In order to grasp the nature and power of the Corporate Agricultural Industrial Machine (CAIM), one needs to look at the history of corporations in the U.S. Ralph Gomory has re-thought how corporations work in our global environment.
Gomory used to be a senior vice-president for IBM and is now the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He asks the question, if free trade is a win-win proposition, why is America losing so many jobs? Gomory wrote Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests in collaboration with William Baumol, a respected economist. Gomory has recently been joined by a group of corporate executives called the Horizon Project, who are concerned about the destructive impact of globalization on American prosperity.
Gomory believes that there is a divergence between the interests of U.S. multinational corporations and the interests of U.S. citizens. He says that American multinationals are the principal actors in the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy class in the 21st century and have been able to function without resistance from the government. The loss of trade is not confined to workers who lose jobs and wages. In time, the accumulated loss of a country's productive base can injure the its overall economic well-being.
The standard of living in the U.S. is going down and billions of dollars of debt are owed to countries like China and Japan. Gomory offers two solutions. First, the U.S. government must cap the nation's trade deficit until there is balanced trade. Second, the government must impose a national policy on the behavior of multinational corporations, directly influencing their investment decisions. This can be done through a new corporate tax code which would penalize those corporations that keep moving high-wage jobs and value-added production offshore and reward those that are investing in redeveloping our country's economy.
Gomory proposes to alter the profit incentive of U.S. multinational corporations thus providing for greater national interest in the U.S. He wants to recreate an understanding of the corporation's obligation to society -- a social perspective that flourished for a time in the last century but is now nearly gone. The old idea was that the corporation is a trust, not only for shareholders but for the benefit of the country: the employees, and the people that use the product.
Source: The information on Ralph Gomory came from an article by William Greider, "The Establishment Rethinks Globalization," The Nation, April 30, 2007.
In Thom Hartmann's book, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, he describes how corporate values and power have come to dominate life in our nation and the world. Hartmann believes that too much corporate power is incompatible with democracy, the market economy, and the well-being of society.
Witness what the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the liberal trade agreements with China have done to working men and women in the United States. There is no way for U.S. workers to compete with low-wage workers in China. Millions of people in this country have lost work, while the multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart and their stockholders have been the winners.
Hartmann explains how there is a legal provision in the U.S. whereby a group of people can get together and form a corporation. This entity has the same rights and powers given to individual people. Corporations, by law are considered "persons," and benefit from tax breaks, trade advantages, media privacy, and regulation protection. Corporations are also entitled to many of the same protections guaranteed to citizens by the Constitution's Bill of Rights. As with individuals, corporations are given the right of free speech, including the right to influence legislation, to be protected from searches, and Fifth-Amendment protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, even when a crime has clearly been committed.
The boards of most corporations primarily value profit, leading them to make decisions individuals of conscience wouldn't make. Look at the for-profit managed health care corporations that value profit over wellness.
According to Hartmann, traditional English, Dutch, French and Spanish law didn't say companies were people. The U.S. Constitution wasn't written with that idea in mind and during America's first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court said that corporations did not have the same rights as humans. Corporate personhood was never voted on by the public, enacted into law or proclaimed by the court.
Hartmann explains in his book Unequal Protection how in 1886 in a case before the Supreme Court, there was a mistaken interpretation from a reporter's notes on a railroad tax case. The comments were in error and should never have been accepted. Because of this, corporations were legally considered "persons," equal to citizens and entitled to many of the same protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights -- a clear contradiction of the intent of the founders of the United States.
Hartmann writes how America's founders and early presidents warned that the safety of the new republic depended on keeping corporations on a tight leash -- not abolishing them, but keeping them in check.
From 1780 to 1910, corporations served the public good at the pleasure of the granting authority. Legislators routinely revoked corporate charters, or allowed the charter to expire and corporations to be dissolved -- at any time when the public's representatives determined that a corporation had failed the test of "serving the public good." History is full of experiments of privately funded roads and postal services that failed to meet the criterion of "serving the public good."
Hartmann says that corporations have done much good in the world, but does not advocate doing away with them. Instead, they need to be reined in and set in their rightful place. There are other ways to exchange goods and earn wealth besides corporation as they now exist.
The problems associated with corporate power need to be fixed by democratic action and citizen involvement. In California and Pennsylvania, citizens have stood up and, through local and state governments, begun to pass laws that deny corporations the status of personhood. Reclaimdemocracy.org is a group working toward a constitutional amendment to mandate that the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments apply only to "natural" persons, not corporate ones. They state that the gradual extension of human rights to corporations is one of the most important factors in the corporate takeover of our resources, our political system, and our cultural life.
For more information on corporate personhood, go to Thom Hartmann at: http://thomhartmann.com
Side Notes:
It's about time that the folks who support the "Small is Beautiful" saying add on another one: "Small Makes Sense." Take, for example, a methane generating plant that produces electricity from garbage. Many people today would rather invest in this smaller type of plant than put money into a refinery. There's nothing wrong with making money but we need to be socially responsible in how we invest capital.
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