MILINT: Ecology of Peace: Control of Consumption

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

CONTROL OF CONSUMPTION: GLOBAL CORPORATE CULTURAL IMPERIALISM RACKET ―It is increasingly plausible that the total social costs of growth (many of which go unaccounted) now exceed the measurable benefits. If so, the world has entered an era of uneconomic growth, growth that impoverishes (see Daly, 1999; Siegel, 2006).‖ - William Rees; What‘s blocking Sustainability? Human nature, cognition and denial1 ―Corporations have gained the position of an imperial, dictatorial power by the subordination of all of our societal values to the single unrealistic aim of somehow maintaining endless economic growth and ever greater short-term profit for the wealthy few (no matter what the cost).‖ - Karen Coulter, Corporations and the Public Interest, Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy, 1999, 98 ―When it comes to grazing at the federal trough, no one sits taller in the saddle than corporate cowboys.‖ - Paul Rogers and Jennifer LaFleur, "Damage Goes on at Taxpayer Expense,", San Jose Mercury News, November 7, 1999. ―Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating... There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.‖ - Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, 1993, 3. ―Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.‖ - Benito Mussolini ―Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.‖ - Winston Churchill

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http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol6iss2/1001-012.rees.html

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Control of Consumption: Global Corporate Cultural Imperialism Racket

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Anthropological Perspective of Cultural Capitalism‘s Global Problems

03-06

Cultural Imperialism: The Religion of Compulsive Developmentism

06-22

Corporate Neo-Liberalism: Cultural Colonizers of Indigenous People's

22-25

Melting Pot Multiculturalism: the ideal Egotist Consumptionism Ideology of Multinational Capitalism

26-29

Consumptionism

29-33

Control of Consumption: Effect on Climate Change

33-37

Corporate Influence and Control of Anthropocentric Jurisprudence

37-68

Corporate Media's Growth Agenda Censorship of PopulationScarcity-Conflict Connection

68-86

De-Industrialization Factor: Only De-Industrialization can prevent runaway global climate change

86-89

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

Anthropological Perspective of Cultural Capitalism’s Global Problems [1]

In Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism2, Richard Robbins, a

Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh takes an anthropological approach to understanding the industrial revolution and the role of consumer capitalism contributed to a group of societies clustered largely, but not exclusively, in the area of northern Europe, east Asia, and North America, came to politically and economically dominate the societies of the rest of the world; and the consequent global problems.

[2]

The importance of an anthropological perspective is because a central tenet of

anthropology is that personal, social, cultural, and historical factors determine the point of view any person might have of a specific phenomenon. No less is true of the members of capitalism who have created the view that we have of global events.

Consequently, these views tend to be, to one extent or another, ethnocentric, the describing, evaluating, and judging of events solely from a specific cultural perspective. One of the major purposes of anthropology is to teach how to avoid ethnocentrism and to appreciate the importance of understanding the beliefs and behaviors of others from their own perspective rather than our own, a view anthropologists refer to as cultural relativism. In order to minimize cultural bias we must recognize the fact that our view of events is partially influenced by our culture, and, for that reason, we must make our own culture an object of analysis.

[3]

His intent is to provide enough background for the reader to begin to better

understand

global

problems,

such

as

population

growth,

world

hunger,

environmental destruction, disease, ethnic conflict, rebellion, and social and religious protest. His approach is anthropological, but he does not hesitate to draw from other disciplines --history, sociology, geography, political science, and, economics -- when he feels that is necessary to understand first, capitalism, and second, how that culture contributes to the global problems, including land scarcity resulting from land colonization, he proceeds to discuss.

[4]

For most of their existence human beings lived as bands of gatherers and

hunters, only a little bit as agriculturists and farmers, and just more recently as industrialists and wage laborers. The industrial revolution however, has transformed the world and human societies as no event in history. In order to understand the events, issues, and problems of today's world we must understanding how and why that happened.

2

Richard Robbins: Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism; Allyn & Bacon Publishing Inc

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [5]

He summarizes his approach as follows: there has emerged over the past five

to six centuries a distinctive culture or way of life dominated by a belief in commodity consumption as the source of well-being. This culture flowered in Western Europe, reached fruition in the United States and spread to encompass much of the rest of the world, creating what some anthropologists, sociologists, and historians call the world system. People disagree on the critical factor in the development of this system, and whether or not it was even historically unique, although most agree on certain basic ideas. Among the most important are the assumptions that the driving force behind the spread of the contemporary world system was industrial and corporate capitalism, and that the spread of the world system is related in some way to the resulting

division

of

the

world

into

wealthy nations and poor nations, or into wealthy core, developed, or industrialized areas,

and

dependent

peripheral,

undeveloped, or non-industrialized areas.

The spread of the capitalist world system has been accompanied by the creation of distinctive patterns of social relations, ways of viewing the world, patterns of food production, distinctive diets, patterns of health and disease, relationships to the environment, and so on. The spread of this culture has not gone uncontested; there has been resistance that has taken the form of both direct and indirect actions --political, religious, and social protest and revolution.

We can perhaps best conceptualize the working of the culture of capitalism as sets of relations between capitalists, laborers, and consumers, each depending on the other, yet each placing demands on, and often conflicting with, the others. In this cultural scheme, the nation–state serves as, among its other functions, a mediator, controlling the creation and flow of money and setting and enforcing the rules of interaction. (Figure 1.1 is a highly simplified model, but it serves to underline the key features and unique style of the culture of capitalism.)

Where did the culture of capitalism come from? One of the assumptions of this book is that the emergence of capitalism has been misrepresented by many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists; rather than recognizing it as the emergence of a historically unique culture, they have generally portrayed it as an inevitable historical or evolutionary development. Capitalist culture was equated with "civilization," implying that anything CC :: 4

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket different was "uncivilized." Later it was considered part of a process of "modernization," implying that anything else was "primitive" or "traditional." The emergence of the culture of capitalism, particularly in the so-called third world, was called "economic development," once again implying that anything less was "undeveloped" or "underdeveloped." However, if we look at capitalism as one cultural adaptation out of many, we will better able to understand and judge the effects it has had on the world‘s peoples and see its spread not as inevitable development, growth, or modernization, but as the displacement, for better or worse, of one way of life by another. Put another way, there is not much to choosing (as we must if capitalism is equated with progress, modernity, and development) between being modern or primitive, developed or undeveloped, civilized or uncivilized; it is, however, a very different matter in choosing whether to be a member of the culture of capitalism or a Zuni, Guaran‘, Mohawk, Chuckchee, Nuer, or Murngin.

The emergence of the culture of capitalism has left little in our lives untouched—it has affected our material, spiritual, and intellectual life; it has reshaped our values; and, as we shall see, it has largely dictated the direction that every institution in our society would take. It has produced wave after wave of consumer goods, revolutionized food production, and prompted previously unimagined developments in technology, communications, and medicine.

Most dramatically, at least from the anthropological point of view, "feeding" the consumer has required a level of global integration unmatched in human history. The clothes we wear more often than not are produced in whole or in part by people in Malaysia, Hong Kong, or El Salvador; workers in Brazil probably cut the sugarcane that became the sugar that sweetens our soft drinks; our morning coffee began as coffee beans in the highlands of Colombia; the oranges we eat may have been grown in Spain, packed in cardboard boxes made of Canadian pulpwood, wrapped in plastic produced in New Jersey, and transported on trucks made in France with Italian, Japanese, and American parts. Our radios, televisions, and VCRs are most likely assembled by workers in Mexico, Haiti, or Indonesia; and our automobiles, of course, may have been produced at least in part in Japan, Taiwan, or Korea.

Furthermore, the culture of capitalism is being exported to all parts of the globe. Yet few people are aware of how the culture works and how it affects our lives and those of people all over the world—how American consumption, labor, and investment patterns relate to wages paid to women in Indonesia, the destruction of the rainforests in Paraguay, or the use of water on the American Plains. This is not necessarily the fault of the individual, for as we shall see, the culture of capitalism purposefully masks from its members the problems that result from its maintenance and spread.

Capitalism requires constant change—new modes of production, new organizations of labor, the expansion of markets, new technology, and the like. It requires a society of perpetual growth. On the one hand this allows a capitalist economy enormous adaptability and flexibility. It allows business to take advantage of new CC :: 5

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket technologies, to create new products and jobs, to pursue new markets, to experiment with new forms of financing, to abandon unprofitable products, forms of labor, or markets. On the other hand, this flexibility often has far-reaching effects on patterns of social and political relations.

[6]

One of the problems faced by indigenous peoples, is that their sustainable self-

sufficient, non-consumption focussed cultures often conflict with the compulsive developmentism culture of capitalism. Indigenous, peasant and agrarian cultures are incompatible with the culture of capitalism; because of their focus on self sufficiency and refusal to become debt consumer and/or labour slaves in the capitalist juggernaut.

Cultural Imperialism: The Religion of Compulsive Developmentism "In Savages & Civilization, Jack Weatherford makes the case that the scientific, artistic, musical and philosophical achievements

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket of civilization were all inspired by our contact with savages.

Primitivists believe that, if it is at all possible to call any culture ―superior,‖ then it must be that of the primitives — those who inspired all of our greatest achievements, and suffer none of our worst flaws." - Jason Godesky, 5 Common Objections to Primitivism and Why They're Wrong3; Anarchist Library

[7]

Laura Carlsen, Indigenous Communities in Latin America: Fighting for

Control of Natural Resources in a Globalized Age4, Americas Program, (Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center), July 26, 2002.: Many of the natural resources found on Indian lands have become more valuable in the context of the modern global economy.

Several factors have spurred renewed interest in natural resources on Indian lands in Latin America, among them the mobility of capital, ecological limits to growth in developed countries, lax environmental restrictions in underdeveloped nations, lower transportation costs, advances in biotechnology, cheap third world labor, and national privatization policies.

Limits to logging in developed countries have led timber transnationals overseas. Increased demand and higher prices for minerals have generated the reopening of mines and the proliferation of small-scale mining operations. Rivers are coveted for their hydroelectric potential, and bioprospecting has put a price tag on biodiversity. Originally considered lands unsuitable for productive activities, the resources on Indian lands are currently the resources of the future.

Indian land rights and decisionmaking authority regarding natural resource use on territories to which they hold claim threaten the mobility of capital and access to resources—key elements of the transnational-led globalization model. Accordingly, increased globalization has generally sharpened national conservative opposition to indigenous rights in the Americas and elsewhere in the name of ―making the world safe for investment.‖ The World Trade Organization (WTO), free trade agreements, and transnational corporations are openly hostile to any legislation that might create barriers to investment or the unlimited exploitation of natural resources on Indian lands. The result has been a growing number of conflicts between indigenous communities and governments and transnational corporations over control of natural resources.

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http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-5-common-objections-to-primitivism-and-why-they-re-wrong http://www.americaspolicy.org/citizen-action/focus/0207indigenous.html

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

[8] In Constant Conflict5, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters writes that the ultimate struggle is cultural. [..] Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. [..] We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare. Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch."

America has figured it out [..] our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. [..] Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment. [..]Our military power is culturally based. [..] Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. .. [..] .. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way.

5

Ralph Peters:: Constant Conflict, US Army War College, Parameters

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [..] The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad).

They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won—and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win. [..] Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

[9]

In Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Identity6, Sandbacka writes Cultural imperialism is the economic, technological and cultural hegemony of the industrialized nations, which determines the direction of both economic and social progress, defines cultural values, and standardizes the civilization and cultural environment throughout the world.

The whole world is becoming a cultural common market area in which the same kind of technical product development, the same kind of knowledge, fashion, music and literature, the same kind of metropolitan mass culture is manufactured, bought and sold.

