Dear HP people, 
Here's another bit of information with serious implications for determinants
of health.
David 

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>Date: Sun, 18 May 1997 12:34:40 -0700
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>Subject: [CHOMSKY] Transnationals I (fwd)
>Cc: Conference "gpty.canada" <[log in to unmask]>,
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>        Comox-Alberni MP <[log in to unmask]>
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>please email me for part II...ernie yacub
>
>
>
>Subject: Transnationals I
>
>CORPORATIONS: HOW DO WE CURB
>THEIR OBSCENE POWER?
>by
>Boyce Richardson
>
>The future, says a British professor coolly, is inequality. The total
>dominance established by corporations over political and economic life
>almost everywhere is plunging us into a dysfunctional world of haves and
>have-nots, a world of rage, resentment and hopelessness. This article
>examines the power of corporations, and some newly-launched popular
>movements that aim to bring them under public control in an effort to
>reverse our headlong rush towards an insane, corporate-dictated future.
>==============================
>
>Many years ago when I was young and impressionable I was assigned by my
>newspaper in Montreal to cover a luncheon speech by Eric Kierans. This was
>the late fifties, before he became a prominent figure in Quebec's Quiet
>Revolution. He was at the time, I think, head of the Stock Exchange, a
>businessman who had successfully revived many struggling companies. I
>expected from him the customary business rhetoric lauding the wonders of
>capitalism, but I didn't know my Eric Kierans. What he delivered instead
>was a solemn warning against corporations. They had only two objectives, he
>said: to maximize their profits, and to ensure their own continued growth.
>In pursuit of these aims they were accountable to no one except their
>shareholders, and, he said, (as I remember it) if something were not done
>to make them accountable to the public, they would eventually take over
>everything, and all of us.
>
>Well, we can't say we weren't warned. But I
>doubt if even Kierans can have imagined the day when governments composed
>of businessmen, elected on a business agenda, would be free to so
>obediently trample underfoot every interest except that of their corporate
>masters. Under such "leaders" as Brian Mulroney, Jean ChrÈtien and Paul
>Martin, we have begun a collective journey that a few short years ago
>seemed unimaginable --- back to the bad old days of unregulated capitalism.
>"Them that's got, will get," sang the immortal Billie Holliday in the 1930s
>(or words to that effect). And she wasn't kidding. Today them that's got
>are getting, in a big way.
>
>1: GLOBAL DOMINANCE
>Each year wealth becomes ever more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
>Small, locally-owned firms give way before the invasion of giant
>conglomerates. Profits soar. The sales of Mitsubishi, the world's biggest
>company, are greater than the gross domestic product of Indonesia, the
>world's fourth largest country. General Motors is bigger than Denmark. Ford
>bigger than South Africa. Of the world's 100 richest economies, 51 are
>corporations. The sales of the top 200 firms in the world are now
>equivalent to nearly 30 per cent of global gross domestic product. In fact,
>if you subtract the GDP of the nine major national economies, the top 200
>corporations sell more products ($7.1 trillion) than the combined GDP of
>the remaining 182 countries ($6.9 trillion). As was reported some time ago,
>the combined wealth of 358 billionaires is now equivalent to the wealth
>held by the poorest 45 per cent of the world's population.
>
>The drive for exports, supposed to be so essential to our futures, redounds
>almost entirely to the benefit of corporations. In 1993 one-third of all
>exports was simply a transfer between different branches of the same firm.
>
>Corporations control huge areas of the globe --- 80 per cent of all land
>used for export agriculture, for example --- and can now shape the futures
>not only of people and communities, but whole ecosystems. As Richard
>Grossman, of the Council on International and Public Affairs, New York,
>writes, corporations enter and leave communities at will, destroy local
>institutions and decision-making, imperil cultural traditions, undermine
>regional self-sufficiencies. They choose which products and technologies
>are researched and created, how workers are employed and discarded.
>
>Adds Peter Montague, Environmental Research Foundation, Annapolis,
>Maryland: "The corporation pretty much determines all the basics of modern
>life, just as the Church did in the Middle Ages.... Small corporate elites
>determine what most of us will read; what we will see in theatres and on
>TV; what subjects will become public issues permissable for discussion and
>debate; what ideas our children will absorb in the classroom; what modes
>of transportation will be available to us; how our food and fibre will be
>grown, processed and marketed; what consumer products will be made by what
>technologies using what raw materials and which manufacturing techniques;
>whether we will have widely-available, affordable health care; how work
>will be defined, organized, and compensated; how war will be waged (and,
>generally, against whom); what forms of energy will be available to us;
>how much toxic contamination will be present in our air, water, soil and
>food; who will have enough money to run an election campaign and who will
>not."
