Quotations and Excerpts 3

from the book

Corporation Nation

by Charles Derber

St. Martin's Griffin, 1998

p178
There is no free lunch for the creature comforts delivered by the corporation. The ravaging of nature, the erosion of economic security, the destabilization of the family, the commercialization of all human relationships, the corruption of democracy, and the dissipation of spiritual meaning in the face of rampant materialism - these are all part of the cost of the corporate system as we know it. And they add up to a very high price to pay for the bounty of the great American shopping mall.

p179
It is always difficult to imagine significant change. Like children who do anything to hold on to parents who abuse them, we tend to hang on to what we know even when it is bad for us. The risk of change is attractive only when terrible crises plague us, and a clear alternative exists.

p203
With one in every four American children growing up in poverty, a rate ten times greater than in any of the European countries or Japan-and more than 50 percent of black children raised in poverty and a million more expected to join them because of welfare reform- the hope for the new generation has been fading.

p203
Societies characterized by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense of the common good. Societies with mass poverty and shrinking opportunity are usually violent and politically unstable. As America drifts in this direction, ending poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the national agenda. It is this populist issue that can mobilize Americans more surely than any other.

p204
Since unions are the best resource workers have to help them push for their own fair share of the pie, the political assault on unions-intended to bring about a union-free world, is the most effective way to redistribute income to the wealthy.

p208
While corporations have always been able to circumvent the details of new campaign-reform legislation, their most important accomplishment has been preventing the issue of campaign reform from leading to a national debate about the political rights of the corporation and the broader question of corporate sovereignty. The idea that corporate election financing is merely free speech needs to be aired on the mass media and discussed in the schools. The cumulative vesting of inalienable rights in corporations-rights that were originally conceived to protect citizens- is central to Americans' loss of control over our lives.

p215
... more young black males between eighteen and thirty-four are in jail or on probation than in a job.

p230
Populism in America has foundered on the public's assumption that any attack on corporate power implies an attack on it own standard of living.

p233
Robert Kuttner
... markets remain fundamentally amoral; values need to be found elsewhere - and then imposed on corporations lest they overrun everything else we hold dear ...

p244
George Soros

"As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of non-market values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them. Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value."

p250
Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government. If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest.

p252

A proposed shift in the Massachusetts statute [governing corporate charters] uses strong language: "A director shall consider the interests of the corporation's employees, suppliers, creditors and customers, the economy of the state, region, and nation, community and societal considerations, including the ability of the corporation to provide, as a going concern, goods, services, employment opportunities and employment benefits and otherwise contribute to the communities in which it does business.... Consideration of any or all of the community or societal considerations is not a violation of the business judgment rule of any duty of the director to the shareholders .. even if the director reasonably determines that a community or societal consideration or considerations outweigh the financial or other benefits."

p273
Debate in the twenty-first century will not be about whether to have a global economy, but about who will make the rules.

p274
Among the thousands of transnational companies, the top 200 account for most of the action. These corporations enjoy greater combined annual revenue than the total income of 4.5 billion people in the world, more than four-fifths of the world's population. The combined income of the top 200 is $7.1 trillion, which is greater than the combined economy of 182 countries. The top 200 are also rapidly expanding their market share of global production, with a few giants, such as Mitsubishi, Sony, Microsoft, and Boeing virtually monopolizing not only U.S. but global production in their respective industries. Oligopoly is increasingly the global norm, where a handful of giant companies compete to control the world's market in each sector

p277
MAI [Multilateral Agreement on Investments] creates a parallel government with no accountability to the public in any country - and with the power to invalidate national laws.

p316
Leaders symbolize what the country stands for. As corruption becomes routine in Washington in both parties, it trickles down as a corrupting influence in everyone's lives. It becomes harder to resist cheating, which up to 70 percent of American college students admit to, when the president and congressional leaders are being caught with their own hands in the cookie jar.

Democracy is the ultimate casualty, and the sapping of democratic life is the most serious contribution of corporate ascendancy to our spiritual decline. As democracy ebbs, Americans retreat into private cocoons, feeling helpless to make a difference. The sense of powerlessness is not morally ennobling. In a democracy, civic participation and the belief in one's ability to contribute to the common good is the most important guarantor of public morality. When that belief fades, so too does the vision of the common good itself.

p330
As more and more Americans sink into the passive identity of the couch potato it will take an inspirational politics to reengage them in public life. Americans have become deeply cynical, and are retreating in droves from politics. As they "bowl alone," as Robert Putnam describes the new American lifestyle, or cocoon alone in the desolate privacy of their television room, they are losing hope in anything but private gratification.

The new politics is finding purchase with a nation in despair. It suggests the possibility of getting beyond personal depression and finding a sense of personal power and meaning. A nation of couch potatoes desperately needs a politics of personal empowerment. Such personal change must accompany any serious movement for economic and social justice.

... people have largely responded to their personal crises in purely privatized ways. For the privileged, the route out has been through psychotherapy or Prozac. For the masses who cannot afford psychiatrists sports, Hollywood, and drugs on the street have been the therapies of choice.

Corporation Nation

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