Jerry Brown & Charles Reich
Discuss "The System"
Jerry Brown: Charles A. Reich, professor of law, associated with Yale University
and the University of San Francisco, is best known as the author of The
Greening of America. His most recent book Opposing the System speaks of
a "system" that is running the show-not democracy, not self-government,
but a combination of power, using the levers of government under a corporate
hegemony, to control our ideas, our research, our culture, what's produced,
what's done to whom-all in a major fundamental departure from the basis
on which America was founded. As a matter of fact, free enterprise and democracy
are themselves the object of attack.
Charles Reich. In the last 30 years I've watched a catastrophe unfold that
is tearing the country apart. You see the family declining, people's earnings
declining, one group of people hating another group. It's the result of
an economic system that ignores values that don't have a price tag on them.
It doesn't care whether people are thrown out of work, whether families
break up, whether the environment is destroyed. It's an organized corporate
economy-carefully managed from the center-versus society. It is not the
free enterprise/free market that this country began with.
JB. In the early part of your book you talk about how corporations at one
time were highly limited in the powers granted them. The corporate charter
was viewed as a privilege, not a right; it was limited in the amount of
money it could have, the purposes it could engage in, and the residency
of the incorporators.
CR. Americans were used to doing business in a personal way-a personally
run newspaper, a whaling ship, people working for themselves or for a single
proprietor, or maybe three or four people. That's what economic liberty
was all about. Then the corporation came along with its potential for unlimited
size and power, and it was very quickly recognized as a threat to
American economic freedom.
JB. How does a corporation get all this power?
CR. A corporation is an organization into which people pour money in the
way of investments, but the stock holders and investors no longer control
it. You can say there is no owner of a corporation any more. It's a free-wheeling
organization that grows with its power and its organization until it's bigger
than the state.
JB. When the Fifth Amendment was adopted, saying that no person shall be
deprived of liberty or property without due process of law, Jefferson, Adams,
Patrick Henry, and others had the idea that "persons" were people
who ate and slept and died.
CR. But the Supreme Court in the nineteenth century decided, without argument,
without discussion, that corporations-which are fictitious persons, artificial
persons- were "persons" protected by the Bill of Rights with the
same right to free speech that individual citizens had. This right allows
Mobil to buy an ad in Time or the New York Times, and use that ad to say
that there's no real danger to the environment. But that's not selling their
product-that's selling politics; that's selling ideology; and selling it
in a tax-deductible ad that the American people are paying for. Corporations
are allowed to compete with individuals in the political arena to the point
where individuals are drowned out and cannot be heard-only the corporate
voice can be heard. It is a disaster for democracy.
JB. So in the nineteenth century, at the very time that Blacks were being
treated as subhuman, segregated in the South, with Jim Crow laws and all
the rest, there is this solicitude for large aggregates of power that were
becoming the robber barons of that time.
CR. That's exactly the irony: Blacks were unpersons at the same time that
corporations were exalted into personal status.
JB. This invisible system, traveling on the perversity of the artificial
person, now has $100 billion dollars and operates in private, in secret.
They can pull up stakes and destroy a community without responsibility.
They can shut down the General Motors plant at River Run-there since World
War II-and open it up in Texas or Mexico and eliminate the jobs of 4,000
people, many of whom are going to be too old to get an equivalent job.
CR. No one in the large American corporations takes any responsibility for
them, for their homes, for their families, for their livelihoods. And the
corporation that abides by our laws in this country can go overseas and
hire child labor or slave labor, and not violate our laws. I would make
it a crime for any corporation chartered in this country to use child or
slave labor abroad.
JB. You cite a case in your book of an obstetrics nurse eating in the cafeteria
of a Pennsylvania hospital who is overheard commenting about whether the
management should use obstetrics nurses in another area of the hospital
in order to save money. For that comment she was fired, and the Supreme
Court said that's okay. This was a government hospital, a government entity,
where the First Amendment was assumed to apply.
CR. When the state or the federal government acts as employer, then the
employment relationship trumps the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
We have a rule now that allows a completely undemocratic, un-American authoritarian
workplace, where there is no free speech, no due process, none of the rights
of the Bill of Rights.