>
>
>2: NATIONAL DOMINANCE
>What is true at the global scale is true also at the national. Some 99 per
>cent, virtually all, of Canada's gain in net wealth in the 1980s went to
>the top 20 per cent of wealth-owners. One in every ten jobs in Canada today
>is temporary. In place of the leisure and regular holidays promised a few
>years ago, many workers now find they have to work longer hours than ever:
>one in every five male workers, seven per cent of women workers is on the
>job more than 50 hours a week. Workers' take-home pay has stalled at the
>levels of 16 years ago (in the United States it has actually fallen, in
>real terms). What used to be considered a normal aspiration for a worker
>--- a full-time, full-year job paying $30,000 a year --- is now available
>to only one in three Canadian workers.
>
>For growing numbers of Canadians life has become a nightmare of insecurity.
>Once, layoffs were caused by hard times. Now the firms that are earning the
>biggest profits are also laying off tens of thousands of workers, thus
>demolishing the idea --- an idea struggled for by committed activists for
>most of this century until it became widely shared by Canadians --- that
>working people have a right to a fair share of the fruits of their labour,
>and that their employers have a responsibility to them and their
>communities.
>
>Nowadays unemployment is deliberately created by government
>policy to combat inflation (a primary objective of the corporate sector),
>and the real number of those who cannot find work is calculated by Andrew
>Jackson, senior economist of the Canadian Labour Congress, at around 20 per
>cent of the work force. The story is stark: profits higher, productivity
>higher, wages stagnant, corporate income taxes down to a mere seven per
>cent of the total, individual taxpayers' share up to 48 per cent. One could
>fill a whole page with statistics that show the growing power of the rich,
>the declining power of the average Canadian, the marginalization of
>community.
>
>To put it bluntly, the governments we elect have ceased to
>concern themselves with the welfare and security of their citizens. No
>matter which parties are elected, they dance to the corporate tune,
>eliminating or reducing programmes designed to enable people to live a
>decent life because the corporations say that these social costs undermine
>their competitive position in the new, globalized world of free trade. So
>let's hack away the excess: slash unemployment insurance (just when it's
>most needed); fire nurses and teachers; close hospitals; enlarge classes;
>restructure universities to meet corporate objectives (maybe even privatize
>them all!); increase student fees; jettison all those pesky environmental
>regulations, throwing the air and water open once again as waste disposal
>dumps in perpetuity; privatize parks; reduce library budgets and hours;
>slash legal aid to the young, poor, sick and elderly; cut bus subsidies,
>increasing fares for students and the elderly; make ailing pensioners pay
>the going rate for their care, or get out (never mind that these are the
>people who have built the country); close group homes for the disabled;
>shut down shelters for battered women; eliminate support for the treatment
>of addictions.
>
>Name your own decency: it is being thrown on the scrapheap.
>The guilty parties are on our television screens every day, rejoicing.
>
>3: MASSAGING THE IMAGE,
>CHANGING THE LANGUAGE,
>COLONIZING THE MINDS
>
>How did corporations attain this immense power? Why have we allowed it to
>happen? Well, for one thing, corporations have spent a huge fortune in
>carefully nurturing the public's perception of corporate behaviour. They
>have become expert at what Edward Said calls "ideological pacification",
>the colonizing of the public mind, the manufacturing, as Noam Chomsky calls
>it, of consent.
>
>Thus, the TINA syndrome (There is No Alternative) has become an unspoken
>assumption that informs virtually every issue of every newspaper, every
>public affairs programme on television or radio. It has insinuated itself
>into the very sentence structure and body language of the journalists,
>commentators and so-called experts who are permitted to enlighten us with
>their views on the affairs of the nation, among whom the idea that there
>might possibly be an alternative to the corporate world-view seldom raises
>its ugly head.
>
>"The sheer power of corporate capital," says American writer
>Cornel West, "makes it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic
>society would be like (or how it would operate) if there were publicly
>accountable mechanisms to alleviate the vast disparities in resources,
>wealth and income..."
