The People's Business part 2

[Guest guest]

Unfortunately, examples of grassroots movements that have succeeded in placing

structural restraints on corporations are not as common as they should be. One

of the ways we can accelerate the process is by organizing a large-scale

national network of state and local lawmakers who are interested in enacting

policies that address specific issues or place broader restraints on corporate

power.

Just as the corporations have the powerful American Legislative Exchange Council

(ALEC) to distribute and support model legislation in the states, so we need our

own networks to experiment with and advance different policies that can curb and

limit corporate power. The National Caucus of Environmental Legislators—a

low-budget coalition of state lawmakers established in 1996 in response to the

Republican takeover of Congress and several state legislatures—is a model that

could be used to introduce and advance innovative legislative ideas at the state

level. The New Rules Project has also begun to analyze and compile information

on these kinds of laws. Additionally, the U.S. PIRG network of state public

interest research groups and the Center for Policy Alternatives have worked to

promote model progressive legislation, as has the newly founded American

Legislative Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE).

 

Moving the movement

Despite their many strengths, many major movements of the past few decades

(labor, environmental, consumer) have all suffered from internal fractures and a

lack of connection to the broader society. The result is that they have been

increasingly boxed into “special interest” roles, despite the fact that the

policies they advocate generally benefit the vast majority of people.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it this way: “Coalitions with different

interest-based messages for different voting blocks [are] without a general

moral vision. Movements, on the other hand, are based on shared values, values

that define who we are. They have a better chance of being broad-based and

lasting. In short, progressives need to be thinking in terms of a broad-based

progressive-values movement, not in terms of issue coalitions.”

If there is one group at the center of the struggle to challenge corporate

power, it is organized labor. As a Century Foundation Task Force Report on the

Future of Unions concluded, “Labor unions have been the single most important

agent for social justice in the United States.”

Labor is at the forefront of efforts to challenge excessive CEO pay, corporate

attempts to move their headquarters offshore to avoid paying their fair share of

taxes, and the outsourcing of jobs. Labor also has played a leading role in

opposing the war in Iraq and exposing war profiteers benefiting from Iraq

reconstruction contracts.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has written, unions need to start “building

social movements that reach beyond the workplace into the entire community and

offer working people beyond our ranks the opportunity to improve their lives and

livelihood.” This is beginning to occur more frequently. Union locals and

national labor support groups like Jobs With Justice have been a key force in

building cross-town alliances around economic justice battles such as living

wage campaigns and the new Fair Taxes for All campaign.

These union-led, cross-community alliances have in turn supported some of the

strongest union organizing campaigns, including the nearly two-decades-old

Justice for Janitors campaign that the Service Employees International Union

(SEIU) and its allies successfully organized in Los Angeles and other cities

across the country.

Clearly, labor unions, along with community-based organizations and churches,

will be central to the construction of lasting local coalitions that can serve

as organizing clearinghouses to challenge corporate rule.

 

Constructing a new politics

To challenge corporate power we must also value and rebuild the public sphere,

and draw clear lines of resistance against the expansion of corporate power,

such as the current push by Bush to convert Social Security into individual

investment accounts that will allow Wall Street to rake off billions of dollars

in annual brokerage fees. Most importantly, we must work to change the rules

instead of agreeing to play with a stacked deck.

In our hyper-commercialized culture, we spend far more time and energy thinking

about what products we want to buy next instead of thinking about how we can

change our local communities for the better, or affect the latest debates in

Washington, D.C. or the state capitol. And when so much energy is spent on

commercial and material pursuits instead of on collective and political

pursuits, we begin to think of ourselves as consumers, not citizens, with little

understanding of how or why we are so disempowered.

The restoration of democracy requires us to address the backstory behind this

process of psychological colonization. It requires us to address the public

policies and judicial doctrines that treat advertising as a public good—a

tax-deductible business expense and a form of speech protected by the First

Amendment. It’s been so long since we have seriously addressed such fundamental

questions that, as a result, the average American is now exposed to more than

100 commercial messages per waking hour. As of October 2003, there were 46,438

shopping malls in the United States, covering 5.8 billion square feet of space,

or about 20.2 square feet for every man, woman and child in the United States.

As economist Juliet Schor reports, “Americans spend three to four times as many

hours a year shopping as their counterparts in Western European countries. Once

a purely utilitarian chore, shopping has been elevated to the status of a

national passion.”

A consequence of the hyper-commercialization of our culture is that instead of

organizing collectively, we often buy into the market-based ideology of

individual choice and responsibility and assume that we can change the world by

changing our personal habits of consumption. The politics of recycling offers a

minor but telling example of how corporations manage to escape blame by

utilizing the politics of personal responsibility. Although recycling is a

decent habit, the message conveyed is that the onus for environmental

sustainability largely rests upon the individual, and that the solutions to

pollution are not to be found further upstream in the industrial system.

The personal choices we make are important. But we shouldn’t assume that’s the

best we can do. We need to understand that it can’t truly be a matter of choice

until we get some more say in what our choices are. True power still resides in

the ability to write, enforce and judge the laws of the land, no matter what the

corporations and their personal-choice, market-centered view of the world

instruct us to believe.

Rebuilding the public sphere

With increased corporate encroachment upon our schools and universities, our

arts institutions, our houses of worship and even our elections, we are losing

the independent institutions that once nurtured and developed the values and

beliefs necessary to challenge the corporate worldview. These and other

institutions and public assets should be considered valuable parts of a public

“commons” of our collective heritage and therefore off limits to for-profit

corporations.