JB. The basis of your book Opposing the System is that a "conspiracy"
isn't even needed. This thing is right out in front. A corporation can have
$100 billion dollars, a 100,000 employees, and more impact on a person's
life than the federal government, state governments, and local governments
combined. Corporations are entitled to the Bill of Rights, but they are
not subject to the Bill of Rights. They get the benefit of the Bill of Rights
against any effort to control their oppressive behavior.
CR. The worst thing is that just a very few corporations control our entire
national dialogue. Sometimes just a single person like Rupert Murdoch controls
so many newspapers and radio and television outlets that he can dictate
a large chunk of what we hear and what we think. A big corporation like
Disney or Time-Warner controls magazines, newspapers, cable TV, television,
radio, records, films-all by a centralized group of managers. How can democracy
survive that?
JB. It can't. Chomsky made the point that censorship in an ostensibly free
society can be more powerful than in a totalitarian society. In Russia,
even the smallest child knew that the media was lying. Here, we believe-because
of the marketplace of ideas and products, because you have KGO and KSFO
even though they are owned by the same Disneyland-that there is real competition.
On KSFO in the San Francisco Bay Area, a woman talked about the spread of
plagues and microbes, and Michael Savage jumped all over her for not admitting
that the Mexicans were causing the disease and the germs and the viruses.
KSFO-pouring out absolute falsehoods, fanning the flames of insensitivity-is
owned by CAP Cities, is owned by KGO, is owned by Disney, so we've got Snow
White and hate and falsehood feeding not only sociological but ecological
breakdown. There's an insanity there-all protected under the Fifth Amendment
that was meant to protect patriots. A lot of people-particularly the one
or two percent that control the corporations-run the television, run the
advertising, run the research, conduct the surveys, provide the chairs of
endowment at the major universities, provide the handouts that McNeil-Lehrer
and all the major news outlets base many of their stories on. In effect,
a social invention of reality then fits into our heads to create our own
subordination in total violation of democracy.
CR. Executives make more than a hundred times what their workers make. It's
a winner-take-all economy in which the people at the very top get millions,
even billions, and other people don't have enough to make ends meet. This
false map of reality says there are jobs and opportunities out there, and
people at the bottom of the economic scale are lazy and shiftless and don't
take advantage of them. This in turn foments racial hatred, foments the
divisions that you see in this country.
A true map of reality presents a very different picture-not enough jobs
to go around, the economy deliberately run to maintain a vast pool of millions
of surplus people who couldn't find a job no matter how hard they looked,
who are rejected, cast off, dispossessed, excluded from participating in
the economy. Naturally, they become very angry, very desperate. They may
go crazy, they may turn to crime, but whatever happens, that class of excluded
is a great problem for America.
JB. We hear a lot about cost benefits. We don't really measure the cost
of the Bank of America and Security Pacific merging in California and laying
off 10,000 people or Wells Fargo and First Interstate merging and laying
off thousands of people. That would be viewed as government interference
with the marketplace.
CR. The economics that we practice now is really the economics of the false
account book. When two giant corporations merge and report a huge profit,
they're not counting the number of people who were laid off. What happens
to them, what happens to their families, is not part of this balance sheet;
they are excluded from the calculus of profit and loss.
JB. You have 30% of the African American men between 18 and 35 either in
prison or under the criminal justice control, probation, or parole-and that
30% is not an accident but is tied in with the corporate management of the
economy.
CR. Billions of dollars in prison construction is part of the cost of our
corporate profits.
JB. The only responsibility that is acceptable to Clinton, McNeil/Lehrer,
the San Francisco Chronicle, is the responsibility of a poor woman who can't
find a job because late-stage capitalism keeps 15 million people out of
work as an inflation-fighting mechanism. The irresponsibility of Wells Fargo
in laying off thousands of people in the next two years is not even a subject
of discussion.
CR. From Clinton on down, you never hear the words "societal responsibility."
They talk about personal responsibility not social responsibility. Another
thing you never hear is a "breach of the social contract." When
a corporation lays off thousands of people to increase its own profits,
it's breaking the social contract that holds us together, the contract that
says those who run the economy will make a place, an opportunity, for all
Americans within the economy. You can work for 25 years for a corporation,
yet they owe you not one day's loyalty, not one day's commitment. The John
Birch Society and others like them, are anti-public government but they
say absolutely nothing about corporate government. A colonialism and an
imperialism are being practiced right here at home, and the victims are
American workers who are not being paid a living wage.
