Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close----Episode 6

       The First Civil War (1861-65) Was A Turning Point For 
                                              Corporations 

   The U.S. Civil War marked a turning point for corporate rights. Violent anti-draft riots rocked the cities and left the political system in disarray. The huge profits pouring in from military procurement contracts allowed industrial interests to take advantage of the disorder and rampant political corruption to virtually buy legislation that gave them massive grants of money and land to expand the Western railway system. The greater its profits, the tighter the emergent industrial class was able to solidify its hold on government to obtain further benefits. Seeing what was unfolding, President Lincoln observed just before his death : 

     Corporations have been enthroned. . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the Republic is destroyed. 

   The nation was divided against itself by the war ; the government was weakened by the assassination of Lincoln and the subsequent election of alcoholic war hero Ulysses S. Grant as president. The nation was in disarray.  Millions of Americans were rendered jobless in the subsequent depression, and a tainted presidential election in 1876 (similar to 2000) was settled through secret negotiations. Corruption insider deal-making ran rampant. President Rutherford B. Hayes, the eventual winner of those corporate-dominated negotiations, subsequently complained : "This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations." In his classic The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson wrote that during the 1880s and 1890s, "The halls of legislation were transformed into a mart where the price of votes was haggled over, and laws, made to order, were bought and sold." { Sounds mighty damned familiar.} 
   These were the days of such upstanding citizens as John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, James Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Philip Armour, and Jay Gould. Wealth begot wealth as corporations took advantage of the disarray to buy tariff, banking, railroad, labor, and public lands legislation that would FURTHER ENRICH THEM.  Citizen groups committed to maintaining corporate accountability continued to battle corporate abuse at state levels, and corporate charters continued to be revoked both by courts and state legislatures. 

    Corporations Got Enough Power To Rewrite  Laws That 
                    Governed Their Own Creation { Big step forward. }

   Gradually corporations gained sufficient control over key state legislative bodies to virtually rewrite the laws governing their own creation. Legislators in New Jersey and Delaware took the lead in watering down citizens' rights to intervene in corporate affairs. They limited the liability of corporate owners and managers and issued charters in perpetuity.  Corporations soon had the the right to operate in any fashion not explicitly prohibited by law. 

   A conservative court system that was consistently responsive to the appeals and arguments of corporate lawyers steadily chipped away at the restraints a wary citizenry had carefully placed on corporate powers. Step by step, the court system set new precedents  that made the protection of corporations and corporate property a centerpiece of constitutional law. These precedents made it virtually impossible for victims to recover damages in cases involving corporate-caused harm, and took  away the right of states to oversee corporate rates of return and prices. Judges sympathetic to corporate interests were quick to grant summary judgments that workers were responsible for causing their own injuries on the job, and declared wage and hours laws unconstitutional. They interpreted the common good to mean maximum production, no matter what was produced or who it harmed. These were important concerns to an industrial sector in which, from 1888 to 1908, industrial accidents killed 700,000 workers---roughly 100 per day.

              The Santa Clara Case and Corporate Theory

   The 1886 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad  has always been puzzling and controversial. From the time Progressive constitutional historians began to mount their attack on the Supreme Court after the Lochner decision in 1905, the Santa Clara case became one of the prominent symbols of the subservience of the Supreme Court during the Gilded Age to the interests of big business. { For the benefit of our non-- lawyer readers, the Lochner case involved the overturning by the SCOTUS of a New York statute limiting the number of hours individuals could work in bakeries per week. The reason for the statute was the health and safety of employees exposed to dust in the bakeries. The SCOTUS held that the Fourteenth Amendment created a right of contract and that New York's state legislature unconstitutionally abridged the right of workers and bakery employers to enter into employment contracts.} 

  The Santa Clara case held that a corporation was a person under the Fourteenth Amendment and thus was entitled to its protection. For such a momentous decision, the opinion in the Santa Clara case is disquietingly brief ---just one short paragraph ---and totally without reasons or precedent. Indeed, it was made without argument of counsel. It declared : 

     The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does. 

   Can it be that so casual a declaration as this did in fact represent a major controversial step in American constitutional history ? Did the decision actually represent a significant departure from American constitutional jurisprudence ? I, and others, think not.  The Santa Clara decision was not thought of as an innovation but instead was regarded as following a line of cases going back almost seventy years to the Dartmouth College Case, which I've already mentioned. 

   My interest, and the interest of many others, in the Santa Clara case extends far beyond the question of whether it was consistent with previous constitutional decisions. Whatever the SCOTUS justices had in mind, the case is usually thought to express a new theory of the corporation or, as it soon became fashionable to call it, of "corporate personality." The Santa Clara  case is thus asserted to be a dramatic example of judicial personification of the corporation, which, it is argued, radically enhanced the position of the business corporation in American law. 














   

"Madame Bovary," by Gustave Flaubert ---Episode 6

          Continuing On With The Emotional Life of Emma

   The ups and downs of Emma's emotions----the longings, the passions, the frustration, the loves, the disappointments ---- a checkered sequence, end in a violent self-inflicted and very messy death. Yet before we part with Emma, we shall mark the essential hardness of her nature, somehow symbolized by a slight physical flaw, by the hard angularities of her hands ; her hands were fondly groomed, delicate and white, pretty, perhaps, but not beautiful. 
   She is false, she is deceitful by nature : she deceives Charles from the very start before actually committing adultery. She lives among philistines, and she is a philistine herself. Her mental vulgarity is not so obvious as that of Homais. It might be too hard on her to say that the trite, ready-made pseudo progressive aspects of Homais's nature are duplicated in a feminine pseudo romantic way in Emma ; but one cannot help feeling that Homais and Emma not only phonetically echo each other but do have something in common --- and that something is the vulgar cruelty of their natures. In Emma the vulgarity, the philistinism, is veiled by her grace, her cunning, her beauty, her meandering intelligence, her power of idealization, her moments of tenderness and understanding, and by the fact that her brief bird life ends in human tragedy. 
 Not so Homais.  He is the successful philistine. And to the last, as she lies dead, poor Emma is attended by him, the busybody Homais, and the prosaic priest Bournisien. There is a delightful scene when these two --- the believer in drugs and the believer in God --- go to sleep in two armchairs near the dead body, facing each other, snoring in front of each other with bulging bellies and fallen jaws, twinned in sleep, united at lasting the same human weakness of sleep. And what an insult to poor Emma's destiny --- the epitaph Homais finds for her grave ! His mind scrammed with trite Latin tags but at first he is stumped by not being able to find anything better than sat victor ; pause, traveler (or stay, passenger). Pause where ? The end of this Latin tag is heroam calcas --- you tread on a hero's dust. But But finally Homais with his usual temerity substituted for hero's dust, your beloved wife's dust. Stay passenger, you tread upon your beloved wife ---the last thing that could be said about poor Charles who, despite all his stupidity, loved Emma with a deep, pathetic adoration, a fact that she did  realize for one brief moment before she died. And where does she die ? In the very arbor where Rodolphe and Emma used to make love. 
   {Incidentally, in that last page of his life, not bumblebees are visiting the lilacs in that garden but bright green beetles. Oh those ignoble, treacherous, and philistine translators of this novel from French to English. One would think that Monsieur Homais, who knew a little English, was Flaubert's English translator. }

   Homais has various chinks in his armor : 

1. His science comes from pamphlets, his general culture from newspapers ; his taste in literature's appalling, especially in the combination of authors he cites. In his ignorance, he remarks at one point " 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper," not knowing that he is quoting Shakespeare and not a Rouen journalist ---nor perhaps had the author of the political article in that newspaper known it either.