Western ideologies, political beliefs, western science, western laws and social institutions, western moral concepts, sexual symbols and ideals of beauty, western working methods and leisure activities, western foods, western pop idols and the western concept of human existence have become objectives, examples and norms everywhere in the world.

But there are too many dispossessed people who have amassed a few western material possessions but no longer have any birthplace, home or final resting-place.

Carola Sandbacka (ed.) 13-36. Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Identity. Transactions of the Finnish Anthropolological Society 2. Helsinki 1977 (in Finnish 1975) 6

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [10] In What is Cultural Imperialism?7, Matti Sarmela, Former Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki from 1973 to 2000, and a founder and the first president of the Finnish Anthropological Society, describes the inner psychological and corporate workings of cultural imperialism.

He draws an ideological profile of the cognitive and ideological factors that ―go some way towards explaining the hegemony of western culture and the process that is leading to the establishment of a common world culture‖ of compulsive development, which has destroyed the ecological equilibrium of ethnic communities; as all cultures are blindly encouraged to blindly adopt their the dogma of compulsive development, as an alleged ‗superior cultural system‘. He concludes that it is time for sociologists and cultural anthropologists to examine their roles in this dogma of ‗compulsive development‘: ―Should they merely record the changes that take place, perhaps even establish new disciplines such as urban anthropology or mass anthropology? Should they concentrate on collecting into museums what can still be salvaged, setting up memorials to dead cultures? Are there no longer any cultures that are not western or westernizing?‖ 1. The ideological profile of cultural imperialism Industrial development is customarily considered to be the path towards a better future for the whole of mankind, material squalor, hunger, sickness and the rawness of nature becoming, in the process, things of the past. Development on a global scale and colossal industrial production since the war have been accompanied by a blind faith in scientific and technical progress and in the ability that western social planning, environmental planning, educational planning, family planning and leisure planning will before long solve all the problems confronting man. [..]

1) The ideology of the technological imperialists. To western man, culture is the antithesis of nature; it implies the subjugation of nature in order to build a technological, man-made world, in order to establish civilization, the acme of which is the metropolis. The ideology of the subjugation of nature has reached its climax in the conquest of outer space, but it has also supplied the moral justification for the white man's voyages of discovery, for colonialism, the slave trade, the unscrupulous exploitation of natural resources and the overseas aid plans of today: the purpose of these being to yoke all nations to the world trade network of the industrialized countries.

2) The maximization of culture; the ideology of total efficiency.

The ideal of the competitive, mass-producing society is to achieve total efficiency. It strives to maximize production, organizational efficiency and human performance in science, art and sport.

3) The cult of modernism; the ideology culture does not set much store by 7

of novelty. Western the unchanging and

www.kotikone.fi/matti.sarmela/culturimperialism.pdf

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket traditional: it accords its highest accolade to the unconventional and the revolutionary. Western civilization has established the cult of the genius for those who are instruments of change. The worship of modernization and the faith in technological progress culminated in the radicalism of the sixties, the heyday of the student, when it was believed a new society could be created by means of surveys. In this scientific utopia the non-democracy dictated by traditions such as the institution of marriage and sexual norms would no longer exist.

Instead unremitting progress, liberation and change would lead eventually to an optimal ethical or ideological democracy. But has this development merely led to the dictatorship of the men of change, of the planners?

4) The ideology of productivity. Both on the group and individual level cultural choices and decisions are made in the first instance on the basis of materialist economic planning, of cost accounting, of a 'scientific' assessment of the relations between input and output. Industrial culture is in fact being transformed into an organization geared exclusively to the planning of productivity, a statistical curve, index and trend mechanism, from which human, historical and traditional elements must be eliminated as disruptive factors.

5) International standards; the ideology of the supranational. In industrial production, science, art and every other human activity, western culture recognizes no higher goal than internationalism: the standards of the metropolis hold sway. The change in the structure of western societies has taken the form of adaptation to market economy, to international trade; the response of the ecosystem to international standards. The technostructures are the most rigidly standardized of all, part of a sterile, professional mass culture employing standardized values, to reach standardized ‗scientific‘ and ‗artistic‘ decisions, a culture in which personal and individual solutions are more illusory than real. Social planning and architecture that come up to the professional international mark have created standardized modern environments, the fruit of the very latest research into metropolitan design, in which life is played out with the same cultural props, the same basic services.

6) The mechanistic system of knowledge and causal relations; the ideology of technical solutions. The functional basis of western society is a classification of the natural world into a cognitive system that only recognizes mechanical, factorial and technical causal connections and solutions. The most important logical model for scientific thought throughout the sixties was factor analysis. The material and human waste problems resulting from the production process are eliminated by means of special mechanisms; a technological waste process grows up side by side with the production process – sewage plants, asylums, approved schools, community homes and police stations. New sicknesses are cured by new medicines, the debilitating effects of mass

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket production and the conveyor belt are solved by the invention of ergonomics. The establishment of counter-technologies, counterorganizations and counter-cultures corrects technological blunders – thus development becomes synonymous with the fragmentation of society into ever smaller and weirder compartments.

7) Group centricity; the ideology of organization. Western society is one-sidedly based on marching masses, which become socialized into one all-powerful cybernetic machine; it is based on group centricity and faith in organization. The mechanistic or atomistic structure of society has led to the formation of increasingly specialized and efficient organizations but also to an intensifying struggle between them for material development, power and growth. Their policy of growth demands that the individual become totally dependent on them so as to strengthen mass identity and solidarity. The manipulation of these masses requires ever more authoritarian personality cults, the dogmatization of ideals, a strict demarcation of interest-areas and an intensified information war. In the western world power has become concentrated in the hands of organizations, which use discontent, gain, progress and social change as instruments of unscrupulous manipulation.

8) The opinion industry; the ideology of the control of knowledge. Scientific and technical progress has also maximalized knowledge. On the other hand it has made communications, the mass media, manipulation, information shocks, industrial opinionmoulding, propaganda and advertising its most important instruments of power and influence. Western society permits any form of manipulation, even if it is systematically one-sided, as long as its aims are economically useful, commercially successful or otherwise progressive. Western man has long accepted the necessity of organizational lies.

2. Super-culture and local culture [..] The industrialized west has adopted a common technological culture that satisfies international standards and that has made possible the realization of the imperialists' centuries-old dream of yoking the entire world's resources with a systematic global production process. This megalomania has given birth to the super-culture, which prides itself on building the largest reservoir in the world, the largest atomic power station and the longest conveyor-belt. Western culture is a monument to its own planners, executive directors, party leaders and developmentalists, a culture evaluated statistically in terms of size, productivity, and material objects, development trends and consumer indices. In this culture the man in the street has increasingly less value collectively or culturally, as a worker or as a consumer. The high standard of living of western society has delivered nations from the tyrannies of nature and submitted them to the tyrannies of man. Primitive societies had nothing of value to offer in the creation of this new society that CC :: 12

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket worshipped development – in the spectrum of human ways of life, the two stand irreconcilably at opposite poles.

So-called primitive cultures are essentially small communitycultures that gain their ethnic characteristics through adaptation to a specific environment.

The individual's relationship with his community is the prime relationship in nontechnological communities. The individual has his own permanent place in his community and he can comprehend this ethno-social organism as an entity. Many small ethnic communities have learnt to live in accord with nature rather than at the mercy of nature and thus aim at a state of permanent equilibrium. Their cognitive world picture, their intra-cultural system of knowledge, is not geared to unscrupulous and egocentric exploitation or to a greed for growth but to their life as a community. Increased productivity and growth are not seen as ends in themselves; production is only expanded enough to guarantee the traditional subsistence of future generations. Research has demonstrated that small ethnic communities are cultures totally regulated by tradition and governed by the traditional world order, the folk culture. [..]

3. The death of ethnic culture In industrialized countries the functioning of the production process necessitates professional specialization. Society is compartmentalized into thousands of sub-cultures; civil servants, technicians, salesmen and workers each have their own 'culture' made up of professional or interest groups that are supranationally and non-locally orientated, cogs in the machinery of development, progress and power, that use professional jargon as a means of manipulating professional discontent.

In differentiated societies the most varied social and religious groups and group-cultures can be found but real regional or folk culture is dead.

To be more precise, folk culture is outlawed, for the scientifictechnical society has turned culture itself into an organization.

Culture has become the exclusive responsibility of vocationally trained specialists, cultural architects, whose job specifications and qualifications are defined by law, and who are all members of unions. Folk culture can only emerge within the limits of the money specifically allocated to it from the public purse and under the direction of professional cultural leaders.

The supranational, compartmentalized eco-system has no room for a spontaneous, do-it-yourself folk or regional culture. The industrialized countries can show imposing and unprecedented achievements in science, art and sport, in the vast metropolitan sets and technical props of professional culture. But what culture has the industrial nomad or the urban lemming? Can restaurants, nightclubs, the entertainment world be called

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket culture? Does the weekly visit to the supermarket constitute a cultural pilgrimage?

4. The fragmentation of cultural identity Cultural identity is the term commonly employed to describe internalized cultural consciousness, identification with one's own culture. In anthropology, cultural identity is most often defined as identification with an ethnic group and its culture, the communal spirit.

With the disintegration of small communities, it has become increasingly difficult to define ethnic identity. Soviet scientists have coined the term 'ethnosocial organism' to describe the process of economic, social and cultural change which takes place in particular historical circumstances within an ethnic community having a common 'ethnogenesis' i.e. history. This historically fatalistic concept is coolly scientific – as is the description of an ethnic community as an ecosystem. It takes no account of the way in which human beings experience their own culture and the changes that take place in it, nor questions the necessity or value from the human point of view of change perpetrated in the name of development and progress.

Cultural identity is perhaps generally understood to mean the concept of reality held by a member of a particular culture, the way in which he comprehends and motivates his own socio-cultural existence. A vital part of cultural identification is therefore the community's concept of the purpose or meaning of life around which the individual organizes his own existence. In this respect global cultural change has meant the disappearance of any generally held concept of the meaning of life and the emergence of numerous substitutes. The sense of regional identity has been submerged in that of national identity, which was perhaps latent anyway. More significantly, the individual has come to identify himself with the culture represented by groups sharing the same profession, interests or ideals. The pivotal point of cultural existence for a member of an urban culture offering multifarious possibilities and possessing multifarious values is a material or ideological objective: a house or property of some other sort, a professional career, a position of influence in a political or religious group or in some other organization. A member of industrialized society may identify himself with his objective, provided that this seems sufficiently worthwhile in the long-term and allows him to make full use of his potentialities. But for a far greater number, who are just factory fodder, the meaning of life lies in identification with the consumer society.

Changes of identity and the essential content identities could perhaps be tabulated as follows:

of

different

Regional identity (spatial/ethnic identity) includes the individual's personally lived-out experience of culture in the environment in which he lives: the social intercourse that links an individual to his community in his capacity as a member of

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket society. Regional identity also includes a fundamental sense of continuity and permanence, social awareness and the idea of the community as the most important framework of existence. The individual sees his own immediate circle as part of the regional community and his own existence as part of a social entity, which manifests itself in communal symbols, traditions and systems of communication.

Group identity means nowadays identification with a meta-group for which the individual has no physical significance. In the differentiated society groups are little more than organizations whose members are united by common professional, political or ideological interests, the struggle between interest groups or the fear of losing rights. On the other hand social alienation and compartmentalization has led to a search for a real feeling of belonging through ideological and religious group fervour, occult, mystical and magical movements, transcendentalist or para-psychological cults, social-psychological group therapy itself and, to a certain extent, communes and other regressive back-to-nature movements. These movements represent a counterculture and have no functional status in industrialized society.

