Please go immediately to Tom Tomorrow’s site (http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2003_02_02.html#000188) and vote on whether David Clennon should be fired for saying some unkind things about Dubya on CBS. Amazingly, right now the vote is 2:1 in favour of McCarthyist action. Right now! Please!
February 7, 2003
DO CORPORATIONS HAVE TOO MUCH POWER?
Some interesting articles lately about how municipalities in Pennsylvania and California are using municipal laws and ballot initiatives to ‘dismantle corporate rule’ — see e.g. (http://ishcon.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=51) and (http://www.monitor.net/democracyunlimited/)
Other than zealots like Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky, the media, academia and politicians have paid almost no attention to the growing power of corporations, which stems largely from the fact that:
— they have limited liability (unlike individual citizens)
— they have perpetual life (and charter revocations are almost unheard of today)
— they concentrate enormous amounts of wealth and hence exert enormous political, social and economic influence
— they have been bestowed by governments with much the same rights as individuals, making them vastly more difficult to oppose or control
The effect of this is that, while on the surface the battles against globalization, and against the more egregious impacts of ‘free’ trade, feeble environmental, campaign finance and labour laws, influence-peddling, etc. are portrayed in the media as ‘people versus government’ issues, they are often fundamentally ‘people versus unfettered corporations’ issues.
In his book When Corporations Rule the World (read http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/corprule/corporat.htm for more on the book and the anti-corporate-power movements it has helped spawn), David Korten argues effectively that corporations, originally designed to improve work collaboration and business financing, have become Frankenstein monsters that we unwittingly allow to subvert democracy, diminish citizen rights, impinge on human freedoms, and weaken democracy because with no checks and balances and no implicit morality, the single-minded pursuit of profit, growth and competitive advantage compels them inexorably to do so.
The solution, once we educate people that corporate power is a problem, is to revoke some corporate charters and change corporation laws so that corporations once again become our obedient servents instead of our masters, and once again serve their intended and important purpose: to facilitate investment in business and to allow people to work effectively ‘ in company‘
As a professional accountant, I’ll have more to say about how this could happen, simply and painlessly, in a later post.
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IS THE TIDE TURNING AGAINST WAR?
Maybe it’s my admittedly-biased news filters, but three items in today’s news make me believe that, outside the Bush die-hards, opposition to war is growing and the trend will be hard to reverse:
1. Blair’s ‘evidence’ shown as fiction ( Reuters):
The latest in a series of British documents focusing on the alleged threat from Saddam and rallying support for a possible U.S.-led wa… was praised by Secretary of State Colin Powell in the U.N. Security Council Wednesday. It claimed to draw upon “a number of sources, including intelligence material.” But Friday, officials admitted whole swathes were lifted word for word — grammatical slips and all — from a student thesis. Outraged politicians jumped on the revelation to accuse Blair of misleading the public and said it cast doubt on the credibility of his whole case against Saddam.
2. News media get tours effectively refuting Powell WMD ‘photo evidence’ ( Reuters):
At the Falluja facility, run by the government’s Al Rafah company, Ali Jassem, an official, said the site was the first visited by U.N. weapons inspectors when they resumed work in Iraq on November 27.”The inspectors visited this site and searched it. They found that everything inside falls under permitted activities,” Jassem said. He said the inspectors had returned to the site several times since, the last of which was on February 4, a day before Powell’s presentation. The official said the experts, who have attended four static tests for the al-Samoud missile with a range of 150 km, had looked at the stand and found it consistent with permitted activities….
Reporters were taken to tour inside the facility and shown the two stands. The hulks of large missiles destroyed by previous inspection teams were strewn in the site. At Al Moatassem, chief engineer Karim Jabbar said Powell’s charge was “a false allegation” and said the facility was producing parts for the short-range Al Fatah missiles. “We were surprised (by Powell’s charge) because there is nothing banned at the factory. It is a declared site…The inspectors have already visited it 10 times,” Jabbar said.
3. The French, Russians and Germans (the Germans speaking side-by-side with the Vatican) have all hardened their position in the past 24 hours (maybe after they read the xenophobic ravings of Richard Perle?) and will clearly veto/oppose both a war and a ‘second resolution’ supporting anything stronger than more extensive inspections. More and more leaders (and voters) seem to be acknowledging that Saddam is contained and that, as long as that is the case, he and his ‘regime’ pose less of a security threat to the world than Al Qaida, North Korea, and others too numerous to mention.
Even Blix acknowledged today that Iraq is ‘making an effort to cooperate’.
Maybe I’m a die-hard optimist, but notwithstanding Bush’s ‘game is over’ blather (and it’s disconcerting that he sees this as nothing more than a game), I think by the time Bush decides to attack (i.e. week after next) his ‘coalition of allies’ will be whittled down to a discredited Blair, a few fledgling E.Europe nations that owe the U.S. a favour, and a couple of disreputable leaders like Italy’s corrupt Berlusconi. Whether such a band of thieves and naives is enough to convince the U.S. people that there is broad global support for a devastating, divisive and expensive war, only time will tell. And although Bush keeps telling us it’s running out, time is now all we have, and I think it’s on our side.
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FEED YOUR HEAD
Before Aaron Sorkin focused his full time and attention on The West Wing, he wrote a quirky half-hour comedy called Sports Night. While it was a critical success, it was a commercial failure, and fans can now buy the full series in a 3-DVD set from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006IRH9/104-6414402-6899114?vi=glance).
Those who love great writing and find the rapid-fire pace of the clever dialogue too fast to really appreciate can soak it in at a more leisurely pace by reading the official scripts and transcripts on the enduring fan sites. If you appreciate language and have never read a screenplay, you owe it to yourself to try a few of these:http://members.aol.com/Graecia13/origscripts.html
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VOICE OF REASON
I’m delighted that Camille Paglia has come out of the cloisters of academia long enough to pontificate on Iraq with Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/02/07/paglia/index.html). Say what you want about her intellectual pretentiousness (and her side-comment on the shuttle disaster as a Greek-style omen of the ill-advisability of invading Iraq was troubling), this woman is articulate, informed, rhetoric-free and scrupulously politically impartial. Here’s some of what she had to say:
I think that Bush administration officials are genuinely convinced of the rightness of their positions, although their biblical piety is cloying. I think they do intend the best for the American people. It’s not just a covert grab for oil to placate corporate interests. But I also think that their current course of action in Iraq is disastrous for long-term world safety. After 9/11, what should have been perfectly clear is that we need a long, slow process of reeducating the peoples of the world, to try to convince Muslims of the fundamental benevolence of American intentions…
I’m disgusted at the Democratic Party — what a bunch of weasels. The senators laid down flat in the weeks before the fall election and voted without a full debate over Iraq. That was the moment for a searching national discussion, no matter what the outcome…
If we do go to war, I pray it’s a brief incursion. But this idea of occupying Iraq! When we need those billions here. Our medical care system is staggering, inner-city education is still a mess, the elderly are in straitened circumstances, and Social Security is in jeopardy, and we’re going to spend all this money not only in bombing Iraq but then building it again from the rubble and governing it? This is madness!
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