Corporation Nation, page 20
After the collapse of communism, some social critics such as Lester Thurow pointed to the profound differences in the various capitalisms that rule the globe, suggesting that Americans might learn from other models.6 The corporate systems in Germany and Japan, for example, are different species from those in the United States, marked in Germany, at least, by much greater countervailing governmental and labor power. But while Japan’s Confucian capitalism and Germany’s social democratic system became, for a while, a source of hope, the bloom now seems to have left these alternatives as well. The American media have relentlessly portrayed high unemployment rates in Europe, the continuing sluggishness of the Japanese economy, the collapse of other Asian economies, and the new dynamism of America’s corporate giants in the mid-nineties as evidence that no sane American would give up our system for theirs.7
But while neither Japan nor Germany nor any other European society offers any panaceas, they do demonstrate that there remain many different ways to organize world-class economies. The United States does far better than either Japan or Europe in many economic arenas, particularly recent job creation, but lags in other major economic indicators and is far worse on many societal ones. The United States not only suffers dangerously greater economic inequality than Japan, Germany, and other advanced nations, but also has much higher rates of poverty, violence, urban and public-school decay, malnutrition, and family breakdown. We also tolerate disproportionately large numbers of people lacking medical coverage, day care, adequate public transportation, affordable housing, and any secure form of emotional and community support.
The problem is not so much the lack of alternatives, but a failure of imagination and will. As we shall soon show, there is no dearth of possible reforms to corporate rule. What is needed is a clear analysis of our crisis and the courage and hope to take action.
The Couch-Potato Syndrome
A fourth explanation of why Americans don’t focus on corporate power is the immensity of the power itself. Polls suggest that many Americans are aware of the existence of the vast power that corporations exercise, and of the greed and exploitation that goes with it. A 1996 national poll commissioned by the Preamble Center for Public Policy in New York showed that 46 percent of Americans saw corporate greed as the main force behind our national economic problems and the current wave of downsizing. More than 70 percent agreed that current corporate trends toward moving production abroad, outsourcing, higher executive compensation, lower health-care and other employee benefits, and escalating political corruption were serious problems requiring national attention. The pollsters conclude that “the American people have become firm in their belief that corporations are good investments but bad citizens.”8
Why, then, is there no populist movement like that of a century ago? The power of corporations has become so vast that many Americans feel lilliputian in contrast. Their sense of their own power has faded as the corporation has closed itself off from public accountability and from any real influence by either worker or consumer.
It’s a reliable truth that concentration of corporate power is inversely related to a public’s feelings of personal power. As corporations like GE have grown larger and more economically powerful than whole countries such as Israel or Denmark, individuals who work in their shadow feel increasingly diminished. The growing sense of disempowerment among Americans reflects current corporate realities, and as it grows it perpetuates itself.
To launch a movement for social change requires a real belief in one’s own power—and in that of one’s friends and neighbors. Americans still believe they can make a difference in the life of a single poor or hungry person. Fully one-quarter of college students, and a substantial percentage of Americans, do some voluntary service in soup kitchens, battered women’s shelters, and the like. But when it comes to changing the corporation or larger system, that sense of hope is far more difficult to find.
Isolated individuals, in truth, have little prospect of transforming big institutions on their own. This kind of change requires social movements or countervailing institutions to mobilize large-scale resistance. In an era of declining countervailing powers and social atomization, the sense of helplessness is understandable. Challenging large-scale power requires both the time and the hope that people can come together to make a difference. Economist Juliet Schor has documented the time crunch that faces growing numbers of low-wage, overworked Americans: Squeezed for time with their families, they are hard-pressed to find a way to make public commitments or even go to evening meetings. In an era of community decline, where Americans are more likely to “bowl alone,” as political scientist Robert Putnam has put it, finding the hope for coming together also takes a courageous leap of faith.9
These factors have contributed to America’s new couch-potato syndrome, a blow to the chances of collective behavior generally and populist movements in particular. Harried, exhausted, and helpless, many Americans retreat after work to the cocoon of their television room. There we are comfortably seduced by corporate messages about the world, pacified by sitcoms and soaps, and removed from the contact with others that might begin to elicit a sense of empowerment and hope.
Disempowerment breeds couch-potato apathy, which breeds greater powerlessness: It’s a cycle that corporations may not be conspiring to create, but it undoubtedly helps their ascendancy. Seduced by the tube, we spend little time dwelling on where the pictures on the screen might have come from. Picking up the remote and changing the channel is, ultimately, an all-too-comfortable substitute for trying to find a way to change the world.
What’s Left?
In the spirited days of the sixties, Martin Luther King, Jr., articulated his dream of a “beloved community,” embracing blacks and whites, old and young, men and women, coming together to fight for justice. King started as a civil-rights activist, but ended up a populist. He had learned that ending legal segregation would not bring justice to African Americans or white Americans: That would take changing the values and power structure of a corporate world.