2. He still feels now and then that dreadful fright he got when he was almost jailed for practicing medicine. 

3. He is a traitor, a cad, a toad, and does not mind sacrificing his dignity to the more serious interests of his business or to obtain a decoration.

4. He is a coward, and notwithstanding his brave words he is afraid of blood, death, dead bodies.

5. He is without mercy and poisonously vindictive.

6. He is a pompous ass, a smug humbug, a gorgeous philistine, a pillar of society as are so many philistines. 

7. He does get his decoration at the endif the novel in 1856. Flaubert considered that his age was the age of philistinism, which he called muflisme. However, this kind of thing is not peculiar to any special government or regime; if anything, philistinism is more in evidence during revolutions and in police states than under more traditional regimes. The philistine in violent action is always more dangerous than the philistine who sits before his television set. 

Let us recapitulate for a moment Emma's loves, platonic and otherwise : 

1. As a schoolgirl she may have had a crush on her music teacher, who passes with his encased violin in one of the retrospective paragraphs of the book. 

2. As a young woman married to Charles (with whom at the beginning she is not in love), she first has an amorous friendship, a perfectly platonic one technically, with Leon Dupuis, a notary clerk.

3. Her first "affair" is with Rodolphe Boulanger, the local squire.

4. In the middle of this affair, since Rodolphe turns out to be more brutal than the romantic ideal she longed for, Emma attempts to discover an ideal in her husband ; she tries seeing him as a great physician and begins a brief phase of tenderness and tentative pride. 

5. After poor Charles has completely botched the operation on the poor stableboy's clubfoot---one of the greatest episodes in the book --- she goes back to Rodolphe with more passion than before.

6. When Rodolphe abolishes her last romantic dream of elopement and a dream life in Italy, after a serious illness she finds a subject of adoration in God. 

7. She has a few minutes of daydreaming about the opera singer Lagardy.

8. Her affair with vapid, cowardly Leon after she meets him again is a grotesque and pathetic materialization of all her romantic dreams. 

9. In Charles, just before she die, she discovers his human and divine side, his perfect love for her --- all that she had missed. 

10. The ivory body of Jesus Christ on the cross that  she kisses a few mites before her death, this love can be said to end in something like her previous tragic disappointment since all the misery of her life takes over again when she hears the awful song of the hideous vagabond as she dies. 

   

Corporations Are Not Human : Not Even Close ----Episode 5

                         HOLDING CORPORATIONS AT BAY 

    Much of America's history has been shaped by a long and continuing struggle for sovereignty between people and corporations. Although there have been similar struggles in other Western democracies, the U.S. experience assumes special importance because of the dominant role the United States has had in shaping the institutions of the world economy since the end of World War I. This global role became increasingly self-conscious and assertive when the United State emerged from World War II as the world's most powerful nation. Even as its economic power declined compared with that of Japan and Europe, the United States remained the dominant player in shaping international institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. As we shall see later, corporate interests have figured prominently in how the United States has defined its national interest in relation to these and other global institutions. Thus the history of corporate power in the United States is more than purely national significance. America was born of a revolution against the abusive power of the British kings and the chartered corporations used by the crown to maintain control over colonial economies. 
   The English Parliament, which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was made up of wealthy landowners, merchants, and manufacturers passed many laws intended to protect and extend their private monopoly interests. One set of laws, for example, required that all goods imported to the colonies from Europe and Asia first pass through England. Similarly, specified products exported from the colonies also had to be sent first to England. The Navigation Acts required that all goods shipped to or from the colonies be carried on English or colonial ships manned by English or colonial crews. Furthermore, although they had the necessary raw materials, the colonists were forbidden to produce their own caps, hats, and woolen and iron goods. Raw materials were shipped from the colonies to England for manufacture, and the finished products were returned to the colonies.
   
              Adam Smith Strongly Condemned Corporations 

   The practices mentioned above were strongly condemned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.( 1776 ) Smith saw corporations, much as he saw governments, as instruments for suppressing the beneficial competitive forces of the market. His condemnation of corporations was uncompromising. He specifically mentioned them twelve times in his classic thesis, and not once did he tribute any favorable quality to them. Typical is his observation that : "It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the greater part of corporation law, have been established." 
   It is noteworthy that the publication of The Wealth of Nations and the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence both occurred in 1776. Each was, in its way, a revolutionary manifesto challenging the abusive control of markets to capture unearned profits and inhibit local enterprise. Smith and the American colonists shared a deep suspicion of both state and corporate power.  The U.S. Constitution instituted the separation of governmental powers to create a system of checks and balances that was carefully crafted to limit opportunities for the abuse of state power. It makes no mention of corporations, which suggests that those who framed it did not foresee or intend that corporations would have a consequential role in the affairs of the new nation.
   In the young American republic, there was little sense that corporations were either inevitable or necessary. Family farms and businesses were the mainstay of the economy, much in the spirit of Adam Smith's ideal, although neighborhood shops, cooperatives, and worker-owned enterprises were also common. This was consistent with a prevailing belief in the importance of keeping investment and production decisions LOCAL and DEMOCRATIC. 
   The corporations that were chartered were kept under watchful citizen and governmental control. The power to issue corporate charters was retained by the individual states rather than being given to the federal government so that it would remain as close as possible to citizen control. Many provisions were included in corporate charters and related laws that limited use of the corporate vehicle to amass excessive personal power. The early charters were limited to a fixed number of years and required that the corporation be dissolved if the charter were not renewed. Generally, the corporate charter set limits on the corporation's borrowing, ownership of land, and sometimes even its profits. Members of the corporation were liable in their personal capacities for all debts incurred by the corporation during their period of membership.  Large and small investors had equal voting rights, and interlocking directorates were outlawed. Furthermore, a corporation was limited to conducting only those business activities specifically authorized in its charter. Charters often included revocation clauses. State legislators maintained the sovereign right to withdraw the charter of any corporation that in their judgment failed to serve the public interest, and they kept close watch on corporate affairs. By 1800, only some 200 corporate charters had been granted by the states. 

  In the nineteenth century an active legal struggle emerged between corporations and civil society regarding the right of the people, through their state governments, to revoke or amend corporate charters. Action by state legislators to amend, revoke, or simply fail to renew corporate charters was fairly common throughout the first half of the century. However, this right came under attack in 1819 when New Hampshire attempted to revoke the charter issued to Dartmouth College by King George III before U.S. independence. The Supreme Court overruled the revocation on the ground that the charter contained no reservation or revocation clause. 
   Outraged citizens, who saw this decision as an attack on state sovereignty, insisted that a distinction be made between a corporation and the property rights of an individual. They argued that corporations were created not by birth but by the pleasure of state legislatures to serve a public good. Corporations were therefore public, not private, bodies, and elected state legislators had an absolute legal right to amend or repeal their charters at will.  The public outcry led to a significant strengthening of the legal powers of the states to oversee corporate affairs. 
   As late as 1885, in Dodge v. Woolsey, the Supreme Court affirmed that the Constitution confers no inalienable rights on a corporation, ruling that the people have not 

   released their power over the artificial bodies which originate under the legislation of their representatives. . . Combinations of classes in society. . . united by the bond of a corporate spirit. . . unquestionably desire limitations upon the sovereignty of the people . . . But the framers of the Constitution were imbued with no desire to call into existence such combinations. 



