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[pf] Fw: [corp-focus] Enemies of the Future
by Kaleopono
04 December 2000 02:23 UTC

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"...and with the coming downturn, trouble lurks."


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Weissman" 
To: 
Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2000 9:45 AM
Subject: [corp-focus] Enemies of the Future


> Enemies of the Future
> By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
> And you thought populism meant the movement of citizens to control,
> through democratic means, their economy, their government, and their
> lives?
>
> Clearly, you have not been paying attention -- to editors of Fast Company,
> Forbes ASAP, and Wired magazine, the authors of The Millionaire Next Door
> and the Beardstown Ladies investment books, to George Gilder, Tom Peters,
> Lester Thurow and Thomas Friedman, to the Nike and Microsoft
> revolutionaries -- and the myriad other business hustlers who would have
> you believe that popular democracy is reflected not by unions, activist
> groups and communities of human beings -- but by avant garde, internet
> connected, tech-savvy corporations.
>
> Revolution is the air! Forget the fight against the WTO in Seattle. We're
> talking about fast companies leading the way to a new marketplace -- fast
> companies that express the will of the e-trading people, who are buying
> and selling their way into millionaire status, and upending the
> hierarchical corporate order.
>
> The incessant bombardment of this drivel drove cultural critic Thomas
> Frank up and over the wall. He landed on the other side with One Market
> Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic
> Democracy (Doubleday, 2000).
>
> Frank, a social critic and editor of the Chicago-based Baffler magazine
> (www.thebaffler.com), has had it with the idea of "market populism" -- the
> notion that markets are identifiable with the "will of the people" -- one
> dollar, one vote.
>
> He's had it with the corporate hucksters who continue to paint this rosy
> picture of the 1990s: Corporate profits multiplied. The Internet liberated
> a new entrepreneurial spirit. A new generation of millionaires was minted
> overnight. Not just the rich -- but all Americans -- prospered, adapted
> easily to downsizing.
>
> Or as laissez faire energy specialist Daniel Yergin put it: Privatization
> plus deregulation plus globalization plus turbo-capitalism equals
> prosperity.
>
> "From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to
> New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that
> markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization
> than democratically elected governments," Frank writes.
>
> In molotov cocktail style, Frank rips into the hucksters of business hype,
> pointing out that democracy still means democratic institutions
> democratically controlled, including governments and unions, and that all
> the hype about the millionaire next door and fast company revolutionaries
> that allow workers to dress casual on Fridays and rip the boss on e-mail
> will not change some fundamentals about our current version of extreme
> capitalism -- the top 10 percent of Americans control 90 percent of the
> nation's wealth, CEO compensation skyrocketed, rising from 85 times as
> much as the average blue-collar wage in 1990 to some 475 times as much by
> 1999, most Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck, union
> membership continues to crash, 15 percent of the population is without
> health insurance, thousands of American jobs have been exported overseas,
> Americans are running up record levels of debt, and with the coming
> downturn, trouble lurks.
>
> Yet, because Frank effectively contrasts the hype of the business
> magazines and corporate hucksters with the reality on the ground in this
> country, he is considered "an enemy of the future" by Reason magazine
> editor Virginia Postrel.
>
> Just practice democracy -- seek to exert people power over corporations --
> and you too can become a card carrying enemy of the future.
>
> Frank points out that for years, corporations, fearing public control,
> have sought to mess with the collective mind of the citizenry.
>
> He says he owes a debt of gratitude to Roland Marchand's classic Creating
> the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in
> American Big Business (University of California Press, 1998), in which
> Marchand points out that for all the legal legitimacy that the courts
> bestowed upon corporations at the turn of the century, corporations
> "conspicuously lacked a comparable social and moral legitimacy in the eyes
> of the public."
>
> So big corporations launched a 100-year public relations campaign to
> "create the corporate soul" -- to convince Americans that corporations had
> a moral purpose and were serving the public good.
>
> The public relations campaign continues today at warp speed. Many have
> been convinced that democracy and the free market are identical. But at
> what price?
>
> "Here at home the price was the destruction of the social contract, the
> middle class republic itself," Frank writes. "Our portfolios may have
> appreciated generously, but they did so only to the extent that we
> countenanced the reduction of millions to lives of casual employment
> without healthcare or the most elementary of workplace rights. We caught
> the tail end of the Qualcomm wave and pretended not to notice as
> sweatshops reappeared on our shores. We wondered like tots at the majesty
> of Cisco, at the generosity of Gates, and we stood by as the price of a
> good education for our kids ascended out of reach."
>
> Pick up this book, not just to help you screw your head back on straight
> and to clear your vision -- but also to help you start thinking about
> those to hold accountable for the outrage that has been perpetrated on the
> nation.
>
> Make the list.
>
> And check it twice.
>
>
> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
> Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
> Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
> Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
> Courage Press, 1999).
>
> (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
> _______________________________________________
>
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