- The history of America is the one story every kid knows.
It's a story of fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the
service of a dream. A story of early settlers hungry and cold, carving
a home out of the wilderness. Of visionary leaders fighting for democracy
and justice, and never wavering. Of a populace prepared to defend those
ideals to the death. It's the story of a revolution (an American art form
as endemic as baseball or jazz) beating back British Imperialism and launching
a new colony into the industrial age on its own terms.
-
- It's a story of America triumphant. A story of its rise
after World War II to become the richest and most powerful country in the
history of the world, "the land of the free and home of the brave,"
an inspiring model for the whole world to emulate.
-
- That's the official history, the one that is taught in
school and the one our media and culture reinforce in myriad ways every
day.
-
- The unofficial history of the United States is quite
different. It begins the same way -- in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial
America -- but then it takes a turn. A bitplayer in the official history
becomes critically important to the way the unofficial history unfolds.
This player turns out to be not only the provocateur of the revolution,
but in the end its saboteur. This player lies at the heart of America's
defining theme: the difference between a country that pretends to be free
and a country that truly is free.
-
- That player is the corporation.
-
- The United States of America was born of a revolt not
just against British monarchs and the British parliament but against British
corporations.
-
- We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena,
the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence
in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There
were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the
Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India
Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the
way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control
the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets
and bring them home to the motherland.
-
- The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company
imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the
tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution
in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed
not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were
turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea
ended up in the salt chuck.
-
- The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest
hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning
to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination
not just as possible but inevitable.
-
- The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans
not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations,
and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained
deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they
granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein.
-
- Early American charters were created literally by the
people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial,
invisible, intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered
by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could
be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if
they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed
on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J.
P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must
never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where
efficiency [is] endangered."
-
- The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US
by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't allowed
to participate in the political process. They couldn't buy stock in other
corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were
severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the
charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States,
and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania
revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public
interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations
from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved
no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely
in place.
-
- In the early history of America, the corporation played
an important but subordinate role. The people -- not the corporations --
were in control. So what happened? How did corporations gain power and
eventually start exercising more control than the individuals who created
them?
-
- The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century
-- the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil
society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits
from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption
of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations
became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw
terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that "corporations
have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow
and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the
prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands
. . . and the republic is destroyed."
-
- President Lincoln's warning went unheeded. Corporations
continued to gain power and influence. They had the laws governing their
creation amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate
profits could no longer be limited. Corporate economic activity could be
restrained only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted
corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and privileges they
did not have before.
-
- Then came a legal event that would not be understood
for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change
the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific
Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that
a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution
and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly,
corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed
only by the people, including the right to free speech.
-
- This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same
powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources,
corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen.
They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously
than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal
stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution -- that all citizens
have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates -- had been
undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William
O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it "could not be supported
by history, logic or reason." One of the great legal blunders of the
nineteenth century changed the whole idea of democratic government.
-
- Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place.
By 1919, corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and
produced most of America's wealth. Corporate trusts had become too powerful
to legally challenge. The courts consistently favored their interests.
Employees found themselves without recourse if, for example, they were
injured on the job (if you worked for a corporation, you voluntarily assumed
the risk, was the courts' position). Railroad and mining companies were
enabled to annex vast tracts of land at minimal expense.
-
- Gradually, many of the original ideals of the American
Revolution were simply quashed. Both during and after the Civil War, America
was increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government and business
interests. The shift amounted to a kind of coup d'état -- not a
sudden military takeover but a gradual subversion and takeover of the institutions
of state power. Except for a temporary setback during Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal (the 1930s), the US has since been governed as a corporate state.
-
- In the post-World War II era, corporations continued
to gain power. They merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed
into ever larger and more complex units of resource extraction, production,
distribution and marketing, to the point where many of them became economically
more powerful than many countries. In 1997, fifty-one of the world's hundred
largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top five hundred
corporations controlled forty-two percent of the world's wealth. Today
corporations freely buy each other's stocks and shares. They lobby legislators
and bankroll elections. They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial,
economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful as they damn
well please.
-
- Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible,
undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak of dissent from
a stunned and inured populace.
-
- At Morain Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois,
a student named Jennifer Beatty stages a protest against corporate sponsorship
in her school by locking herself to the metal mesh curtains of the multimillion-dollar
"McDonald's Student Center" that serves as the physical and nutritional
focal point of her college. She is arrested and expelled.
-
- At Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, a student
named Mike Cameron wears a Pepsi T-shirt on the day -- dubbed "Coke
Day" -- when corporate flacks from Coca-Cola jet in from Atlanta to
visit the school their company has sponsored and subsidized. Mike Cameron
is suspended for his insolence.
-
- In suburban shopping malls across North America, moms
and dads push shopping carts down the aisle of Toys "R" Us. Trailing
them and imitating their gestures, their kids push pint-size carts of their
own. The carts say, "Toys 'R' Us Shopper in Training."
-
- In St. Louis, Missouri, chemical giant Monsanto sics
its legal team on anyone even considering spreading dirty lies -- or dirty
truths -- about the company. A Fox TV affiliate that has prepared a major
investigative story on the use and misuse of synthetic bovine growth hormone
(a Monsanto product) pulls the piece after Monsanto attorneys threaten
the network with "dire consequences" if the story airs. Later,
a planned book on the dangers of genetic agricultural technologies is temporarily
shelved after the publisher, fearing a lawsuit from Monsanto, gets cold
feet.
-
- In boardrooms in all the major global capitals, CEOs
of the world's biggest corporations imagine a world where they are protected
by what is effectively their own global charter of rights and freedoms
-- the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI). They are supported
in this vision by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Chamber of Commerce
(ICC), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other organizations
representing twenty-nine of the world's richest economies. The MAI would
effectively create a single global economy allowing corporations the unrestricted
right to buy, sell and move their businesses, resources and other assets
wherever and whenever they want. It's a corporate bill of rights designed
to override all "nonconforming" local, state and national laws
and regulations and allow them to sue cities, states and national governments
for alleged noncompliance. Sold to the world's citizens as inevitable and
necessary in an age of free trade, these MAI negotiations met with considerable
grassroots opposition and were temporarily suspended in April 1998. Nevertheless,
no one believes this initiative will remain suspended for long.
-
- We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these
legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more
rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal
state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the right
thing, we plead. Please don't cut down any more ancient forests. Please
don't pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don't move your factories
and jobs offshore either). Please don't use pornographic images to sell
fashion to my kids. Please don't play governments off against each other
to get a better deal. We've spent so much time bowed down in deference,
we've forgotten how to stand up straight.
-
- The unofficial history of America, which continues to
be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal
sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed,
of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced
to servitude.
-
- Excerpted from Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America
(Kalle Lasn, William Morrow/Eaglebrook, 1999).
|
