CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE ---Episode 14

 THE WHOLE POINT OF PRIVATIZATION IS TO TRANSFER 
 WEALTH FROM THE PUBLIC PURSE --- WHICH COULD 
 REDISTRIBUTE IT TO EVEN OUT SOCIAL INEQUALITIES
 ----- TO PRIVATE HANDS TO INCREASE THE BOTTOM
 LINE OF THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY RICH 


   The proponents of corporate libertarianism damned near shit in their knickers when the Soviet empire finally keeled over and died in 1989. They viewed the demise as an opportunity to press forward with their cause. They whooped and hollered over the thought that the world was finally becoming a global consumer society. 
   The governments and corporations of the West quickly reached out to urge Eastern Europe  and the countries of the former Soviet Union to embrace the lessons of Western success by opening their 
borders and greening their economies. Armies of Western experts were fielded to help these and other "transition states" write laws that would prepare the way for Western corporations to penetrate their economies. 
 Simultaneously, the industrial West intensified its effort to create a unified global economy through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), establish a powerful World Trade Organization (WTO), and create regional markets through such initiatives as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Maastricht (the European common market), and the Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC). Anxious to please powerful corporate interests, feeling Robert Rubin's tongue in his ear, and otherwise clueless about what else to do, President Bill Clinton embraced economic globalization as both his jobs program and his foreign policy.
   Marxist socialism died an ignoble death. However, it is no more accurate to attribute the West's economic and political triumph to the unfettered marketplace than it is to blame the U.S.S.R.'s failure on an activist state. Contrary to the boastful claims of corporate libertarians, the West did not prosper in the post-World War II period by rejecting the state in favor of the market. Rather, it prospered by rejecting extremist ideologies of both Right and Left in favor of DEMOCRATIC PLURALISM : a system of governance based on a pragmatic, institutional balance among the forces of government, market, and civil society. 
   Driven by the imperatives of depression and war, America emerged from Word War II with government, market, and civil society working together in a healthier, more dynamic, and more creative balance than at any time since the pre-Civil War years. A relatively egalitarian income distribution created an enormous mass market, which in turn drove aggressive industrial expansion. America certainly was far from socialist, but neither was it 100 percent laissez-faire capitalist. We might more accurately call it pluralist. This is the America that readily withstood the challenges posed by the Soviet empire to emerge as the Cold War victor. The America of democratic pluralism and equality defeated communism, not "free" market America. 
   Although the specifics differed, similar patterns of democratic pluralism prevailed in most of the Western industrial democracies. Some moved more toward public ownership and management of nationalized industries than others but within a pluralistic framework in which both market and government were strong players. 
   In contrast, the Soviet system embraced an ideological extremism so strongly statist that the market and the private ownership of property were virtually eliminated. The same ideology resulted in eliminating the civic sector's essential public oversight role. This left only a hegemonic and unaccountable state. Lacking the pluralistic balance and civic accountability afforded by the civic and market sectors, the Soviet economy was both unresponsive to popular needs and inefficient in the use of resources. The consequent suffering of the Soviet people was not a consequence of an activist state. It was the consequence of an extremist ideology that excluded everything except the state. 
   The West is now on a similar extremist ideological path ; the difference is that we are captive to detached and unaccountable corporations rather than to a detached unaccountable state. It is ironic that the closer the corporate libertarians move us toward their ideological ideal of laissez-faire capitalism, the less responsive the economy becomes to the real needs of people and planet. Ironically, the reasons for the failure are virtually identical to the reasons the Marxist economies failed : 

*   Both lead to the concentration of economic power in unaccountable centralized institutions --- the state in the case of Marxism, and the transnational corporations in the case of capitalism.

*   Both create economic systems that destroy the living systems of the earth in the name of economic progress. 

*   Both produce a disempowering dependence on mega-institutions that erodes the social capital on which the efficient function of markets, governments, and society depends. 

*   Both take a narrow economistic view o human needs that undermines the sense of spiritual connection to the earth and to the community of life essential to maintaining the moral fabric of society. 

   An economic system can remain viable only as long as society has mechanisms to counter the concentration and abuse of both state and market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate. Democratic pluralism isn't a perfect answer to the governance problem, but it seems to be the best we have discovered in our imperfect world.