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June 27, 2002
Rahual Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 27,
2002
Alternative Futures:
a Review
of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy
by Robert Jensen
There is no alternative. Capitalism is the only
future. Free markets are the essence of democracy.
How do we know? Because we are told repeatedly
by smart guys from corporations and government, and by the journalists
and academics paid to explain why the smart guys are right.
In the face of that "consensus,"
the folks at the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD)
have launched a direct attack on the nature
of the corporation, the institution at the core of modern capitalism.
So, are they crazy or just confused?
Neither. The POCLAD members are refreshingly
clear, and the book of their writings -- Defying
Corporations, Defining Democracy -- makes a compelling
case for their analysis and strategy.
The key is that their critique is of
the nature of the corporation. They are not simply saying that
corporations do bad things or sometimes distort democracy (most
liberals and even some conservatives admit that, especially post-Enron).
Instead, they argue that the rise of the contemporary corporation
has been the death of meaningful democracy. While I think their
analysis needs to broaden (more on that later), the POCLAD collective
has done an important service by framing the issue of economic
justice in a language accessible to people not yet persuaded
by a left/progressive analysis.
Here's the story POCLAD tells:
Our wealthy founding father devised a
system that allowed them to maintain power -- by restricting
citizenship to propertied white men, and through elite-controlled
institutions such as the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court that could
corral any wild ideas that regular people might pursue through
the relatively more democratic House of Representatives, or state
and local governments. Still, the democratic principles on which
the country was founded were real, and popular movements over
time expanded the franchise and agitated for more democracy.
At the same time those battles have been
going on, lawyers and lobbyists have waged a war to expand corporate
power. Often relying on judges to do what even well-lobbied legislatures
wouldn't, corporations went from being limited entities in the
18th and first half of the 19th centuries that could be controlled
by the people and their representatives, to today's concentrations
of wealth and power that have almost completely escaped popular
control.
In POCLAD language, corporations began
as entities subordinate to the sovereign people but eventually
became masters, eroding the core concept of democracy -- power
resides in We the People. Key to this was the courts' granting
to corporations the rights of persons, including 14th Amendment
rights and eventually even free speech rights. POCLAD points
out the obvious: Rights can be claimed only by persons, and corporations
aren't real persons but only fictional ones, creations under
law.
According to POCLAD, we should move beyond
fighting corporations on their terms -- battling to control the
worst of their offenses through regulatory law or asking them
to curb abuses through voluntary codes of conduct. Instead, citizen-activists
should demand that corporations act responsibly in accord with
their charters or face charter revocation, the death penalty
for corporations.
Along the way, POCLAD retells some American
history, with two main effects. First, it denaturalizes the corporation
-- and by implication capitalism -- showing that like any other
system it is the product of human choices, not some unchangeable
natural order. Second, POCLAD members remind us of past resistance
to corporations -- from the first half of America's history when
corporations were kept on a much shorter leash and such revocations
occurred, to the Populists' activism in the late 19th century
contesting the legitimacy of corporations, to the work of the
early labor movement to articulate an alternative to capitalism.
For progressive political change to be possible, people not only
have to understand the nature of the systems and institutions
that wield power, but also see that it is possible for systems
to change.
The book points out that corporations
do not simply engage in business but govern much of our lives,
in a system that disadvantages natural persons doing battle with
these fictional persons. Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy
makes this point particularly well in discussing labor law, which
gives management huge advantages over workers trying to organize.
The authors also argue cogently that whatever short-term victories
citizens and environmental groups have won, or can win, in regulatory
agencies, the ecological health of the planet has deteriorated,
and will continue to deteriorate. So long as corporations can
accumulate the wealth and power that contemporary law and politics
allows, progressive activists start out in a hole.
As these letters, essays, and speeches
(all short and easy to digest) lay out this case, it becomes
clear quickly the POCLAD folks have made the strategic choice
to focus on corporations and avoid using the word "capitalism."
That decision makes sense in a country where critiques of capitalism
typically are associated with foreign ideologies (European or
Third-World socialism and communism) and totalitarian systems
(the Soviet Union and its satellites). While it is true that
spirited critiques of capitalism are a homegrown part of American
history (some are referenced in the book, such as the Knights
of Labor's) and not foreign imports, at this moment in history
a strategy that focuses on the corporation is likely to resonate
more with Americans. No matter what people think about capitalism
as a system (if they think about it at all), virtually everyone
has some reason to dislike or distrust corporations; we've all
been screwed by a corporation -- as a competitor, employee, consumer,
or bystander -- in some fashion at some point.