    

"Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert ---Episode 5

                             More About Emma's Daydreaming

  The theme of Emma's daydreaming has some connections with the whippet(greyhound) , the gift of a gamekeeper which she took "out walking (in Tostes), for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road . . . Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander at random, like her whippet, who ran round and round in the open country, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew -mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of some acres of wheat. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, 'Good heavens! why did I marry?' 
   "She asked herself if by some chance combination it would not have been possible to meet another man ; and she tried to imagine what would have been those unrealized events, that different life, that unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old schoolmates had married. What were they doing now ? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses blossom. But her life was as cold as a garret, whose dormer-window looks on the north, and boredom, the silent spider, was darkly weaving its web in every nook of her heart." 

   The loss of the whippet on the journey from Tostes to Yonville symbolizes the end of her mildly romantic, elegiac daydreaming at Tostes and the beginning of more passionate experiences at fateful Yonville.  
   But even before Yonville, Emma's daydreaming romantic image of Paris emerges from the silk cigar case she picked up on that empty country road returning fromVaubyessard. This vision of Paris is one of a succession of Emma's daydreams that appear throughout the book. One daydream, shortly destroyed, is that she can make the name of Bovary famous through Charles. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of grim and passionate pursuits who work all night deep in their books, and finally at sixty, when the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a cross of honor stitched on their ill-fitting black coat ? She wished the name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers, repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition. 

                         Daydream Theme and Deceit Theme 

   The daydream theme joins quite naturally with the theme of deceit. She hides the cigar case over which she dreams ; she deceives Charles from the very first in order to have him take her elsewhere. By faking an illness, she is responsible for the removal to Yonville, supposedly a better climate : "Would this misery last for ever ? Would she never issue from it ? Yet Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep ; she envied the lives of stir ; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield. 
   "She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her more. . . 
  As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began ti think seriously of setting up elsewhere. 
   From the moment she drank vinegar to make herself thin, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite."

   It is in Yonville that fate will overtake her.The fate of her bridal  bouquet is a kind of premonition or emblem of her taking her own life a few years later. She had wondered when she found Bovary's first wife's bridal flowers what would be done to her bouquet. Now on leaving Tostes she burns it herself in a wonderful passage : "One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges . She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted ; and the shriveled paper petals, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney." 

The theme of daydreaming surfaces again in the romantic names she thinks of bestowing on her daughter. "First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala, ; she like Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better." The other characters are faithful to themselves in the names they propose. "Charles wanted the child to be named after her mother; Emma opposed this. " Monsieur  Leon, says Homais, "wonders why you do not choose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion now." 
  "But Madame Bovary senior cried out loudly against this name of a sinner.  As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for names that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a humane idea ... " One should note why Emma chose Berthe. "At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe ; from that moment this name was chosen." 
   The romantic considerations in naming the child contrast with the conditions under which she had been farmed out to nurse, an extraordinary custom of those days. Emma strolls with Leon to visit the child. "They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuces, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several nondescript rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country. " 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close------Episode 4

             Corporations Are A Burden Under Which The People 
                                       Groan In Misery 

The fact that the interests of corporations and people of wealth are closely intertwined tends to obscure the significance of the corporation as an institution in its own right.  On the more positive side, the corporate charter is a social invention created originally to aggregate financial resources in the service of a public purpose. ( Some omnipotent power did not create corporations.) On the negative side, it allows one or more individuals to leverage massive economic and political resources behind narrowly focused private agendas while protecting themselves from legal liability for the public consequences. 
  Less widely recognized is the tendency of individual corporations, as they grow in size and power, to develop their own institutional agendas aligned with imperatives inherent in their nature and structure that are not wholly under the control even of the people who own and manage them. These agendas center on increasing their own profits and protecting themselves from the uncertainty of the market. They arise from a combination of market competition, the demands of the financial markets, and efforts by individuals within them to advance their careers and increase their personal income. 
 Large corporations commonly join forces to advance shared political and economic agendas.  In the United States, they have been engaged for more than 150 years in restructuring the rules and institutions of governance to suit their interests. Once created corporations tend to take on a life of their own beyond the intentions of their human participants.
   Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet, with the largest among them reaching into virtually every country of the world and exceeding most governments in size and power. Increasingly, it is the corporate interest rather than the human interest that defines the policy agendas of states and international bodies. 

    Corporations Were The Instruments of Colonial Extraction 

 It is instructive to recall that the modern corporation is a direct descendant of the great merchant companies of fifteenth and sixteenth-century England and Holland. These were limited liability, joint stock companies to which the crown granted charters that conferred on them the power to act as virtual states in dealing with vast foreign territories.
   For example, in 1602 the Dutch Crown chartered the United East India Company, giving it a monopoly over Dutch trade in the lands and waters between the Cape of Good Hope at the Southern tip of Africa and the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America. Its charter vested it with sovereign powers to conclude treaties and alliances, maintain armed forces, conquer territory, and build forts. It subsequently defeated the British fleet and established sovereignty over the East Indies (now Indonesia)after displacing the Portuguese. Early on it acquired large tracts of land in Eastern Indonesia through a system of loans to cultivators that lead to their eventual dispossession. It prohibited the growing of cloves on lands not in Dutch hands. Unable to produce sufficient food to sustain themselves on the remaining infertile land of their islands, the local people were obliged to buy rice from the company at inflated prices, eventually ruining the local economy and reducing the population to poverty. 
   The British East India Company was the primary instrument of Britain's colonization of India, a country it ruled until 1784 much as if it were a private estate. The company continued to administer India under British supervision until 1858 when the British government assumed direct control. 
   In th early 1800s, the British East India Company established a thriving business exporting tea from China and paying for its purchases with illegal opium. China responded to the resulting social and economic disruption by confiscating the opium warehoused in Canton by the British merchants. This precipitated the Opium War of 1839 to 1842---which Britain won. As tribute, the British pressed a settlement on China that included the payment of a large indemnity to Britain, granted Britain free access to five Chinese ports for trade, and secured the right of British citizens accused of crimes in China to be tried by British courts. This settlement was a precursor to modern "FREE TRADE" agreements imposed by powerful Northern nations on weaker Southern nations. 
   British crown corporations also played an important role in the 
colonization of North America. The London Company founded the Virginia colony and for a time ruled it as company property. The Massachusetts Bay Company held rights to trade and colonization in the New England region. The Hudson's Bay Company, which was founded to establish British control over the fur trade in the Hudson's Bay watershed area of North America, was an important player in the British colonization of what is now Canada. 
   The corporate charter represented a grant from the crown that limited an investor's liability for losses of the corporation to the amount of his or her investment in it---a right not extended to individual citizens. Each charter set forth the specific rights and obligations of a particular corporation, including the share of profits  that would go to the crown in return for the special privileges extended. Such charters were bestowed at the pleasure of the crown and could be withdrawn at any time. Not surprisingly, the history of corporate-government relations since that day has been one of continuing pressure by corporate interests to expand corporate rights and to limit corporate obligations. (Sounds like a typical spoiled brat.) 

"Madame Bovary," by Gustave Flaubert --Episode 4

                                 More Flaubert Imagery

   The wedding procession winding its way through the fields should be compared with the funeral procession, with dead Emma, winding its way through other fields at the end of the book. In the wedding :"The procession, at first united like one colored scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding among the green wheat, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons as its scroll. Then came the married pair,  the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell ; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the fruiting bells from the oak-stems, or playing among themselves unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground ; from time to time she stopped to lift its hem, and then delicately with her gloved fingers, she picked off bits of coarse grass and small spikes of thistles, while Charles, his hand unoccupied, waited until she had finished. Old Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands down to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As to Monsieur Bovary senior, who, really despising all these folks, had come simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons---he was passing bar-room compliments to a young peasant girl with fair hair. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played the fool behind each other's backs, tuning themselves up for the coming fun. If one listened closely one could always catch the squeaking (cricket's note) of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields." 