Goal identity is identification with the illusions of the creative, development-minded and forward-looking cultural architects for whom work and achievement are the purpose of Life.

Or equally well compensatory alienation and escape from the realities of monolithic culture.

Mass identity is identification with the industrial mass production society as a consumer of the technological products of a specialized metropolitan culture. The meaning of life is to be found in egocentric, new experiences, in taking advantage of all the technically maximal entertainments and stimuli offered by the professionals: restaurants, sport, television, or so-called creative hobbies and art-forms, or the new technological challenges – parachuting, slalom and motor racing. Existential experiences provided by specialized departments of the welfare state are the be-all and end-all of human existence.

5. The imperialism of the production process Economic development today is dominated by supranational, world trade organizations, common market federations between states, and supranational or multinational giant enterprises. In the market economy countries the development of monopolies, mergers and the emergence of mammoth corporations is a fact; in the language of the politics of commerce it is called integration or the international division of labour. The cultural and ecological changes that have taken place as a result of adaptation to world trade in every country are self-evident: 1) The regional concentration of production, the emergence of mammoth industrial areas.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket 2) The establishment of a metropolis-periphery relationship between central and subsidiary industrial areas with all its economic, social and cultural consequences (governmental and cultural centralization).

3) Increasing specialization in international division of labour.

production

demanded

by

the

4) Adaptation of the structure of production plants and sales organizations to supranational marketing.

5) Product development and production planning determined by international standards, standardization of cultural products.

6) Policy of a centralized labour force. The individual seeking employment becomes the new nomad of the industrial society.

7) Death of small ethnic communities.

The nations of the world have been made to run on terms laid down by industrial, urban employment and world trade, they have been concentrated around standardized services, packed into the endless rows of identical suburban and slum-land boxes. Modern man is himself a mass product, the cheapest, most insignificant and dispensable structural unit of a worldwide production process. The continual intensification of technological growth is a prerequisite of the functioning of political organizations; the political ideologies of the world compete amongst themselves to bring about scientific and technical development – on terms laid down by international trade. The international production process has given birth to the mechanism of political, obligatory development. The fate of the natural environment and of plant and animal species threatened by the ever-expanding global production process has become a subject of universal concern. Ethnic cultures have come into being as a consequence of their isolation and by a process of economic and ecological adaptation to their regional environments; they are mutations just like the Galapagos sparrows. But the market economy and the production process do not only trample underfoot aboriginal cultures: every single small regional community and traditional ethnic culture is threatened by eco-catastrophe.

6. The imperialism of marketing mechanisms The continued development of the industrialized countries is dependent on marketing their culture in total. The further production moves from the satisfaction of basic needs, the more important become sales organizations, the creation of consumer demand and the regulation of consumption. Cultural experts have paid too little attention to the fact that the most efficiently organized thing in the world is diffusion, and that it is the marketing organizations – direct and indirect advertising, newspapers and magazines, the entire worldwide awareness industry – that create the framework of meaning in the modern folk culture. Folk culture is merely the response of the people to external, supranational, commercial and political influence and CC :: 16

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket regulation, a more or less uniform manifestation of mass identity, in which national, ethnic and regional differences are primarily reflected in terms of consumer potential, the unequal distribution of economic resources over the world.

In the market economy culture everything that is produced must be sold, the tools of culture, science, art, even man himself. The cultural eco-system of the mass production society is only kept going by marketing which is more important than the tools of production, surplus and capital. The marketing mechanisms are approaching scientific and economic perfection: marketing has not for a long time meant the advertising and distribution of individual products but integrated marketing in which the demands of marketing influence the earliest stages of planning and production down to the smallest detail. In a world becoming economically unified the mechanisms of marketing are in their turn becoming global: 1. Supranational marketing creates common illusions throughout the world, the cultural values of the urban consumer 2. Marketing is the sale of the total technological way of life.

It would be cynical to deny that much else of the western way of life is not introduced into other cultures along with western technology. One cannot buy a transistor without also buying western pop music, a television without advertising breaks, gangster films and violence, a glossy magazine without pornography. No part of western culture can be bought as an isolated product, one machine requires another and thus one is launched on the slippery slope of western consumption.

In non-technological cultures the mechanization of one phase of production assumes the mechanization of the other phases and, in order to function efficiently, every machine requires all the rest of the related western technology. And when agricultural production is automated then transport, storage and further processing must also be automated. In the tough world of international technology, formal speeches about gentle development from a national base and individual choices are more often than not empty rhetoric.

The marketing of western cultural development has created supranational illusions of the metropolitan living-style: the modern furnishings of the white European, his de luxe kitchens, night clubs, yachts and sports cars. During the last decades whole armies of writers and pen-pushers have sold a fairy-tale urban world, have swooned in ecstasies of self-expression describing the narrow-mindedness of small communities, the tangled web of social relationships, social controls, the absence of real stimulus. Man has been made to believe that in his little urban box he can spend a more remarkable life than anywhere else or ever before. There he can liberate himself entirely from social relationships and social controls and devote his time exclusively to himself and his own consumption.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket 7. The imperialism of the social order To the expert in international politics the world might seem to be an arena of national interests and cultural contradictions.

Yet in every state behind the political violence, cruelty, terror and the fight for justice a centralized social order is being created which in terms of its structure and governmental machinery more and more conforms to world-wide governmental models. In every country of the world centralized, technically efficient, economic and political organizations are being created, western bureaucracies and social hierarchies which bury beneath them the communal order (the result of adaptation to local circumstances) and standardize the socio-cultural structures within each state.

In the construction of this state machinery, regional ethnic cultures (tribalism) are seen as a threat to national unity and to patriotism. In many countries the creation of a uniform governmental social order and a state culture is political expediency, the unadorned construction of a mechanism of power.

This is sometimes realized in the name of civilization and social development, sometimes in the name of a future of equality for the various racial groups. All too often the western machinery of manipulation called political democracy is employed in the creation of a uniform, supra-national, technocratic culture, even as a tool of the utilitarian politics of supranational economic organizations and interests. In developmental phraseology ethnic cultures are synonymous with primitiveness, witchcraft, feudalism and despotism: these labels of a Eurocentric cultural and social science are surely infinitely more suited to describe the governmental and political reality of the western countries than non-technological ethnic cultures. Political bureaucracy has established the concept that the small ethnic communities of the Third World exemplify non-democracy whereas the organized, western political mechanism of power exemplifies democracy.

The centralized state machinery is more and more energetically removing the possibilities of influence from the local community, from the level at which the individual, the man in the street, lives. In many countries internal colonialism prevails. In many developing countries the palatial parliament and administrative buildings – monuments to western architecture – are the tombstones of the country's true ethnic culture. In many countries the small community world has been transformed into a benevolent dictatorship of smiling party representatives and popular development leaders.

8. The imperialism of the transmission of culture In the civilized modern state enculturation, the transmission of culture to new generations has become increasingly institutionalized: it has become the responsibility of official organizations, which conform to supranational, metropolitan standards. The cultural heritage of every race comes more and

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket more under the control of 1) The western educational system and 2) The supremacy of western communication. A standardized western epistemological superstructure standardizes the cognitive, ethical, social and historical world picture of every race. The technological superpowers and the communications controlled by the west, not forgetting audio-visual mass communication and the pop culture, are instituting a cultural imperialism that is rapidly supplanting ecologically and socially localized knowledge with globally standardized knowledge.

In every country, regardless of its ideology, the western educational system is pursuing didactic goals that are increasingly standardized. The developing countries are following suit in the creation by professionals of educational communities that are all organized along similar lines and are alike in what they teach. For the technological culture of the west cannot be bought without the white European's ways of thinking, cultural values and ideology of mechanistic knowledge. Today western super-culture is being transmitted to more and more of the world's schoolchildren.

The technological and political super-culture renders utterly devoid of meaning the ethno-science and intra-cultural systems of local communities, the fundamentals of social and existential order, the explanations of life here and in the hereafter, the whole communicative, symbolic and empirical system of causal relations on which traditional culture is based. In their place the super-culture supplies the western mechanisms of socialization, the humiliating and authoritarian educational system that instils organized behaviour and competition as also the aggressiveness, the unrelenting fight for status symbols, for power and the instruments of power of the white man.

In many Third World countries the educational system is as inheritance from colonial times and tuition, at any rate at university level, takes place in the language of the former colonial power. Alternatively the responsibility for curriculum planning may lie with a small 'upper class' that has itself received a western education.

The use of tribal languages is frowned upon by nation-states bent on centralization and the consolidation of power nor are these languages considered suitable for the transmission of the technological knowledge of the white man. The educational technocrats seem more interested in method than content, the aim being to create the most efficient methods for transmitting western knowledge to new generations and for establishing a uniform global educational system.

9. The imperialism of the assessment of cultures The super-culture has its own superior machinery for the assessment of cultures. Just as individuals are assessed in terms of intelligence quotients and capability scales, the nations of the world are also assessed in terms of technocratic units of CC :: 19

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket measurement. Every aspect of a culture has its own quantitative unit of measurement: 1) Those of development: gross national product, volume of exports, industry index. 2) Those of 'happiness' i.e. the standard of living: how many material possessions each person/household has.

3).

Those of 'unhappiness': starvation, sickness, mortality. These cultural statistics have become indispensable to western society as they provide the scientific basis for social and economic planning.

Today their compilation is the responsibility of the World Bank.

Although these statistics are accepted as gospel and find their way from encyclopaedias to school textbooks and the pages of the weeklies, the basis on which they are compiled is not known and their veracity is un-certifiable. The Eurocentric writing of history is paralleled by the imperialism of western statistics.

In the assessment of cultures a simplistic scale is employed which merely measures the extent of technological development. On this basis small, self-supporting communities find themselves at zero on the scale for they can produce no export figures, no indices of urbanization – how in fact the gross national product is calculated at all in such communities is one of the mysteries of western science. What these comparative statistics fail to take into account is the other side of the coin: the increasing class distinctions, crime, violence, the use of narcotics, the sharp upward turn of the problems of social waste, which are an integral part of super-development even in the Third World.

Western cultural statistics arrange the nations of the world in an order of precedence that encourages the race for western development and the creation of a material culture on western lines. By means of statistics economic development is controlled over the heads of national leaders, new needs are created for entire nations, compulsive development is justified.

The statistics are complemented by the supranational bureaucracy even by the United Nations' numerous agencies, which establish the imperialism of starvation. The starving have their uses.

Starvation statistics demonstrate the necessity of the supranational developmental bureaucracy and all the great and small development directors that take it upon themselves to plan a new global society. They demonstrate the necessity of mass communications to supply information shocks. In the treatment by the western media on the problems of the developing countries, one can see the creation of a total lie, for economic organizations have been seen in the role of charities, and expansionist politics, economic re-colonization and the selling of western technocracy have been seen as missionary work euphemistically called development co-operation or development aid. It should be more widely known that development aid in its present form is only the real-politics of the industrialized countries, whose aim is to guarantee new potential markets for intensified production. There have always been people in the West who have justified their right to make crusades to other cultures CC :: 20

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket and in the Eurocentric history of the west the subjugation of peoples has only too often been seen as a deed of heroism.

Gross national product per capita is one of measures to order the nations, cultures and life-styles of the world in order of precedence as defined by the white man. Another equally common method is to list nations according to how small a proportion of their population works on the land or how large a proportion lives in towns. A small self-sufficient agricultural village cannot make a significant enough contribution to world trade to figure in capitalist indices. What sort of civilization and development is it that moves the greatest proportion of its population into city slums in order to produce the cheapest luxury goods, labour force, services, criminality and starvation?

