[change-links] BOOK REVIEW: Corporate Predators (fwd)

FYI. Is Corporate Feudalism the next world system?

//CJR

---------- Forwarded message ----------
BOOK REVIEW
+
Charles J. Reid
American Reporter Correspondent
Santa Cruz, Calif.
<DATE>
predators
3200/$32.00

          Predators from the Supreme Court
                By Charles J. Reid
          American Reporter Correspondent

        (Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman.  Corporate Predators. The 
Hunt
        for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy. Common Courage
        Press, 1999. 213 pp., Index. $14.95, paper.)

        SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. 
Constitution stipulates that "No State shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." 
        In the 1886 Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v. Southern
Pacific Railroad Co., the Court declared that a corporation was a "person"
as interpreted by the Fourteenth Amendment. In a preface to the Court's
argument, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite observed that all the Justices
shared the opinion that the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment that
applied to persons also "applied to these corporations," the corporate
defendants affected by the case before the Court. 
        This 19th Century decision set a momentous precedent. It gave an
abstract paper construct, a corporation, the legal rights of a "person,"
though without binding these legal persons with the same social
responsibilities communities place on individual human beings. 
        Four score and fourteen years later, the Court de facto extended
the progressively enhanced legal empowerment of corporations, enabling
them finally to design contracts that supercede and nullify an individual
human being's protections under the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights. 
        Not surprisingly, it was a government agency, namely, the CIA,
that pioneered the use of employment contracts to limit the fundamental
freedoms of American citizens. In Snepp v. the CIA (1980), the Court
upheld an injunction enjoining Snepp from publishing any work concerning
the CIA or its activities without prepublication review by the CIA. 
        The Agency had sued ex-agent Frank Snepp for publishing his book,
"Decent Interval," without submitting it to the CIA for prepublication
review. Although the book did not contain any information that was not
already part of the public record, when Snepp entered the CIA, he signed a
secrecy contract in which he promised not to publish any information or
material relating to the agency without prepublication approval. The Court
found that Snepp had not only violated his contract, but also breached a
fiduciary duty to the government. It imposed a "constructive trust" on the
proceeds of his book. Thus, all the money Frank Snepp received from
publishing his book had to be turned over to the federal government. 
        Today, corporations are using the "contract tool" to nullify the
rights of citizens under the Constitution of the United States. The best
example of this occurs when insurance companies require patients to
"waive" their Constitutional rights to due process and submit to
"arbitration" in a dispute with a doctor covered by the insurer. This de
facto deprives the human patient of immediate legal due process as
guaranteed by the same Fourteenth Amendment that gave life to paper
corporations. 
        Through the years and a series of corporate-friendly, perhaps
socially irresponsible decisions, the Supreme Court has created a horde of
monstrous predators, legal Dr. Jekels/Mr. Hydes. 
        At one level, corporations develop new technologies and economies
of scale. These may serve the economic interests of mass consumers by
introducing new products and more efficient methods of mass production. On
another level, given the absence of political control today, corporations
serve to destroy the foundations of the civic community and the lives of
people who reside in them -- here in the United States, and everywhere
else in the world. 
        In the struggle to survive, denial is strong. Most Americans are
frustrated by the gravity of the problem: legally, corporations have
unlimited life, unlimited size, unlimited power, and a whole lot of
license to control the political, economic, and cultural destinies and
disparities of local communities and of the world. Having no conscience
for the community, corporations remain focused solely on their own
"rational" self interest in profit, respecting no human being that stands
in their way, especially those lacking status, wealth, or power. 
        Mokhiber and Weissman's book, "Corporate Predators," is important
for the information it contains about impact corporations have on you and
I, our communities and the world. 
        Russell Mokhiber is editor of the "Corporate Crime Reporter."
Robert Weissman is editor of the "Multinational Monitor." The authors'
agenda is clear, and "Corporate Predators" is spiced with the kind of
rhetoric one would expect from writers reporting on the evils of
corporations. But you can ignore the rhetoric, if you want. Facts speak
for themselves. 
        The book itself is a collection of the columns the authors wrote
during 1997 and 1998. The data it contains is a step toward raising public
consciousness about the legally accepted institutions that control their
future. "Corporate Predators" contains facts and information about
