Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (19 page)

Corporate monoliths are taking over local politics, reshaping communities, and displacing citizen power with corporate power. An Iowa study showed that small towns lose up to 40 percent of their retail trade after a Wal-Mart moves in. Wal-Mart pays an average of $9.70 per hour, when the U.S. average is $10.25 per hour. Wal-Mart is driving down wages, killing local businesses,
and undermining the middle class in America. And Wal-Mart is only the most public of the mega-corporations that are using their monopoly power to change American society.

But what is truly frightening is that the corporatocracy that is taking over the levers of power in our government is lobbying for political rights for the corporate entity itself. Corporations are claiming all the rights of persons, creating another front in the undeclared war on the middle class.

The case of
Nike v. Kasky
tells the whole story. In 2002, while Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught Nike in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multibillion-dollar corporation.

Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that it didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same "free speech" right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, "The check is in the mail" or "That looks great on you," Nike's reasoning went, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever it wants in its corporate PR campaigns.

In a
New York Times
column supporting Nike's position, Bob Herbert wrote, "In a real democracy, even the people you disagree with get to have their say."
²

True enough.

But Nike isn't a person—it's a corporation. Corporations are nonliving, nonbreathing, legal fictions. They feel no pain. They don't need clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, or healthy food to consume. They can't be put in prison. They can change their identity or appearance in a day, change their citizenship in
an hour, and sever parts of themselves to create entirely new entities. They can live forever. Some have compared corporations to robots in that they are human creations that can outlive individual humans, performing their assigned tasks forever.

Nike was asking the courts to declare that this artificial construct—the corporation—had all the rights of a person like you or me. Why would it want such rights? Not to be a better citizen of the USA! What it was really asking for—what it stated in plain language in its brief—was the right to deceive people.

Nike took this argument all the way to the California Supreme Court, where, in a 2003 decision heard 'round the corporate world, it lost. Nike then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case on the grounds that it hadn't properly wended its way through the court system. Before going to trial, however, Nike settled.

It could have tried the case, and, if it lost, gone back to the U.S. Supreme Court, but most legal analysts agree that Nike thought it might lose the case and didn't want to test its argument again. Perhaps the company didn't like the negative press it was getting in the papers. Perhaps it realized that you can't tell the American people you intend to deceive them and expect to get away with it.

Just because corporate America lost that battle, however, doesn't mean it lost the war. Corporate America is rising up, and, unlike you and me, when large corporations speak they can use a billion-dollar bullhorn.

Of the many pernicious features of the Nike case, perhaps the most insidious was the support Nike received from the U.S. government. The U.S. solicitor general—the lawyer who is supposed to represent We the People—joined the case, arguing for Nike. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a brief on Nike's behalf, arguing
that the effect of the California Supreme Court ruling would be to "suppress corporations' speech" and discriminate against them by holding that speech by corporations on important public policy matters is subject to the reduced protection accorded "commercial speech."

Historically in the United States, we have had a clear line of separation between government and corporate interests. For two hundred years, if corporations gave money to government, that was called bribery. In fact, in 1907 Teddy Roosevelt passed a law saying it's a crime for a corporation to give money to a politician. And that law is still on the books.

When a private interest takes over our government, we have a serious problem: it means the loss of democracy and inevitably leads to a war on the middle class. That's what is happening today.

In 2005 George W. Bush, using your and my tax dollars, sent out official invitations, asking people to attend events in support of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The president has every right, as a free citizen in a democracy, to say whatever he wants, including saying that corporations should run America. He'd be wrong, but he can say it.

But the event in question was sponsored wholly by private corporations. And the invitation from the White House—paid for with your money—came complete with corporate logos. The White House was using your tax dollars to advertise some of the world's largest multinational corporations.

Have we lost all distinction between government power and corporate power?

Perhaps it's time for another tea party.

On a 2002 visit to Argentina, I found myself in a pleasant, middle-class home, sitting across the table from a woman who had been tortured and electro-shocked by the police for protesting, exactly twenty years earlier, the war between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. I never would have guessed. She was soft-spoken, middle-aged, middle-class, and fashionably dressed. But she was one of "the disappeared"—and among the lucky ones who were released.

"The war covered up the dark side of the government and the corruption of the politicians of the time," another woman in a Buenos Aires restaurant told me. "It was a good way of putting the attention of the people somewhere else, like when you're with a little child, and you want to distract him, and you say, 'Come here and have some sweets.' And we bought that immediately. There was dancing in the streets. 'We're going to win a war—oh boy, oh boy!' We went with flags to the streets, singing the national songs to celebrate the possibility of winning this war."

The Falklands war was over quickly, in part because each side had an enemy: a nation. Terrorism, on the other hand, is not an enemy: it's a tactic. Unless you want to have a perpetual war, you must declare war against an enemy, not a behavior.

But what if a perpetual war is just what the cons want, as another man in a restaurant in Buenos Aires suggested? What if war provides the corporatocracy the best possible means of hiding behind the flag?

In the novel
1984
by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war. Cynics suggest that the lesson wasn't lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, both of whom, they say, extended the Vietnam War so that it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime president's party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a president in peacetime.

Similarly, Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) building by a deranged Dutchman to declare a "war on terrorism" and establish his legitimacy as a leader (even though he hadn't won a majority in the previous election).

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion—"a sign from God," he called it—to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their "evil" deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later the first prison for terrorists was built in Oranianberg, holding the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the nation's flag was everywhere, even printed in newspapers suitable for display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation
that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; and police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed, over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, Hitler agreed to put a four-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the people's freedoms and rights would be restored and the police agencies would be rerestrained.

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political adviser, Hitler brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. Instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "the Homeland." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the seeds of an us-versus-them mentality were sown. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, Hitler's advisers determined that the nation's local police and federal agencies lacked the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, including those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist sympathizers. He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the Homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single powerful leader.

Most Americans remember his Office of Homeland Security (known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and Schutzstaffel) simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.

Perhaps most important, Hitler invited his supporters in industry into the halls of government to help build his new detention camps, his new military, and his new empire, which was
to herald a thousand years of peace. Industry and government worked hand-in-glove in a new type of pseudo-democracy first proposed by Mussolini and sustained by war.

This wasn't a new lesson, however, and neither Orwell nor Hitler was the first to note that a democracy at war was weakened and at risk.

On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and would become president of the United States in the following decade, wrote, "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."

Reflecting on war's impact on the executive branch of government, Madison continued his letter about the dangerous and intoxicating power of war for a president:

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.

"No nation," he concluded, "could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

But it's not just Madison's ghost warning us. More-recent presidents have also noted the danger of a corporate usurpation of democracy, particularly when fed by the bloody meat of war.

As he was leaving office, the old warrior President Dwight D. Eisenhower had looked back over his years as president and as a general and supreme commander of the Allied Forces in France during World War II and noted that the Cold War had brought a new, Orwellian type of war to the American landscape—a perpetual war supported by a perpetual war industry. It was the confluence of the two things Jefferson had warned against—and had tried to ban in his first proposed version of the Bill of Rights.

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea," Eisenhower said in sobering tones in a nationally televised speech.