King was killed before he could lead that struggle forward. Since his death, no other leader or movement has been able to lead where King hoped to go. In the absence of a strong populist movement, critical thinking about the role of big business has become idle fantasy in the eyes of most Americans.
In the Gilded Age, when a great populist movement swept through the Midwest prairies and fired the imagination of hundreds of thousands of farmers and workers, the power of the corporation became a household topic. If you lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, you could read this in a farmers’ journal: “The corporation has absorbed the community. The community must now absorb the corporation.… Has there been a better system in the world? Does not the problem of humanity demand that there shall be a better system? There MUST be a better system.”10
If you didn’t live in Lincoln, the issue of corporate power would still have been part of the conversation. In their 1892 founding platform, the new People’s party created by the populists asked every American to vote for stripping away railroads, telephone and telegraph services, banks, and land from corporations and returning them to direct government ownership or community control. They did not persuade most citizens, but every American of the time was obliged to think about what limits were appropriate on corporate power.
The populism of the nineteenth century failed. In part it fell victim to the vast power and political resources of the robber barons, who won control over both political parties: Both the Republicans and Democrats worked to undermine a populist third party. The Democrats ultimately succeeded by co-opting them, nominating William Jennings Bryan as their candidate in 1896. Bryan, as we see shortly, was far from an authentic populist, but his nomination and defeat spelled the end of populism. Since then there have been periodic resurfacings of left- and right-wing populist movements, but most have taken demagogic, paranoiac, or xenophobic forms such as Buchanan’s, and they have tarnished populism as a viable American political idea. The original populism, despite flaws of its own, became the last mainstream political movement to raise a radical and legitimate challenge to the new sovereign American corporation.
Today we need a new, positive populism. While the seeds and vision of such a movement are already emerging, its prospects for success depend on the chances of making a major change in the political culture of the progressive forces that are its natural leaders.
In the twentieth century, what Richard Flacks calls the “tradition of the Left” has been the main political hope for raising the issue of corporate power. Flacks defines the Left as “that body of thought and action that favors the democratization of history making, that seeks to expand the capacity of the people themselves to make the decisions that affect the conditions and terms of everyday life.” Populism was part of that tradition; historically, the Left has targeted the corporation as the arch antidemocratic institution. The Progressives of the early twentieth century were no radicals, and created a system of regulation that helped consolidate corporate capitalism, but they raised deep questions about the purpose and public accountability of the corporation—questions that dominated the thinking of the era. During the Depression, similarly, the New Dealers reformed the corporate order to help save it, but they also pushed the question of corporate power and responsibility onto the national agenda.11
The question of corporate power gradually faded in mid-century as business accepted a pact with labor and a modest contract of social responsibility. After business abandoned that contract in the Reagan era and brought back the specter of the robber barons, the issue of corporate power should have returned to the center of American thought, as it did in the Gilded Age. But at that very moment, the Left community was decomposing into the fragmentary movements of multiculturalism. These movements for racial, sexual, and ethnic emancipation—which made up the new “politics of identity”—had profoundly important missions, but they no longer constituted a common cause, and they no longer claimed the problem of corporate power as their own.
There is every potential for a natural marriage between multiculturalism and populism, but there are many barriers to its consummation. It will take radical new thinking to reconstitute these movements and bring them together around a set of shared populist interests that they have yet to articulate completely. Such change would electrically revitalize both the Left and a larger populist movement, yet the prospects at this writing remain to say the least, uncertain.
Moreover, in order to accomplish such a sea change, any new breed of populism would require a far broader base in the population than populist movements have traditionally enjoyed. The Left is too marginalized in American political culture to foment that kind of movement on its own, its historic approach too unsuited to mass appeal. For too many years it has shared some of the negative features of “paranoid populism,” including the kind of unqualified denunciation of business that tends to threaten rather than energize most Americans.
We need a new approach to politics, and to the role of the corporation as America’s dominant institution. The next two chapters outline the vision and practice of a positive populism with the potential to change the country. While it is nowhere to be found in Washington, the seeds of positive populism are beginning to sprout in grassroots communities, a new labor movement, socially committed religious congregations, and innovative multicultural movements all over the country. Surprisingly, signs of nascent populism are also emerging within the corporation itself, among workers and a growing number of managers and shareholders who believe corporations should be serving the public rather than the reverse.
TEN
How to Be Politically Hopeful for the Next Century
When I speak in public groups about why we should start thinking about corporate power, I often ask people to look at their feet. Who made the shoes they are wearing? Where were they made? What was it like to be a worker stitching them together? For many audience members, it is a sobering and sometimes transformative experience.
Typically a good percentage of the listeners are wearing Nikes or Reeboks, so my question leads us quickly into a discussion of working conditions overseas. We talk about the fact that Indonesian and Chinese peasant factory girls often stitch fourteen hours a day for the grand total of a dollar—not enough even to feed themselves. Inevitably, too, we touch upon the profit margins such companies make off each pair of shoes, which can cost them under $5 and sell for up to $150.