Is it because in cities human beings provide their leaders with development statistics? Why is it that in the statistical comparison of cultures, no mention is made of those other figures that describe the urban consumer culture, the statistics of crime, violence and narcotics? Why are only trade volumes measured? Why not the alienation and rootlessness of the slum dweller or the real human consequences of mechanical conveyorbelt work?

10. Compulsive development During the past decades a mechanism for compulsive development has been generated by the centralized and specialized organizational structure of society. The mechanism of development is no longer controllable by individuals and the process of standardization is no longer directed by one particular class or interest group but by the organization. It is above all the working-class that has seen western development as its hope for the future. But as organizations grow, the mechanism of compulsive development grows up with them as do the mechanisms of economic unification and the standardization of social structures, education and cultural concepts and acculturation.

It is a fact that the ecological equilibrium of ethnic communities has been disturbed and that the developing countries are forced to change in order to adapt to the new economic system. The catch phrases of today are the new economic order, self-sufficiency, regional democracy, devolution, cultural heritage, africanization and so on. But what is at issue is not regional culture but the levelling out of differences in the standard of development. Nationalist movements in many countries may speak of taking their own road to development; the mechanism of global development is approaching an indivisible whole.

In non-technological countries western development is considered the superior cultural system, which offers untold riches to those that adapt themselves most quickly. In the developing countries an international sub-culture has grown up that has been nicknamed the International cocktail club and which apes the western way of life. But western development is indispensable to the bureaucrats

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket who use it to construct the machinery of power around themselves, to ups-tart national politicians who flirt with international ideologies, to scientists and artists who can set themselves up as geniuses after the western model. Numerous developing countries are governed by political and economic profiteers, who have stakes in the industrial and commercial enterprises in their country, who receive princely sums from investors, entrepreneurs and importers. Corruption is the price to be paid by the west for the expansion of its markets and the demise of ethnic cultures.

The time has come for sociologists and cultural anthropologists to examine their own role in this compulsive development.

Corporate Neo-Liberalism: Cultural Colonizers of Indigenous Peoples Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy means rule over women and nature.

The ―glories‖ of civilization and women‘s disinterest in them. To some of us the ―grass huts‖ represent not taking the wrong path, that of oppression and destructiveness. In light of the globally metastasizing death-drive of technological civilization, if only we still lived in grass huts!

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Women and nature are universally devalued by the dominant paradigm and who cannot see what this has wrought? Ursula Le Guin gives us a healthy corrective to Paglia‘s dismissal of both: ―Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other — outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness, to be used as I see fit.‖ - John Zerzan, Patriarchy, Civilization, and the Origins of Gender8, Anarchist Library ―It‘s crazy whenthese outsiders come and teach us development. Is development possible by destroying the environment that provides us food, water and dignity? You have to pay to take a bath, for food, and even to drink water. In our land, we don‘t have to buy water like you, and we can eat anywhere for free.‖ - Lodu Sikaka, Dongria Kondh ―Life expectancy now is around 60 to 65 years. Before it was 80 to 90 years. It‘s because before [our access to our forest was restricted] we ate tubers, fruits, and other forest products, whereas now the Soliga diet is bad.‖ – Madegowda, Soliga ―You take us to be poor, but we‘re not. We produce many kinds of grains with our own efforts, and we don‘t need money.‖ – Baba Mahriya, Bhil ―We don‘t want to go to the city and we don‘t want to buy food.

We get it free here.‖ – Malari Pusaka, Dongria Kondh

[11] Primitivist John Zerzan9 argues that the primary motive of the ‗left‘ is to co-opt indigenous cultures into becoming industrialized cultures, where their members become workers and consumers in the industrialized retrace. The problem with the left, is their addiction to industrial progress, industrialization and domestication, and their cooptation of indigenous and non-industrialized cultures, on behalf of international corporations. Primitivists do not endorse industrialization or industrialization‘s cooptation of indigenous cultures; whereas the left are fully engaged in the cooptation of indigenous people‘s into becoming workers and consumers, and not to be indigenous agrarian and outside of industrialization.

Primitivists perceive indigenous cultures as cultures which still have community face to face, and an authentic community and cultural life, in touch with the land.

Primitivists believe we cannot all of a sudden become primitives and return to a http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-patriarchy-civilization-and-the-origins-of-gender John Zerzan: Pretensions of Modernity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmSjMmqtF8g John Zerzan on Property and Primitivism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlnAYeWWwt8 Zerzan: The Left, No Thanks: http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/the-left-no-thanks.html; Zerzan: Seize the Day: http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/seize-the-day.html 8 9

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket relocalized and non-industrialized way of life, but overtime we can do so; and if we do not do so, the collapse of industrial civilization shall either exterminate us, or force us to do so.

[12] Not Primitive: Tribal people are not 'backwards', they haven't been 'left behind'. They choose to live on their land, in their own ways10.

[12.1] Studies have shown that tribal people on their own land are some of the happiest in the world – the nomadic Maasai tribe were found to be just as happy as the world‘s richest billionaires.

[12.2] Tribal peoples‘ lives are not static, or ‗stuck in the past‘ – they adopt new ideas and adapt to new situations just as we all do. We are all living in the 21st Century. It is simple prejudice that makes us think some peoples are ‗modern‘ whilst others are ‗backwards‘.

[12.3] This prejudice is used to justify displacing tribal peoples and pushing them into the ‗mainstream‘ – on the assumption that ‗experts‘ know what is best for them.

[12.4] A striking example of this was the argument that mining company Vedanta Resources used to defend the devastating impact that their mine would have on the lives of the Dongria Kondh. The Dongria are united against the mine, they distrust and reject Vedanta‘s claim that the company will bring development.

Instead the Dongria choose to live their own way of life on their land.

[12.5] A Vedanta spokesperson said: ―‗As enlightened and privileged human beings, we should not try to keep the tribal and other backward people in a primitive, uncared-and-unprovided-for socio-economic environment.‘ [12.6] Despite often being described as ‗primitive‘ and ‗poor‘, a study of the hunter-gatherer Jarawa tribe‘s nutrition and health found that the Jarawa, who remain self-sufficient on their own land, have ‗optimum nutritional status‘. They have a detailed knowledge of more than 150 plant and 350 animal species.

[12.7] However, their neighbours, the Great Andamanese, were brought into the ‗mainstream‘ by the British and robbed of their land. They were decimated by disease and are now completely dependent on the government. Alcoholism and diseases such as TB are rife.

10

http://www.notprimitive.in/

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

Melting Pot Multiculturalism: the ideal Egotist Consumptionism Ideology of Multinational Capitalism

―We Americans are apostles of the Fast World, the prophets of the free market and high priests of high tech. We want ‗enlargement‘ of both our values and Pizza Huts. We want the world to follow our lead and become democratic and capitalistic, with a Web site in every pot, a Pepsi on every lip, Microsoft Windows in every computer and with everyone, everywhere, pumping their own gas.‖11 ―…globalization has its own dominant culture, which is why it tends to be homogenizing. Culturally speaking, globalization is largely, though not entirely, the spread of Americanization – from Big Macs to Mickey Mouse – on a global scale.‖12 - Thomas L Friedman

[13] In Stalking the Wild Taboo, by Garrett Hardin13: Part 4: Competition: (20) Competition, a Tabooed Idea in Sociology; (21) The Cybernetics of Competition; (22) Population, Biology and the Law; (23) Population Skeletons in the Environmental Closet; (24) The Survival of Nations and Civilisations, he deals with the concept of Competition, a process that is inescapable in societies living in a finite resource world. He proves that the end result of perfect laissez-faire, competition‘s end result reduces all competitors until there is only one left. The monopolist will try to manipulate the machinery of society in such a way as to extend his powers everywhere, without limit. The same applies to labour monopolies. Under these conditions it is important to seek the boundary conditions within which the rule of laissez-faire can produce stability. An Act that may be harmless when the system is healthy and strong may be quite destructive when the system is stressed near its limits. To promote the goal of stability, a law must take cognizance not only of the act but also of the state of the system at the time the act is performed. A good example is described by Ben Bagdikian14 of the systemic process of corporate media cannibalism in Media Monopoly15.

[14] Globalization refers to the dominance of multinational corporations and the destruction of cultural identities.

Thomas L. Friedman, ‗A Manifesto for the Fast World‘, The New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1999.

Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 1999), 8.

13 Garrett James Hardin (21 April 1915 – 14 September 2003) was a leading ecologist from Dallas, Texas, who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the tragedy of the commons brought attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment". He was most well known for his elaboration of this theme in his 1968 paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Ecology: "You cannot do only one thing".

14 In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg gave Bagdikian — then an editor at the Washington Post — portions of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret classified history of the Vietnam War. Bagdikian passed a copy of the documents to Senator Mike Gravel, who promptly read them into the Congressional Record.

15 The Media Monopoly, Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.

11 12

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [15] Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed that the quest for everexpanding markets would in time compel nation-based capitalist economies to push against national boundaries in search of an international economic imperium.

Whatever else has happened to the scientific predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved farsighted. All national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law.

In Europe, Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding national sovereignty and giving rise to entities—international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations that increasingly lack a meaningful national identity—that neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or regulative principle. ―Cultural imperialism is used to (1) increase demand for foreign goods; (2) depress growth within local industry; and, (3) foster a consumerist mentality where the need to save is overcome by the desire to emulate the foreign rich. Once such a desire is instilled in this market, corporations (4) widen and consolidate their market by investing in merchandising facilities and sales promotion. Their goal of establishing of preference for their goods in the local economy means that they are involved in the international transmission of values.‖ - Glendal P. Robinson, ‗A Mythic Perspective of Commodification on the World Wide Web‘.

[16] Communist Philosopher and Economist Slavoy Zizek argues in Multiculturalism: The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism16, that fake Multiculturalism, is the ideal Egotist Consumptionism cultural logic of Multinational Capitalism, intent on colonizing all cultures into slaves to Egotist Consumptionism. Multinational Corporations wish to colonize all nations and their cultures, turning all culture‘s primary cultural value into that of an egotist consumer, for the profits of multinational corporations.

Multiculturalism: How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of Nation State in our era of global capitalism?

Perhaps, this relationship is best designated as ‗autocolonization‘: with the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company as it were cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origins as simply another territory to be colonized. This is what disturbs so much the patriotically oriented right-wing populists, from Le Pen to Buchanan: the fact Slavoj Žižek: Multiculturalism or the cultural logic of multinational capitalism, in: Razpol 10 - glasilo Freudovskega polja, Ljubljana 1997 http://www.soc.aau.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/kbm/VoF/ Kurser/2011/Multiculturalism/slavoj_zizek-multiculturalism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-multinational-capitalism.pdf 16

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket that the new multinationals have towards the French or American local population exactly the same attitude as towards the population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic justice in this self-referential turn? Today‘s global capitalism is thus again a kind of ‗negation of negation‘, after national capitalism and its internationalist/colonialist phase.

At the beginning (ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the confines of a Nation-State, with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign Nation-States); what follows is the relationship of colonization in which the colonizing country subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized country; the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization in which there are only colonies, no colonizing countries—the colonizing power is no longer a Nation-State but directly the global company. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republic shirts but also live in banana republics.

And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‗natives‘ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‗respected‘. That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism: in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multiculturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one‘s own particular culture. In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‗racism with a distance‘—it ‗respects‘ the Other‘s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‗authentic‘ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position.

Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn‘t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures— the multiculturalist respect for the Other‘s specificity is the very form of asserting one‘s own superiority.

[17] The International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD17) is a worldwide network of artists and cultural groups dedicated to countering the homogenizing effects of globalization on culture. The Proposed Convention on Cultural

17

http://www.incd.net/incden.html

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Diversity Prepared for the International Network for Cultural Diversity 2003, states, among others: There is the need to ensure that cultural diversity is preserved in the face of the unprecedented challenges posed by rapid technological change, the convergence of telecommunications and media corporations, erosions of distinctions between content and carriage and the increasing global concentration of ownership over the production and distribution of cultural content. At the same time, efforts to dramatically expand the framework of international trade regimes to encompass services, investment, competition policy and government procurement, impose constraints on the capacity of governments to implement cultural policies in response to these pressures.

It is understandable then that all three proposals state the same fundamental purpose: to preserve the sovereign right of all nations to take such actions as they consider appropriate to preserve, promote and enhance cultural diversity.

All three drafts also state explicitly that cultural goods and services must not be treated as mere economic commodities as has been the case when trade dispute bodies have been called upon to adjudicate conflicts between trade liberalization policies and those necessary to achieve non-commercial cultural objectives.

There is also strong agreement about the need for the new international instrument on cultural diversity to be legally binding. A purely declaratory instrument will not be an adequate buffer against the coercive forces that now threaten cultural diversity. For this reason, meaningful enforcement procedures are seen as an essential component of the new Convention.

[18]

In Constant Conflict18, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters effectively agrees with Zizek: [..] Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are

18

Ralph Peters:: Constant Conflict, US Army War College, Parameters

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department.

Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere-clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive. [..] Our military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. .. [..] In the meantime, the average American can look forward to a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free membership in the most triumphant culture in history. For the majority of our citizens, our vulgar, nearchaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive change in history. .[..] .. It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. .. [[..] .. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way. ..[..] Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either empowered or imprisoned.

The majority of the world's inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape.

Consumptionism [19]

Consumptionism: Consumption Vanity Disorder: ―Consumptionism: where State considers an individuals importance in terms of consumption, not citizenship‖ – The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture.

People must be trained to desire. To want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America." - Paul Mazer CC :: 29

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket ―Cultural Capitalism: where the very act of egotist consumption, already includes the price for its opposite.‖ – Slavoy Zizek ―[A ‗throwaway‘ society‘ means] more than just throwing away produced goods (creating a monumental waste-disposal problem), but also being able to throw away values, life-styles, stable relationships, and attachments to things, buildings, places, people, and received ways of doing and being… individuals were forced to cope with disposability, novelty and the prospects for instant obsolescence.‖19 – David Harvey

[20] Consumption-Vanity Disorder20 is a disease spread not through a mutating virus or genetic predisposition – but through cultural ―Memes‖ – turning the world into a reflection of the advertising images broadcast daily by 90% of all media - a world of mini-malls, fashion obsessions, fake tits and belligerent gadgetry.

[21] 1924: Samuel Strauss: Consumptionism: science of compelling men to use more and more things: Samuel Strauss was a journalist and philosopher writing in the 1920s. The November 1924 issue of The Atlantic Monthly carried Strauss' signature essay, "'Things Are in the Saddle.'" Following nineteenth century American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ode he quotes, Strauss contemplates the empire of "things" and the ethics of "consumptionism" he felt had overtaken the country. He defines "consumptionism" as "the science of compelling men to use more and more things."

[22] Strauss was of the opinion that, despite their differences, both capitalism and socialism were moving society in the same damnable direction, in a competition to see "which can ensure the distribution of the most goods to the people."

[23] Samuel Strauss suggested the term consumptionism to characterize this new way of life that, he said, created a person with ―a philosophy of life that committed human beings to the production of more and more things—―more this year than last year, more next year than this‖—and that emphasized the ―standard of living‖ above all other values.

[24] 1929: Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied - Charles Kettering, General Motors Research Director, in Nations Business: Charles Kettering wrote that: ―We hear people complaining because of new models in automobiles. If it were not for these new models these same people would be paying more for what they have.

Recognition of the fact that progress is inevitable forces us to recognize that we must have improvements in motor cars. We, as manufacturers, must offer those improvements after they have been found to be capable improvements. The public buys and disposes of what it has. The fact that it is able to dispose of what it has enables us, as producers, to put a lower price tag on the new model. The law of economy in mass production enters here. We are permitted to turn out cars in volume because there is a market for them. If automobile owners could not dispose 19 20

David Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989), Consumption Vanity Disorder: http://youtu.be/iKkEjl-RSfc

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket of their cars to a lower buying strata they would have to wear out their cars with a consequent tremendous cutting in the yearly demand for automobiles, a certain increase in production costs, and the natural passing along of these costs to the buyer. If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.‖ [25] In The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis‗ BBC documentary documents how Edward Bernays21, the father of "Public Relations"22, developed public relations, by using his Uncle Sigmund Freud‗s discoveries concerning the unconscious "primitive sexual and aggressive forces"23, to change the focus of advertising from the facts of a product24, to implying the product would fulfill the individuals psychological/sexual insecurities25 (Insecurity about small penis: purchase a large car26; Female penis envy insecurity: start smoking27). "Public Relations‗ worked to psychologically engineer and manipulate citizens into the "All Consuming Self": the illusionary belief the power is finally in their hands, they live in a "democracy" 28; they are in charge29, while their sense of identity is subconsciously manipulated from citizen (individual authority/inner power of personal decision-making) to consumer (empty vessel addicted to consumption of external ideas and products for sense of identity and acceptance30), fueling the growth of the "Freedom is DebtSlavery" mass-consumer society31.

[26] Cultural Capitalism’s Egotist Consumption: Where the very act of egotist consumption, already includes the price for its opposite: [27] In First as Tragedy, then as Farce32, Communist Philosopher and Economist Slavoj Zizek shares his perspective on the problems of ‗Ethical Consumption‘: ―Like Soros, in the morning he grabs the money; in the afternoon, he gives half of the money back to charity. In today's capitalism, more and more the tendency is to bring this tendency together. So when you buy something, your antiCurtis (2002): The Century of the Self (01/04) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmUzwRCyTSo ".. If you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace .. propaganda got to be a bad word .. so I found another word .. public relations" (07:15-08:39) 23 "A hundred years ago, a new theory of human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered, primitive sexual and aggressive forces, hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings" (00:10-21, 04:28-05:47, 09:10-10:20) 24 ".. a products practical virtues, nothing more" (15:40-16:10) 25 "He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn‗t need, by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires." (01:21) 26 ".. tell car companies, they could sell cars as symbols of male sexuality" (14:20, 18:45-19:00) 27 "Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes .. "cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power" .. "connect smoking cigarettes to idea of challenging male power, women would smoke to have their own "torches of freedom" penis .. hence irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional identity symbols" (10:22-:14:25) 28 "[At Versailles] .. we worked to make the world safe for democracy.. that was the big slogan .." (07:15-08:39) 29 "Out of this would come a new political idea about how to control the masses, by satisfying people‗s inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile; which was the start of the All Consuming Self .." (01:30) 30 Paul Meyser of Lehman Brothers wrote "We must shift America from a needs to a desire culture. People must be trained to desire. People must want new things before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desire must overshadow his needs." (16:10-18:03) 31 Consumptionism.. where State considers individuals importance in terms of consumption, not citizenship (20:3020:50) 32 http://youtu.be/hpAMbpQ8J7g 21 22

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket consumerist duty is to do something for others, for the environment and so on, is already included in the price. If you think I am exaggerating, walk around the corner, into any Starbucks coffee, and you will see how they explicitly tell you, I quote "Its not just what you are buying, its what you are buying into. When you buy starbucks, whether you realize it or not, you are buying into something bigger than a cup of coffee. You are buying into a coffee ethics. Through our Starbucks Shared Planet Program we purchase more fair trade coffee than anyone in the world, ensuring that the farmers who grow the coffee beans receive a fair price for their hard work.......‖ Its a good coffee karma. This is cultural capitalism at its purist. You don't just buy a coffee. In the very consumerist act, you buy your redemption from only being a consumerist. You do something for the environment, you do something for starving children in Guatamala. ..... For every act of consumerism, within the price you pay, you purchase your redemption. This generates almost a kind of semantic over investment or burden. Its not just buying a cup of coffee, you are fulfilling a whole series of ethical duties. This logic today is almost universalized. Why? It makes you feel warm, it makes you feel like you are doing something for … My point is that, this very interesting short circuit, where the very act of egotist consumption, already includes the price for its opposite.‖ [28] He proceeds to quote: Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism: ―It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering, than it is to have sympathy with thought. People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, ugliness, and starvation. It is inevitable they would be strongly moved by this. Accordingly with admirable, but misdirected intentions, they very sentimentally set themselves the task of remedying the problems they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease, they merely prolong it. Indeed, they are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, by keeping the poor alive, or in the case of an advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution, it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. It is the altruistic virtues which have prevented the carrying out of this aim. The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves. In doing so they prevented the core of the system to be realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it. Charity degrades and demoralizes.‖ [29] Documentaries exploring the psychological and ecological consequences of the ideology of Consumptionism include: Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers 33; On Modern Servitude34; The Good Consumer Slave35; The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit36; Killing us Softly: Advertisings Image of Women37; Consuming Kids38; The High Price of Materialism39; Consumed: The http://youtu.be/bXmuWecIQos http://youtu.be/SdToaJtVNJg 35 http://youtu.be/A_ut93YYZu8 36 http://youtu.be/Y888wVY5hzw 37 http://vimeo.com/48800829 38 http://youtu.be/2XSaaQjuuK0 39 http://youtu.be/oGab38pKscw 33 34

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Human Experience40; No Logo: Brands Globalization Resistance41.

Control of Consumption Effect on Climate Change [30] GDP/Economic Growth and energy consumption’s aggravating/threat multiplier ‘heat engine’ relationship to the national security threat of climate change (CO2 emissions):

ARE economist David Roland-Holst‘s chart – which one of his student‘s calls his ‗demonic bubble bath‘ – shows the tight relationship between energy use and prosperity, a key climate change issue. Based on World Bank and International Energy Agency data, the vertical axis plots per capita energy use in terajoules/year; the horizontal is per capita income as measured by the GDP. Bubble sizes represent population.

[30.1]

Energy consumption is the foundation of industrial development; since

energy use is equivalent to development. A country‘s development is a symptom of its energy consumption. The rate of energy consumption and increase in carbon dioxide emissions are virtually identical and have grown exponentially over the last 40 years. Increased efficiency leads to more energy use.

[30.2]

Since the earth‘s non-renewable resources are finite, and its renewable

resources can only be exploited on a finite level equivalent to carrying capacity regeneration; this trend cannot continue.

40 41

http://vimeo.com/13535207 http://youtu.be/Lmmnknt4mCg

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [31]

P. F. Henshaw (10/17/09): Jevons' Effect and why improving technology

efficiency multiplies energy consumption42.

Energy efficiency improvements and energy use have both been increasing steadily growing rates.

So improving economic efficiency apparently enables the creation of more new energy uses than energy savings. The net effect is to increase the rate of resource depletion. - (fig 1)

Consequently, efficiency improvement results in 2.5 times more energy uses than energy savings, consistent with the observations of Jevons in 1885. (fig 1) Equally surprising, CO2 is being produced at the same increasing rate as total energy use, so new clean energy sources are not replacing any fossil fuel use, only adding enough to keep the same proportion of clean energy in the mix as in 1971. (fig 1)

[32]

At Do Renewables decrease global CO2 emissions43, Prof Tadeusz (Tad)

Patzek, Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin; rescaled the slopes of the trends of Henshaw‘s graph with the multipliers shown in the inset box, so that all trends more less overlay. His analysis:

42 43

http://www.synapse9.com/pub/EffMultiplies.htm http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-renewables-decrease-global-co2.html

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

The rate of energy use and carbon dioxide emissions are virtually identical and have grown exponentially over the last 40 years.

