"... few Americans remember that "we the people" fought the American Revolution as a protest against
both distant big government
and unaccountable big corporations.
In the words of Jim Hightower
(in If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote,
They Would Have Given Us Candidates):
'The people who founded this nation didn't fight a war so they could have a couple of "citizen representatives" sitting in on meetings of the British East India Company. They carried out a revolution in order to be free of oppression: corporate, governmental, or otherwise; and to replace it with democratic self-government. Adams,
Jefferson,
Paine, and
the rest had not had a happy experience with the corporations of the crown and were unabashedly anticorporate at the founding, with Jefferson even speaking of the need
'to crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations.'
The citizens of early America knew what they were up against:
raw economic power. They were rightly wary of the corporate structure itself, knowing that it allowed a few individuals in the society to stockpile a massive amount of money and power, then use this and the corporate shield to pursue their private gain to the harm of the common good.
Anyone so timid as to think that it is radical for citizens today even to consider "interfering" with the private will of corporations is not made of the same stout stuff as the citizens who created our states and our country.
In America's first hundred years, applicants could get a corporate charter only by approval of their state legislature, usually requiring a two-thirds vote to win one. Few charters were awarded, and those few corporations that got them were limited in their function, in how much money they could aggregate, in how long they could exist, and in how they could function.
Citizens took their hard-won sovereignty seriously, adamantly defending it against the possibility of corporate usurpation. State after state imposed strict terms on the issuance of a charter, leaving no doubt about who was in charge. This is our hidden history of proud and aggressive citizenship...
[But] [g]radually, the bridle has been removed, resulting in what we have today -- the runaway corporate autocracy that the founders predicted and feared. Shall we just accept it?
We need to crank up a
political fight that has some guts to it, some fire-breathing democratic passion in it, some of the revolutionary spirit of 1776 behind it. This is not a fight about regulations or really even about corporations -- it's about control, sovereignty, self-government,
democracy.
Let's force the issue and put it as starkly as it is: Are corporations going to rule, or are we?... The self-evident battle of our era is to defeat corporate autocracy and establish citizen rule over our government, our economy, and our environment."
"Shamelessly, the Bush Administration and Congress have taken advantage of the patriotic outpouring to fulfill the wish lists of their most generous corporate campaign donors. Not only is the Treasury being raided, but regulations protecting everything from personal privacy to environmental safeguards are under attack by well-heeled lobbyists who want to stampede Congress to act while the media and citizens are distracted."
"Schlumberger Ltd., an oil-field-services company with 52,000 employees spread over 80 countries ... 'is the only organization that I know of that has formal elections', says Richard McDermott, a Boulder, Colo., consultant who has worked with Schlumberger and others. 'People ... see it as a real democratic institution in what is otherwise an authoritarian institution, a business.' Other companies, apparently, are scared of that. ...
In the late 1990s, then-Chief Executive Euan Baird
'felt almost everything that had been tried had failed', says Schlumberger veteran Henry Edmundson.
Engineers, physicists, geologists worked well on individual projects, but the company hadn't a clue how to help them develop the professional sides of their lives.
'If you can't manage these people', Mr. Baird decided,
'let them manage themselves', recalls Mr. Edmundson.
He was ordered to implement the idea."
1) This is a "dog walking on its hind legs" story. (Though pace
Dr Johnson, in this case it seems to be done well.)
2) Corporate democracy was specifically the last resort:
every possible means of "managing these people" was considered a better option and tried before this was considered.
"Nine out the 30 companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Index are convicted corporate criminals, according to a report released today by Corporate Crime Reporter. ...
Corporate Crime Reporter identified nine Dow Jones Industrial Index corporations -- 3M, Alcoa, Boeing, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Merck, Pfizer, and United Technologies -- that have been convicted of crimes.
In tallying the corporate criminals, the weekly newsletter did not include crimes committed by joint venture companies or subsidiaries of the 30 corporations.
It looked only at whether or not the parent companies had been convicted of crimes.
Below is a list of the 30 companies that comprise the Dow,
and their crimes, if any."
A couple of these fines were exceedingly small
(for the crimes of making illegal campaign contributions and of
conspiracy under antitrust regulations to supress public transportation) and even the larger ones were not of such a size to seriously inconvenience a large corporation.
"The greenbonds initiative -- so named because the developments it funds are supposed to be energy efficient -- was among scores of items stuck into the energy bill by lawmakers meeting behind closed doors.
These provisions had no official sponsors and weren't part of the original documents approved by the House and Senate, but were added later by unseen hands as the 816-page bill was crafted in a secret conference.
Intended to lay out an energy policy for the nation for the first time in more than a decade, the energy bill became a cash bonanza for corporate interests in and out of the energy arena. The bill, which is stalled because of a Senate filibuster but which is still one of President Bush's top legislative priorities, features initiatives to encourage production of new and existing energy sources. But it has also become a phonebook-sized symbol of modern Washington lawmaking, in which policy is driven by those who have money, power, and access to a relatively small group of decision-makers.
A Globe analysis of tens of thousands of pages of lobbying records shows that entities with a stated interest in energy policy spent $387,830,286 lobbying Washington last year. They also paid tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to officials putting together the package at the White House and on Capitol Hill. ...
The construction of the bill reflects the way business is done in Washington in 2004: With Republicans enjoying control of both chambers of Congress, plus the White House, GOP leaders in the House craft giant bills behind closed doors, freezing out the minority party and squelching dissent from moderate Republicans and lobbyists whose agendas are unsympathetic to the GOP's goals, according to interviews with members of both parties and former House members."
"A German IT security firm said it has banned whingers and complainers in the office.
Nutzwerk, no really, has incorporated a clause in the work contract which states that whining and moaning are completely verboten.
It has fired two people so far because they moaned too much, said Thomas Kuwatsch, VP of the firm. They, he said, were "inveterate whingers whose productivity was well below par".
