Fighting Corporations on their own Turf
One of the most important points to remember about democracy in America is how strongly controlled it is by large corporations. What exactly is a corporation, anyway? How did we get to the point where there is no way of fighting a bad corporation or even realistically boycotting one? (you usually end up putting money in their coffers through subsidiaries) State and Corp. by Noam Chomsky (ZNet) offers a description of corporations that is grounded in U.S. law and is both accurate and chilling:
“And [they] were granted rights by the courts. … They gave them the rights of persons, meaning they have the right of freedom of speech, they can propagandize freely, advertise, they run elections and so on, and they have the protection from inspection by the state authorities which means that just as the police technically can’t go into your apartment and read your papers, the public can’t find out what’s going on inside these totalitarian entities. They’re mostly unaccountable to the public. Of course they are not real persons, they are immortal, they are collectivist legal entities. In fact they are very similar to other organizational forms we know and are one of the forms of totalitarianism that developed in the 20th century. The others were destroyed, these still exist, and later they were required by law to be what we would call pathological in the case of real human beings.”
Indifferent machines
If you’d read this passage in a science fiction book, you’d assume the author was talking about machines or robots. Asimov’s books in particular dealt heavily with the ideas surrounding what to do when a more evolved life form is in humanity’s midst and it does not necessarily mean us well. Chomsky is speaking of corporations, but the similarity to doomsday scenarios involving machines taking over the world is eerie. Like the machines in the Matrix, corporations see people as resources to be used to create profit.
Why not take advantage of the machine-like nature of corporations, using their short-sightedness and short-term thinking to achieve our own ends? Use the profit motive and duty to their stockholders to trap them. Take, for example, the corporation’s desire to socialize its risks while privatizing its profit, almost optimally realized in the American industrial system.
“…the cutting edge of the economy is becoming biology-based. Biotechnology, genetic engineering and so on, and pharmaceuticals, so it makes sense for the public to pay for that and to take the risks for it under the pretext of, you know, finding a cure for cancer or something. Actually what’s happening is just developing the infrastructure and insights for the biological-based private industries of the future. They are happy to let the public pay the costs and take the risks, and then transfer the results to private corporations to make the profits. From the point of view of corporate elites it is a perfect system, this interaction between state and private power.”
Is there some way to funnel lure corporate resources into useful ends instead of letting them build billion dollar industries on creating transient erections? The ultimate goal would be to tempt them with tasks that entice with short-term profit, but entail long term gains, as well. The problem is that they are rapacious and blind, reacting only when absolutely necessary. The investors in a corporation, though human, are shielded from direct responsibility by fiscal layers that assuage their conscience. CEOs are generally paid so much money that they can buy an easy conscience. No, in this scenario, a problem must come to such a head that people simply start dying or suffering in droves (in Western countries, where it matter, of course) before corporations and governments, or, for that matter, people themselves, react.
The US food supply will not get healthier until lifespans shorten significantly or everyone has diabetes. The environment will not be respected until it is almost completely destroyed. Suburban expansion will continue until people literally can no longer commute to and from work in a single day. Alternate-fuel cars will only be developed when their is no primary fuel left. When such points are reached, governments will invest taxpayer money to keep the existing companies afloat so that they can bring us the next solution. The aircraft and auto industry already work this way, both being heavily subsidized in most countries (road and airport maintenance and expansion are not paid for by private money).
Outbid them
One possible solution is to beat them at their own game. The hegemony of large corporations run America through their well-placed donations and lobbyists. They actually pay surprisingly little for the favors they reap. BP will spread a few millions around in order to get oil rights in ANWAR, but will then show billions of profit as a result over the next several years. This pattern repeats itself everywhere; look at the favors Bush returns to campaign contributors who showed only a piddly few hundred thousand of love. Our politicians are not only crooked − they are cheaply bought as well. We have been taught in our schools that we, as citizens, speak with our votes. Corporations, people though they may be, cannot vote in elections, but control everything nonetheless. It is time the American people put their money where their mouth is.
What about a website dedicated to collecting “sponsorships” for pet projects like legalizing gay marriage or withdrawing from Iraq? Sure, there are already plenty of funds, but they’re going about it the wrong way. They are obviously losing. Imagine the mounds of capital that could be amassed and used as direct graft to our representatives, working just as the corporations already do. Naturally, it offends to think that we have to pay our elected officials to do their jobs. However, if their crookedness is such a given and will not change, we have to accept it and take advantage of their weakness for cold, hard cash.
Imagine the power that the American public could wield by taking this bastardized mixture of capitalism and democracy and fascism that we now have and beating the corporatations at their own game through sheer buying power.