In My Own Write

Enemy of the People

What institution pretty much determines what we’ll read and watch on TV? The public issues we’ll discuss and debate? What our kids will learn in school? The foods we’ll eat and products we’ll buy? Who’ll have health care? Where and how we’ll work? How much of our environment will be polluted? Who will hold public office?

If you answered the government, you’d be wrong.

In our democracy, we’ve allowed a truly undemocratic institution — the modern corporation — to assert a powerful influence in our schools, our courts, our legislatures, our elections, our culture, our lives.

The nation’s founders despised corporations as much as King George because it was through corporations that the British government carried out much of its hated oppression. As a result, citizens of the new United States chartered few corporations and kept them on a short leash.

Since then, unleashed corporations have seized full constitutional rights intended only for people, and hundreds of local, state and federal laws protecting us from corporate harm were struck down. The natural rights of flesh-and-blood people have been bestowed on fleshless, unnatural creatures, and they’ve turned on us. Profit is the ultimate motive of all things corporate. It takes precedence over community well-being, worker safety, public health, environmental preservation and national security.

The slopes of the Selkirks and Cabinets above Sandpoint, Idaho where I live are scarred with clearcuts and eroding logging roads. Most were subsidized with tax dollars. The timber was taken at cut-rate prices under lax environmental restrictions thanks to influential politicians swayed by timber industry lobbying and campaign contributions.

Now the timber is running out, and so are the timber companies. Mills are breaking their links to the community and shedding workers in favor of automation and cheaper timber elsewhere in the world. They leave behind devastated ecosystems and damaged communities.

Corporate lobbying, campaign financing, and political favors dominate all levels of government. In Idaho, lobbyists outnumber lawmakers 3-to-1 and write many of our laws. A timber lobbyist recently wrote a bill allowing logging along the shores of Priest Lake, a pristine lake in Idaho’s panhandle.The lobbyist’s law displaced one that had protected this unspoiled lake for seventy-five years.

Sandpoint once enjoyed an independent, community-centered newspaper. Our paper is now part of a chain owned by a large corporation. The news and views in its pages are influenced by profit margin, corporate philosophy, and the wishes of large advertisers. It has become a bland and biased substitute for a once dynamic forum for community issues.

Much of the nation’s media are controlled by corporations, and accounts for the dearth of debate about corporate power. In a recent nationwide study, 93% of newspaper editors said advertisers tried to influence the content of their articles. Half said pressure came from within their own newspaper.

Public relations professionals outnumber news reporters. When corporate interests are threatened by you or me seeking better working conditions, national health care, fair wages and prices, safe food, freedom from toxic pollution, and social justice, the PR flacks, lobbyists, and corporate front groups mobilize vast resources to manipulate news, public opinion and public policy against us.

In a national wilderness in the Cabinet Mountains upriver from Sandpoint, a global corporation, responsible for some of the country’s worst hazardous waste sites, is poised to open a huge copper mine next to the Clark Fork River. It’s untested toxic waste containment system threatens the river and Lake Pend Oreille into which it empties.

Despite widespread public protest, they’ll probably prevail because of a 19th century mining law and the efforts of a handful of politicians blocking the law’s reform. The outdated law allows mining companies virtual free lease to take minerals from public lands at a fraction of market value, and then leave behind much of the waste. The toxic legacy of nearby Silver Valley may be what’s in store for our valley. Yet this same corporation, the nation’s fourth largest polluter, continues to prosper.

Corporations are our biggest welfare recipients, receiving $51 billion in yearly subsidies and $54 billion in tax breaks. This $105 billion handout contrasts with $75 billion spent on major federal social welfare programs. Add to this the cost of corporate misbehavior that would land you or me in jail.

Last year, street theft cost us $4 billion. Corporate crime, including pollution and occupational homicide, cost over $200 billion. The nation’s yearly homicide rate is approaching 24,000, but 56,000 die on the job or from occupational diseases. Most corporate crime goes unpunished because major corporations have the clout to stonewall reform legislation and pressure prosecutors to drop criminal charges. Few corporate officers ever do time or pay penalties.

Public attention is fixated almost entirely on “government” as the cause of our problems while debate on corporate misdeeds is virtually nonexistent. However, a growing grassroots movement is beginning to turn people’s anger away from government and toward our real, but unelected, governing bodies — giant corporations. Corporations are chartered by state governments, and the people can mandate the state to recharter them in ways that limit their power.

The corporation made us the wealthiest people on earth. But it has ravaged our planet, and locked us into a value system distorted by money, power, greed, corruption, consumption, and waste. The rise of corporate power and the fall of American democracy are linked. Corporations have stolen rights as people have lost them. To regain participatory democracy, this must change. Corporations are tools created to serve us. Rights are for people.

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