The impact of large dams and nuclear power plants has been barely visible, and disappeared by 2007.

The renewable energy sources, wind turbines, biomass cogeneration, and biofuels (photovoltaic panel area is too small to be relevant), are barely keeping up with the deforestation and general paving of the world.

Increased efficiency leads to more energy use and the ratio of the slopes has remained constant (3.7) over the last 40 years.

Thus, just as Stanley Javons predicted, higher efficiency leads to more energy use which leads to still higher efficiency.

Since the Earth is finite, this trend cannot continue and the current global economy must break down. There is nothing we can do about it, unless we fundamentally change, and the approach to breakdown is exponential. I spoke more on this subject in Paper prepared for the 20th Round Table on Sustainable Development of Biofuels: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?: How Can We Outlive Our Way of Life? (PDF44) For example, the expected period of doubling of global energy consumption is 34-37 years.

Since this doubling is impossible, claims45 to the contrary by the IPCC notwithstanding, the global economy as we know it today will cease to exist within the next 10-20 years.

44 45

http://www.oecd.org/sd-roundtable/papersandpublications/40225820.pdf http://gaia.pge.utexas.edu/papers/EnergyCoalPaperPublished.pdf

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [33]

Breakthrough (12 Jan 2019): Carbon Dioxide and the Global Economy46.

The relationship of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (with data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency) with global GDP (as measured in PPP terms and reported by Maddison).

[34]

Adrian Bejan and Sylvie Lorente (5 April 2010): The constructal law of

design and evolution in nature47 (PDF48); Royal Society.

To summarize, all the high-temperature heating that comes from burning fuel (QH or the energy associated with QH and the high temperature of combustion; cf. Bejan 2006) is dissipated into the environment. The need for higher efficiencies in power generation (greater W/QH) is the same as the need to have more W, i.e. the need to move more weight over larger distances on the surface of the Earth, which is the natural phenomenon (tendency) summarized in the constructal law.

At the end of the day, when all the fuel has been burned, and all the food has been eaten, this is what animate flow systems have achieved. They have moved mass on the surface of the Earth (they have ‗mixed‘ the Earth‘s crust) more than in the absence of animate flow systems. The moving animal or vehicle is equivalent to an engine connected to a brake (figure 4), first proposed by Bejan & Paynter (1976) and Bejan (1982, 2006).

The power generated by muscles and motors is ultimately and necessarily dissipated by rubbing against the environment. There is no taker for the W produced by the animal and vehicle. This is

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/carbon_dioxide_and_the_global http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1545/1335.full 48 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1545/1335.full.pdf 46 47

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket why the GNP of a country should be roughly proportional to the amount of fuel burned in that country. (Bejan 2009).

[35] Ross Garnaut (2011) The Garnaut Climate Change Review 2011: Australia in the Global Response to Climate Change49: Chapter 3: Emissions in the Platinum Age50.

Figure 3.13 Global energy use and CO2 emissions, 1970 to 2007

Sources: Energy use from BP (2008); CO2 emissions from IEA (2007b) and Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre (2008).

Corporate Influence and Control of Anthropocentric Jurisprudence ―Proponents of Critical Legal Study theory believe that logic and structure attributed to the law grow out of the power relationships of the society. The law exists to support the interests of the party or class that forms it and is merely a collection of beliefs and prejudices that legitimize the injustices of society. The wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy. The basic idea of CLS is that the law is politics and it is not neutral or value free.‖ – Critical Legal Studies: An Overview, Cornell University Law School

49 50

http://www.garnautreview.org.au/index.html http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp3.htm

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket ―[l]ike frankfurters, laws cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.‖51 ―Corporations are a Frankenstein monster which States have created by their corporation laws.‖ - Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1916 ―The principal instrument of the concentration of economic power and wealth has been the corporate charter with unlimited power….‖ - United States Congressional committee, 1941 ―The state need not allow its own creation to consume it.‖ - U.S. Supreme Court, First National Bank v. Bellotti, 1977

E. ESAR, COMIC DICTIONARY 158 (1943). Indiana legislators are fond of quipping, "The making of law, like the making of sausage, should not be witnessed." Of course, having seen sausage made, we may choose never to eat it again; we have no choice but to be consumers of law.

51

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

The Hidden History of Corporations and Corporate Personhood: ―Corporations are a Frankenstein monster which States have created by their corporation laws.‖ - Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1916 ―The principal instrument of the concentration of economic power and wealth has been the corporate charter with unlimited power….‖ - United States Congressional committee, 1941 ―The state need not allow its own creation to consume it.‖ - U.S. Supreme Court, First National Bank v. Bellotti, 1977 ―Corporations have gained the position of an imperial, dictatorial power by the subordination of all of our societal values to the single unrealistic aim of somehow maintaining endless economic growth and ever greater short-term profit for the wealthy few (no matter what the cost).‖ - Karen Coulter, Corporations and the Public Interest, Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy, 1999, 98 "El Paso - 200 children - $5 to $10,000 per kid." -- Handwritten notes of Gulf Resources vice president Frank Woodruff, calculating Gulf's liability for poisoning 500 children with lead from its Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho; Gulf concluded it was cheaper to poison the children than to replace pollution control equipment.52

[36]

Chronology of Incorporation and Monopoly:

[37]

In The Corporate Consensus: A Guide to the Institutions of Global

Power, George Draffan provides a historical chronology of Corporate Incorporation and Monopoly53: 1400-1770 Era of commercial capitalism and monopolistic mercantilism, with joint stock companies and royal charter corporations holding trade monopolies and colonization privileges. Mercantilism was replaced with industrial capitalism and "free-trade" imperialism in the late 1700s, which gave way to monopoly capitalism and a revived colonial imperialism between 1870 and World War I, and to a defensive monopoly capitalism and neo(liberal)-colonialism since then.

52 53

Draffan, George (2000) http://www.endgame.org/primer-history.html

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket 1600-1900 The British "enclosure" period redefined land as property, a transferable commodity, evicted commoners from the ancient commons, turning them into landless laborers who were also a commodity, creating a dispossessed proletariat and bands of beggars, and transferred political power from the people to a wealthy elite. In the 1649-1660 revolution the landowners came to power and passed 4,000 Private Acts of Enclosure on seven million acres. In 1845 a General Enclosure Act was paszsed which privatized another seven million acres.

1600s American colonial settlements were often corporations with patents from the British Crown. In 1606, James I gave a patent to the London (South Virginia) stock company to settle the area between Washington D.C. and New York; the Plymouth (North Virginia) company was to settle New England. The company brought laborers over; they turned over their harvest to the company, and typically received 100 acres after seven years.

Ten thousand poor people are estimated to have been sold into slavery each year in Great Britain. Between 1609 and the early 1800s, as many as two-thirds of the white colonists are estimated to have been forced to come over as slaves (sometimes called "indentured servants").

Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were commercial enterprises run by chartered trading companies. In the Caribbean and South, sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, produced by indentured servants, until in the late 1600s more laborers were needed and slavery was instituted. In New England, fishing and fur trading were the basis, with Hudson's Bay Company sending home 75 percent dividends.

The middle and southern colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia used the "headright" system, where land (typically 50 acres per head) was granted to those who paid their own and/or others' transport from the old world. This also provided labor, a key to New World profits, so ship captains got would-be travelers from taverns and fairs, and bribed judges and debtors prison jailers to secure prisoners who could be indentured. Two-thirds of white American immigrants were indentured servants. The labor was temporary, and because headright system granted land to servants when their indenture period was over, slavery became the system of choice.

Another form of privatization in early America was the proprietary colony, in which the Crown granted lands to individuals. This created private estates which could be sold, leased, or mortgaged, so the grantees became land investors and speculators.

Private wealth created systems of private government, with the landowners in effect taxing and legislating. Proprietary colonies included Virginia and New Jersey. Grants of up 30,000 acres were given by Virginia to those who would defend the forts on the frontier. There were

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket huge large estates of up to 840 square miles (537,600 acres) along the Hudson River in New York; in Virginia, one estate was 800,000 acres.

1641 Massachusetts legislature declared that "there shall be no monopolies granted or allowed among us but of such new inventions as are profitable to the country, and that for a short time."

The earliest corporate charters were granted only to special public enterprises such as insurance companies, banks, canal, dock and highway companies; they were "quasi-public agencies of the state."

1680s Beginning in the 1680s, William Penn sold 300,000 acres to wealthy English Quakers. Half the land granted to individuals in Massachusetts between 1630 and 1675 went to magistrates and governors; much of the rest went to "schoolmasters, ministers, and military heroes."

1756 Benjamin Franklin petitioned the British Crown for two Ohio River colonies. In 1766, he asserted claims for the Illinois Company, in which he held an interest, to 1.2 million acres along the Mississippi.

1787 Privatization of the public domain and economic crises: In 1787, disposal of the public lands by U.S. Congress began with three one-million-acre sales to the Ohio Company of Associates (for about 10 cents an acre), to the Scioto Company, and to John Sayles. Periodic peaks in land sales occurred during economic peaks in 1818-1819 (6.5 million acres), 1835-1836 (33 million acres), and 1854-1855 (25 million acres) -- peaks of borrowing and spending which were followed by crises and depressions.

Eventually 70 percent of the public lands -- about a billion acres -- were transferred to private or corporate hands.

1791-1811 First government.

National

Bank

incorporated

by

the

U.S.

1805 U.S. Supreme Court rules that ownership of property implies the right to develop it for business purposes in Palmer v.

Mulligan.

1810 Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cranch 87 (1810) ruled that once government had granted land, tax exemptions, or charters, the state could not take away those privileges -- and that it wasn't even "within the province of the judiciary to take notice of corruption or examine the mischivious effects of legislative acts in determining their validity."

1811-1813 Luddites rise in rebellion against labor-saving devices, destroying three factories and 1,500 weaving machines; 14,000 soldiers put down the uprising; 3 dozen Luddites and a millowner were killed during the actions; 24 Luddites were hung.

"Technology comes with the logic and aims of the economic system that spawns it."

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket 1816-1836 Second government.

National

Bank

incorporated

by

the

U.S.

1819 McCulloch decision.

1819 In Dartmouth College v. Woodward, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Marshall declares the corporation (Dartmouth College) to be "an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of the law. Being a mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it" -- but ruled that states (New Hampshire) could not impair contracts (change a corporate charter) which a previous legislature (King George) had given to Dartmouth. Judge Joseph Story's concurring opinion said the way to alter charters was to reserve that right; many states began to do that, even adding the right to their constitutions.

Dartmouth distiguished between private corporations operated for the benefit of shareholders, and public corporations operated for public purposes. The Constitutional protection offered to corporations by Dartmouth was contradicted by the 1837 Charles River Bridge decision, which declared, reasonably enough, that "the continued existence of a government would be of no great value, if by implications aand presumptions, it was disarmed of the powers necessary to accomplish the ends of its creation; and the functions it was designed to perform, transferred to the hands of privileged corporations." But Justice Marshall (like Alexander Hamilton) saw the privileged value procured by nationalism and property rights.

1837 Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of the Warren Bridge, 11 Pet. 420 (1837).

