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By Skip Spitzer
Government safeguards the basic needs of industry
That corporate wealth buys broad influence in law and public policy is well documented and widely acknowledged. Yet much government predisposition toward industry is less direct.
Holders of high office themselves frequently have significant ownership in large corporations and other corporate ties and histories. For example, virtually every member of the Bush cabinet has extensive corporate connections, including outgoing Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, who was a director of the biotech company Calgene (now owned by Monsanto) and served on the International Policy Council on Agriculture, Food and Trade, a group funded by Cargill, Nestle, Kraft, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many Clinton cabinet members had similar ties.
Governmental bias toward industry is also based on the state's dependence on economic growth as a generator of tax revenues and creating conditions favorable to perpetuation of political power. This structural position of the state is reflected in a general nonpartisan orientation of government toward ensuring a prosperous business climate, particularly for the largest companies. Clinton Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, for example, reflected this "What's good for General Motors is good for the rest of America" perspective when he said that the good news about economic concentration in agriculture is that it means that "We're strengthening our global competitive edge."
Media and other institutions reinforce corporate values and ideas Institutions of beliefs and knowledge-such as the mass media, public relations, science and education-also reflect the exigencies of the corporate system. As with politics, there are direct avenues of corporate influence, including: legal threats; lobbying, flak and other manipulation of journalists; and funding university research, research institutes and think tanks. In education, corporations provide schools with curriculum, funding, teacher training, advisors, exhibits and contest programs to, in the words of one industry newsletter, "get them started young."
Interestingly, while many acts of corporate influence are orchestrated in-house, the market itself generates goods and services for extending corporate influence. For example, Lifetime Learning Systems develops "corporate sponsored" materials for schools and asks corporations to "Imagine millions of students discussing your product in class. Imagine their teachers presenting your organization's point of view."
Many mechanisms of ideological influence are less direct. In science, for example, many researchers sit on corporate boards, own stock or have other financial ties to the companies to which their research relates. One member of a National Academy of Sciences panel on agricultural biotechnology acknowledged, "It would be kind of hard to find [scientists] who didn't have some funding from biotechnology groups."
In media, likely the most important institution of beliefs and knowledge, there are numerous ways in which the structure of the industry passively shapes the range of news and entertainment content. For example, media is itself an extremely concentrated industry and depends on the good graces of business advertisers. Journalists and writers are selected from the ranks of the mainstream.[11] Larry Grossman, former president of NBC News, put it this way: "the press are terribly conventional thinkers.... and that's why they are there. That's why they reach millions."
The general effect of direct and indirect corporate influence is that the mass media portray the world in ways that are consistent with the basic needs of industry. For example, a recent Associated Press story on biomonitoring[13] for pesticides and other industrial chemicals concluded "There's still debate among advocates over which of the 75,000 chemicals to specifically look for when biomonitoring. And even when chemicals are found, there's little an individual can do." In fact, the more significant discussion among advocates is how best to challenge the chemical industry by mobilizing the public with this new documentation of corporate "chemical trespass." A study of sources for U.S. TV network news found such bias across the board, concluding that there is "a clear tendency to showcase the opinions of the most powerful political and economic actors, while giving limited access to those voices that would be most likely to challenge them."
Much debate about news media focuses on the issue of liberal vs. conservative bias. This framing misses the point that what liberal and conservative outlets have in common is that they rarely question the systemic role industry plays in causing social and environmental problems or its extensive institutional influence, or describe what the public can do to change the structure of harm.
Patriarchy and racism
While the structural features sketched above focus the corporate power, patriarchy and racism are also systemic sources of harm, which interact with the market dynamics. Patriarchy refers to male dominance in a society, a universal condition that predates and is influenced by the market economy. For example, gender relations changed dramatically as industrialization broadly shifted economic production from the home to separate workplaces, and again with the relatively recent mass entry of women into the paid economy.
Today, women in the U.S. workforce face unequal pay, hiring standards, working conditions, training opportunities, prospects for promotion, participation in workplace decision-making, as well as segregation in lower-level occupations. These factors lead directly, and through lower social status, to negative occupational health and other impacts. Assessments of "safe" levels of pesticide and other chemical exposure, for example, have typically relied on male subjects and generally ignore women's greater sensitivity to exposure. For women, patriarchy also results in domestic violence, disproportionate shares of poverty and household work (even when holding a paid job) and other impacts.
Likewise, racism occurs independently of and is influenced by the corporate system. Racism, in the broadest sense, refers to prejudice or discrimination based on race (i.e., perceived physical differences) or ethnicity (i.e., socially defined cultural characteristics), and to institutional discrimination (i.e., differing treatment regardless of individual attitudes about race and ethnicity). Racism plays a significant role in education, occupational, health and other disparities. For example, African American, Latino, Native American and Asian American communities are disproportionately impacted by hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators, and polluting industries. In fact, race is the most significant variable associated with the location of hazardous waste sites.
