Our Corporate Masters

A couple of days ago, I listened to an interview on Public Radio. A fellow from some free enterprise institute was asked if he thought there was corporate responsibility for creating jobs in this country. His reply was predictable but unusually chilling in the coldness of his certainty.

Personnel are a just an entry in the expenses column, he said. Asking a corpotation to hire more people is the same as asking them to raise their expenses. Providing jobs is not their responsibility. Corporations owe nothing beyond making profit. They aren't the same as the government, he said.

Beyond the fact that I made that same argument in a previous blog--corporations are not governments--I find his easy dismissal of any responsibility beyong lining the pockets of the wealthy to be repulsive.

If I had been interviewing this cold fish, I would have asked him why, given that corporations exist only to generate profit, they insist on doing their best to prevent the government from governing the people it has sworn to serve. Instead of demanding greater and greater profit squeezed from public resources, why aren't they out there being businesses instead of buying our legislators and lobbying for laws to the own advantage.?If they are not governments, what are they doing on Capitol Hill in the first place. That, supposedly, is where governing goes on, not in the boardrooms and the CEO bathrooms.

Instead of demanding concessions from us taxpayers, they should be paying us for the privilege of having access to our markets.

By any measure, our largest corporations have done well in this country except when their own greed has pulled them down. Economists now look on them as small nations in their own right. Walmart Stores, for example, ranks twenty-second in GDP revenues when compared with the economic resources of the world's nations. That's right--in comparison with national GDPs, Royal Dutch Shell ranks thirty-fourth, Exxon Mobile is thirty-fifth, and Toyota ranks forty-fourth. The only things larger than these corporations are countries such as the US (still the world's largest economy) and other nations including (in order) Japan, China, Germany, France, and the UK.

Looked at another way, of the top 100 economies in the world, 44 are corporations. The figures are not mine. I borrow them from the work of Tracy Keyes, Director of Strategy Dynames Global Limited and Thomas Malnight, professor of strategy and general management.

Figures such as these make it very difficult to feel sympathy for pathetic bleats regarding the need for ever yet more concessions and the continuance of subsidies that serve only to enrich the bonus checks of higher management. It doesn't make for compelling reading when what jobs remain in this country (free trade ventures seemingly only free to the extent that our jobs are freed to other countries) are held hostage to the corporate desire to wring yet more profits as the expense of this nation.

I'm not surprised that we are seeing the start of a grassroots movement that is spreading across the country. People are staring to recognize how much we are at the mercy of our corporate masters.

Just in the food industry, they centralize production for efficiency, destroy our local businesses by undercutting costs, and then feed us foods laced with chemicals to preserve them while they are shipped across the country to us. They claim lucrative farm subsidies and then drive out the smaller farms who are unable to compete. All this is justified by giving us more "choice" and lower prices. The logical end place for this is very hard to comtemplate. They will utterly control our food.

In the face of this, I have resolved to buy local wherever I can, although how much can one do in the face of oil companies with incomes larger than most of the nations of the world?

I, for one, hope this occupy Wall Street movement continues because the stakes are very high. I read somewhere that we have 300 million guns in this country. Let's hope we can bring about peaceful change and have our voices heard. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.