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Emma is being buried. "The six men,  three on either side, walked 
slowly , panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choir-boys recited the De Profundis, and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of the path ; but the great silver cross rose always between the trees.  ( Compare the fiddler at the wedding.) 
   The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods ; each of them in her hand carried a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself weakening at this continual repetition of prayers and torches, beneath this oppressive odor of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was blowing ; the rye and colza ("cabbage seed") were green, dew-droplets trembled at the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gamboling of a foal running away under the apple trees. The pure sky was fretted with luminous clouds ; a bluish haze rested upon the huts covered with iris. Charles as he passed recognized each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this, when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to her. ( Curiously enough, he does not remember the wedding procession ; the reader is in a better position than he.) 
 The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time, laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave." 

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   After the wedding our young man's bliss in his daily life is pictured in another subtly sensuous paragraph. And here again we are forced to improve on the poor translations : "In bed, in the morning, by her side, his elbow on the pillow, he watched the sunlight as it touched the golden bloom on her cheeks half hidden by the scallops of her nightcap. At close range her eyes looked strangely large, especially when on waking up she opened and shut them. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, layers of successive colors, which, denser at the bottom, grew lighter toward the surface of the cornea." ( A lithe echo of the layers theme.) 

   __________________________________________________

   In chapter 6 Emma's childhood is shown in retrospect in terms of shallow romanesque culture, in terms of the books she read and what she got from those books. Emma is a great reader of romances, of more or less exotic novels, of romantic verse. Some of the authors she knows are first-rate, such as Walter Scott or Victor Hugo; others are not quite first-rate, such as Bernadine de Saint-Pierre or Lamartine. But good or bad this is not the point. The point is that she is a bad reader. She reads books emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character's place. Flaubert does a very subtle thing. In several passages he lists all the romantic cliches dear to Emma's heart; but his cunning choice of these cheap images and their cadenced arrangement along the curving phrase produce an effect of harmony and art. In the convent, the novels she read "were all love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postillions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, heart-aches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, 'gentlemen' brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed and weeping like tombstone urns. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, sleeked her hands over with dust of books from old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, under the foils of ogives, pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching the approach of a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields." 
 He uses the same artistic trick when listing Homais's vulgarities. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that matters in books.

Corporations Are Not Humans---Not Even Close : Episode 3

         Harmful Effects of Economic Globalization ---cont

   Economic globalization has greatly expanded opportunities for the rich to pass their environmental burdens to the poor by exporting both wastes and polluting factories. This has been a particularly common practice among Japanese companies, with nearby Southeast Asia being a major recipient. The figures are striking. Japan has reduced its domestic aluminum smelting capacity from 1.2 million tons to 140,000 tons and now imports 90 percent of its aluminum. 
   What this involves in human terms is suggested by a case study of the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corporation (PASAR). PASAR operates a Japanese-financed and constructed copper smelting plant in the Philippine province of Leyte to produce high-grade copper cathodes for shipment to Japan. The plant occupies 400 acres of land expropriated by the Philippine government from local residents at giveaway prices. Gas and wastewater emissions from the plant contain high concentrations of boron, arsenic, heavy metal, and sulfur compounds that have contaminated local water supplies, reduced fishing and rice yields, damaged the forests, and increased the occurrence of upper-respiratory diseases among local residents. Local people whose homes, livelihoods, and health have been sacrificed to PASAR now largely depend on the occasional part-time or contractual employment they are offered to do the plant's most dangerous and dirtiest jobs. 
  The company has prospered. The local economy has grown. The Japanese people have a supply of copper at no environmental cost to themselves. The local poor---the project's professed beneficiaries --- have lost their means of livelihood and suffer impaired health. The Philippine government is repaying the foreign aid loan from Japan that financed the construction of supporting infrastructure for the plant. And Japanese are congratulating themselves for the cleanliness of their domestic environment and their generous assistance to the poor of the Philippines. 
   There is nothing particularly special about this case, other than the fact that it has been documented. Thousands of similar stories illustrate the realities of corporate globalization. The Economist, an ardent globalization proponent, has argued that those who criticize such toxic dumping practices would deprive the poor of needed economic opportunities. 
   Although an open trading system is sometimes advocated as necessary to make up for the environmental deficits of those who have too little, it more often works in exactly the exactly the opposite way --- increasing the environmental deficits of those who have too little to provide additional environmental resources for those who already have more than their need. Furthermore, an open trading system makes it easier for the rich to keep the consequences of this transfer out of their own sight. The further out of sight those consequences are, the easier it is for those who hold power to ignore or rationalize them. 

             GROWTH IN THE NAME OF DEVELOPMENT

   Many developmental economists believe that moving a country on the path to industrialization requires that labor be forced off the farm and into the cities so that agriculture can be modernized and an urban industrial labor pool can be created. The parallels to the enclosure process in Britain are striking. Costa Rica provides a particularly egregious contemporary example of how it works. 
   Before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank restructured Costa Rica's economic policies in the name of easing its foreign debt problems. Costa Rica was widely known as one of the most stable, peaceful, prosperous, and equitable of Southern countries. It had a strong base of small farmers and a few of the large landholdings characteristic of other Latin American societies. The policies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank shifted the economic incentives away from small farms producing foods that Costa Ricans eat toward large estates producing for export. As a consequence, thousands of small farmers have been displaced, their lands have been consolidated into large ranches and agricultural estates producing for export, and Costa Rica's income gap is becoming more like that of the other Latin American countries. An increase in crime and violence has required sharp increases in public expenditures on police and public security. The country now depends on imports to meet basic food requirements, and the foreign debt that the structural adjustment was supposed to reduce has doubled. As outrageous as the consequences of their policies have been, the IMF and the World Bank point to Costa Rica as a structural adjustment success story because economic growth has increased and the country is now able to meet its growing debt service payments. 
   In Brazil, the conversion of agriculture from smallholders producing food for domestic consumption to capital-intensive production for export displaced 28.4 million people between 1960 and 1980 ---a number greater than the entire population of Argentina. In India, large-scale development projects have displaced 20 million people over a forty-year period. In 1989, ongoing World Bank projects were displacing 1.5 million people, and projects in preparation threatened another 1.5 million. Bank staffers were unable to point to a single bank-funded project in which the displaced people had been relocated and rehabilitated to a standard of living comparable to what they enjoyed before displacement. A conference on Asian development sponsored by Asian nongovernmental organizations working at the grassroots on environmental and poverty issues revealed an aspect of Asia's development experience that the gushing reports in World Bank documents and business periodicals never mention : 

   In Thailand, ten million rural people face eviction from the land they live on to make way for commercial tree farms. Ground water is depleted and mangroves are continually destroyed by export-oriented shrimp farms. Tribal people struggle for recognition of ancestral land rights in the forests of Eastern Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Philippines, the government's land reform program is systematically eroded by the conversion of prime agricultural lands into industrial estates and other non-agricultural uses---even as the country needs to spend its scarce foreign exchange on rice imports. Agricultural chemicals and toxic industrial wastes, including those brought to the region by foreign corporations and agencies under the guise of international assistance, continue to poison us. Dams and geothermal projects displace people and destroy agricultural and forest lands to meet the energy demands of export-oriented industries. Slum dwellers are evicted to make way for industries and shopping centers that benefit others. Destructive fishing practices, commonly sponsored by corporate interests serving foreign markets, deprive our fisherfolk of their livelihoods and threaten the regenerative capacities of our oceans. 

