CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE _Episode 21

                                                       A DIFFERENT WORLD 

   When Alexander Trotman assumed the post of chairman, president, and CEO of Ford Motor Company in 1993, he was responsible for making more than 3 million vehicles a year. Yet he did not own a car of his own and had never bought one from a dealer. Ford, as is common practice in the auto industry, provides all its top executives with new cars --- ensuring that they always have cars that are in perfect working order without ever having the unpleasant experience of negotiating with a dealer and hassling 
with registration, insurance, repairs, and maintenance. 
   In 1989, Lone Star Industries took a $271 million loss. Its CEO, James E. Stewart, ordered layoffs, sold off $400 million of corporate assets, eliminated the dividend to stockholders, and told his managers to fly coach. Yet he maintained a $2.9 million expense account for himself and continued to commute in the 
corporate jet between his home in Florida and the company 
headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. As CEO of RJR Nabisco, F. Ross Johnson built a palatial hangar in Atlanta to house the corporation's ten planes and twenty-six corporate pilots. Next door he built a three-story VIP lounge complex with mahogany walls, Italian marble floors, and an atrium with a Japanese garden. Ivan Boesky, the global financier (with a talent for obtaining info from 
the inside), was known to order eight entrees from the menu at the 
exclusive Cafe des Artistes, sample each, and then decide which he would eat. 
   In June of 1991, at the annual conference of the American Forum for Global Education inHartford, Connecticut, Ed Pratt, the chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Inc., a drug and medical products producer with annual worldwide sales of $7 billion, was an opening 
speaker. He received an award for his contributions to global education and shared his insights on educational needs with several hundred American educators, telling them that the education of young Americans must focus on giving them the greatest competitive edge in the new global economy. In his view, there was no time for unnecessary frills---such as studying foreign languages. 
He reported that in his travels around Pfizer's world operations, he found that everyone with whom there was any need to talk already spoke English. So he advised that the classroom hours that children in other countries spend learning English be devoted to teaching American students science and economics. 
   Nike, a major footwear company, refers to itself as a "network firm." This means that it employs 8,000 people in management, design, sales, and promotion and leaves production in the hands of some 75,000 workers hired by independent contractors. Most of the outsourced production takes place in Indonesia, where a pair of  Nikes that sell in the United States for $73 to $135 is produced by girls and young women paid  as little as fifteen cents an hour.  The workers are housed in company barracks, there are no unions, overtime is mandatory, and if there is a strike, the military may be called to break it up. The $20 million that basketball star Michael Jordan reportedly received in 1992 for promoting Nike Shoes exceeded the entire annual payroll of the 
Indonesian factories that made them. { Richard I. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams : Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York : Simon and Shuster, 1994), pp. 325-29 } 
   When asked about the conditions at plants where Nikes are produced, John Woodman, Nike's general manager in Indonesia, gave a classic Stratos-dweller response. Although he knew that there had been labor problems in the six Indonesian factories making Nike shoes, he had no idea what they had been about. Furthermore he said, "I don't know that I need to know. It's not within our scope to investigate." 
   The Nike case is a striking example of the distortions of an economic system that shifts rewards away from those who produce real value to those whose primary function is to create marketing illusions to convince consumers to buy products they do not need at inflated prices. It is little wonder that many managers, like the Nike manager who avoided contact with Indonesian workers, prefer to avoid talking to too many people outside the elite circles. 
   It seems fitting that in 1993 the winner in the annual executive compensation package sweepstakes was master illusionist Michael Eisner, chairman of the Walt Disney Company, a corporation dedicated to the creation of fantasy worlds. Eisner's compensation package of $203.1 million equaled 68 percent of the company's total profits of $299.8 for that year --- surely ample to create a few 
personal illusions of his own. 
   
   This is the cloud world in which the architects of the global economic order live. For themselves and their corporations, local 
markets become too confining. No amount of wealth and power is enough. They must constantly push new frontiers, build new empires, and colonize new markets. There is good reason to conclude that people who are so isolated from the daily reality of those they rule are ill prepared to define the public interest.