Sovereignty is in the Eye of the Beholder

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” - J.J. Rousseau [1762]

“Today’s business corporation is an artificial creation, shielding owners and managers while preserving corporate privilege and existence. Artificial or not, corporations have won more rights under law than people have—rights which government has protected with armed force.”  - Richard Grossman and Frank T. Adams [1993]

“Government must impose national policy direction on the behavior of US multinationals, directly influencing their investment decisions…most effectively through the tax code.”  - Ralph Gomory [2007]

“A new Internal Revenue Service enforcement unit targeting the very wealthy will help the tax agency decode partnerships, offshore trusts and other complex techniques used to hide income.”  - IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman [2009]

When Chicago Bear linebacker Brian Urlacher was asked after a recent game to explain his dilemma of hitting opposing players under new guidelines of National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell, he simply said:  “It’s a dictatorship.”
Speaking more in frustration than in bitterness, Urlacher was also speaking the truth about all corporations, not just the NFL. In fairness, Commissioner Goodell has made it clear that his policy is aimed at bringing down the number of concussions in the violent sport of football.  This would make his dictatorship a benevolent one, but there is nothing democratic about punitive fines levied at violators of the policy.  Urlacher and his colleagues know very well that if they wish to continue to pluck the fruits of free enterprise in their chosen profession, they must play by rules imposed from above, not by their own notions of free will and discretion.

Folks who toil for less money than Urlacher in a world dominated by multinational corporations are faced with another grim reality that is scarcely recognized, but obvious nonetheless. If you compare the annual revenues of top Fortune 500 companies with the annual revenues of all but 20 or 30 nations in the world, you would find that the income of corporations far outstrips those of nations.  Compare any major oil corporation with Haiti, Peru, Greece, or Bangladesh, and you will see what I mean.

Thus, not only are corporations fundamentally undemocratic, they are all-powerful as well.  Moreover, unlike nations, they are not responsible to citizens, but only their majority shareholders, whose numbers are theoretically controlled by the mythical marketplace, but in reality by concentrated wealth and power. Shell Corporation, for example, is controlled ultimately by the Dutch Royal family, and its “Golden Share,” that guarantees it majority status.

Rather than instruct their citizens as to this everyday reality of arbitrary corporate power, media corporations like the Bismarck Tribune and FOX news would convince me that I had better schedule a visit to my proctologist before boarding a plane for the holidays this year. That way I will be better prepared for the indignities I am allegedly bound to suffer from a government trying to keep my plane from being blown up.
Always the trees, never the forest, with these guys. Terrorism is real enough, of course, but not everyday. Corporate power is real, and it is every day,...and everywhere, not always bad by any means, but always there.

Occasionally the media slip up and show us the truth of corporate power in dramatic ways. This happened recently on the front page of the Bismarck Tribune on November 7, 2010.  Accompanying a story by AP White House correspondent, Ben Feller, entitled “Obama: India a creator, not poacher, of U.S. jobs,” was a picture of President Obama next to General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt and Anil Ambani of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani.  Not heads of state, mind you, but corporate CEO’s.
Although revealing of where real action takes place in the world, this recent portrait of corporate power pales by comparison with my all time favorite:  Averill Harriman, representing President Franklin Roosevelt in Moscow, seated between Josef Stalin and Lord Beaverbrook, Winston Churchill’s representative to the joint allied conference against Hitler of September 28-October 4, 1941.

Stalin was short of cash and materiel, and he was not going to find it with the British, whose courage was unquestioned, but whose resources were exhausted. Only capitalist America had enough resources to bolster the leader of the Communist world in a joint struggle with the forces of fascism.

Averill Harriman was no ordinary capitalist, however. In this portrait, which hangs in the palace of Frederick the Great of Prussia in Potsdam, Germany, this multi-lingual former polo player looks by far the most relaxed of the three. It was as if he owned them, which, in a sense, he did. The Harriman family had made their fortune in railroads but had since branched out into ownership of Manganese mines in Siberia well before World War I.

The element Manganese was essential to steel manufacturing and while the Bolsheviks might have been able to control Harriman’s Siberian mines after their victories in 1920, and certainly could provide enough labor from their Gulag, the Harriman interests controlled the market for Manganese in much the same way as South Africa controlled the market for diamonds.

Averill Harriman was not in Moscow to lord it over Stalin, however. He was there to help save the free world from Hitler with any help he could get, even from a sworn enemy of capitalism.  Later, as one of the key architects of Cold War strategy with George Kennan and John McCloy, Harriman also helped save the free world from communism. Not bad for the head of a corporate family.

Averill Harriman was a far cry from the corporate types nowadays such as the Bush and Cheney families. The George Bushes and Dick Cheney were, and are, oil men, interested only in saving American corporations from taxes.

The Presidents Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, like Lawrence Kudlow, Milton Friedman and other High Priests of Deregulation, care little or nothing for Americans they have delivered into destitution.

Although it is profound, their failure is not monetary. They have taken good care of themselves, and are wealthy and “successful.”

It is this. Because they only honor the corporate trust, they have failed to uphold the public trust.

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