Culture
The most general expression of the structure of harm is a dominant culture that reflects and reinforces values, beliefs, actions and lifestyles that are essentially consistent with the corporate system. A citizenry engrossed by individualism, the mythology of the free market and the measurement of personal success by wealth, and that is consumption-fixated, inwardly focused and often unaware and too busy for political engagement, enables business and politics as usual and undermines public action. It is difficult, for example, to mobilize the U.S. public in opposition to court appointments given that, according to a recent national poll, 64% of respondents could not name a single member of the Supreme Court, but 66% could name all three characters used to market Rice Krispies cereal.
Global dimensions
Of course, the social structures of harm discussed above have important international dimensions. U.S. corporations have remarkable global reach. Exports of goods and services in July 2004 alone were roughly $96 billion and private investment abroad for 2003 was about $7.8 trillion. One result of international investment is the ability of corporations as a group to influence public policy in weaker economies on threat of capital flight.
Likewise, the U.S. government pursues a wide range of foreign political, economic and military policy, often to advance corporate interests. For example, international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are mechanisms through which industrial powers are able to influence national policy, principally within the global South. As conditions of lending, these institutions impose Structural Adjustment Programs, which typically require shifts to export production, slashes in social spending and other terms that prioritize expansion of markets for foreign firms and servicing debt held by foreign banks. Similarly, corporate rights are globalizing through powerful new international trade and investment agreements such as those of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and a battery of new regional and bilateral pacts. These emphasize "freeing" the market through sweeping limits on regulatory policy, while granting corporations new intellectual property and other rights and largely ignoring the anti-competitive nature of multinational corporations.
Military policy is also geared toward corporate interests. Extreme lobbying and other influence by the arms industry to promote military spending and shape U.S. foreign policy constitutes a "military- industrial complex," about which outgoing president Eisenhower warned. Some have argued that this has lead to a "permanent war economy," in which military spending and intervention play a central role in national economic stability. At a minimum, it is clear that in most cases, geopolitical concerns, access to resources and markets, and corporate positioning underlie official pretexts for intervention. In Iraq, for example, the Bush administration brought in business leaders to head up reconstruction (such as former Cargill executive Dan Amstutz in agriculture) and established a neo-liberal interim government with U.S. advisers in all departments. U.S. corporations are acquiring reconstruction contracts (more than $20 billion so far), ownership of Iraqi resources (including oil and water) and intellectual property protections (playing a key role in the corporatization of the nation's agriculture).
Corporate activities overseas, foreign policy, international institutions and military action profoundly exacerbate social and environmental problems. Looking at just pesticides and the WTO, for example, free-trade rules undermine national policy-making and international environmental agreements which can reduce pesticide use, and foster the industrial agricultural model at the center of pesticide-reliant farming.
Seeing structure
Although social structures are by nature difficult to see, the above sketch should begin to form a picture of key underlying institutional features that are the context of contemporary change making. In sum:
** Corporations are pervasive, economically and socially powerful actors compelled to pursue narrow self-interests in a system that drives economic concentration, generates socially and environmentally harmful models of production and requires perpetual growth.
** Those charged with public policy are fundamentally compelled by corporate influences and the primacy of economic growth to safeguard corporate interests.
** Mass media, public relations, science, education-and the dominant consumption- and wealth-oriented culture as a whole-significantly reflect and reinforce the corporate system.
** Patriarchy and racism are sources of harm that interact with the corporate system.
** Corporate interests are projected internationally through economic, military, political and other activity, including a rapidly developing trade and investment framework undermining the ability of governments to control corporate behavior.
From this vantage point, strategies for moving beyond near-term, issue-based action can be more easily assessed. For example, it is clear that there is nothing about incrementalism that necessarily transforms the structure of harm.
Making systemic change
How can those engaged in near-term, issue-oriented approaches advance systemic change? Fortunately, this is not a matter of "reform or revolution." It is true that partial victories and reformism can drain potential for mobilization (as when banning residential uses of a pesticide, while leaving only farmworkers and other marginalized communities affected). This is an important strategic point. However, the notion that conditions should be allowed to worsen so that mobilization for systemic change can more readily take place overlooks the fact that in many ways conditions for deep change already exist. One useful reconciliation of the reform/transformation question is to integrate the near-term with the transformative, such that issue-based action explicitly functions to advance systemic change. This approach accommodates the reality of urgent harm that cannot be ignored. It also maintains a focus on concrete entry points for engaging and mobilizing the public. The point, however, is not that both orientations are useful; it is that they can be integrated so that they are mutually reinforcing.
The following are a few practical points for furthering this integration.
Building a broad, global movement
One crucial insight drawn from a structural perspective is that movements must be bigger, multi-issue and international. Fortunately, if there is anything opportune about the structure of harm it is that it is emerging as a unifying concern of people and progressive movements around the world. For example, most toxics groups in the U.S. taking a "NIMBY" (Not In My Backyard) position in the early 1980's developed at least a perspective of the larger context of harm. Today there are truly global movements (such as the anti- or alternative-globalization movement and Via Campesina), processes (like the World Social Forum) and statements of unity (like the "Rio Earth Summit Declaration of Principles")-all of which emphasize common themes of democratic inclusion; environmental sustainability; class, racial and gender justice; diversity; and fundamental change. There are ample opportunities to tie near-term change efforts to these expressions of the unifying global progressive movement.
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