Borderland

Maybe you’ve heard that the Supreme Court ruled there should be no limits on corporate campaign contributions, finding that “the government has no business regulating political speech.” This follows from the corporation’s status as a person, and money’s ability to talk, legally speaking. Consequently, a movement to legalize democracy is taking shape.

The video clip below is from chapter 3 of The Corporation:

Having acquired rights of immortal persons, what kind of person is the corporation? By law, the corporation can only consider the interests of their shareholders. It is legally bound to put its bottom line before everything else, even the public good.

Watch or download the whole movie, uninterrupted, at the Internet Archives.

From The Corporation’s Wikipedia page:

Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, the popular General Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station; the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

Take a few moments to see what a class of 8th graders in Ontario did with the film.

Worth noting in Chapter 6, psychologist Robert D. Hare offers a diagnosis of the corporation’s psycho-social “personhood,” and finds that “The corporation is the protoypical psychopath.” (See Hare’s complete diagnosis [pdf].) According to the Personality Diagnostic Checklist, corporations exhibit:

• Callous unconcern for the feelings of others
• Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
• Reckless disregard for the safety of others
• Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit
• Incapacity to experience guilt
• Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Examples are all-too common. Alaska, my home for the past 30 years, depends entirely on the oil industry to fund our state government. We are a single-client state. Our situation is typical of any community that depends on resource extraction, agriculture, tourism, or any major corporate interest for jobs and a tax base. In the end, people figure out where they stand. Riki Ott, author of Not One Drop, speaks about the oil spill:

We thought that the worst thing that could happen to us was the spill, and killing the physical environment in Prince William Sound, and killing off our fisheries. But we have learned since 1989 that really the worst thing that happened was tearing apart our community – the mental health effects on our community. And this wasn’t just with the spill; it was with the clean-up effects, with the money coming into town, the very divisive atmosphere….This has been 18 years. And there can be no closure to an emotional trauma when there is this much upheaval still being generated…

How did corporations get this big, where their values count more than the values of ordinary people and ordinary communities? We’ve got to rebalance power. And we’ve got to give power back to the people and make people’s values count. Community values count.

Twenty years after the spill, Exxon has still not made things right.

Wendell Berry, in The Idea of a Local Economy offers some thoughts on rebuilding communities, seeing that we’ve mostly given away our ability to feed, clothe, shelter, care for, entertain, and educate ourselves because we’ve delegated these cultural practices to others. Berry sees that as people begin to take back portions of their economic responsibility, they discover that “the ‘environmental crisis’ is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens.”

The idea of the global “free market” is merely capitalism’s so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a “right” within its presumptive territory. The global “free market” is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby “freeing” the hounds.

The loss of the idea of vocation is a critical cost of the globalized economy, says Berry. As economic determinism replaces vocation, people are encouraged to mold themselves into whatever form is called for according to current economic conditions rather than each of us being given the opportunity to work at the task for which we are best suited and inclined. Contrary to what Arne Duncan says, education for “economic security” is not the “civil rights issue of our generation.” The issue is a human rights issue, and it hinges on each person being given the freedom to explore who they are, and what they might wish to become. When we honor human freedom and dignity in our schools, in our workplaces, and throughout our communities, then corporations might find their rightful place in our service, not the other way around.