Challenging Corporate Power

(An interview with Richard Grossman)

Richard Grossman is co-director of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. He is co-author of Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation. He lectures widely on issues of corporate power, law, and democracy.
 
BARSAMIAN: You write in an essay, “Giant corporations govern. In the Constitution of the United States they are delegated no authority to make our laws and define our culture. Corporations have no constitutions, no bills of rights. So when corporations govern, democracy flies out the door.” What do you mean by that?
 
GROSSMAN: On one level, it’s that corporations are making the fundamental decisions that shape our society. They determine essentially what work we do, which technologies get developed, which production methods are used. They are constantly pushing the concept that production has to expand, and from that comes wealth, liberty, and freedom. Most of the decisions they make are essentially beyond the public’s ability to interfere with. In terms of having this fundamental authority to shape our society, to get the law to reflect their position.
The federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, have bestowed the equivalent of human rights on these artificial entities. They now have the protection of law and the Constitution, which means the protection of the police and the military, to interfere in our elections and in our lawmaking. They’re able to field 50 to 1,000 lobbyists. They’re able to take politicians to dinner, to buy all kinds of advertising, to shape the culture. Increasingly over this century even citizen activists and activist organizations, have not challenged the claimed authority of corporations to make the fundamental decisions. What’s happened is, we’ve been channeled into regulatory administrative agencies, like the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, where we try to make the best of the worst of a bad situation.
We’re saying that if we are to be a self-governing people, which is what the American Revolution is about, then we have to be in charge of everything. There can be no realm of decision-making that should be considered private, beyond our authority.
The conventional wisdom would have it that we are governed by local, state, and federal governments.
Look at the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the MAI. It would grant to property, to corporations, to artificial concentrations of wealth the authority to go into other countries, and exercise the same kind of so-called private rights of decision-making that they have exercised in this country.
If you go back and look at populist and other public resistance to increasing corporate power in the 1880s and 1890s, you find a vigorous societal debate, about what the role of the state is in creating corporations. It’s our states that charter corporations and are supposed to define them and keep them subordinate. What happened was, towards the end of the l9th century corporate leaders realized that they needed to get away from the authority of the states to define them. They ran to the federal government and said, This is unconstitutional. This interferes with the interstate commerce clause, our property rights, and our freedom of contract. And the federal courts helped them. They stripped the states of their ability to define the corporation.
Here’s something that comes out of the whole mythology, that jobs, progress and the good life come from giving these corporation a free hand and saying, Do whatever you want because we’re incapable as people of creating jobs, of figuring out how to grow our food, of arranging our affairs. We need you. The politicians say, We have to create a good business climate. We have to give the corporations whatever they want, including all kinds of subsidies and special privileges. All the money goes to them. They have the law on their side. We as the people are left with, well, if anything bad happens to this corporation, what will happen to jobs, to taxes? How can we possibly compete with the rest of the world? The whole gamut of mythologies that the corporations have created in our culture means that at the local level we have very little control.
 
You emphasize redefining democracy and law.
And in the process redefining us. What’s happened is that corporations have defined human beings as consumers. We’re told we can vote with our dollars and with our feet and not buy. That’s crap. If we’re a self-governing people, then our main job is to nurture the democratic process. That’s a job that has been entrusted to us by previous generations and that we want to help empower future generations to do.
One of the things to stress is that corporations don’t have rights. Rights are for people. Corporations only have privileges, and only those that the people bestow on them.
A New York Times editorial recently applauded a court decision granting to people due process rights dealing with HMO corporations on medical care issues. Think about that. The corporation already has due process rights because the courts have made clear that they think the corporation is a legal person. But on company property workers don’t have First Amendment rights. They don’t have due process rights. On issues that are concerned with these insurance companies, these medical companies, it’s not just generally assumed that all human beings have due process rights. It’s nuts.
Over the last 15 years. There have been a number of cases where the Supreme Court has expanded the privileges of free speech to corporations. One of them came out of a case in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a law saying that in referendum elections corporations don’t have the right to spend money to sway the vote one way or the other. Corporations took that all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in the Commonwealth. It approved the law. The corporations then took it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sort of changed the question and said, When is democracy the most helped? When all voices are heard. These corporate voices need to be heard. Therefore this law is unconstitutional. They refused to acknowledge the finding of the Massachusetts legislature and courts that great concentrations of wealth and power that are considered private in our society are a menace to the functioning of democracy and that the state has the total right to say, For corporations to use shareholder money to sway votes without having even polled the shareholders is inappropriate. What the Supreme Court did was totally throw out the logic and say, Democracy means all voices, and since corporations are persons, they have voices. Let them be heard, even if they’re going to outspend humans a billion to one.
Critics sympathetic to your argument might say that state and federal legislatures are largely dominated and controlled by corporate money and interests and to go that route for some kind of change is totally futile. You’re asking the fox to police the hen house.