CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE -Episode 23

                             BUYING OUT DEMOCRACY

   U. S. corporations entered the 1970s besieged by a rebellious anticonsumerist youth culture, a mushrooming environmental and product safety movement, and a serious economic challenge from Asia. Not only was their dream of global hegemony in tatters, they even risked losing control of their own home turf. In response, they mobilized their collective political resources to regain control ofthe 
political and cultural agenda. Their methods included a combination of sophisticated marketing techniques, old-fashioned vote buying, funding for ideologically aligned intellectuals, legal action, and many of the same grassroots mobilization techniques that environmental and consumer activists had used against the corporations during the 1960s and 1970s. Their campaigns were 
well funded, involved sophisticated strategies, and were professionally organized. The major goals of the corporate enemies were deregulation, economic globalization, and the limitation of corporate liability --- in short, to enlarge greedy, reckless corporate rights and reduce corporate responsibilities. And their campaign continues in full force in 2014.




      MOBILIZING CORPORATE POLITICAL RESOURCES

   In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sought the advice of 
Virginia attorney and future Supreme Cort Justice Lewis Powell about the problems facing the business community. Powell produced a memorandum, "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," that warned of an assault by environmentalists, consumer activists, and others who "propagandize against the system, 
seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it." He argued that it was time "for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it." This set the stage for an organized effort effort by a powerful coalition for business groups and ideologically compatible foundations to align the U.S. political and legal system with their ideological vision. 
   Among Powell's recommendations was a proposal that the business community create a business-organized and-funded legal center to promote the general interests of business in the nation's courts. This led to the formation of the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) in 1973. Housed in the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce building, it was the first of a number of corporate-sponsored "public-interest" law firms dedicated to promoting the interests of their sponsoring corporations. The PLF specialized in defending business interests against "clean air and water legislation, the closing of federal wilderness areas to oil and gas exploration, workers' rights, and corporate taxation. " Some 80 percent of its income was from corporations or corporate foundations. 
  In a 1980 speech, PLF's managing attorney Raymond Momboisse turned reality on its head by attacking environmentalists for their "selfish, self-centered motivation . . . ; their ability to conceal their true aims in lofty sounding motives of public interest ; their indifference to the injury they inflict on the masses of mankind ; their ability to manipulate the law and the media ; and, most of all, their power to inflict monumental harm on society." 
   
 Business interests (Such as the John M. Olin Foundation) funded the establishment of law and economics programs in leading law schools to support scholarly research advancing the premise that the unregulated marketplace produces the most efficient---and thereby the most just --- society. Business funded all-expense-paid seminars at prestigious universities such as Yale and George Mason  to introduce sitting judges to these economic principles and their application to jurisprudence. 

Before the 1970s, business interests were represented by old-fashioned corporate lobbying organizations with straightforward names : Beer Institute, National Coal Association, Chamber of Commerce, or American Petroleum Institute. As aggressive public-interest groups succeeded in mobilizing broad-based citizen pressures on Congress, business decided that another approach was needed. 
   Corporations began to create their own"citizen" organizations with names and images that were carefully constructed to mask their corporate sponsorship and their true purpose. The National Wetlands Coalition, which featured a logo of a duck flying blissfully over a swamp, was sponsored by oil and gas companies and real estate developers to fight for the easing of restrictions on the conversion of wetlands into drilling sites and shopping malls. Corporate-sponsored Consumer Alert fights government regulations of product safety. Keep America Beautiful attempts to give its sponsors, the bottling industry, a green image by funding anti-littering campaigns, while those same sponsors actively fight mandatory recycling legislation. The strategy is to convince the public that litter is the responsibility of consumers ---not the packaging industry.
   The views of these and similar industry-sponsored groups --- thirty-six of them are documented in Masks of Deception : Corporate Front Groups in America---are regularly reported in the press as the views of citizen advocates. The sole reason for their existence is to convince the public that the corporate interest is the public interest and that labor, health, and the environment are "special" interests. The top funders of such groups include Dow Chemical, Exxon, Chevron USA, Mobil, DuPont, Ford, Phillip Morris, Pfizer, Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto, Proctor& Gamble, Phillips Petroleum, AT&T, and Arco. 
   Business interests funded the formation of new conservative policy makers who think in tanks such as The Heritage Foundation and revived lethargic pro-establishment tank thinkers such as the American Enterprise Institute, which experienced a tenfold increase in its budget. In 1978, the Institute for Educational Affairs was formed to match corporate funders with sympathetic scholars producing research studies supporting corporate views on economic freedom. 
   In 1970, only a handful of the Fortunate 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington; by 1980, more than 80 percent did. In 1974, labor unions accounted for half of all political action committee (PAC) money. By 1980, the unions accounted for less than a fourth of this funding. With the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981, the ideological alliance of corporate libertarians consolidated its control over the instruments of power. 
   Although many of those involved in these campaigns truly believe that they are acting in the public interest, what we are seeing is a frontal assault on democratic pluralism to advance the ideological agenda of corporate libertarianism. Though advanced in the name of freedom and democracy, this massive abuse of corporate power mocks them both.