Taming the Giant Corporation
Ralph Nader’s conference on corporate accountability. By Zach Marks, Yale University
Thursday, June 14, 2007
“The corporate institution is able to metastasize its power through mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, unilateral contracts, and to evade law enforcement, taxes, and other restraints through fleeing jurisdictions, lobbied loopholes, legal wars of attrition or ‘disappearing’ its own existence,” Ralph Nader said Friday at “Taming the Giant Corporation,” a conference hosted by the Center for Study of Responsive Law that ran from Friday through Sunday. The result, said Nader, has been “the supremacy of corporate commercial values and controls over community civic values and voices.”
The Washington, D.C. conference drew about 200 activists, scholars, and advocates to the Carnegie Institution’s lovely Beaux Arts Administration Building, where about 30 experts gave presentations examining the evolving forms of corporate power and discussing how to “subordinate corporate power to the will and interests of the people,” according to the conference program.
The three-day event featured 10 panels whose purposes included: identifying how corporations have expanded their power and abused it; how policymakers, advocates, and communities can reduce the influence of corporations; and what institutions can do to offset corporate power.
Members of the first panel, “The Great Constitutional Deficiency: Corporate ‘Rights,’” pointed out that “corporations are not people” and have no rights under the Constitution.
“Corporations have no authority to make our laws and define our culture,” argued Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy. “So when they govern, democracy flies out the door.”
A Friday afternoon panel on “Subordinating Corporate Power” featured a rousing call from James Brock, a professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio, for citizens to “reclaim the language corporations have stolen to gain power.” Brock claimed corporations “are winning the fight against antitrust because they’ve taken the terms ‘efficiency’ and ‘consumer welfare.’ Efficiency isn’t an excuse for economic power to go unchecked if it means you’re going to charge $5,000 a pill.”
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, added that executives “stole the words ‘free trade’ and used them to excuse corporate scandal.”
While many students in attendance found the presentations informative, some felt the conference did not adequately prepare them to take action against corporate power in their daily lives.
“The panelists talked about big-picture strategy, but never presented concrete examples of what we can do to get involved as young people,” said Daniel Schechner, a sophomore at Yale University. “That’s a shame because this is such a relevant issue for students.”
Indeed, Charlie Cray, director of the Center for Corporate Policy, noted the overwhelming influence of corporations over education. “You see it in the corporate advertising on school grounds, the corporate warping of the curriculum, the corporate endowment of professorships, and the corporate pushing of credit cards which leave students graduating in debt,” Cray said. “The latest wave is that academic research has become a wholesale subsidiary industry of corporations and there are now over 700 corporate [for-profit] universities. It didn’t used to be this way.”
Serena Thomson, a senior at the University of British Columbia who was in attendance, said she had noticed the growth of corporate power in the “alarming corporatization of the college campus.” UBC recently demolished a library and constructed in its place a “learning center, which was really just the same as what we had before,” Thomson said, “but it gave the school an excuse to put up plaques of corporate donors.” She added that “Coke has a monopoly on everything at UBC. You think you’re getting water, but you’re getting Dasani. When you want juice, you’re buying Minute Maid.”
Wenonah Hauter, director of Food and Water Watch, commented on the environmental impact of corporations at a Saturday panel, “Displacing Corporations: Expanding the Commons.” She pointed out that bottling water from springs can have a devastating effect on ecosystems and the containers release dangerous toxic chemicals into the air and water when they are manufactured. “Think of how we could improve our tap-water infrastructure if we took the money spent on bottled water and spent it on our public water systems,” Hauter said.
Throughout the conference, speakers emphasized the need to eliminate corporate influence from politics. Warren Gunnels, a policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), pointed to the role of corporations in the recent immigration debate.
“What the immigration bill was really about was corporate America’s ability to import low-skilled and high-skilled workers to keep wages down,” said Gunnels, who noted that American workers are paid significantly more than foreign workers in the country on H-1B visas. Gunnels said an amendment sponsored by Sanders to reduce the number of H-1B visas given to companies that are simultaneously laying off workers never reached the floor because of the sway corporations held over other senators.
