Challenging Corporate Power

I don’t know what other mechanisms to seek. We’re not naive. Our near-term approach over the next few years is to provoke a different debate and discussion about this. These issues have been off the agenda for a century. We’re taught in a knee-jerk way if we have a problem to look for justice, for resolution, to go into the EPA or the NLRB or the FCC. They don’t have the authority to deal with what we’re talking about, which is the constitutional question of who’s in charge. Maybe after ten years a community group knows how to shut a toxic dump or make it a little more safe or a little less harmful or get rid of a particular toxic chemical. But we don’t have time to be going one chemical at a time, one forest at a time, one assault on liberty at a time.
If we don’t have a revolution in consciousness , <` among enough people, then there’s no way we’re going to ever end up going to our legislators and our courts and where we’re supposed to go, the mechanisms of self-governance, in order to get redress.
People are starting to address this issue and understanding that we have to move into different areas as organizers, as educators, as activists. It would ,,- ~ be a very different organizing task and a very different struggle if groups that have been dealing with, say, trying to stop toxic chemicals in food, instead of trying to get one more regulatory law passed giving the EPA ten years to write a code of regulations to limit how many chemicals can be used and set up a system of fining corporations if they use a little too much of X or Y, to go into the state, amend the state corporate law to say, a corporation will not be allowed to do business in this state if it emits any poisons into the air or the water. A corporation will not be allowed to operate in this state if it claims the rights of persons. A corporation operating in the state does not have free speech. Workers on corporate property in this state will have free speech and free assembly.
Every privilege that a corporation has means a right denied to human beings. The courts in particular have had a special responsibility to undo this because they caused a lot of this. If you compare in the 19th century, for example, the extent to which the federal courts and some state courts kept granting more privileges to capital to organize and denying the privilege of workers to organize, you can make a chart. Every time they gave capital another privilege, they took something away from workers.) So you have an incredibly uneven fight.
 
How can some of the issues and concerns that you’re raising be injected into the mainstream discourse if that discourse is largely driven, shaped, and formed by corporate-controlled media?
We have to understand that from an organizing educational strategy the media corporations are the adversary, more than the adversary, they’re part of the whole structure of corporate dominance and governance. However, there’s an enormous, incredible alternative, grassroots media. When we first came out with our early publications, like the pamphlet Taking Care of Business in 1993, none of the mainstream corporate media would touch it. We were forced to go to the grassroots. We got hundreds of reviews and excerpts in print, newsletters, magazines, radio, some videos. The word spread in a very effective way. The base we’ve been building is much stronger because people have had to grapple with this stuff. I think that the opportunities are there. In a couple of years, when there are challenges to corporate privilege even the corporate press is going to be forced to grapple with this.
 
What are your views on the notion of socially responsible corporations?
I think it’s a terrible and dangerous diversion. If all we’re going to do is create organizations and develop materials and educate people to come-together in order to say to corporations, Please, you have a responsibility not to be so destructive. Please be a little less harmful. Please be nicer. What you’re doing is reinforcing the corporate worldview that they have ultimate authority, like petitioning a king to be a little nicer or a little less bad. Some of the groups have invested ten years into these voluntary codes, an incredible amount of time and energy getting their members involved, and when they win, what do they get? Pretty much codes without teeth and no law backing them up.
A principal purpose of a business corporation is to ~) shield decision-makers from responsibility. That’s why there are limited-liability corporations. The corporation can be doing all sorts of horrible things, assaulting democracy, destroying property, taking people’s future income, and nobody’s responsible. What happens when a corporation is brought before a regulatory body or even into court on a criminal case? The worst thing is it’s fined. Maybe it’s declared a felon and the corporation is fined. But that’s not going to have a deterrent effect. A corporation doesn’t think. It doesn’t have feelings, a soul. It doesn’t have a conscience. It’s playing games to think that these minor fines, which by the way are usually tax deductible, have any real impact on the corporation.
 
What is your response to the corporate chieftains who argue that they are creating jobs, creating wealth, this is a capitalist economy?
There’s nothing in the Constitution that mentions corporations or capitalism. There’s nothing in the Constitution, other than protecting contracts, that sets up a system that is so overly competitive and not cooperative. There are a lot of people throughout our history who believed that everything doesn’t have to be cutthroat, that people can cooperate. I would say that the smartest corporate leaders from the 1870s on have always understood that what they wanted was the ability to cooperate among the top corporations and make everybody else compete.
There was a piece in the New York Times by Walter Goodman that quoted James Randall, the president of Archer Daniels Midland Corporation. ADM was caught in some scam in which they were fined $100 million, peanuts. Randall was secretly taped saying to some of his associates, “Our competitors are our friends and our customers are our enemies.” I think that’s how big corporations have felt for 100 years. They created the regulatory system and laws to minimize competition among themselves but maximize competition among workers and the community so they could play one community off against another and one country off against another. Of course corporations bring some jobs. That’s where all our money goes, our subsidies, our wealth. With all these privileges they have, they damn well should be creating some jobs. But the question is, Is that the only source and the appropriate source of getting things done? Are we so helpless that if we didn’t have these giant corporations we wouldn’t have wholesome food, we couldn’t build our own houses, we couldn’t have newspapers and radio and television and magazines, we couldn’t heat our homes and create electricity? If people and communities had any fraction of the vast authority and the public wealth that has been channeled into these corporations, we would be able to do what’s needed to be done.
I was involved in a major anti-nuclear effort in California in the early 1970s that led to a statewide initiative on nuclear power. In 1975 the utility corporations were saying they were planning to build 50 nuclear plants in California. The government was planning to build 1,000 nuclear plants around the whole U.S. We came up with another scenario for California showing that for the next 30 years you wouldn’t have to build a single central station power plant, nuclear, coal, oil, whatever, in order to meet energy needs. You could do it with energy efficiency, solar, wind, conservation. They called us crazy, Communists, nuts, Luddites, whatever. By the early l990s, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the dominant utility in California, essentially adopted our position. They were saying, We don’t have to build any central station power plants over the next generation because we’re using efficiency and solar and wind. They’ve since backed off on that. But if we had had access to the money that they had in 1975, which after all was rate-payer money, we could have made the decisions to start installing solar and conservation and doing that. They chose to squander billions of dollars of rate-payer money into building nuclear and coal plants and investing in other countries. So of course they’re creating jobs. They’ve also destroyed ten million jobs over the last 15 years, taking production overseas. It’s totally based on their whim.