Category Archives: Corporations

Corporations

A Non-reformist Resistance to Corporate Power

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The final paper I wrote to finish college interpreted many of the Progressive Era reforms which laid the groundwork for modern U.S. regulatory bureaucracies as fundamentally reactionary. Driven by corporations and their owners, the new rules served to foreclose the possibility of a resurgence of the more radical farmer and labor rebellions of the preceding decades. Writing it was not only formative to my political practice as a young activist, its lessons still guide the ongoing evolution of my sense of strategy.

Police attack striking street railway workers in New York City, 1886. (Source)

After graduation, I continued on to learn how today’s regulatory apparatus serves the same function: to regulate activists, not corporations. The latter are permitted to carry on business as usual while the former are disciplined to express our grievances in ways that don’t challenge the status quo, while accepting incremental measures rather than genuine democratic control.

It’s no wonder that corporations have invested in the regulatory infrastructure that provides them such stability and protection. Despite the Supreme Court’s pretense that corporations are people, it’s obvious to see the difference between the legal system’s treatment of human offenders, and the much softer regime of fines and penalties imposed on corporate criminals.

Generations of executives have made their wealth at the expense of countless lives, secure in the knowledge that they will never be personally prosecuted for the deaths they have caused. Even in the rare instances where a corporation is held liable and fined or penalized, our legal system protects the human decision-makers from criminal punishment. And meaningful consequences for the corporation – like revoking its charter and expropriating its assets for public use – are almost unthinkable under our current system of governance.

Graphic notes from the “Smart Regulation” panel at the ruling-class World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, 2013. (Source)

This is not a call to extend the criminal penal system to corporate offenders. Police and prison abolitionists have demonstrated that any expansion of the carceral state is ultimately wielded against the oppressed more than the powerful. My point is that centering regulatory redress limits our demands and what we can potentially win.

The distinction between reformist and abolitionist reforms offers important strategic insight for our related struggles. In the resistance to prisons and policing, reformist measures like body cameras and implicit bias training give police more resources, power and license to operate. Abolitionist reforms like ending cash bail or decriminalizing drugs or sex work reduce the scope of the entire system and increase people’s capacity to create real community safety without police.

A parallel distinction can help those resisting corporate power to avoid reformist strategies which empower corporations with further resources, legitimacy, or ability to maneuver. Corporate reformism can look like channeling a community’s resistance into a process that can only regulate details of a polluting facility while permitting its presence over residents’ objections. Or it can look like investing activist energy and resources in strategies that legitimate or even encourage corporate interference in policymaking.

The line between reformist and abolitionist corporate campaign strategies can be subjectively drawn in different places, but integrating the distinction should help us focus on undermining corporate power and supporting people’s movements. To me, shifting the balance of power between people and corporations means looking beyond the given regulatory channels to prioritize wins that build our collective power to center our economic and political lives around the needs of people over corporations and the owners and managers whose interests they serve.

Corporations

2022 in the corporate colony

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As people in the U.S. commemorate the colonization of this land with the Thanksgiving holiday and National Day of Mourning, two current court cases remind us that the genocide underlying that occupation continues, centuries beyond the initial conquest.

On its face, Haaland v. Brackeen is a custody challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act’s protections against separating Native children from their kin. But by redefining Native status as a racial identity rather than nationalities, the case threatens to overturn the entire basis for Indigenous sovereignty and rights. This is clearly the goal of the law firm Gibson Dunn, which represents corporate clients including Chevron, Shell, and Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Gibson Dunn offered pro bono representation to the Brackeen plaintiffs just months after Indigenous water protectors cost their client billions in lost revenue.

Meanwhile, a Minnesota court is assessing the constitutionality of Enbridge Inc.’s funding, training and influencing the strategy of state forces charged with suppressing the indigenous-led resistance to its Line 3 pipeline.

While the corporate prerogative to exploit land and natural resources is an obvious driver in the second case, Indigenous commentators are clear that the ongoing genocide perpetuated by the separation of Native families has also always served that same agenda.

I don’t write to dictate strategy or speak over the voices linked above: anti-colonial struggles must be led by those indigenous to the land. My wish is to highlight these connections for the comrades with whom I’ve spent decades organizing against corporate power and abuse. We would do well to heed the lessons from these cases.