Keeping people’s attention focused on their own feet also serves to keep the discussion personal. When people reflect that the poverty-stricken lands of Asian workers have shaped the cloth that is touching their feet, the desperate pay and working conditions of such workers becomes less remote. Reactions vary: Some feel outrage, others guilt. Some are tearful. Others see a different story; this is the beginning of economic development in rural Asia, they say. Some listeners hear this as a tale of jobs going abroad, of foreign laborers doing work that used to be done in Massachusetts or South Carolina factories. But every one of them has taken the time to think about the corporation and how it affects everyone around the planet, binding us together and separating us all at once.
Such conversations are beginning to take place all over the country, and not always idly so. Activists come forth regularly, mobilizing to try to help workers or rein in corporate excesses. Labor unions in the United States have organized to call attention to the plight of workers in places from Indonesia to El Salvador, and to demand strict corporate adherence to International Labor Organization standards. Religious groups such as the Interfaith Religious Council have launched their own campaigns to boycott offending corporations, sometimes exercising not just their moral authority but the economic clout of the billions of dollars in pension funds that churches control. Some consumer groups have urged company boycotts or federal government action to cut off subsidies to offending companies, or halt trade with entire nations, such as China and Burma, with poor human-rights records.
The popular pressure has been heated enough for corporations to begin to take action to ward it off. Reebok has taken the lead in developing its own corporate codes of conduct, promising to stop using child labor and paying wages below the Indonesian or Vietnamese national standard. In 1997 Reebok, Nike, and other shoe and apparel makers announced a global industry-wide initiative to limit sweatshops and child labor. Scores of major corporations, from Levi Strauss to General Motors, are adopting their own similar corporate codes.
While grassroots groups are calling attention to corporate conduct abroad, a much larger number of people are responding to evidence of corporate greed or abuse at home. This kind of activism ranges from the popular outcry against downsizing by giants like AT&T and GM, to local community efforts to shut down sweatshops in Los Angeles and New York, to new national union initiatives to organize the unorganized. National legislation for corporate responsibility has been introduced, and President Clinton has sponsored high-profile White House conferences on the subject. Former labor secretary Robert Reich has argued that a new social contract is good not only for the country but for the corporations themselves. A growing number of corporations appear to agree, partly in deference to public relations, but also partly after a reevaluation of the potential economic payoffs of a socially responsible business strategy.1
At their most promising, these initiatives suggest the beginning of a new positive populism in the United States. Positive populism refers to an embryonic social movement that has begun to take form and emerge from within several more traditional social movements, including a revived labor movement, a variety of loosely coordinated grassroots community movements, and various other religious, student, environmental, and other social movements. While the organizational structure and ideology of this movement is still relatively undeveloped, a new vision is now coming into view. But it has many obstacles to overcome. And the well-being of the nation in the next century may depend on whether and how this new populism develops as a national social force. The new populists can learn a great deal from their precursors who rallied the nation briefly in the Gilded Age a century ago, but they have to become a fundamentally different movement to succeed in the next century. It is time to think about the vision and practice of what I shall call positive populism.
Positive Populism
Populism has a bad odor in America. Associated in the public mind with demagogues like Pat Buchanan, it has been largely dismissed as a paranoid style of politics that is more likely to undermine than to save democracy. Paranoid populism has little to do with the reality of the nineteenth-century populists, but they, too, had their flaws.
At least three factors explain populism’s bad name, starting with the terms some of America’s most famous historians have used to describe the original populists. Richard Hofstadter, the eminent social historian, saw the populists as a reactionary agrarian movement that helped to define what he called the “paranoid strain” in American political thought. Hofstadter noted that some early populist leaders such as Georgia’s Tom Watson and the fiery Kansan orator Mary Ellen Lease hinted at vague Jewish or international banking conspiracies lurking beneath the surface of corporate power. Populists wanted to return, in Hofstadter’s view, to a preindustrial America, free of foreign influence, immigrants, and the complexities of urban economies. Leaders like William Jennings Bryan, whom the Democrats nominated for president in 1896, were tied to erratic political schemes, such as “silverism,” that had little to do with solving the nation’s problems.2
Hofstadter’s indictment is not entirely wrong. Bryan’s Cross of Gold agenda was simplistic and narrow. Neither Bryan nor his currency scheme would have saved the nation. The problem with Hofstadter’s indictment, as Lawrence Goodwyn, the greatest American chronicler of populism, has shown, is that Bryan and the Silverites did not represent the true stream of populism. They spoke only for its shrunken and deformed spirit, as molded and coopted by the Democrats. Bryan had abandoned the heart and soul of populism to become the Democratic candidate. He never expressed the broad, inspiring vision and democratic spirit of the hardscrabble Southern and Midwestern farmers who had challenged not just the gold standard but the entire fabric of corporate rule.3