Mark Green, president of Air America Radio and former public advocate of New York City, said politicians who are influenced by corporations “are not bad people. They’re the product of a bad system. Only when officials fear voters more than donors will we have real change.”
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The united states of corporations and the Republican administration are in control of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Are we so consumed by affluence that we don’t care enough to take an active interest in what’s happening to our country?
— Grace Stentz - Jun 15, 03:13 PM - #Years ago while driving w/ my (then) neighbor in his 1949 Dodge PU a meandering 19 miles along the Molokai coast road, he turned to me and asked: “Do you think they’ll let us know before a depression starts?” Well, it was an interesting question and I was only 29 at the time. I am truly saddened that I missed this event. I believe we as a nation and as a world people have crossed a threshhold and the tipping point toward an world unknown to us as a species. The corporate elite and the collusion w/K Street and their selected representatives clearly have only themselves in mind when distributing the many trillions of funds on an annual basis ( the masses of trillions in offshore/offbudget accounts can only perpetuate the system as it is ). We, common folk, well meaning as we are, have been religated to the bleachers. I listened to Sen. B. Sanders today on Air America answer a question about that dreaded word “impeachment”. Well, his answer was forthright and said that it is not in the best interests of this nation to proceed in that direction. All in all procedurally he is right. The length of the process to depose the executive branch “criminal element” would consume weeks/months and probably more than a year and a half to complete. This would have little effect on all the underlying structure that perpetuates the status quo. It is vast; the controlling MSM would shout louder than all the well meaning citizenry combined. They have too much to lose. The paranoia and fear the media use to support the “American way” combined with so much back room politicing is beyond the tipping point. It is suggested that the 2008 election cycle has already been decided. That whatever the scientific doctrination against the global warming proposition determines, the Arctic tundra will unleach much more CO2 and methane than all of mankinds’ contributory fossil fuel emissions gasses over time. So, I limit my expenditures for I am surely not a bold Baby Boomer! We learned in the anti-vietnam war era that mass demonstrations were mostly ineffective. Subsequently some of us “returned to the land” as such. Later some of us attempted to bring about an alternative economy w/ homegrown weed, and the taking back of the country that way. All this was altruistic; we were always vilified by those who stayed behind and accumulated the middle class lifestyle and all it’s acuttraments. We homeschooled, did our own diapers( not pampers) carried wood and carried water and planted seeds. And still the bottom line had to do with how much your income was-had you become a drug lord or some other type of robber baron as opposed to the other A type personalities.. Happiness was never enough! and so Thorstin Veblen’s 19th Century theory about refuting the communist manifesto: which espoused that the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeorsie; and instead he espoused that the proletariat emulated the bourgeorsie instead-apparently was the correct assumption ( keep up w/the Joneses ) here in America or what the media projected onto us as a nation. And that’s how they have us. Trapped in the ever inflating grip of the federal reserve note. I write Grace Stentz, whoever you are because I care.
— Richard D. Gordon - Jun 15, 05:18 PM - #I agree, Richard, that corporate abuses of power (both illegal – e.g. CEOs swindling money from shareholders – and legal – e.g. protectionist legislation practically written by lobbyists which passes through Congress) are indefensible. Many corporations exploit labor and the environment while governments, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund aid and abet this exploitation with policies favoring multinationals over small businesses. I too am dismayed by the extent to which corporations dominate our lifestyle and culture often to the detriment of society. But do you really think growing ganja at home will bring the revolution you’re looking for? I can’t tell if you’re suggesting that chopping up crack rocks and slingin’ dope is viewed by our society as an equally respectable profession as a corporate exec or if you’re trying to say in the hustler’s defense that he contributes just as much as the hedge fund manager. Either way, I think you’re wrong.
— Marky Mark - Jun 16, 05:38 PM - #