Defying The Suicide Economy

Charlie Cray and Lee Drutman

November 30, 2004

Corporate reform experts Cray and Drutman spend their days poring over the dry but important details of cases involving corporate malfeasance. With the exception of the rare Eliot Spitzer, those who challenge corporate control seldom make headlines. But at the same time that Congress seems more corrupt and beholden to corporate interests than ever, Cray and Drutman give cause for optimism. Ordinary citizens—like defrauded investors and older Americans—are fighting back.

Charlie Cray is the director of the Center for Corporate Policy (www.corporatepolicy.org). Lee Drutman is the communications director for Citizen Works (www.citizenworks.org). Together they are the authors of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2004).

In the wake of this year's election , pundits trying to figure out what happened have reached a consensus that Bush's ability to speak to people's concerns about “moral values” was what made the difference. According to exit polls, “moral values” were the top issue for more voters than any other issue. But when asked by Zogby pollsters what the most urgent moral crisis was, 33 percent of American voters said “greed and materialism”—a percent far higher than abortion (13 percent) or gay marriage (9 percent), the issues that the press seized on to explain why Bush won.

So the question that remains unanswered is: if Kerry had run an aggressively populist campaign and gone on the offensive against unbridled corporate power—the source of so much greed and materialism in our society today—could he have won? Most of the pundits would say “no.” But most of them work for either the Republicans or Democrats or big media corporations—and both parties are clearly in the pocket of the corporations.

Hope And Fear vs. Facts

The Bush campaign was all about Fear, and Kerry's about Hope; vague psychological themes that have so effectively driven the debate over national security toward the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq that it would have sounded downright unpatriotic to interject that far more Americans have been killed and injured since 9/11 as a result of corporate crimes and misbehavior—workplace safety violations, product safety violations, environmental safety violations—than have been killed in the terrorist attacks and the Iraq war combined. For example, more than 5,500 workers were killed on the job due to traumatic injuries in 2002 (an average of 15 a day) and another 4.7 million suffered other serious injuries or illnesses, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, the AFL-CIO reports that deaths from occupational diseases claim the lives of an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 workers each year.

The constriction of debate in a way that ignored fundamental economic questions was one reason why Business Week declared the winner before anyone else on the eve of the election: Corporate America. “Either one is going to be good [for corporate America] in very different ways,” the article read. Kerry, for instance, pledged to cut corporate taxes by 5 percent. 

Yet corporate crime and abuse continues to remain a top concern of the little people.  And as it did in 2002, once again it's beginning to affect even the powerful themselves—i.e. defrauded investors and older Americans (who tend to vote in higher numbers)—people that politicians in Washington ignore at their own risk even right after an election.

That's why, in mid-November, there were two Senate hearings devoted to corporate malfeasance.

Cozy Corporations

In one, members of the Senate Government Affairs Committee took a look at the apparent widespread abuses in the insurance brokerage industry. According to suits filed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others, insurance brokers have for years been taking big kickbacks in exchange for steering business to specific insurers at higher-than-market rates. At the hearing, outgoing Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald—a Republican—had this to say in his written testimony: “Everyone inside and outside the insurance industry condemns the criminal conduct and calls for its vigorous prosecution and punishment…My study of this insurance brokerage controversy convinces me that there is a federal role—the time-honored federal role that guarantees competition and fights the mischief of undue market concentration.”

In the other, a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, drugmaker Merck came to Washington to explain why it had waited until recently to take its $2.5 billion a year drug Vioxx off the market—after an estimated 139,000 American had suffered serious side effects, many of them fatal. Merck knew of the potential problems as early as 1999.  At the hearing, Committee Chairman and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley—also a Republican—complained that the FDA "has a relationship with drug companies that is too cozy…It doesn't make any sense from an accountability standpoint to have the office that reviews the safety of drugs that are already on the market to be under the thumb of the office that put the drugs on the market in the first place.”

Yet when it comes to most forms of corporate abuse, even when there is press coverage, and even when the Congress actually holds hearings, there is rarely any action. In the White House, we have a newly re-elected president who is in the pocket of corporate America as no president has been since Herbert Hoover. As Business Week put it in its post-election wrap-up, “It's pretty clear that only those industries that hired morons for lobbyists have failed to get something from the Bush administration.”

Economic Justice Getting Popular

Yet, paradoxically, the continued power grab by corporations is creating a backlash that cuts across party lines and geography. And interesting things are percolating at the local level in places like rural Pennsylvania, where communties are starting to stand up to corporate planners and deny them the illegitimate claim to constitutional rights—used to cut down local democratic decision-making.

In fact, perhaps the greatest untold story of this year's election is not the problem with the elections industry's electronic voting machines but various emerging signs that economic justice is rapidly becoming popular once again. If anyone bothered to mention it, the big news pundits would probably snarl about “class warfare” (which, of course the rich have been waging all along, practically unopposed), but people are beginning to fight back even if their purported leaders don't get it. For instance, while Kerry lost Florida and Nevada, minimum wage initiatives (introduced by ACORN and other groups) passed in those two states. And his attack on “Benedict Arnold companies” like Tyco (which relocated to Bermuda) helped him win the New Hampshire primary.

Disenchantment with the two-party corporate lockdown has also motivated voters to begin dismantling the barriers to third-party campaigns that usually get swatted down by progressive voters who rightly fear the spoiler effect. The successful introduction of ranked choice voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) in cities like San Francisco and Bennington, Vt. are examples of how we can punch open the two-party system without damaging candidates who have the best chance of unseating a corrupt incumbent, just as public funding has given candidates who are not beholden to corporations a fighting chance to run an issues-driven campaign in places like Arizona and Maine.

Understanding The Struggle

In our new book, The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2004), we discuss these and many other steps that can be taken to bring corporations under control and begin to restore our ability to determine what's right for our families and communities.

Regardless of where we come from or who we voted for in the last election, one abiding faith that almost all Americans share is that in a democracy, the citizens should be able to decide how they wish to live—not some big bureaucracy or institution, whether it's the government or a big corporation.  As we note in our book, the most effective way to control corporations will be to reclaim the once widely-accepted principle that corporations exist to serve the public good. Until we have brought the most important economic institutions under control, it will be impossible to create the just and sustainable economy that we seek, an economy driven by the values of human life and community and democracy instead of the current suicide economy driven only by the relentless pursuit of financial profit at any cost.

If we understand our struggle correctly, we will view it as one that can't possibly be solved by any one candidate or campaign or even completed in one election cycle. Until we ground ourselves in solid movement organizing, we are likely to be distracted by questions that seduce us away from defining the terms of our struggle in ways that reflect the values we wish to pursue.