CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE ---Episode 8

       ASCENDANCE AND REVERSAL OF PLURALISM

   By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, business excesses of the1920s, the depression, and the resulting plight of farmers, laborers, the elderly, blacks, women, and others had produced a wave of political and cultural radicalism throughout the United States. Roosevelt feared that without dramatic action, this radicalism might overwhelm the entire structure of government. He set about to save the system by pushing through an epic agenda of social and regulatory reforms. Congress's passage of his National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was key, as it gave government a mandate to play a more active role in achieving an economic recovery that market forces alone were unable to manage.
   On May 27, 1935, the SCOTUS voided the NIRA and ruled that states could not set minimum wage standards. This decision continued a century-old pattern of Supreme Court defense of business and corporate rights over civil and human rights. The 
Supreme Court's action on NIRA and the minimum wage radicalized a furious Roosevelt, motivating his commitment to a sweeping reform of American institutions. He set about to break up the business trusts, strengthen the regulation of business and financial markets, and push through legislation providing stronger guarantees for worker rights. Programs of public employment were started, and a social safety net was put in place.
   Roosevelt attacked the Supreme Court with a vengeance and tried to expand its membership with new appointments of his choice. His attempt to "pack" the court failed, but his charges had a distinct impact on the justices themselves, and the majority became more supportive of progressive initiatives. In the end, Roosevelt's long period in office allowed him to appoint justices to fill seven of the Court's nine seats, setting the Court on a liberal course that lasted until the 1970s, when Republican President Richard Nixon began to re-create the Court in its earlier pro-business, anti-human image. 
   World War II brought the government into an even more central and politically accepted role in managing economic affairs. The government placed controls on consumption, coordinated industrial output, and decided how national resources would be allocated in support of the war effort. A combination of a highly progressive tax system put in place to finance the war effort, full employment at god wages, and a strong safety net brought about a massive shift in wealth distribution in the direction of greater equity. In 1929, there were 20,000 millionaires in the United States and two billionaires. By 1944 there were only 13,000 millionaires and no billionaires.  The share of total wealth held by the top 0.5 percent of U.S. households fell from a high of 32.4 percent in 1929 to 19.3 in 1949. It was a great victory for the expanding middd class and for those among the working classes who rose to join its ranks. 
  Pluralism flourished into the 1960s, a period of cultural rebellion in the United States. A new generation, the flower children, vocally challenged basic assumptions about lifestyles, the military-industrial complex,foreign military intervention, the exploitation of the environment, the rights and roles of women, civil rights, equity, and poverty. The U.S. corporate establishment was badly shaken by the apparent threat to its values and interests. Perhaps most threatening of all was that the young were dropping out of the consumer culture. This generation was rebelling not so much against poverty and the deprivations of exploitation as against the excesses of affluence. This rejection of materialism by a new generation of Americans in some ways presented a more fundamental threat to the system than had earlier generations of angry workers seeking a living wage and safe working conditions.
   The names of consumer activist Ralph Nader and environmentalist Rachel Carson became household words. Liberal Democrats had firm control of Congress and were passing important legislation to strengthen environmental protection and product and worker safety. The government was aggressively pursuing antitrust cases to break up monopolies and keep markets competitive. 
   Abroad, U.S. corporations were under attack on two fronts, Japan and Asia's newly industrializing countries { NICs }---Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong --- had become enormously successful in penetrating U.S. markets. At the same time, U. S. corporations were being prevented from fully penetrating Southern economies, including those of the NICs, by aggressive government support of domestic industries, protectionism, and foreign investment restrictions. U.S. corporations felt these Southern government policies put them at an unfair disadvantage. With hight taxes on corporations and investor incomes and rigorous enforcement of environmental and labor standards at home, U.S. corporations cried foul and demanded the creation of "a level playing field." 
   
                      ELECTION OF RONALD REAGAN 

   The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 ushered in a concerted and highly successful effort to roll back the clock on the social and economic reforms that had created the broad-based prosperity that made America the envy of the world and to create a global economy that was more responsive to U.S. corporate interests.
   In his insightful book Dark Victory, Philippine economist Walden Bello provides a Southern perspective on the Reagan agenda : 

       A highly ideological Republican regime in Washington . . . abandoned the grand strategy of "containment liberalism" abroad and the New Deal modus vivendi at home. Reaganism in practice was guided by three strategic concerns. The first was the re-subordination of the South within a U.S. -- dominated global society. The second was the rolling back of the challenge to U.S. economic interests from the NICs, or "newly industrializing countries," and from Japan. The third was the dismantling of the New Deal's "social contract" between big capital, big labor and big government which both Washington and Wall Street saw as the key constraints on corporate America's ability to compete against the NICs and Japan. 

   The debt crisis of 1982 provided the opportunity to address the threat of prospective new NICs. The U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund moved to restructure the economies of debt-burdened Southern countries to open them to penetration by foreign corporations. The structural adjustment policies imposed by these institutions rolled back government in economic life in support of domestic entrepreneurs, eliminating barriers to imports from the North, lifted restrictions on foreign investment, and integrated Southern economies more tightly into the Northern-dominated world economy. Trade policy was the weapon of choice for imposing similar reforms on the NICs. 
   
  The Full Political Resources Of Corporate America Were 
  Mobilized To Regain Corporate Control Of The Political 
  Agenda And The Court System 

  High on the political agenda of the crowd that took over Washington D.C. in 1981 were domestic reforms intended to improve the global competitiveness of the United States by getting government "off the back" of business. Taxes on the rich were radically reduced and restraints on corporate mergers and acquisitions removed. Enforcement of environmental and labor standards was weakened. The government sided with aggressive U.S. corporations seeking to make themselves more globally competitive by breaking the power of unions, reducing wages and benefits, downsizing corporate workforces, and shifting manufacturing operations abroad to benefit from cheap labor and lax regulation.
   As these measures took hold in the United States, unemployment became a chronic problem, and labor unions lost members and political clout. Wages began to decline, as did the incomes of the poorest households. A fortunate few profited handsomely. The earnings of big investors, top managers, entertainers, star athletes, and investment brokers skyrocketed. The number of billionaires in the United States increased from one in 1978 to 120 in 1994. Lending abuses by a deregulated savings and loan industry left U.S. taxpayers with a bill for $500 billion to clean up the mess. These were hard times for ordinary citizens. Greed had a field day. 
  As the Reagan initiatives took hold abroad, backed by similar conservative revivals in other Western nations, the same patterns emerged in most of the other Western nations, as well as the indebted countries of the South. Inequality increased within and between countries. Unemployment rose to alarming levels, and many indicators that had shown steady improvement over the previous three decades stagnated or in some instances began to decline. Many of the indebted Southern countries fell even further into international debt.The number of billionaires in the world increased from 145 in 1987 to 358 in 1994. 
   The Reagan Administration had pledged to arrest U.S decline. However, it made a number of strategic blunders that strengthened U.S. military might and economic growth in the short term, but seriously weakened the U.S. position in the global economy over the longer term. First, massive deficit spending on the military contributed to making the United States the world's leading debtor nation. Second, by denying any government role in economic planning and priority setting, the Reagan bunch left the economic future of the United States entirely in the hands of corporations that were being pressed by the capital markets to focus only on short-term profits.  Third, by allowing corporations to pursue their anti-labor strategy, the United States squandered its key resource in the global marketplace --- its human capital. Overall, however, the strategy has worked brilliantly for for the largest corporations, their top managers, and their wealthiest shareholders --- at the expense of the planet and most of the world's people.