Given that corporations and modern capitalism
can't be separated or separately defined, POCLAD's critique of
the corporation goes to the heart of the system. It is possible
to highlight the key problems inherent in capitalism -- its need
for constant expansion, the exploitation of workers, the commodification
of everything -- by focusing on corporations. Indeed, capitalism
as we know it couldn't exist without the corporate form. Still,
at some point in discussion about politics and economics, people
understandably ask, "OK, you don't like what we've got --
what kind of system do you want?"
Do left/progressive folks answer by saying
we want capitalism without corporations? Or capitalism with corporations
that just have less power? It's not clear what the first claim
would mean, nor is it obvious the second would bring substantive
improvements.
Or do we articulate a vision that --
whether or not we use the term -- will sound a lot like what
traditionally has been known as socialism: no private ownership
of the means of production, worker control over production, collective/council
structures throughout the economy, participatory planning, etc.
Such a system can go by other names; for example, Michael Albert
and Robin Hahnel call it "participatory economics"
(see their book Looking Forward or the web site <www.parecon.org>).
But in the end, it's not unreasonable for people to expect an
answer to that question.
One might argue that the first step is
to delegitimize the corporation, exposing not only the way it
corrupts democracy in the political sphere but crushes people
in the private. No argument there, but that first step quickly
leads to questions about vision for an alternative system. This
is not a demand for an alternative defined in great detail, which
usually is a tactic to derail criticism of the existing system.
Indeed, when any system is oppressive, it is in some sense enough
to demand that the system end. But the effectiveness of that
demand is much enhanced by a clear articulation of the underlying
principles (which POCLAD offers) and some discussion of that
vision, even if tentative and sketchy (which isn't included in
this volume).
Another necessary step forward is to
include a more specific accounting of racism, sexism, and U.S.
imperialism -- not as issues separate from corporate capitalism
but intricately bound up with it. It is clear POCLAD wants to
keep its eye on the prize of contesting corporate power, but
expanding the analysis can aid in that task.
In one sense, capitalism is not inherently
racist or sexist -- corporations are happy to exploit anyone
in the drive for profit. But owners and managers have used racism
to divide workers and solidify control, and sexism has been important
in keeping certain jobs associated with women or "women's
work" (such as the expanding customer service sector) low
paying. Those stories are also an integral part of the history
of the corporation.
It's also imperative, as the American
empire seeks even greater domination of the world, to link the
corporate system to U.S. foreign policy and militarism. At a
time when expressions of patriotism run high, this may seem risky.
But it's difficult to imagine making inroads against the corporate
power at home without challenging the brutality and violence
of U.S. policy as it secures resources and markets abroad for
corporations.
These are issues that left/progressive
movements have to hash out. In a world of multiple systems of
repression and oppression that are enmeshed, we have no choice
but to deal with them analytically. One person or group can decide
to focus on a particular issue, but the analysis that underlies
that political action can't ignore this complexity.
Whatever differences in strategy and
emphasis I might have with POCLAD, Defying Corporations, Defining
Democracy reminds us that this kind of political work can be
done in a language that speaks to ordinary people. POCLAD avoids
long, jargon-filled writing that will turn off most readers,
and that's all to the good. But too many of these short, to-the-point
pieces repeat the same themes, sometimes in pretty much the same
language. The book could have been cut in half and conveyed as
much information, making it more effective for outreach tool
to the general public.
Still, leftists and progressives should
read Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy -- and keep up
with the group's work through the website (<www.poclad.org>)
and newsletter (By What Authority) -- not only for the history
and analysis it offers but for rhetorical strategies for taking
the message to the public. POCLAD reminds us the task is not
to convince policymakers and elites of the problem of corporations
but to reach the public and build a mass movement.
At a time when most people accept the
big lie that there is no future outside of capitalism, it's time
to move forward with political strategies grounded in the recognition
that there is no way to think about a decent future except outside
of capitalism.
Robert Jensen
is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin,
a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the
Mainstream. His pamphlet, "Citizens
of the Empire.
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
Today's
Features
Rahual Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership;
Calls for Fair Elections
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