   We must free ourselves of the obsession of growth. 
   

"Madame Bovary," by Gustave Flaubert---Episode 3

                                This Is The Third Episode

   Madame Bovary the first is the widow of a bailiff. This is the first and false Madame Bovary, so to speak. In Chapter 2 while the first wife was still alive, the second one looms. Just as Charles installed himself opposite the old doctor as his successor, so the future Madame Bovary appears before the old one is dead. Flaubert could not describe her wedding to Charles since that would have spoiled the wedding feast of the next Madame Bovary This is how Flaubert calls the first wife : Madame Dubuc (the name of her first husband), then Madame Bovary, Madame Bovary Junior (in relation to Charles's mother) then Heloise, but the widow Dubuc when her notary absconds with her money in his keeping ; and finally Madame Dubuc. 
   In other words, as seen through the simple mind of Charles, she starts to revert to her initial condition when Charles falls in love with Emma Rouault, passing through the same stages but backward. After her death, when Charles Bovary marries Emma, poor dead Heloise reverts completely to the initial Madame Dubuc. It is Charles who becomes a widower, but his widowhood is somehow transferred to the betrayed and then dead Heloise. Emma never seems to have pitied the pathetic fate of Heloise Bovary. Incidentally, a financial shock assists in causing the death of both ladies.

     -------------------------------------------------------------------------

      The term romantic has several meanings. When discussing Madame Bovary----the book and the lady herself ----- we shall use romantic in the following sense : "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature." (Romanesque rather than romanticist.) A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind. Emma Bovary is intelligent, sensitive, comparatively well educated, but she has a SHALLOW MIND : her charm, beauty, and refinement do not preclude a fatal streak of philistinism in her.  Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional ; and her passion for luxury does not prevent her from revealing once or twice what Flaubert terms a peasant hardness, a strain of rustic practicality. However, her extraordinary physical charm, her unusual grace, her birdlike, hummingbirdlike vivacity --- all of this is irresistibly attractive and enchanting to three men in the book, her husband and her two successive lovers, both of them heels : Rodolphe, who finds in her a dreamy childish tenderness in welcome contrast to the harlots he has been consorting with ; and Leon, an ambitious mediocrity, who is flattered by having a real lady for his mistress. 
   Now what about the husband, Charles Bovary ? He is a dull, heavy, plodding fellow, with no charm, no brains, no culture, and with a complete set of conventional notions and habits. He is a philistine, but he is also a pathetic human being. The two following points are of the utmost importance. What seduces him in Emma and what he finds in her is exactly what Emma herself is looking for and not finding in her romantic daydreams. Charles dimly, but deeply, perceives in her personality an iridescent loveliness, luxury, a dreamy remoteness, poetry, romance. This The second point is that the love Charles almost unwittingly develops for Emma is a real feeling, deep and true, in absolute contrast to the brutal or frivolous emotions experienced by Rodolphe and Leon, her smug and vulgar lovers. So here is the pleasing paradox of Flaubert's fairy tale : the dullest and most inept person in the book is the only one who is redeemed by a divine something in the all-powerful, forgiving, and unswerving love that he bears Emma, alive or dead. There is yet a fourth character in the book who is in love with Emma but that fourth is merely a Dickensian child, Justin. Nevertheless, we should note him for sympathetic attention. 

          -------------------------------------------------------------

   Let's go back to the time when Charles was still married to Heloise Dubuc. In chapter 2 Bovary's horse ---horses play a tremendous part in this book, forming a little theme of their own ---takes him at a dreamy trot to Emma, the daughter of a patient of his, a farmer. Emma, however, is no ordinary farmer's daughter : she is a graceful young lady, brought up in a good boarding school with young ladies of the gentry. So here is Charles Bovary, shaken out from his clammy connubial bed (he never loved that unfortunate first wife of his, oldish, fly-chested and with as many pimples as the spring has buds---the widow of another man, as Flaubert has Charles consider her in his mind), so here is Charles, the young country doctor, shaken out of his dull bed by a messenger and then proceeding to the farm of Les Bertaux to reset the leg of a farmer. As he approaches the farm, his gentle horse all of a sudden shies violently, a subtle premonition that the young man's quiet life will be shattered. 
   We see the farm and then Emma through his eyes as he comes there for the first time, still married to that unfortunate widow. The half a dozen peacocks in the yard seem a vague promise, a lesson in iridescence. 

                 Let's Follow The Little Theme of Emma's Sunshade
                             Towards the End of the Chapter

  Some days later, during a day when the bark of the trees was glossy with dampness and the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting , Emma stood on the threshold ;then she went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of prismatic silk through which the sun shone illumined the white skin of her face with shifting reflected colors. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling with a precise drumming note, one by one, on the taut moire, the stretched silk. 
   Various items of Emma's sensuous grace are shown through Bovary's eyes : her blue dress with the three flounces, her elegant fingernails, and her hairdo. "Her hair in two bandeaux, or folds, which seemed each of a single piece, so sleek were they, her hair was parted in the middle by a delicate line that dipped slightly as it followed the incurvation of her skull (this is a young doctor looking) ; and the bandeaux just revealed the lobes of her ears (lobes, not upper "tips" as all translations have it; the upper part of the ears was of course covered by those sleek black folds) , her hair knotted behind in a thick chignon. Her cheekbones were rosy." 

   

Corporations Are Not Humans---Not Even Close : Episode 2

              From Home On The Range To The Full World

   Throughout most of human history, the aggregate demand placed on the planetary ecosystem by human economic activities has been inconsequential compared with the enormous regenerative capacity of those systems, and we have not been forced to take the issue of resource limits seriously. When industrialization caused countries to exceed that national resource limits, they simply reached out to obtain what was needed from beyond their own borders, generally by colonizing the resources of nonindustrial people. Although the consequences were sometimes devastating for the colonized people, the added impact on the planetary ecosystem was scarcely noticed by the colonizers. 

  Thus, Europe's industrialization was built on the backs of its colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For the United States, this same need was met largely by colonizing its western frontiers at the expense of the Native Americans who inhabited them and y expanding its economic domain to embrace Latin America and the Philippines. Japan, a more recent colonizer, used a sophisticated combination of aid, foreign investment, and trade to colonize the resources of its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia. Asia's newly industrializing countries, South Korea and Taiwan, are now reaching out in a similar manner, as are Thailand and Malaysia. 
   When only a small portion of the world was industrialized, environmental frontiers were available for exploitation through settlement, trade, and traditional colonization. Similarly, frontier territories served as a social safety valve to absorb surplus population from industrial societies. Between 1850 and1914, difficult economic conditions in Britain (average population of 32 million) prompted an outward migration of more than 9 million people mainly to the United States.
   The era of colonizing open frontiers is now in its final stage. The most readily available frontiers have been exploited, and the competition for the few that remain in such remote locations as Iran Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Siberia, and the Brazilian Amazon is intensifying. 
  It is relevant to our current inquiry to note that the out-migration from Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that the commonly-held idea --- that colonialism benefited the people of the colonized countries --- is largely myth.  The situation was more ambiguous and has much in common with the new corporate colonialism of economic globalization. For the most part, its benefits went to the monied classes, NOT to the average citizen. A recent study of the British colonial experience by two American historians found that although wealthy investors profited from investments in the colonies, the middle class received only the tax bills that supported the vast military establishment required to maintain the empire. The study concluded , "Imperialism can best be viewed as a mechanism for transferring income from the middle to the upper classes." Economic globalization is a modern form of the same imperial phenomenon, and it carries the same consequence. 
   The bottom line for our species is that because of population growth and the more than fivefold economic expansion since 1950, the environmental demands of our economic system now fill the available environmental space of the planet. This has brought us to a historic transition point in the evolutionary development of our species from living in a world in a world that's at home on the range to living in a full world in a mere historical instant. We now have the option of adjusting ourselves to this new reality or destroying our ecological niche and suffering the consequences. 
   The first environmental limits that we have confronted, and possibly exceeded, are not the limits of renewable resources and the  environment's ability to absorb our wastes ---referred to by ecologists as "sink functions." Evidence of our encounter with these limits is everywhere. Acid rain has damaged 31 million hectares of forest in Europe alone. At the global level, each year deserts encroach on another 6 million hectares of once productive land. The area covered by tropical forest is reduced by 11 million hectares, there is net loss of 26 billion tons of soil from oxidation and erosion, and 1.5 million hectares of prime agricultural land are abandoned due to salinization from irrigation projects. Per capita grain production has been falling since 1984. Five percent of the ozone layer over North America, and probably globally, was lost between 1980 and 1990. There has been a 2 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.  in the past 100 years. 
   The countries that are consuming beyond their environmental means control the rule-making process of the international community. They adjust the rules to ensure their own ability to make up their national environmental deficits through imports ---often without being mindful of the implications for the exporting countries. 

