roots of a present
reality which is now becoming evident throughout the land and throughout
the world. Not only is the corporate drive for profit and power
superseding people and principles, but we the American people have
often been complicit with this pattern, and only We The People can
alter it.
Our Enchantment with Corporate Power & Its Promise of the Good Life
The Depression of the 1930's seemed to reject the euphoria of the "Dance
of the Millions" which followed World War I, while the welfare state of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s seemed to offer a governmental
version of the common good. But after World War II, that changed and the
drive for the good life turned our thoughts to modernity and materialism.
Environmentalist writer Jerry Mander describes what happened:
The new value system that was sold in the forties and fifties was
designed to fuel the most massive expansion of U.S. industrial and
marketing sectors in history. The `American way of life' became an
advertising theme; it drew an explicit equation between how much you
consumed and how American you were.... To say that we, the public, had
no participation in these vast changes would be inaccurate. By our
silence we gave our tacit approval....It all happened so fast, and with
SO MUCH POWER, it was difficult to grasp what was changing, as it was
changing. The process itself overpowered all doubt. We asked no
questions....(6)
During the 1980's we were told by President Ronald Reagan that we could
both spend enormous sums on the military and at the same times reduce
taxes. It was an economist's fantasy which became a corporate gold mine
and a people's nightmare. The United States fell into massive debt.
But corporations kept on expanding as markets grew, subsidies kept
flowing, and the stock market, despite fluctuations, kept rising. This
allowed corporations to keep most of their enormous profits and the
good times seemed to have no limits. But a day of reckoning was at
hand for workers and farmers.
Benjamin Friedman and Al Krebs explain what happened to these two key
sectors of the American labor force. Friedman on workers:
Of all the new year-round full-time jobs created since 1979, 36
percent have provided workers with less than half of what the average
worker made in 1973.... The prospect of economic advancement is simply
disappearing for many Americans. The typical worker no longer earns
what his father or older brother earned at a comparable age a decade
or two before.(7)
Al Krebs paints an even bleaker picture for the American farmer:
Not only have individual lives been stripped away, but entire
rural communities are disappearing. The number of U.S. farms have
declined from 6.8 million in 1935 to under 2.1 million in 1989. The
years 1985-1986 alone saw the loss of over 112,000 farms....As one
farmer told me, "the earth is bleeding and I can't stop the
hemorrhaging."(8)
Yet many affluent Americans, contented and indifferent, went on
spending and consuming as these former mainstays of U.S. society fell
by the wayside. Contrary to what the corporate libertarians would have
us believe, David Korten warns:
Embellished by promises of limitless and effortless affluence,
the vision of a global economy has an entrancing appeal. Beneath its
beguiling surface, however, we find a modern form of enchantment, a
siren song created by the skilled image makers of Madison Avenue,
enticing societies to weaken community to free the market, eliminate
livelihoods to create wealth, and destroy life to increase unneeded
and often unsatisfying consumption.(9)
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
We cannot hope to break out of the control by these huge transnational
corporations through piecemeal measures or the reform of existing trade
agreements or projected corporate strategies. As long as the goal of the
multinational corporations and international banks is total control of
the marketplace and at forcing nation states to capitulate to their
wishes, reform is meaningless. The situation requires more fundamental
change.
Just as the Clinton Administration promised to reform NAFTA by attaching
two side agreements (on labor rights and environmental protections) which
never materialized, so too, the draconian conditions projected by the
upcoming Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) demonstrate we
cannot hope to reform projects and policies which only serve the
interests of the powerful.
Before we can hope to achieve real progress toward economic justice, it
seems to us that we must first awaken the American people to the imminent
crisis facing us in the United States and to the even worse reality for
people in Third World societies. Clearly, alternative visions and
specific projects are already being developed and should be implemented
from outside the parameters of the existing system, but to alter the
New World Order, we must first develop a broad popular consciousness
about the threat of corporate power.
The problem with corporate power consists of more than specific immoral
policies and unjust practices. By their very nature, large corporations
use people and love things. That is, they have no fundamental moral
principle except that of greater profit; they have no soul. The reason,
says Jerry Mander, is that corporations have no corporeality, in the
sense that they are basically concepts: a name, bank account, a legal
entity. Their basic drive is to expand and make money, profit being
the only standard by which a company is deemed worthy. In Mander's
view,
All other values are secondary: community welfare, the happiness
of workers, the health of the planet, even general prosperity....In this
sense a corporation is essentially a machine, a technological structure,
an organization that follows its own principles and its own morality,
and in which human morality is anomalous.(10)
This is why corporate power as global ruler is so dangerous: it refuses
to be accountable to people, democracy and society. It wants free reign
to pursue its ends without any public limitations or governmental
controls. Thus, its fundamentally anti-democratic nature. This is why
WE THE PEOPLE must bring these monster corporations back under our
control. Otherwise, these powerful THINGS, will continue to usurp
OUR fundamental freedoms.
Ideally, all corporations should have only one reason to exist: to serve
people and communities. Because power and greed have led large
corporations to assume they can control societies and rule the world,
we must challenge their basic assumptions even as we develop a peoples'
agenda for the coming era.
Sue Wheaton is National Co-Chair of the Alliance for Democracy and Phil
Wheaton is a member of the Metro-Washington, DC Chapter of the Alliance.
Notes
1.Ronnie Dugger, "Real Populists Please Stand Up," The Nation, August
14/21, 1995, p. 159.
2. David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press,
West Hartford, Connecticut, 1995, p. 158.
3. Jim Hightower, There's Nothing In the Middle of the Road But Yellow
Stripes and Dead Armadillos, HarperCollins, N.Y., 1997, p.31.
4. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Harper & Row,
1980, pp. 251-252.
5. Ibid, p. 292, emphasis added.
6. Jerry Mander, In The Absence Of The Sacred, Sierra Club Books, San
Francisco, 1991, pp. 22-23.
7. Benjamin M. Friedman, Day of Reckoning, Vintage, Random House, New
York, 1988, p.159-160).
8. A.V. Krebs, THE CORPORATE REAPERS, The Book of Agribusiness, Essential
Books, DC, 1992, p. 26)
9. David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press, West
Hartford, Connecticut, 1995, p. 131.
10.Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, opus cited, p.125-126.
The Alliance for Democracy - P.O. Box 683 - Lincoln, MA 01773
Tel. 781-259-9395 - Fax. 781-259-0404 - Email <peoplesall@aol.com>
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 11:37:10 -0800
From: Catherine McCarthy <mccarthy@dcn.davis.ca.us>
Subject: JOB AVAILABLE: City of Fairfield Recycling Coordinator
Recycling Job Available:
_______________________
CITY OF FAIRFIELD - RECYCLING COORDINATOR
$16.78/hour
22 hours a week
medical/dental/vision etc. benefits on a pro-rated basis
___________________________________________________________________
Application Due: April 24, 1998, 5pm (postmarks not accepted)
application screening - April 30
interivews - May 7
City of Fairfield
located on I-80 in Solano County
population 85,000
position is located in City Manager's office
Job Duties
grant administration
AB 939 solid waste/ recycling programs
household hazardous waste programs
for a complete job description and application contact:
City of Fairfield
Human Resources Dept.
1000 Webster Street
Fairfield, CA 94533
call 707-428-7396 for application/707-428-7505 for info
<<This is not a complete or official listing, to get a complete copy of the
job description please call the City of Fairfield at the number listed
above. Please forward to people who may be interested, Thanks - Catherine
McCarthy, Solano County>>
______________________________________________________________________
Catherine McCarthy
HOME: 2244 Muir Woods Place, Davis, CA 95616 (530)753-8389
EMAIL: mccarthy@dcn.davis.ca.us
______________________________________________________________________
WORK: Solano County Department of Environmental Management
601 Texas Street, Fairfield, CA 94533
PHONE:(707)421-6765 FAX:(707)421-4805
EMAIL: no access at work
______________________________________________________________________
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 09:48:49 -0700
From: "Tedd Ward, M.S." <recycle@cc.northcoast.com>
Subject: Recycled frisbees
Hi greenies!
The Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority is looking for a
promotional flying disk (aka frisbee) which can be printed. We prefer
recycled plastic, obviously, but want a disk which is of good quality.
For instance, the light little disks with the extra bump in the middle
are, in my opinion, not worth keeping. Does anyone know of a good source
of quality recycled disks which may be printed with a logo?
Theanks,
Tedd Ward
707-465-1100
FAX 707-465-1300
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 13:35:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Roger M. Guttentag" <rgutten@concentric.net>
Subject: Recycled frisbees
At 09:48 AM 4/14/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi greenies!
>
>The Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority is looking for a
>promotional flying disk (aka frisbee) which can be printed. We prefer
>recycled plastic, obviously, but want a disk which is of good quality.
>For instance, the light little disks with the extra bump in the middle
>are, in my opinion, not worth keeping. Does anyone know of a good source
>of quality recycled disks which may be printed with a logo?
>
>Theanks,
>Tedd Ward
>707-465-1100
>FAX 707-465-1300
=====================================================================
Dear Tedd:
Since you are located in CA, I would suggest taking advantage of the
recycled content product database that is maintained at the CA Integrated
Waste Management Board's web site. It's address is:
http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/mrt/rcp/rcpdbint.htm
Look under Toys - Flying Saucers, Distributors, and select Everywhere for
the geographic range.
The Recycling Data Network maintains a subscriber based database of recycled
content products. Their web address is:
These sites are also discussed in my "Recycling In Cyberspace" column for
March, 1997 in Resource Recycling.
Roger M. Guttentag
E-MAIL: rgutten@concentric.net
TEL: 215-513-0452
FAX: 215-513-0453
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 13:35:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Roger M. Guttentag" <rgutten@concentric.net>
Subject: Recycled frisbees
At 09:48 AM 4/14/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi greenies!
>
>The Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority is looking for a
>promotional flying disk (aka frisbee) which can be printed. We prefer
>recycled plastic, obviously, but want a disk which is of good quality.
>For instance, the light little disks with the extra bump in the middle
>are, in my opinion, not worth keeping. Does anyone know of a good source
>of quality recycled disks which may be printed with a logo?
>
>Theanks,
>Tedd Ward
>707-465-1100
>FAX 707-465-1300
=====================================================================
Dear Tedd:
Since you are located in CA, I would suggest taking advantage of the
recycled content product database that is maintained at the CA Integrated
Waste Management Board's web site. It's address is:
http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/mrt/rcp/rcpdbint.htm
Look under Toys - Flying Saucers, Distributors, and select Everywhere for
the geographic range.
The Recycling Data Network maintains a subscriber based database of recycled
content products. Their web address is:
These sites are also discussed in my "Recycling In Cyberspace" column for
March, 1997 in Resource Recycling.
Roger M. Guttentag
E-MAIL: rgutten@concentric.net
TEL: 215-513-0452
FAX: 215-513-0453
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 22:40:39 +0300
From: Navarra Dario <navarra@isracom.net.il>
subscribe dario navarra
------------------------------
End of GreenYes Digest V98 #95
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