1839 Bank of Augusta v. Earle ruled that corporations were "persons" domiciled in the state of their charter, but free to do business in other states, but the decision stopped short of declaring that corporations were citizens protected from state laws which violated the U.S. Constitution.

1844 In an early decision undermining local control, Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Railroad v. Letson, 2 How. 497 (U.S. 1844), 11 L.Ed. 353 ruled that corporations are citizens of the chartering state, but the Constitution's diversity clause (Art. III, Sec. 2) allows corporate cases to be heard in federal court.

1848 West River Bridge v. Dix, 6 How. 507 (1848), ruled that corporate property can be taken under eminent domain, which is inalienable; states cannot divest themselves of the powers of eminent domain, taxation, police power, of the ownership and control of navigable waters.

1850-1870 In the climax of the great public lands "barbecue," almost ten percent of the continental U.S. was transferred to 61 railroad corporations to be sold to settlers; a third of the 190 million acres was eventually forfeited for the railroads' CC :: 42

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket failure to comply with the terms of the land grant contracts, but the railroads became the first modern corporation -- and millions of acres and billions of dollars of natural resoure assets still remain in the hands of railroad, mining, timber, and real estate corporations descended from the land grant railroads.

1855 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Ohio was not allowed to alter its contract with an Ohio-incorporated bank, but declared that the people of the states had 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" (Dodge v. Woolsey, 59 U.S. 331 (1855)).

1868 Paul v. Virginia, 8 Wall. 168 (1868) ruled that corporations are not citizens within the meaning of the Constitution's Article IV, Section 2; the term "citizens" as there used applies only to natural persons, members of the body politic, owing allegience to the state, not to artificial persons created by the legislature and possessing only the attributes which the legislature has prescribed.

1873 Farmers' Anti-Monopoly Convention in Des Moines stated that "all corporations are subject to legislative control; [such control] should be at all times so used as to prevent moneyed corporations from becoming engines of oppression."

The Grangers and the Populist Movement: By 1875, there were 800,000 members in 20,000 local Granges.

During the 1877 depression, the first Farmers Alliance was formed in Texas; unlike the more conservative Grangers, the Alliances created cooperatives and other alternatives to escape crop-liens, indebtedness, and corporate domination of their economy. By 1886, there were 100,000 farmers in 2,000 Alliances.

By 1887, 200,000 farmers had formed 3,000 Alliances; by 1889, there were 400,000 members in the National Farmers Alliance that sought political as well as economic reforms. But by 1896, the Populists had been "enticed" into the Democratic party, and even though William Jennings Bryan was being funded by Anaconda Copper, Hearst, and other corporations, big business and the press supported McKinley, in the first big-money election; Bryan received 6.5 million votes, while McKinley received 7.1 million.

In 1892, with conservative Grover Cleveland's entry to the White House, Henry Clay Frick wrote to his boss Andrew Carnegie "I cannot see that our interests are going to be affected one way or the other by the change in administration."

1876 In Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 114 (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court approved state regulation of corporations with a public

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket interest, in this case, the rates grain elevators charged to farmers, writing that "[property] clothed with the public interest, when used in a manner to make it of public consequence... must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good..." and ruled that the reasonableness of rates is a legislative, and not a judicial, question Justice Stephen J. Field dissented, aghast at the thought that "if this be sound law... all property and all business in the state are held at the mercy of the majority of its legislature."

Field's minority opinion, which first enunciated the view that the 14th Amendment's due process clause should protect private business from state regulation, soon prevailed in the 1886 Santa Clara case, which actually declared that corporations were persons protected under the Constitution. And in 1886, the state "Granger" laws were struck down, in Wabash v. Illinois.

1879 Henry George, in Progress and Poverty, wrote that only a land tax paid by landlords could eliminate monopoly and poverty.

1879 In the Orton case, the U.S. courts "limit[ed] the federal power of control over the railroad land grants while also severely restricting state remedies against the ultra vires acts of corporations" -- in other words corporate actions that go beyond the powers actually granted to corporations. Orton was one of several cases involving Ninth Circuit Court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer and the Southern Pacific Railroad (see also the 1882 San Mateo and 1886 Santa Clara cases). Orton led to settlers on railroad grant land being evicted by force; in the Mussel Slough battle near Visalia, California, in May 1980, five settlers and two railroad agents were killed.

1882 Rockefeller stated that "the day of combinations is here to stay. Individualism is gone, never to return."

1882 In the San Mateo Railroad Tax Case, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer declared corporations to be persons; Judge Field was also involved. See the 1886 Santa Clara decision.

1886 In Wabash v. Illinois, the Supreme Court struck down state Granger laws regulating railroad rates charged to farmers, declaring that interstate commerce could only be regulated by the federal government. In 1886 alone, the Court struck down 230 state laws passed to regulate corporations.

1886 "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question of 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."

With that, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down local taxes on railroad property--and declared that corporations were persons; Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886)).

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Sixty years later, Justice William O. Douglas stated that "there was no history, logic or reason given to support that view."

There were, however, the facts that U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer was a shareholder in the Central Pacific Railroad, and that he and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field were close friends of Leland Stanford and other parties involved. "Sawyer was uniquely placed to expand the rights and prerogatives of corporations," that "what is extraordinary is the extent to which Sawyer used unorthodox techniques of statutory interpretation and judicial review in granting the corporation additional powers... [Sawyer's decisions] "served as an avenue for the expansion of a corporate construction of economic life, the judicial approval of vast aggregations of wealth and power, and the subordination of the public trust under public utilities." "... of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations."

1887 The first U.S. regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was created to regulate a "natural" monopoly -- the railroads.

1888 The Republican Party opposed "all combinations of capital organized in trusts."

1890 Bacon Committee of Congress.

1890 The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed 52 to 1 in the Senate, and unanimously in the House, outlawed contracts, combinations, trusts or conspiracies which restrain or monopolize trade, but Sherman took control from the states -- and the corporations ignored it anyway, engaging in the biggest wave of mergers in the two decades after Sherman was passed.

Sherman Section 6 declared that any property transported across state or national boundaries which was owned under such a contract or by such a combination shall be forfeited to the U.S. Sections 7 and 8 defined corporations as persons.

1890 Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway v. Minnesota, 134 U.S. 418 (1890) began the judicial retreat from the Munn case, ruling that a commission's rates were subject to judicial review and due process; the Brass v. North Dakota, 153 U.S. 391 (1894) followed suit. Reagan v. Farmers Loan & Trust, 154 U.S. 362 (1894) and the Smythe v. Ames, 169 U.S. 466 (1898) went even further, ruling that rates are subject to judicial review even if set by a legislature.

1890s New Jersey passes its holding company act, allowing corporations to buy and sell the stock and property of other corporations, and to issue their own stock as payment; in 1892, New Jersey repealed its anti-trust law; in 1896, New Jersey's General Revision Act allowed incorporation for any legal purpose, and mergers were freely allowed.

CC :: 45

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket The broadened holding corporation powers removed the 50-year limit on corporate life; corporations were authorized to operate in any state or foreign country; stock could be valued at whatever the directors chose, regardless of the corporation's assets; corporations were allowed to be classified into preferred and common, and thus given unequal power; directors were allowed to amend the by-laws without shareholder approval; directors could rely solely on proxy voting; and "shareholder" meetings were required to be held in New Jersey.

Between 1880 d 1896, New Jersey had fifteen corporations worth $20 million or more; by 1897-1904, there were 104 corporations that big in New Jersey. By 1902, these new powers were so attractive to corporations that their filing fees and franchise taxes provided enough revenue to New Jersey to allow the state to abolished property taxes.

Delaware, not to be outdone, passed a precedent to its General Corporation Law in 1899, allowing corporations to write any provisions they wished "creating, defining, limiting, and regulating the powers of the corporation, the directors and stockholders; provided, such provisions are not contrary to the laws of this state." (Which were rapidly becoming so favorable that nothing mattered). Delaware's 1967 law further broadened corporate management powers: only directors could propose amendments to the charter; directors were no longer required to disclose executive compensation; and officers and directors could be indemnified for criminal and civil cases without court or shareholder approval.

1892 Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892) ruled that the state has an inalienable public trust, and cannot give away lands covered by navigable waters.

1893 U.S. v. Workingmen's Amalgamated Council, 54 Fed. 994 (E.D. LA) (1893) upheld an injunction against a union on the grounds that the Interstate Commerce Act required common carriers to accept freight without discrimination.

1893 Noble v. Union River Logging Railroad, 147 U.S. 165 (1893) was the first time corporations received Bill of Rights guarantees, in a ruling that the 5th Amendment's due process clause was violated by the U.S. Department of Interior's attempt to revoke approval of a right-of-way over federal public lands.

1894 Henry Demarest Lloyd published his classic Wealth Against Commonwealth.

1894-1905 Low v. Rees Printing (1894) struck down the 8-hour shift for mechanics and laborers. In re House Bill 203 in Colorado (1894) struck down the 8-hour day for mining and manufacturing. Ritchie v. People, 155 Ill. 98 (1895) struck down the 8-hour work law for women in garment manufacturing. Lochner v. New York (1905) struck down the 10-hour law for bakers.

CC :: 46

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Ten thousand poor people are estimated to have been sold into slavery each year in Great Britain. Between 1609 and the early 1800s, as many as two-thirds of the white colonists are estimated to have been forced to come over as slaves (sometimes called "indentured servants"). Between 1860 and 1900, 14 million immigrants entered the U.S., almost half of them between 1877 and 1890. In 1870, a third of the manufacturing workers in the U.S. were foreign born. By 1907, 80 percent of Carnegie's steelworkers were Eastern Europeans. Carnegie's native born whites received $22 per week. His Irish and Scots received $16 per week. Slavs, Russians, and Italians received $12 per week.

Between 1880 and 1900, 35,000 workers were killed every year, and 536,000 workers were injured, every year.

In the 1880s, with more than 200,000 railroad construction workers, more than 2,000 railroad workers were being killed, and 30,000 injured, every year. Between 1890 and 1917, 72,000 railroad employees were killed on the tracks; close to two million were injured; another 158,000 were killed in repair shops and roundhouses.

Were these the bad old days of primitive technology and callous industry? In 1990, 46,000 people were killed in auto accidents.

Today, 100,000 people die every year from toxins and other workplace hazards, and 5.5 million people are injured, and 3.3 million people are hospitalized, and 390,000 people contract new cases of occupational disease. Workplace carcinogens are estimated to cause between 23 and 38 percent of all cancer deaths each year. Consumers pay the price, too: 28,000 people die and 130,000 people are seriously injured each year by using dangerous products.

1895 The Supreme Court upheld a monopoly of 98 percent of the country's sugar production on the grounds that the Sherman Act applied only to commerce, and not to production, in U.S. v. E.C. Knight Company, 156 U.S. 1 (1895). Justice Harlan's dissent said the ruling put the Constitution in "a condition of helplessness... while capital combines... to destroy competition."

See also the 1918 decision which prohibition for the same reason.

struck

down

a

child-labor

1895 The Supreme Court said the Sherman Antitrust Act could be used against interstate labor strikes (in this case, the railway strike of 1894) because they were in restraint of trade.

In the 1910s, criminal syndicalism statutes also used antitrust laws (which were ostensibly for controlling monopolies) to control workers who tried to protect themselves from monopolies.