corporations that rarely reaches the general public in a unified, coherent
way. And the public can change the law, once people grasp the problem and
unify to solve it. 
        "Corporate Predators" exposes the problems in monitoring corporate
crimes, for example. In "No Mind, No Crime," the authors write, "While
street crime is reportedly being brought under control in America's major
cities, all indications are that corporate crime and violence continue to
skyrocket." Yet some legal scholars like George Mason Law School Professor
Jeffrey Parker argue, "Since a corporation has no mind, is can commit no
crime." Then why give it the legal status of a thinking human being? 
        According to Mokhiber and Weismann, "The FBI does not issue a
yearly "Corporate Crime in the United States" report, despite strong
evidence indicating corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage
on society than all street crime combined." Indeed, the FBI "Crime in the
United States" report ignores corporate and white-collar crimes such as
pollution, procurement fraud, financial fraud, public corruption and
occupational homicide, while it does document murder, robbery, assault,
burglary, and other street crimes. 
        The authors also note throughout the book that corporate crime and
violence goes undetected or unprosecuted either because corporations can
modify the laws to excuse them from wrongdoing or they have enough power
to influence prosecutorial actions and outcomes. 
        Yet companies do commit crimes. A few are uncovered and sometimes
prosecuted. Their column, "Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Blue Criminal," 
describes the 1998 case where Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois pled
guilty to eight felony counts after admitting concealing evidence in a
Medicare claim payment investigation. In another case, Blue Cross/Blue
Shield of Florida paid $10 million to settle charges that it falsified and
failed to properly screen provider claims. These are not the only states
wherein this particular corporation faced criminal charges. 
        The authors report in "Brinkley Shills for Corporate Criminals"
that in 1996 Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) pled guilty to criminal price
fixing and paid a $100 million fine. ADM hired David Brinkley to film a
series of TV promos to repair the company's image. Our vocabulary has no
concept of working for a corporate felon. 
        In 1998 state testimony showed that General Electric dumped a
millions tons of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) into the Hudson River,
lining the bottom of a 200 mile strip. The Oil Pollution Act, passed by
Congress in 1990, required the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (N.O.A.A.) to develop a new set of rules and procedures to
determine exactly how toxic cleanup sums should be calculated. 
        As described in "Saving or Trashing America's Treasures?" at issue
for General Electric are the tons of PCBs that it dumped into the Hudson
River. G.E. wants escape responsibility for the environmental damage it
caused and wants the rules changed before it is forced to clean up this
toxic environmental mess. The cleanup could cost the company $2 billion to
remove from the river. GE says such a cost is unfair, even though its
revenues for 1997 alone reached a record $90 billion. Court cases are
pending. 
        In "Dissolving Unocal" the authors describe how a California
citizens group petitioned the state attorney general (Dan Lungren) to
revoke the charter of Union Oil of California for pollution, OSHA
violations, worker discrimination, and complicity in human rights
violations in Afghanistan and Burma. Of course, Lungren rejected the
127-page petition within a couple days. Revoking a corporate charter has
happened only once in California this century. Loyola Law School Professor
Robert Benson explains, "California attorneys general haven't often done
it because they've become soft on corporate crime." 
        While the public is becoming increasingly aware of corporate
control of the political process, the question of how to take back our
government from corporations is a problem the authors raise that requires
a solution. Mokhiber and Weissman suggest, "Citizens activists forced to
confront corporate crime and violence in their community increasingly see
that Big Business dominates both major parties." 
        In "Boom and Bust" the authors describe how large institutional
investors -- Merrill Lynch & Co., Goldman Sach & Co., Bear, Stearns, & Co.
and Bankers Trust Corp. -- call on the government for taxpayer bailouts
when hedge funds with $billions invested go bust. Calls placed to the
Federal Reserve Chairman or Treasury Secretary lead to orchestrated
bailouts that benefit those with the $millions in risky investments. The
political party affiliation of the office holder has little significance
-- the big guy can always get an infusion of worker and middleclass
taxpayer capital to reduce his risk irrespective of which political party
holds power. 
        Similar kinds of political arrangements exist in other industries,
including oil, pharmaceuticals, gambling, and manufacturing.  Meanwhile,
forget campaign finance reform. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976)  and First
National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), the Supreme Court declared
corporate political contribitions as a person's exercise of free speech.