     El Salvador and Costa Rica grow export crops such as bananas coffee, and sugar on more than one fifth of their cropland. Export cattle ranches in Latin America and southern Africa have replaced rain forest and wildlife range. At the consumer end of the production line, Japan imports 70 percent of its corn, wheat, and barley, 95 percent of its soybeans, and more than 50 percent of its wood, much of it from the rapidly vanishing rain forests of Borneo. In the Netherlands millions of pigs and cows are fattened on palm-kernel cake from deforested lands in Malaysia, cassava from deforested regions Thailand, and soybeans from pesticide-dosed expanses in the south of Brazil in order to provide European consumers with their high-fat diet of meat and milk. 

   The lands used by Southern countries to produce food for export are unavailable to the poor of those countries to grow the staples they require to meet their own basic needs.  The people who are displaced to make way for export-oriented agriculture add to urban overcrowding or move to more fragile and less productive lands that quickly become overstressed. The grains that many Southern countries import from the North in exchange for their own food exports are often used primarily as feedstocks to produce meat for upper-income urban consumers. The poor are the double losers. 

   These dynamics are invisible to Northern consumers, who, if they do raise questions, are assured that this  arrangement provides needed jobs and income for the poor of the south, allowing them to meet their food needs more cheaply than if they grew the basic grains themselves. It seems like a plausible theory, but in practice the only certain beneficiaries of this shift from food economy to trade dependence have been the transnational agribusiness corporations that control commodities trade.
   

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

EPISODE 2

  In the first chapter we pick up our initial thematic line : the layers or layer-cake theme. This is the fall of 1828 : Charles is thirteen and on his first day in school he is still holding his cap on his knees in the classroom. "It was one of those headgears of a composite type in which one may trace elements of the bearskin and otterskin cap, the Lancers' shapska ( a flat sort of helmet ) , the round hat of felt, and the house cap of cotton; in fine, one of those pathetic things that are deeply expressive in their mute ugliness as the face of an imbecile. Ovoid, splayed with whalebone, it began with a kind of circular sausage repeated three times ; then, higher up, there followed two rows of lozenges, one of velvet, the other of rabbit fur, separated by a red band ; next came a kind of bag ending in a polygon of cardboard with intricate braiding upon it ; and from this there hung, at the end of a long, too slender cord, a tassel of gold threads. The cap was new ; its visor shone. ( So, you have ambitions to write a novel, do you ??? ) 

   In this, and in the three other examples to be discussed, the image is developed layer by layer, tier by tier, room by room, coffin by coffin. The cap is a pathetic and tasteless affair : it symbolizes the whole of poor Charles' future life---equally pathetic and tasteless.

   Charles loses his first wife. In June 1838, when he is twenty-three, Charles and Emma are married in a grand farmhouse wedding. A set dish, a tiered cake---also a pathetic affair in poor taste ---is provided by a pastry cook who is new to the district and so has taken great pains. "It started off at the base with a square of blue cardboard { taking off, as it were, where the cap had finished ; the cap ended in a polygon of cardboard } ; this square held a temple with porticoes and colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches studded with gilt-paper stars ; there came next on the second layer a castle in meringue surrounded by minute fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of orange ; and, finally, on the uppermost platform, which represented a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and nutshell boats, a little cupid sat in a chocolate swing whose two uprights had two real rosebuds for knobs at the top. " 
   The lake of jam here is a kind of premonitory emblem of the romantic Swiss lakes upon which, to the sound of Lamartine's fashionable lyrical verse, Emma Bovary, the budding adulteress, will drift in her dreams ; and we shall meet again the little cupid on the bronze clock in the squalid splendor of the Rouen hotel room where Emma has her assignations with Leon, her second lover. 
   We are still in June 1838 but at Tostes. Charles had been living in this house since the winter of 1835-1836, with his first wife until she died, in February 1837, then alone. He and his new wife Emma will spend two years in Tostes (till March 1840) before moving on to Yonville.{ First layer } : The brick front ran flush with the street, or rather highway. { Second layer} : Behind the door hung a cloak with a small cape, and on the floor, in a corner, there was a pair of leggings still caked with mud. { Third layer } On the right was the parlor , which served also as dining room. Canary yellow wallpaper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale flowers, quivered throughout its length on its loose canvas ; the windows were hung crosswise with white calico curtains, and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two silver-plated candlesticks under oval shades . { Fourth layer } : On the other side of the passage was Charles's consulting room, a little place about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office armchair. Volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science, the leaves unopened (that is, not yet cut open) but the 
binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost alone the the six shelves of a deal bookcase. {Fifth layer} : The smell of frying butter could be felt through the walls during office hours, just as in the kitchen one could hear the patients coughing in the consultation room and recounting all their woes. {Sixth layer} : Next came a large dilapidated room with an oven. It opened straight onto the stable 
yard and was now used as a woodshed, cellar, and storeroom." 
  In March 1846 after eight years of married life, including two tempestuous love affairs of which her husband knew nothing, Emma contracts a nightmare heap of debts she cannot meet and commits suicide. In his only moment of romanticist fantasy, poor Charles makes the following plan for her funeral :"He shut himself up in his consulting room, took a pen, and after a spell of sobbing, wrote :"I want her to be buried in her wedding dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. { Now come the layers.} Three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, and one of lead. . . Over all, there is to be laid a large 
piece of green velvet." 
   All the layers themes in the book come together here. With the utmost lucidity we recall the list of parts that made up Charles's pathetic cap on his first day of school, and the wedding layer cake. 




  



binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost alone the six shelves of a deal bookcase. { 

CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS---NOT EVEN CLOSE

                         POVERTY, WAR, AND DISEASE 
                         WERE NOT ELIMINATED BY 
                         THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF
                         THE OF THE 20th CENTURY 

   The twentieth-century institutions and leaders that promised a golden age are not delivering. They assail us with wondrous new gadgets, such as airplane seats with individual television monitors, and an information highway that makes it possible to connect to the Internet while sunning ourselves on the beach. Yet the things that most of us really want ---- a secure means of a livelihood, a decent place to live, healthy and uncontaminated food to eat, good education and health care for our children, a clean and vital natural environment --- seem to slip further from the grasp of most of the world's people with each passing day.