>
>Certainly at the level of formal politics, the corporations have swept
>aside all opposition. The TINA assumptions have become so pervasive that
>to gain a hearing from the corporate-owned mass media every political
>party has to pay some obeisance to the right-wing gods of
>deficit-reduction, privatization, shrinking government, cost-cutting,
>productivity and global competitiveness. In such circumstances the
>four-yearly vote has become almost irrelevant. The Americans are offered
>so little choice that they hardly bother to vote. Candidates who espouse a
>real alternative (such as Ralph Nader in the presidential elections) are
>simply ignored by the media. And as for Canadians: many are already asking
>whether we really need to hold the next election, it seems so cut and
>dried. There is really no opposition. Yet, no electorate anywhere has ever
>reacted so decisively as did Canadians when they turfed out Kim Campbell
>and (as they thought) everything the hated Mulroney gang stood for. Even
>that brought no change, but simply earned the voters a continuation of the
>same policies under different millionaire-leaders.
>
>Is there, however, lurking out there, spreading its insights across the
>continent, the beginning of a backlash, the first stirrings of a public
>reaction against the plutocracy that has taken over our decision-making
>functions?
>
>The answer would be no, of course, if you depended for your
>information on the mainstream media. For them, everything still is for the
>best in the best of all possible worlds. Opposition to the corporate
>agenda has been utterly vanquished. The left is in disarray. Protest is
>now divided between many disparate groups, separated by gender, race,
>focus and cause. Divide-and-rule has reached its apogee. The citizenry is
>under control. The holy crusade against government and its evil powers
>proceeds apace, to the applause of the opinion-formers. The silent
>majority seem so preoccupied adjusting to the painful changes forced by
>global restructuring, that they have little energy left to think about
>things they might do.
>
>It has become tough to pick one's way through the bewildering reversals of
>language that the skilled public relations operatives of the corporate
>agenda have forced on all of us. The "vested interests" of yesteryear (for
>whom one could read "big business") have mysteriously disappeared as
>businesses have become even bigger. In their place now stand the "special
>interests", unions, environmentalists, nurses, public servants, natives,
>anyone who raises a voice of protest. They are now portrayed as sinister
>forces, somehow mysteriously powerful in spite of the comparative paucity
>of their resources, and dedicated --- so unlike the altruistic owners of
>capital! --- to a greedy defence of their personal interests and
>hobby-horses. Even the NDP Premier of British Columbia, a union man
>himself, has caught the habit, dismissing his government employees' union
>as "an interest group."
>
>Policies that we used to think guaranteed equal opportunity and economic
>and emotional security for working people --- minimum wages, enforceable
>employment standards, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance,
>retirement and disability pensions, bus subsidies, student grants,
>marketing boards, environmental and health regulations, and so on and on
>--- have all been redefined in the contemporary language of corporatism as
>"rigidities" which have to be reduced or abandoned, in the name of holy
>profit, sacred competitiveness. What a travesty of language!
>
>Occasionally, of course, some dissent is so obvious that news of it cannot
>be ignored. Scores of thousands of people march in Ontario cities to
>protest the Harris onslaught on education and health, women march across
>the country for jobs and justice, nurses fight to defend the health system
>in Alberta, vigils, demos, workshops involve thousands of people from
>coast to coast in protest against the heartlessness of the new economics.
>Maybe people are not so happy, after all, with the brave new corporate
>world.
>
>Then one reads of a poll conducted by the Preamble movement in the
>United States (you'll never see its spokesmen on television!) which
>suggests that discontent may be boiling away under the surface. Though
>Americans have been persuaded to distrust their government, seven out of
>ten of them, it seems, are not exactly in love with the corporations,
>either. They believe that "corporate greed" --- as demonstrated by
>layoffs, downsizing, reductions in benefits and relocation of jobs abroad
>--- is an equal or more important cause of the economic problems facing
>families than is government. Circulated so widely around the Internet that
>it even squeaked into the back pages of some newspapers, this poll
>suggests a completely different public opinion from the one pedalled day
>after day by the media: the middle class is angry, stalled on the success
>ladder, fearful about the future, and, given the option, eight of every
>ten persons would favor a policy of setting wage, job, pollution and other
>standards for corporations, and offering lower tax rates to those that
>meet the standards. One in three favor government action to make
>corporations act more responsibly.
>
>Of course, the United States government knows this is happening. Its
>Labour Secretary, Robert Reich, said recently that economic expansion is
>occurring at the expense of the workers who are propelling it. "Ominous
>forces," he said, have divided the country into "an overclass" living in
>the safety of elite suburbs, and an underclass "quarantined in
>surroundings that are unspeakably bleak and often violent"; and he
>mentioned "a new anxious class" that is trapped in "the frenzy of effort"
>it takes for them to simply stand pat, to hold what they've got. The
>middle class, in other words, is disintegrating. As Stanford economist
>Paul Klugman observed in a recent article, such a split "demoralizes those
>at the bottom and coarsens those at the top."