Corporations are just a tool that the same ruling class has used to exert its will and evade accountability since the first European settlers staked their claim to this continent. From the Mass Bay Colony to the Virginia Company, this land was colonized by corporations, which were the original governing entities from the outset.

Even after the so-called Revolution, the new nation’s first flag:

was obviously based on the flag of the British East India Company:

This visible continuity of our governing institutions from the initial colonization to the modern nation should clarify the terrain of contemporary struggle. The obstacle to justice today is the same as it ever was: corporations and government agencies alike represent the interests of a ruling class that controls both.

We should be wary of any strategy that assumes corporations and the state are oppositional forces: neither will transform the extractive social order they have constructed and enforced without sustained, organized pressure. There is no single map for a just transition, but there is also no tactical shortcut for building the power of ordinary people. As we reflect on the history this weekend, let’s make sure to connect this context to all of our struggles confronting the current face of corporate power. Only by standing together, in concrete solidarity against the shared colonial project of state and corporate violence, can we create a freer, more humane future.

Corporations, Providence

The Delightful Contagion of Public Expression

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This story is a few months old but I hadn’t told it to anyone until last week, when I realized it’s funny enough to be worth sharing and that it requires photos to tell properly, so here goes.

Back in February, in the midst of one of the coldest, snowiest winters I can remember, I was in serious need of some inspiration when I went to my neighborhood mailbox and found this sticker:

2015_2_6 Bway box

I took a photo because I had gone to send music about activism and corporate campaigns to a fellow organizer, and I knew she’d be amused. I also took it as a sign that I was living in a great neighborhood, on the west side of Providence, Rhode Island.

Crossing from the west side into downtown Providence means crossing an interstate on one of the overpasses that are dotted along its length every few blocks. Many of these bridges have water stains, graffiti and other markings, so I probably would have missed it if I hadn’t been on foot, but in the spring I spotted this incredible piece of public art:

2015_6 Washington overpass

If you can’t tell from the photo, the water stains at the bottom are natural formations, but the painting above reproduces the same pattern with dramatic effect. It stopped me in my tracks with pure joy, and also provoked a great exchange with a cyclist who noticed me photographing it while he was stopped at the red light.

This anonymous blessing reminded me of the mailbox sticker and made me want to contribute to the fun. By this time, the sticker had been removed and/or painted over, so I resolved to replace the message. I can’t paint but I do have a decent printer, so I printed the photo and put it inside of a magnetic plastic sleeve, which I stuck on the same side of the box where the sticker used to be:

2015_7 magnet

It was small but legible when standing next to the box. My hope was that someone would be inspired as I had been: perhaps the person who originally posted the sticker would see that it had been appreciated, or someone new would see the message who wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. I chose a magnet intentionally to be impermanent; I didn’t want to create clean-up work for anyone but I was curious to see how long it would stay in place.

Not only did it stay for nearly two months, the first time it rained someone adjusted it to protect it better from the rain. I had slapped it on a bit crooked, but someone clearly straightened and centered it, making the slot on the side less exposed to the elements:

2015_7 straightened

…and that’s my story: anonymous public expression inspiring more of the same. On one level, it’s a laughably small thing to do, but at the same time, it felt like a reminder from the universe (or my neighbors) that everything we do matters. Every day we have the choice to inspire each other and lift up the beauty around us. I truly hope I can find more opportunities for public art, humor and silliness in 2016 – and I’m more convinced than ever that Providence is a great city to do it in. Continuing across to the other side of that overpass, you will find this gem:

TIProvidence

I rest my case.

Corporations

The Corporate Emperors Have No Clothes

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Since the US Supreme Court lifted restrictions on corporate political contributions in its 2010 Citizens United ruling, concerns about corporate political power have been growing in this country. And not just among activists: the vast majority of US voters across the political spectrum believe that corporate money is a major threat to our electoral process. As a 20-year veteran of corporate campaigning, I share these concerns, although the focus on election spending strikes me as overly narrow. Political spending is only one of the ways corporations influence our policies and our very perceptions. From junk science to revolving door relationships to PR and outright ownership of the media, the threat is real, but it is not new.

Citizens United and the rulings that preceded it rest on the legal extension of “personhood” to allow corporations to usurp citizens’ Constitutional protections, with little of the accountability. In 1911, Ambrose Bierce defined a corporation as “an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” Today’s transnational giants wield exponentially more wealth and power – political, economic, legal and cultural – but Bierce still holds a critical insight: corporations aren’t persons, but their beneficiaries are.

