The dirty little secret of economic insecurity revealed by Pat Buchanan's jeremiads has focused the attention of the ordinary folk on the corporations to an unusual degree this election year. It almost feels like a replay of the Populist fervors of the late nineteenth century; the only thing lacking is a repeat of their large-scale political organizing, powerful enough to have selected a presidential candidate and forced a national debate around economic destiny.
The Populists may have lost politically, but their credos have never died because they embody fundamental American beliefs about self-governance and anti-monopolism active since before the days of the Revolution. It may seem as if corporations rule the world and every football bowl game will now be named after a company, but "the people" have weapons in their arsenal if they, like the original Populists, wish to fight this corporate take-over.
First, people must learn their own history. It may appear that corporations, as declared in 1886, are "natural persons," but our fellow citizens of four generations ago knew this was a scam and fought hard to bring them to heel. For instance, the Exxon of its day was the railroads, which argued that economic necessity told them the only way they could make money was to create a nation-wide transit system based on low rates for long-haul, full-car cargoes. Anyone in between had to pay higher rates for short-haul, less-than-full car loads. But the debate over the Interstate Commerce Commission in the 1880s, and especially railroads like A.B. Stickney's Chicago Great Western, demonstrated that regulated competition and a regional focus on economic development could provide rate stability, reasonable profits, and a better distribution of wealth and opportunity than a massive, monopolized cross-continental system subject to rate wars and inefficient operation.
For many reasons the notion of regulated competition lost out, but it was an option that people fought hard to put into law. And that's the point: if people become more savvy about their history, especially economic history, they will discover all sorts of ideas that people have used to manage concentrations of economic power, which they rightly recognized as destructive of self-governance and freedom of opportunity. There's no reason why citizens of the 1990s cannot revive these ideas and use them just as effectively.
Second, people must remember that corporations are created, not born. State legislatures, not divine power, create corporations, and as such have the power to amend or revoke corporate charters. Our ancestors knew this. During the century after the Revolutionary War, according to the pamphlet "Taking Care of Business" by Richard Grossman and Frank Adams, citizens and legislators directed the fate of corporations by strictly limiting what they could do with their charters. They spelled out the rules each business had to follow and held business owners liable for any harms or injuries caused by their actions.
The 1886 Supreme Court decision declaring corporations "natural persons" quashed this promising line of democratic control, but the fact remains that embedded right in the Massachusetts constitution is a provision that gives the state the right and duty to limit and even revoke a charter if the activity of the business does not add to the common good. This is a tool that we, the pluribus of the unum, can use, if only we educate and organize ourselves.
Third, we do not have to hold ourselves in economic thrall to the corporations if we don't want to. The United States has a rich history of cooperative economic development, which today manifests itself in tens of thousands of cooperative businesses throughout the country. Socially responsible investing offers another avenue to make our dollars do good, and newsletters have blossomed about how to live frugally within the confines of an elaborate throw-away culture.
Many communities are looking into creating alternative currencies to supplement the federal money system, and self-described "deep ecologists" and believers in "bionomics" are looking at ways to increase regional economic development as an antidote to the depredations of the global economy. It's a fertile grouping of alternative ideas about how to salvage our dignity and reinstate our ability to rule ourselves.
Because the corporations are a creature of history and politics, not some natural formation like the earth itself, they are not the be-all and end-all of economic development in the world. They can, and must, be changed if any of us are to have a world worth living in. It will take hard work and much disappointment, but the truth is that people can make these changes if they really want to. The history is there, the tools are there, the ground has been broken -- now all that is required is the will to make history.
(July 1996)