   Fewer and fewer people believe that they have a secure economic 
future. Family and community units and the security they once provided provided are disintegrating. The natural environment on which we depend for our material needs is under deepening stress. Confidence in our major institutions is evaporating, and we find a profound and growing suspicion among thoughtful people the world over that something has gone wrong.These conditions are becoming pervasive in almost every locality of the world and point to global-scale failure of our institutions. 

   In the United States, high levels of unemployment, corporate downsizing, falling real wages, greater dependence on part-time and temporary jobs without benefits, and the weakening of unions are creating a growing sense of economic insecurity and shrinking the middle class. The employed find themselves working longer hours, holding multiple part-time jobs, and having less REAL INCOME.  American workers are tired, depressed, and many are addicted to mindless late-night TV shows, or alcohol, or mind-altering substances. Many among the young---especially of minority races --- have little hope of ever finding jobs adequate to provide them with basis necessities, let alone financial security. Advanced degrees no longer guarantee jobs. 
   
  In rich and poor countries, as competition for land and natural resources grows, those people who have supported themselves with small-scale farming, fishing, and other resource-based livelihoods find their resources are being expropriated to serve the few while they are left behind to fend for themselves. The economically weak find their neighborhoods becoming the favored sites for waste dumps or polluting smokestacks.

   The world is increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who live in dehumanizing poverty, servitude, and economic insecurity.  While top corporate managers, investment bankers, financial speculators, athletes, and celebrities bring down multimillion-dollar annual incomes, approximately 1.2 billion of the world's people struggle desperately to live on less than $1 a day. One need not go to some remote corner of Africa to experience the disparities. I could see it daily within a couple of blocks of my daughter's law office in midtown Manhattan. Shiny chauffeured stretch limousines with built-in bars and televisions discharge their elegantly coifed occupants at trendy , expensive restaurants while homeless beggars huddle on the sidewalk wrapped in thin blankets to ward off the cold. 

   Deepening poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction share an important characteristic : solutions require local action---household by household and community by community. This action can be taken only when local resources are in local hands. The most pressing unmet needs of the world's people are for food, security, adequate shelter, clothing, health care, and education ---the lack of which defines true deprivation. With rare exception, the basic resources and capacity to meet these needs are already found in nearly every country. The natural inclination of local people is to give these needs priority. If, however, control lies elsewhere, different priorities usually come into play.

  Unfortunately, in our modern world, control seldom rests with local people. Most often it resides either with  central governmental bureaucracies or with distant corporations that lack both the capacity and the incentive to deal with local needs. The result is a crisis of confidence in our major institutions.

 Nobody With A Brain Cell Believes A Corporation Exists For  
Any Reason Other Than Aggregating Even Greater Wealth & Power

Public-opinion polls reveal a growing sense of personal insecurity and loss of faith in major institutions all around the world. Particularly telling is the public attitude in the United States, the country that defines for many of the world's people their vision of prosperity, democracy and high-tech consumerism. Here the polls tell us that the real dream of the vast majority of Americans is NOT for fast sports cars, fancy clothes, caviar,  giant TV screens, and country estates, as the popular media might lead one to believe. Rather, it is for a decent and secure life ---which American institutions are failing to provide. The single greatest fear of Americans in 1994 was job loss. Only 51 percent of non management employees in the United States felt their jobs were secure ---- DOWN FROM 75 PERCENT TEN YEARS EARLIER.  A similar drop occurred in the sense of job security among management employees. Fifty-five percent of adult Americans no longer believed that one could build a better life for oneself and one's family by working hard and playing by the rules. The future looks even bleaker.

   The Louis Harris polling organization's annual index of confidence in the leaders of twelve major U.S. institutions fell from a base level of 100 in 1966 to 39 in 1994. At the bottom of the list were the U.S. Congress (8 percent of respondents expressed great confidence), the executive branch of government (12 percent), the press (13 percent), and major companies (19percent). Meanwhile, the Louis Harris "alienation index," which taps feelings of economic inequity, disdain about people with power, and powerlessness, rose from a low of 29 in 1969 to 65 in 1993. A Kettering Foundation report captured the mood of the American electorate : "Americans describe the present political system as impervious to public direction, a system run by a professional political class and controlled by money, not votes."


  Confidence in our major institutions and their leaders has fallen so low as to put their legitimacy at risk ---and for good reason. 
                                              

"Madame Bovary," by Gustve Flaubert

                             Our Approach To Reading Emma

     The girl Emma Bovary never existed. The book Madame Bovary will exist forever and ever. The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and illusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Flaubert won his case. Today, our kids and grandkids watch much raunchier sex scenes on TV. Times change. 
   We shall discuss this book in terms of structures(if you read biographies of Flaubert, you know he called these mouvements),  thematic lines, style, poetry, and characters. The novel consists of 35 chapters, each about ten pages long, and is divided into three parts set respectively in Rouen and Tostes, in Yonville, and in Yonville, Rouen, and Yonville, all of these places invented except Rouen, a cathedral city in northern France. 
   The main action is supposed to take place in the 1830s and 1840s, under King Louis Philippe (1830--1848). Chapter 1 begins in the winter of 1827, and in a kind of afterword the lives of some of the characters are followed up till 1856 into the reign of Napoleon III and indeed up to the date of Flaubert's completing the book.  Madame Bovary was begun at Croisset, near Rouen, on the nineteenth of September 1851,  finished in April 1856, sent out in June, and published serially at the end of the same year in the  Revue de Paris. A hundred miles to the north of Rouen, Charles Dickens in Boulogne was finishing Bleak House in the summer of 1853 when Flaubert had reached part two of his novel. One year before that, in Russia, Gogol had died(we discussed this 8-10 years back) and Tolstoy had published his first important work, Childhood. 

          Don't Be Misled : Flaubert Invented All Characters and 
                    the Environment of Madame Bovary (I was formerly  
                    wrong about this.) 

Three forces make and mold a human being : heredity, environment, and the unknown agent X. Of these the second, environment, is by far the least important, while the last, agent X, is by far the most influential. In the case of characters living in books, it is of course the author who controls , directs, and applies the three forces. The society around Madame Bovary has been manufactured by Flaubert as deliberately as Madame Bovary herself has been made by him, and to say that this Flaubertian society acted upon that Flaubertian character is to talk in circles. Everything that happens in the book happens exclusively in Flaubert's mind, no matter what the initial trivial impulse may have been, and no matter what conditions in the France of his time existed or seemed to him to exist.  I missed the boat the first time around by insisting upon the influence of objective social conditions upon the heroine Emma Bovary. Flaubert's novel deals with the delicate calculus of human fate, not with the arithmetic  of social conditioning. 
   
             Don't Be Fooled by the Term Bourgeois, As I Was

   We are told that most of the characters in Madame Bovary are bourgeois. But one thing that we should clear up once and for all is the meaning that Flaubert gives to the term bourgeois. Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means "philistine," people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket.  For example, in a famous scene of our book when hardworking old woman, getting a medal for having slaved for her farmer-boss, is confronted with a committee of relaxed bourgeois beaming at her --- mind you, in that scene both parties are philistines, the beaming politicians and the superstitious old peasant woman --- both sides are bourgeois in Flaubert's sense. ( Recall that we so-called serious readers must also be careful readers. ) It's the same as in communist Russia, where Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, were fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. There was a lace curtain behind the iron one. A Soviet official, small or big, was the perfect type of bourgeois mind, of a philistine. The key to Flaubert's term is the philistinism of his character Monsieur Homais. Think about it this way : Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts. 