One of the most important precedents for Citizens United was the 1978 Bellotti case, in which First National Bank successfully challenged state restrictions on corporate political spending by means of a First Amendment claim that such spending constituted protected speech. Of course a bank doesn’t have opinions, it represents the interests of its owners and managers: that is who gains extra access and extra representation under this legal regime, through their association with this fictional “person.” If First National, now Bank of America, were a person, it would have been locked up years ago for mistreatment of its employees, customers, competitors, regulators, and the communities in which it operates. This list chronicles the bank’s dozens of fines, settlements and misdeeds since the financial crisis and bailout. And those are just the legal infractions, it doesn’t even capture BoA’s environmentally destructive investments and its equally destructive pollution of our democratic process.

Of course if Bank of America were a person, it would be hard-pressed to find a safety net equal to the 2008 bailout. The fact that we are incarcerating, disenfranchising and abandoning our fellow human beings at heartbreaking and globally unprecedented rates while these serial offenders continue their rampage virtually unchecked should give us all cause for outrage. Unaccountable elites have hidden behind the corporate shield for generations. Granting political rights to structurally amoral, profit-seeking organizations corrupts one of our most important mechanisms for protecting the public interest and pursuing progress. Government of, by and for the people may be an unfulfilled ideal, but moving toward that goal requires a movement that encompasses a breadth of creative strategies and forms of activism. Whether we’re building local solutions, challenging specific harms or building toward broader policies like a Constitutional Amendment, it is we – the human persons on whose consent this government exists – who must make the rules.

I’ll end on a hopeful note because I truly believe in the power of organized (human) people. Do yourself a favor and check out Twice Thou’s the Bank Attack, written for a national protest against Bank of America and starring inspiring organizers from City Life/Vida Urbana, which is fighting back against foreclosures and building strong communities in Boston.

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Corporations

America the Credulous

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The annual Superbowl has become the best time of year to hear public discussion about advertising, something I wish we could be more critically aware of year-round. This year’s focus was Coca-Cola’s multi-lingual rendition of America the Beautiful, celebrating the nation’s demographic and geographic diversity. Racist and xenophobic backlash online predictably generated the best kind of publicity for Coca-Cola; one NBC anchor declared: “Coca-Cola has always been about inclusion. And they clearly know how to get people talking about their brand.”

Some commentators observed that Coca-Cola is not “about” inclusion, it is about selling its products. But a disheartening number jumped to defend Coca-Cola and applaud its message. A commercial message: a strategy to associate Coke with patriotic multicultural values. At a cost well over $4 million, the ad’s aesthetic or social value is secondary. Its purpose is commercial: an investment in a brand.

The clip’s message is clear: the US encompasses a beautiful diversity, but what unites us all is Coke. Calling Coca-Cola an ally in the work for justice and equality requires tremendous feat of amnesia. Not long ago this corporation held the record for the largest racial discrimination settlement in U.S. history. Coca-Cola doesn’t have feelings or opinions, inclusive or otherwise. It is a corporation, not a human being. No advertisement should lull us into attributing motives other than profit to an institution bound by law and structure to prioritize its own perpetuation and growth. No marketing angle will change Coke’s labor violations and ongoing racial discrimination, or hold this corporation accountable for its global abuses.

so many examples...
so many examples…

Coca-Cola hasn’t cornered the market on hypocritical advertising. Take, for example, recent appeals to feminist values like the Pantene series which flies in the face of parent Procter & Gamble’s corporate track record of gender discrimination and sexual harassment of female employees, not to mention its funding for reactionary and anti-gay political candidates.  Marketing statements don’t signify a policy or commitment of any kind. Often the same corporation promotes different messaging around its male-targeted brands.

Information on corporate practices is easily available, there’s no excuse for relying on ads and misinformation for an impressionistic view of the corporations that dominate our media and consumer landscape. It’s satisfying to stand up to misogynist or racist backlash, but we should avoid adding fuel to the fire which seeks to burn away the corporation’s track record and actual practices in a blinding crucible of positive associations. By provoking the trolls, Coke and Pantene hope to summon our (brand) loyalty by provoking the bogeyman on the right. Personally, I get enough of that at the ballot box. I’d rather hear corporate actions speaking louder than ads.