Derber - Corporation nation: how corporations are taking over our lives and what we can do about it

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CONTENTS

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country 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 by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Abraham Lincoln, 1864

To

My Father and Mother

who inspired my principles and my love of life

Morrie Schwartz

whose sunny love in life and triumph in death

brightens all my days

and

Elena

for whose strength, nurturance, and heroic perseverance

I am in loving awe

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all the scholars and critics of the corporation who came before me, my colleagues and friends who sustained me, and all the activists around the world who are working to make possible a new world. I am indebted to the participants of a Boston seminar on the corporation, including Tim Costello, Richard Grossman, June Sekera, Charles Edmunson, Severyn Bruyn, Kent Greenfield, Elly Leary, Debra Osnowitz, Yale Magrass, S. M. Miller, and Michael Bettencourt. Grossman and Costello helped me rethink some of my basic assumptions; Osnowitz, Magrass, and Miller read the entire manuscript and gave me valuable substantive and editorial feedback; Greenfield read parts of the manuscript and helped guide me in legal thinking and critique; Edmunson inspired me as an employer-owner who walked the talk and Leary as a labor historian and organizer whose keen thinking and passion for justice burned bright; and Bruyn deepened my vision at every level, from local to global.

My colleagues in the Leadership for Change Program at Boston College helped nurture my belief inand entertained my skepticism aboutdemocratic change arising from within the corporation itself. These include Severyn Bruyn, Paul Gray, Joe Raelin, Eve Spangler, Bill Torbert, Sandra Waddock, Judy Clair, Charles Edmunson, Laury Hamel, Robert Leaver, Charlene OBrien, Neil Smith, Steve Waddell, Lynn Rhenisch, and Leah Egan. I also want to thank Steven Piersanti for his own contributions to corporate responsibility and his close reading and comments on the manuscript, as well as Noam Chomsky, David Korten, Howard Zinn, and Paul Levenson for their intellectual and personal inspiration.

Numerous undergraduate and graduate students were a captive audience for various drafts of this work, and their insights and suggestions made this a much better book. Thanks also to Eunice Doherty, Brenda Pepe, and Roberta Negrin for their office and personal help at Boston College. I also want to express gratitude and enthusiasm for the legion of new populist activists, including David Lewit and the thousands of hopeful citizens joining the Alliance for Democracy, Chuck Collins and his crusaders for equality at United for a Fair Economy, and Tim Costello and all the labor activists committed to making the labor movement a social movement again.

I am deeply grateful to my editor, Cal Morgan, for his excitement about the ideas, for the extraordinary attention he gave to the manuscript, and for the gift of his expert editorial skills.

I cannot express adequately my gratitude to my friends and colleagues, David Karp and John Williamson, who read and commented on the manuscript, indulged my obsessions, and supported me all along the journey. While my dear friend Morrie Schwartz died before this work appeared, his faith in me, belief in the importance of the ideas presented here, and merry, loving presencewhich has now touched millions of peoplewere a daily blessing.

Only Elena fully understands the meaning of living with a writer obsessed. Her close reading and critical commentary on the manuscript, which helped shape both the substance and style of the work, as well as her loving support, made this book possible.

INTRODUCTION by Ralph Nader

The controlling power in any society strives to make sure that, one way or another, its dark sides are not part of the mainstream public dialogue nor are they part of the perceived explanation for that societys structural shortfalls and injustices. The modern large corporation is, as lawyer William Gossett, former vice president of Ford Motor Company wrote forty years ago, the dominant institution in our country. In the subsequent years, ask yourself how the traditional countervailing powers have fared vis--vis these giant multinational companies which command the global heights of power these days. Trade unions are weaker and on the defensive. The media is being scooped up by the conglomerates. The courts are under attack whenever they act, under the tort laws, on behalf of wrongfully harmed people. The universities are rapidly being corporatized. The churches do not seem able even to challenge gross commercialism, including the exploitation of children by business. While much of the government, starting with cash register elections, has become increasingly a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business and a bazaar of accounts receivables for demanding corporate Welfare Kings.

Abroad, these corporations blithely cut deals with dictators or bring financially strapped governments into an indentured-debt status both directly and through allied agencies, such as the IMF and the World Bank, that reflect the corporate model of economic policy. More recently, the autocratic system of global governance called the World Trade Organization moves the subordination of domestic health, safety, and environmental policies beneath the supremacy of international commerce into a newly regressive dimension.

This is not to say that the media totally ignores stories about corporate crimes, frauds, and other abuses. While much more coverage of such public damage is needed, even the network television stations and print publications provide citizens with enough for a wake-up call. These stories are conveyed anecdotally (as they need to be for communications purposes), but rarely are they aggregated and given organized meaning about what basic changes are necessary to prevent repetitions and to allow our country and its peoples to fulfill their human possibilities.

Instead, such exposs can lead to a publie fatalism that nothing can be done because repeatedly there is no corrective follow-through by the affected institutions. These multiple disconnects are reflected in political campaigns whose candidates read major page one stories in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times about serious corporate misbehavior and then continue with the language of avoidance on the hustings by ignoring their context. Historically, commercial carriers, from the ancient moneylenders to todays corporations, have known few voluntary boundaries to their avarice. Every major religion has warned about this monistic drive for profitable gain. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and many other of our forebears have done likewise. But when the culture itself becomes a corporate culture, we grow up corporate, accepting corporate assumptions about most things ranging from the designs of cars to the corporate control of other peoples properties to the definitions of military policy to restrictions on the very meaning of words (violence excludes corporate violence, crime excludes corporate crime, welfare excludes corporate welfare, for example). When we grow up civic, the broader social values beyond the firms mercantile ones achieve visibility and power. Past reform movements, including those of the farmers and industrial labor a century or more ago, changed significantly the countrys laws, policies, and ways of judging what is permitted and not permitted for the exercise of corporate power. The coal industry, for instance, had to be brought to some higher standards in the way it treated coal miners by the emergence of the United Mine Workers, and the late sixties drive for coal mine health and safety laws. While coal mining is still a dirty, hazardous occupation, it is much less so than the conditions formerly obtaining in the industry, which between 1880 and 1980 cost as many lives (from mine collapses and black lung disease) as those lost by the United States in World War II.