>
>The media, however, carry on as usual. Scarcely a word appears anywhere
>about the growing movement, now active in many states to the south of us
>(and, with any luck, ready to take root in Canada), designed specifically
>to try to rein in the corporation and bring it under the control of the
>public's elected representatives.
>
>In October an impressive national teach-in was held in universities, union
>halls, community centres across the entire United States, where thousands
>of Americans discusssed the misdeeds of corporations, and tried to figure
>what's to be done. Every locality had its own particular horror story to
>recount about local corporations. I didn't see anything about this in the
>press. But then, very little, if anything, ever appears that in any way
>questions the corporate world-view.
>
>No one pretends that confronting the corporations is going to be easy. The
>timeframe, of necessity, must be long. The alternative is to simply
>surrender. But the idea is beginning to spread that surrender is not
>really an option, because the present directions we are following are
>heading us into a world that hardly anybody would want to live in.
>
>4: A KAFKA-ESQUE WORLD UNDER
>      CORPORATE DOMINANCE
>
>That world we are heading into was described in September with clinical
>heartlessness by Ian Angell, professor of information systems at the London
>School of Economics, in an article in the British newspaper The
>Independent. Much of what he describes is already fact.
>
>        The main problem of the future, he wrote, will be the glut of
>unnecessary people who will be irrelevant to the needs of corporations,
>and therefore will be uneducated, untrained, aging, and resentful.
>Corporations, unhindered by national barriers, will increasingly relocate
>their shareholders, executives and employees to wherever the profit is
>greatest and the regulation least. So they will be free to hire "elite
>knowledge workers, rootless economic mercenaries" from anywhere they can
>get them, and this elite will expect to pay little tax in return for their
>irreplaceable skills. Governments will have to acquiesce. The tax burden,
>therefore, will continue to move irrevocably from the elite on to the
>immobile. Work will become increasingly casual and part-time. With no one
>to protect the interests of workers, wages will converge worldwide towards
>Third World levels. If a state maintains what Angell calls "a greedy
>collectivist and populist stance" the entrepreneurial and knowledge
>aristocracy will simply move on, leaving the abandoned country
>economically unviable, full of unproductive masses sliding into a vicious
>circle of decline. The slow redistribution of wealth, to which we became
>accustomed after World War II, is already being rapidly reversed, so "the
>future is inequality.... We are entering an age of hopelessness, an age of
>resentment, an age of rage... Who will defend us?.... The world belongs to
>the global corporation. The nation state is now desperately sick..."
>
>It is hard to say from his tone whether Angell approves or disapproves of
>this coming world. He certainly writes as though all this is pre-ordained,
>cast in stone, and there's nothing any of us can do to stop it.
>
>This is the nightmare into which corporate globalization is leading us. To
>disapprove of this terrifying vision of the future it's not even necessary
>to regard the corporate bosses as bad people, or crooks, because, after
>all, they can't help themselves. The corporate structure that propels them
>on at breakneck speed is not entirely subject to human control. Rather, as
>author Jerry Mander has pointed out, it is "an autonomous technical
>structure that behaves in a system of logic uniquely well suited to its
>primary function: to give birth and impetus to profitable new
>technological forms, and to spread techno-logic around the globe." This
>inhuman aspect of corporations is no doubt what Eric Kierans was warning
>us against forty years ago.
>
>Sacred, should be required reading in every high school on the continent.
>He updates Kierans, showing how the profit and growth imperatives of
>corporations must take precedence over community well-being, worker and
>public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security.
>Since corporations by their very nature are amoral, he writes, they can,
>without misgivings, make decisions that are antithetical to community
>goals. In fact, "non-emotionality" is the desired attitude required for
>"objective" corporate decision-making. Of course, corporations seek to
>hide their amorality and try to act as if they were altruistic. Mander
>(himself a former advertising man) says they often take to advertising the
>very qualities they lack in order to allay negative public perceptions.
>"When corporations say 'We care'," writes Mander, "it is almost always in
>response to the widespread perception that they do not care.... How could
>they?.... All acts are in service to profit. All apparent altruism is
>measured against possible public relations benefit."
>
>More to come in the second and final part....
>
>
>
>