When the elections are over, it's time to legislate. And as the authors
report, "If major corporations don't like a law, they can invest millions
in campaign contributions, lobbyists, and political advertisements" to
change the law. 
        Sometimes they just ignore the law. The 1998 proposed merger of
Citicorp and Travelers Group is such a case. According to Mokhiber and
Weissman, "This merger is flatly prohibited by federal law that prevents
banks, securities firms, and insurance companies from owning each other."
But the financial services industry fought for years to tear down the
regulatory wall separating commercial banking from insurance and
investment banking. The merging companies can tie up litigation for two to
five years, while they lobby to change the law. 
        According to Mokhiber and Weissman, "When Teddy Roosevelt-era
trustbusters broke up the Standard Oil monopoly, they were motivated by
political as much as economic concerns. They understood that concentrated
economic power translates into political power, and that concentrated
political power in incompatible with democracy." Today, conservatism has
buried the trustbusters. 
        In "One World, One Company" the authors note that a recent United
Nations report highlights the importance of recognizing the political
implications of mergers and acquisitions, especially American and European
takeovers of Third World companies. Such acquisitions do not create new
jobs, generate new economic activity, or even represent new investments.
Only the company name changes. Meanwhile, the takeovers create private
monopolies and oligopolies that sustain local price gouging, degradation
in living standards, suppression of local independent innovation, and the
maintenance of a hierarchical social structure with great disparities in
wealth. 
        People who've lived in the United States through the corporate
downsizing strategies implemented during recessions or as a result of
mergers understand how corporate consolidation and intimidation affect
local communities. 
        During the Reagan years, a new climate for Big Business emerged.
The decision to fire the striking air traffic controllers broke the
Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO). Union membership
declined nationally. Congress passed the Garn-St Germain bill, which
deregulated the Saving and Loan Associations. Taxpayers paid the $500
billion plus bill for the S & L collapse, resulting in increased
dissatisfaction with taxation: the politically desired result from the
conservative, pro-business perspective. 
        Big Business still today capitalize on the political and economic
climate Reagan created. Corporations acquired enhanced power from
increased capital mobility, foreign competition, rapid technological
change, and downsizing. After NAFTA, they could move to Mexico. As
Mokhiber and Weissman report, "Employers use threats of plant relocations
to bust unions; rely on weak or non-existent unions to permit downsizing;
they capitalize on technological change to speed restructuring and to
shift production abroad. Many workers are so intimidated that they fear
unionizing or even asking for a raise." 
        The authors report a recent study showed that, in companies
subjected to union drives between 1993 and 1995, more than a third of
employers fired workers for union activity, 38 percent gave special favors
to those who opposed the union activity, and 14 percent used electronic
surveillance of union activists. 
        Moreover, as corporations have become strident defenders of First
Amendment freedoms in an electoral context, with increasing frequency they
are intimidating citizens from exercising their own free speech rights.
More and more corporations are charging community activists who speak out
against alleged corporate wrongdoing with defamation, libel, slander, and
other offences, suing them for large sums of money. As the authors
suggest, "Most corporate suits fail, but they have the desired effect of
tying up activists' time, and intimidating them and others from speaking
out." Free speech is rarely allowed anywhere corporations control the
message through their financial power. 
        Public political culture is becoming less and less a pure human
endeavor and more and more a corporate product. Information control is an
important corporate mission, as politicians plan to privatize prisons, law
enforcement, social security, and even components of the military. 
        In "Corporate Fronts: An Epidemic with a Cure," the authors tell
the story of Sandra Steingraber, whose book, "Living Downstream: An
Ecologist Looks At Cancer and the Environment," was savagely reviewed by
Dr. Jerry Berke from Ashton, Massachusetts, in the "New England Journal of
Medicine." Berke called the book, "a biased work" of an environmentalist.
According to the authors, "Steingraber soon learned that the Dr. Jerry
Berke who reviewed her book was in fact director of toxicology at W.R.
Grace & Co., on of the largest chemical companies in the United States."
The chemical pollution of this company was captured in the book, "A Civil
Action," now a motion picture starring John Travolta. 
        Corporations are resorting to new tactics to delude the public. 
Mokhiber and Weissman describe how corporations set up and fund think
tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Hudson Institute. The set
up front groups like Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse or the Electric
Consumers Association. They fund "public interest groups"  like the World