JB. America is not a democracy because it is not the consent of the governed.
It's the consent of the advertiser. It's the consent of large aggregates
of power who express themselves through the Congress and the $600 million
it takes to elect them, or the presidency and the $200 million it takes
to run that process. We're not getting a free enterprise. The enterprise
is managed inside the corporation, and it isn't free because the channels
of communication, the availability of credit, and all the rest are influenced
by the size of the purveyor, the large corporation. That's the map that
has to be perceived.
If we're going to try to recapture democracy, these new private governments
called corporations must have the restraints that our founders put on the
central power. That central power is now contained inside the private corporation,
so the corporation itself ought to have the Bill of Rights applied to it,
ought to have restraints so that we get the freedom against that power center
that our founders said a free country has to have.
CR. It is ridiculous to call a giant corporation that employs thousands
of people and has thousands of investors a "private enterprise."
In every sense it's larger and has more assets than many governments. It
should be subject to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; there should
be public people on the Board of Directors and public responsibilities toward
the communities where those corporations operate.
JB. There's nothing very radical in that because a hundred years ago a corporation
in many cases had to get the approval of the community even to be a corporation.
There was a limitation on the money they could accumulate, on the duration
they could exist (in some cases as short as 20 years) and on their purpose.
Now they're all-powerful. There's no way to violate their charter since
their charter is coterminous with the universe itself, an absolute perversion
of the original idea of corporations.
CR. When Newt Gingrich and others say that if we had less public government
we'd have more freedom, that's not true. The public government is not the
menace it's portrayed to be. The real menace is the private government.
Politicians today never mention the word corporate power because they are
the tools of corporate power.
JB. The CIA was revealed to be spying in France, not for military purposes,
but for corporate purposes. So this $30 billion spook agency is now at the
disposal of these oligarchic corporate structures run by the 1%. Nothing
could be more offensive to the notion of America! It strikes me that if
the CIA and the U.S. government could help El Salvador and Guatemala kill
union organizers and other people speaking for reform, then the same thing
might happen here if reformers in this country were to truly threaten the
oligarchy. That is a frightening thought-that maybe our freedom is a reflection
of our impotence rather than any capacity to bring about real equality.
CR. If we really count all the things that are social costs and offset them
against the gross domestic product, we will have a much more accurate view
of what's happening to our economy. We will find that it is going down,
not up. We need to redefine our economic indices to tell the truth about
our economy.
JB. Putting the Bill of Rights onto the corporation, breaking up the corporation,
measuring the costs as well as the benefits, will give us a better road
map. The road maps we have now are projected by TV and $300 billion of advertising.
CR. I don't think this system is going on much longer. We have growing unemployment,
more and more people struggling to make a living. People are going to start
asking who's running things and for whose benefit? Then they'll begin to
realize there's a better way. There's nothing easy about what we're going
to have to do in the next decade, but the choice is nonsurvival. If we go
ahead the way we're going now, we're not going to survive as individuals
or as a society. The economy is in a war against human beings and in that
war people can only end up being wiped out. Let's have a society designed
to be good for human beings. Let the economy be a subordinate part of that
society, and we'll be back on the right track.
JB. First, we need a clear map of what's going on in the world. Second,
with our friends and neighbors and colleagues, we can model other ways of
being together. I think there are positive steps we can take. One thing
We the People is going to establish is a coop right here in Oakland, based
on shared effort and collaboration and cooperation. I think there are positive
steps we can
take.
CR. We need much more of that.
Material for Jerry Brown's article in North Coast Xpress was excerpted and
edited with permission, from Jerry Brown's "We the People" radio
broadcasts. Jerry Brown broadcasts live on non-commercial radio FM (Pacific
Standard Time: 4-5 p.m., M-F, KPFA, Berkeley, CA, 94.1; KFCF, Fresno, CA,
88.1; KPFK, Los Angeles, CA, 90.7; Central Standard Time: 6-7 p.m., KPFT,
Houston, TX, 90.1; Eastern Standard Time: 7-8 p.m., New York, WBAI, 99.5).
Contact "We The People" in Oakland, 1-800-426-1112, or 200 Harrison
St., Oakland, CA 94607 for more information or to join We the People.
May 1997 - - Archives
- - HOME- - Electrons
to Editor