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The reign of LouisPhilippe, the citizen king ( le roi bourgeois ), from1830 to 1848, was a pleasantly dingy era in comparison to Napoleon's fireworks in the beginning of the century and to our own times. In the 1840s "the annals of France were tranquil under the cold administration of Guizot." But "1847 opened with gloomy aspects for the French Government : irritation, want, the desire for a more popular and perhaps more brilliant rule . . . Trickery and subterfuge seemed to reign in high places. . ." A revolution broke out in February 1848. Louis Philippe, "assuming the name of Mr. William Smith, closed an inglorious reign by an inglorious flight in a hackney cab." This is mentioned because good Louis Philippe with his cab and umbrella was such a Flaubertian character. Now another character, Charles Bovary, was born according to best calculations in 1815 ; entered school in 1828 ; became an "officer of health" (which is one degree below doctor) in 1835; married his first wife, the widow Dubuc, in the same year, at Tostes, where he started practicing medicine. After losing her, he married Emma Rouault (our heroine) in 1838 ; moved to another town, Yonville, in 1840 ; and after losing his second wife in 1846, he died in 1847, at age thirty-two. 

 THIS IS THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOK IN A CAPSULE    

What Happened To Our Manufacturing Jobs ?

It's important to talk ceaselessly about out national debt of $13.8 trillion, but we must not ignore our trade deficit. In 2008, our trade deficit was nearly $700 billion. In 2009, our trade deficit with China was almost $227 billion. In other words, we are purchasing a whole lot more products than we are selling. 


We are exporting a lot but we are importing a hell of a lot more. The big economic issue is that we are losing millions of good paying jobs because of our disastrous trade policy. On top of that, we are seeing a decline in wages and benefits provided by the jobs we still have. 

It's not just an economic issue. It is a moral issue as well. Take for example the story of General Electric(although they aren't the only culprits). The Federal Reserve's recent disclosure about bailouts pointed out that the taxpayers of this country, through the Fed, provided a $16 billion bailout to General Electric during the recent financial debacle. Here's the immorality of the issue : On December 6, 2002, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric told his managers this : 

   When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to $5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18-cubic-foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18-cubic-foot refrigerator today ourselves. 

But guess what ? ! ? A few years back when GE had some difficult economic times, and they needed $16 billion to bail them out, I don't recall hearing about Mr. Immelt going to China, China, China, China, China. Nobody heard anything of the sort. I heard all about Mr. Immelt going to the taxpayers of the United States for his welfare check. 

So I say to Mr. Immelt and the other CEOs who have been so quick to run to China that maybe it's time to start investing in the United States of America. Way too many American corporations see the future in China, in Vietnam, in countries where people work for pennies an hour. 
  Mr. Immelt came to his China decision of December 6, 2002 in the footsteps of the former CEO of GE, Jack Welch. What Jack Welch was famously quoted as saying is this : 
   "Ideally," said the guy who was head of General Electric before Immelt, "Ideally, we would have every plant on a barge."
   What did he mean by that ? What he meant by that is this : if you are on a barge, you can move your plant to any part of the world where the labor is the cheapest. So if it gets too expensive in China, and you have to pay people 75 cents an hour, you go to Vietnam. If it gets too expensive in Vietnam, maybe you can go to North Korea and have people work under martial law. 
   But what he was saying is that his goal was to make sure that GE would create jobs in those countries where workers were paid the lowest possible wage. 
   Former GE executive vice president Frank Doyle said : "We did a lot of violence to the expectations of the American workforce. We downsized,we delayered, and we outsourced." 
   
It's worth mentioning John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. He said we should tell young people that the future is in information technology. We want them to be smart, to learn how to use computers because they will not be going to work in factories. Then, in 2004, Chambers turned right around and said : "China will become the IT center of the world. And we can have a healthy discussion about whether that will be in 2020 or 2040. What we are trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company." He went on to say : "We believe in giving something back and truly becoming a Chinese company." 
   Meanwhile, when Cisco needs tax breaks, they get it from the taxpayers of the United States of America. Boy, are they playing us for a bunch of dumbasses. They outsource their jobs to China and we give them tax breaks. But, this is what corporate America believes is the righteous thing to do. They believe it is appropriate to throw American workers out on the street, move to low-wage countries, pay people a few cents an hour. and bring their products back to the United States. And some of the managers of these sleazy American corporations actually go to church and synagogue. 

  TOM DONOHUE, CEO OF U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

Tom Donohue is the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He got a lot of publicity during the 2008 POTUS election because  the Chamber of Commerce is a funnel for a lot of money that went into campaigns around the country. They raised tens of millions of dollars, on top of a huge chunk that was undisclosed. Most of the billionaires and other rich folks gave money to the Chamber of Commerce, and they were able to elect candidates who were sympathetic to their point of view. 

Let's find out what that point of view is. Way back in 2004, Tom Donohue said this :" One job sent overseas, if it happens to be my job, is one too many. But the benefits of offshoring jobs outweighs the cost."

Members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are in favor of offshoring American jobs. They think it is a good idea. They understand that if corporations throw American workers out on the street and go to China and pay people there pennies an hour, it will make more profits. They don't care about the United States of America. They don't care about young people in America. They don't care about the future of this country. The future of the world is in China. Here's an AP story about  Donohue that appeared in the press in 2004 : 

  " ' Donohue said Wednesday that exporting high-paid tech jobs to low-cost countries such as India, China, and Russia saves companies money. ' It's no surprise that Donohue, who tripled the Chamber of Commerce's lobbying team since 1997 and aggressively promotes pro-business policies, endorses offshoring. The 3 million member organization, the Chamber of Commerce, the world's largest business consortium, champions tax cuts, free trade, workers compensation reform, and more liberal trade policies with China."

If we want to understand why the middle class is collapsing, why unemployment is high, why our manufacturing base has been depleted, why it is hard to purchase a product made in the United States, it has a lot to do with our trade policies, which were pushed by people such as Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other greedy, selfish individuals. 

But it is not just a disastrous trade policy that has brought us to where we are today. The immediate cause of this crisis is what the crooks on Wall Street have done to the American people. These people fought for years to deregulate the banking industry. These people said to us : Well, if you would do away with Glass-Steagall, if you will just allow financial institutions, commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies to merge, do away with these walls which Glass-Steagall, since the Great Depression, established, my God, it will be just terrific. It will be good for the economy, good for the American people, good for our international competitiveness. 
   Hot shots appeared before the Financial Services Committee of the House of Representatives to argue for deregulation. People like Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin came before the congressional committee and said : "You have to deregulate. You have to let these guys merge. Bigger is better. " 

   What we saw is people on Wall Street operating from a business model based on fraud, based on dishonesty, understanding that the likelihood of them ever getting caught was small, that if things got very bad, they would be bailed out by the taxpayers, understanding that they are too powerful to ever be put in jail, to be indicted, understanding that in this country when you are a CEO on Wall Street, you have so much wealth and so much power and so many lawyers and so many friends in Congress, you could do pretty much anything you want and not much is going to happen to you----and they did it. Their greed and their recklessness and their illegal behavior destroyed this economy. 

   What they did to the American middle class is so horrible. Here we had a middle class that was already being battered by shameful trade agreements, loss of manufacturing jobs, health care costs, health care costs going up, college cost becoming out of reach ---that had been going on for years --- and then these Wall Street crooks started pushing worthless and complicated financial instruments and the whole thing exploded. 

And they came crying to the taxpayers of America to bail them out.