Wildlife Federation or the Environmental Defense Fund.  Corporations have
taken over organizations, like the National Consumers League. And they
fund many national corporate-friendly conferences with misleading themes,
such as "Focus on Youth: The New Consumer Power," sponsored by Visa USA,
the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers Association, the Chlorine Chemical
Council, Monsanto, General Motors, and others. 
        At the same time, all media efforts are made to block reports
deleterious to corporate interests. The "old boy" network meets
advertising. 
        In a lawsuit filed against WTVT, a Fox Television affiliate in
Tampa, Florida, two journalists allege that Fox executives ordered them to
broadcast lies about Monsanto's controversial bovine growth hormone (BGH),
now being used by many dairy farmers across the country. Jane Akre and
Steve Wilson had produced a four-part series on BGH in the Florida milk
supply. Several countries around the world prohibit use if BGH in cows.
When Akre and Wilson refused to include falsehoods in "adjustments" to the
script, they were fired. 
        This case represents only one of many involving issues focused on
the media and a number of corporations. Self-censorship of the media is
well known today. 
        Meanwhile, corporations have extended their national cultural
reach and control to museums, schools, and the arts. Corporations
regularly sponsor exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington,
D.C., where they also block information that is critical to their
interests.  "Fund raisers" at cultural institutions throughout the country
are faced with this problem. 
        Corporations are now providing study guides and textbooks to
public schools, and not without attempting to influence the contents. All
the while, the flow of information has become concentrated in fewer and
fewer independent newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. 
National bookstore chains threaten all local independent booksellers. 
        With the political control of the American body politic in their
pockets, corporations control the political state of the world by inducing
foreign policies protecting authoritarian regimes, oligopolies, and
investment risks. At the international level, support for corporate
interests while sacrificing needs of people has become a permanent
component of U.S. foreign policy. Countries like China and India have been
able to maintain some modicum of political and economic independence due
to the size of their populations and nationalist policies of their
political leaders. Other smaller countries from Argentina and Chile to
Nigeria and Indonesia have had their authoritarian regimes installed and
sustained through American foreign policy designed to protect corporate
interests. 
        Bottom line, at a pure human level, corporations represent the
amoral, absence of ethics in human society. Some corporations try to
balance their deeds with philanthropic contributions of one sort of
another. But this is not recompense for the damage and death done to
communities and people throughout the world. 
        The blind pursuance of corporate interests leads to the
devaluation of human beings, as the author describe, when they report that
Occidental Petroleum is intent on drilling in the Columbian rainforest on
land considered sacred by the U'wa people, who say they will commit
collective suicide if the drilling doesn't stop. The same can be said for
companies that charge a price that is 10 to 100 times the cost of
producing the product, as is the case in the apparel and pharmaceutical
industries. This is something the facade of occasional conscience-easing
corporate philanthropy cannot hide. 
        Corporations have large budgets for marketing mendacity promoting
dishonest "spins" that have become part of the expectation of doing
business. They lie about their products and maintain law-suit budgets to
cover losses due to product defect judgements. As Mokhiber and Weissman
document, too many corporations get low performance scores for "decent
treatment of workers, environmental preservation, respect for human
rights, delivery of affordable and quality consumer goods and services and
adherence to the law." 
        Perhaps the most disastrous impact corporations have in our lives
is on the human personality. On one hand, the PR-driven marketplace
degrades honesty and integrity. On the other hand, democratic values of
tolerance and open discussion become diluted in an organizational
environment that fundamentally emulates a feudalistic/militaristic
structure. The struggle to maintain a job occurs in the context of an
asymmetric relationship where obsequious sycophancy is highly prioritized. 
        Today, the Fortune 1000 corporations control 70 percent of the
economy. When the nation was founded, the economy more closely approached
a state of pure competition. Then people dealt with people. Now
supervisors manage their "human resources" as they manage raw materials,
which are discarded when they lose their usefulness. 
        Read "Corporate Predators." And perhaps drop a line to your
favorite Supreme Court Justice and inquire about how this march toward
Corporate Feudalism can be legally stopped, on the ethical assumption that
we truly ought to "put people first." 


  (Charles Reid is a freelance writer living in Santa Cruz,
California.)













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