“The idea of the commons helps us identify and describe the common values that

lie beyond the marketplace,” writes author David Bollier. “We can begin to

develop a more textured appreciation for the importance of civic commitment,

democratic norms, social equity, cultural and aesthetic concerns, and ecological

needs. . . . A language of the commons also serves to restore humanistic,

democratic concerns to their proper place in public policy-making. It insists

that citizenship trumps ownership, that the democratic tradition be given an

equal or superior footing vis-à-vis the economic categories of the market.”

Changing the rules

Much citizen organizing today focuses on influencing administrative, legislative

and judicial processes that are set up to favor large corporations from the very

start. Put simply, many of the rules are not fair, and until we can begin to

collectively challenge this fundamental unfairness, we will continue to fight

with one hand tied behind our backs. Instead of providing opportunities for

people to organize collectively to demand real political solutions and start

asking tough questions about how harmful policies become law in the first place,

many community-based organizations seem content to merely clean up the mess left

behind by failed economic policies and declining social services.

The most successful organizing happens when it is focused on specific demands.

Two crucial reforms have great potential to aid the movement’s ability to grow:

fundamental campaign finance reform and media reform. Together, these could

serve as a compelling foundation for a mass movement that challenges corporate

power more broadly.

The movement for citizen-controlled elections, organized at the local level with

support from national groups such as the Center for Voting and Democracy and

Public Campaign, provides a useful framework for action for the broad spectrum

of people who currently feel shut out of politics.

 

Media reform is also essential. With growing government secrecy and a

corporate-dominated two-party political system, the role of independent media is

more critical than ever. As Bill Moyers suggested in his keynote address at the

National Conference on Media Reform in 2003, “If free and independent journalism

committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen

goes out of democracy.”

The media have always been and will continue to be the most important tool for

communicating ideas and educating the public about ongoing problems. Thomas

Paine wrote more than 200 years ago:

There is nothing that obtains so general an influence over the manners and

morals of a people as the press; from that as from a fountain the streams of

vice or virtue are poured forth over a nation.”

The movement for citizen-controlled elections, organized at the local level with

support from national groups such as the Center for Voting and Democracy and

Public Campaign, provides a useful framework for action for the broad spectrum

of people who currently feel shut out of politics.

Media reform is also essential. With growing government secrecy and a

corporate-dominated two-party political system, the role of independent media is

more critical than ever. As Bill Moyers suggested in his keynote address at the

National Conference on Media Reform in 2003, “If free and independent journalism

committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen

goes out of democracy.”

The media have always been and will continue to be the most important tool for

communicating ideas and educating the public about ongoing problems. Thomas

Paine wrote more than 200 years ago:

There is nothing that obtains so general an influence over the manners and

morals of a people as the press; from that as from a fountain the streams of

vice or virtue are poured forth over a nation.”

History is replete with examples that show how critical the media’s role has

been in addressing the injustices of our society. For instance, many Progressive

Era reforms came only in response to the investigative exposés of corporate

abuses by muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. Writing in

popular magazines like Collier’s and McClure’s, these writers provided a

powerful public challenge to the corruption of the Gilded Age.

Because of increased corporate consolidation of the media, coverage of all

levels of government has been greatly reduced. When people are kept ignorant of

what is happening in their communities, in their states, in Washington, D.C. and

in the world, it becomes much easier for large corporations to overwhelm the

political process and control the economy without citizens understanding what is

happening. Though media reform is a complex subject, one approach bears

mentioning—establishing and strengthening nonprofit media outlets.

The long-term vision

Though campaign finance reform and media reform offer useful starting points,

ultimately, there is much more to be done. We need to get tough on corporate

crime. We need to make sure markets are properly competitive by breaking up the

giant corporate monopolies and oligarchies. We need to make corporations more

accountable to all stakeholders and less focused on maximizing shareholder

profit above all. We need to stop allowing corporations to claim Bill of Rights

protections to undermine citizen-enacted laws.

Ultimately, we need to restore the understanding that in a democracy the rights

of citizens to govern themselves are more important than the rights of

corporations to make money. Since their charters and licenses are granted by

citizen governments, it should be up to the people to decide how corporations

can serve the public good and what should be done when they don’t. As Justices

Byron White, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall noted in 1978: “Corporations

are artificial entities created by law for the purpose of furthering certain

economic goals. . . . The State need not permit its own creation to consume it.”

 

The people’s business

The many constituencies concerned with the consequences of corporate power are

indeed a diverse group, and although this diversity can be a source of strength,

it also makes it difficult to clearly articulate a vision for the struggle. What

principles, then, can unite us?

One abiding faith that almost all of us share is that of citizen democracy: that

citizens should be able to decide how they wish to live through democratic

processes and that big corporations should not be able to tell citizens how to

live their lives and run their communities. The most effective way to control

corporations will be to restore citizen democracy and to reclaim the once widely

accepted principle that corporations are but creatures of the state, chartered

under the premise that they will serve the public good, and entitled to only

those rights and privileges granted by citizen-controlled governments. Only by

doing so will we be able to create the just and sustainable economy that we

seek, an economy driven by the values of human life and community and democracy

instead of the current suicide economy driven only by the relentless pursuit of

financial profit at any cost.

Therefore, we must work assiduously to challenge the dominant role of the

corporation in our lives and in our politics. We must reestablish citizen

sovereignty, and we must restore the corporations to their proper role as the

servants of the people, not our masters. This is the people’s business.

 

 

http://www.blueaction.org

" Better to have one freedom too many than to have one freedom too few. "

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