1897 New York investigation.

1899 Canadian investigation.

1900-1902 U.S. Industrial Commission on Trusts and Industrial Combinations. An act of Congress on June 18, 1898, created the CC :: 47

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket two-year Commission of five Senators, five Representatives, and nine persons representing the different industries and employments, in order to investigate questions pertaining to immigration, labor, agriculture, manufacturing, and business, to furnish information and suggest such laws as may be made a basis for uniform legislation by the various states, in order to harmonize conflicting interests and to be equitable to the laborer, the employer, the producer, and the consumer. Volume 2 contains Statutes and Decisions of Federal, State, and Territorial Law; the Commission concludes that "it is a striking fact that not one of these statutes aims at especially at securing publicity regarding the business of the large industrial combinations through detailed reports, in order that the publicity itself may prove a remedial measure" (page 7).

Other volumes deal with Prison Labor; Transportation; Labor Legislation; Distribution of Farm Products; Capital and Labor; Chicago Labor Disputes of 1900; Transportation; Agriculture and Agricultural Labor; Agriculture and Taxation; Capital and Labor I the Mining Industry; Trusts and Industrial Combinations; Capital and Labor in Manufactures; Immigration; Foreign Legislation on Labor; Labor Organizations, Labor Disputes and Arbitration; Industrial Combinations in Europe.

1903 Teddy Rooosevelt tried to distinguish between good and bad trusts with his Antitrust Division, established under the Department of Justice, and his Bureau of Corporations.

1904 In the Northern Securities case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the giant merger of the robber barons J.P. Morgan and Jim Hill's railroads to be illegal, but failed to control the Northern Securities monopoly.

The Supreme Court finally recognized the merger, by then called the Burlington Northern, in 1970.

1905-1915 The U.S. Bureau of Corporations made annual reports to the Secretary of Commerce on the beef industry (1905); transportation of petroleum (1906); petroleum industry (190709); cotton exchanges (1908-09, 1912); water transportation (1909-13); corporate taxation (1909-15); tobacco industry (190915); steel industry (1911-13); water power development (1912); International Harvester (1913); lumber industry (1913-14); farm machinery trade associations (1915); Oklahoma oil field (1915); state laws concerning foreign corporations (1915); trust laws and unfair competition (1915).

1906 Hale v. Henkel. In a tobacco antitrust case, the Supreme Court rejected the corporation's attempt to use the 5th Amendment, but ruled that overly broad subpoenas for corporate documents could be a violation of a corporation's 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

"The corporation is a creature of the state. It is presumed to be incorporated for the benefit of the public. It receives

CC :: 48

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket certain privileges and franchises, and holds them subject to the laws of the state and the limitations of its charter..."

1911 American Tobacco Company ordered dissolved.

1911 Supreme Court orders Standard Oil broken into 33 corporations in Standard Oil of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 83 (1911). "All who recall the condition of the country in 1890 will remember that there was everywhere, among the people generally, a deep feeling of unrest. The nation had been rid of human slavery-fortunately, as all now feel-but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the American people: namely, the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit ad advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life."

Standard Oil of New Jersey has since become Exxon; Standard of California has become Chevron; and Standard Oil of New York (Socony-Vaccuum) has became Mobil.

1912 Pujo Committee hearings investigate the banking monopoly.

1913 The Underwood Tariff Act established a graduated income tax.

1913 The 1901 acquisition of the Southern Pacific Railroad by the Union Pacific was struck down by the Supreme Court. The UP acquired the SP again in 1996.

1913-1914 Louis Brandeis' "Other People's Money and How Bankers Use It" first appeared in Harper's Weekly magazine.

the

1913-1914 U.S. Bureau of Corporations' The Lumber Industry showed the extent of the concentration of corporate ownership of the nation's forestland by Southern Pacific Railroad, Northern Pacific Railroad, and Weyerhaeuser.

"If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it." (President Woodrow Wilson).

1914 Federal Reserve bank system organized.

1914 The Clayton Act legislated price discrimination, tying contracts and exclusive dealing, mergers, and interlocking directorates within the same industry, and said labor unions are not trusts.

1914 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission was established as an independent, quasi-judicial agency empowered to prohibit unfair methods of competition not specifically prohibited by the Sherman and Clayton acts. FTC authority has led to the legislation directed at the meat industry (1921), banks (1933

CC :: 49

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket and 1934), utilities (1935), Robinson-Patman (1936), and CellerKefauver (1950).

1916 The exports.

federal

Webb-Pomerene

Act

allowed

monopolies

for

1916 The Shipping Act exempted common-carrier rate agreements from anti-trust law if they were approved by the Maritime Commission.

1917 Idaho became the first state to enact criminal syndicalism laws; Idaho's was written by an attorney for timber and mining corporations. Twenty-three other states followed. The laws were used to justify suppression of labor organizers, social and political activists, and foreigners.

1918 Supreme Court struck down the Keating-Owen Child Labor Law of 1916, which prohibited interstate commerce of goods produced with child labor, on the grounds that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act applied only to commerce (the transportation of goods), and not to the production of those goods.

1918 After simultaneous raids on 48 Wobbly halls, the government crushed the Industrial Workers of the World in U.S. v. Haywood et al. The five-month trial of 101 Wobblies resulted in prison sentences of up to 20 years and fines totaling $2.5 million, and a 44,000 page transcript.

1919-1920 U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, using the Deportation Act of 1918, raids activists and foreigners. About 10,000 people were arrested in 70 cities (71 percent of the 1,500 deportation orders were canceled by the Dept. of Labor; even Palmer's assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, agreed to raids were unconstitutional).

1920 U.S. Steel found to be a legal "good trust" as defined by the "rule of reason" in the 1911 tobacco and Standard Oil cases.

1920-1924 Silverthorne Lumber v. U.S., 251 U.S. 385 (1920), and FTC v. American Tobacco, 264 U.S. 298 (1924) ruled that government officers seizing corporate papers violated the corporation's protections against 4th Amendment unreasonable search and seizure.

1921 Packers and Stockyards Act. 1921 Evidence of conspiracy by businessmen disallowed evidence in the Wobblies' Centralia Massacre case.

as

1922 Agricultural seller cooperatives were exempted from antitrust laws. Additional legislation was passed in 1926 and 1937.

1925 Gitlow ruled that Constitutional protections for corporations included the 14th Amendment, freedom of speech and press, and the 5th Amendment.

1929 ? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis condemned criminal syndicalism laws, saying "the deterrents ordinarily to be applied to prevent crime are education and punishment for CC :: 50

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket violations of the law, not abridgements of the rights of free speech and assembly."

1933 Pecora hearings.

1933 Securities Act. 1933 Brandeis dissent in Louis K. Liggett Co. v. Lee, 53 S. Ct. 481.

1934 Securities Exchange Act. 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act. 1936 Nye "merchant of death" hearings into World War I. 1936 Robinson-Patman Act forbade price discrimination.

1936 IBM v. U.S., 298 U.S. 131. See also the 1969 suit in which the U.S. charged IBM with monopoly of the computer market.

1937 Miller-Tydings Act legalized price-fixing between manufacturers and dealers to protect inefficient small dealers.

1937 National Labo Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 81 L. Ed 893, 57 Sup. Ct. 615 (1937) ruled that Congress could "protect interstate commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial war" (labor organizing).

1938 Corporate personhood was challenged in the dissenting opinion of Hugo Black in Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938).

1938 FDR appointed Thurman Arnold head of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and increased its budget from $413,000 in 1938 to $2.3 million in 1942. His enthusiasm caused the DOJ to reign in the Antitrust Division, and Arnold left in 1943.

1938 Temporary National Economic Committee was established. TNEC reports include Congressional hearings on the concentration of economic power (1939-41); U.S. Steel (1940); patents and industrial progress (1942); petroleum industry (1942); and on investment and business activity (1944).

1938 The Subcommittee of Federal Licensing of Corporations held four volumes' worth of hearings on Senate Bill 3072 sponsored by populist Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming and Senator William Borah. O'Mahoney said "a corporation has no rights; it has only privileges." See also O'Mahoney's testimony in the closing the closing session of TNEC, March 11, 1941.

1939-1941 TNEC monopoly hearings.

1941 Final TNEC report Investigation of Concentration of Economic Power. "The principal instrument of the concentration of economic power and wealth has been the corporate charter with unlimited power."

1944 International Monetary Fund (with the U.S. and Europe having veto power) and the World Bank (International Bank for CC :: 51

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Reconstruction and Development) established at the Bretton Woods conference.

1945 Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) found to be illegal; court ordered Alcoa to sever ties with Aluminum of Canada (Alcan) and to license other aluminum producers under its patents. After the war, U.S. aluminum plants were given to Kaiser and Reynolds, and in the 1950s, to other companies.

1947 U.S. v. Henry S. Morgan et al.

1948 Reed-Bulwinkle Act amended the Interstate Commerce Act to legalize price-fixing by rail, water, or motor carrier "rate bureaus."

1949 Corporate personhood was challenged by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas; he stated that "there was no history, logic or reason given to support [the] view" of the Supreme Court in the 1886 Santa Clara decision that corporations were "persons' protected by the U.S. Constitution.

1950 Celler-Kefauver Act amended Section 7 of the Clayton Act to prohibit the lessening of competition through the acquisition of another company's assets (the Clayton Act prohibited only monopoly through acquisition of stock); like the Clayton Act, the Celler-Kefauver attempts to prevent monopoly. In the next 16 years, the FTC and DOJ challenged 800 mergers in 200 complaints.

By 1966, 62 percent of the manufacturing corporations with assets exceeding $1 billion had been challenged in their acquisitions of other companies.

1953 Baseball declared by the Supreme Court to be exempt from anti-trust laws.

1956 AT&T consent decree.

1957 U.S. Senate hearings on Concentration in American Industry.

1960 Bank Merger Act directed regulatory agencies to consider the competitive effects of mergers before approving them.

Affected by the Supreme Court's 1963 Philadelphia Bank decision, which declared that even approved bank mergers were not immune from anti-trust prosecution.

1965 House Antitrust Subcommittee (chaired by Celler) probe on interlocking directorates.

1966 Bank Merger Act allowed anti-competitive mergers if they are outweighed by the convenience and needs of the community to be served.

1969 Overseas Private Insurance Corporation (OPIC) created under the U.S. State Department to provide political risk insurance to corporations investing in developing countries.

1969 U.S. charged IBM with monopoly of the computer market (see also the 1936 decision IBM v. U.S., 298 U.S. 131).

CC :: 52

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket 1969 Newspaper Preservation Act exempts newspapers from antitrust law.

1960s-1970s. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee (chaired

by Philip Hart) hearings resulted in more than 200 volumes totaling more than 100,000 pages.

1971 U.S. House conglomerates.

of

Representatives

report

on

corporate

1973 National Conference on Land Reform in San Francisco.

1976 Buckley v.

Valeo granted freedom of speech to corporations by ruling that corporate political contributions can be limited, but their spending cannot -- in effect equating money with speech. As Ward Morehouse has pointed out, if money is speech, then a corporation can speak louder than any person.

1976 U.S. v. Martin Linen Supply Co., 430 U.S. 504 (1976).

Corporations used 5th Amendment protection against double jeopardy to avoid retrial in an antitrust case.

1976 Virginia Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976) used the 1st Amendment to protect advertising as free speech.

1977 Marshall v. Barlow, 436 U.S. 307 (1977) used the 4th Amendment to thwart federal occupational health and safety inspections.

1977 First National Bank v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1977) used the 1st Amendment to overturn state restrictions on corporate spending on political referendums.

1977 Deregulation of airlines. 13,000 striking controllers fired by President Reagan in 1981.

air

traffic

1980s Deregulation and mergers & acquisitions waves get underway as Reagan's ant-trust department allows mergers which destroy competition as long as they increase "efficiency." But mergers cost money (to pay the fees of the executives and brokers who set them up), and trigger poison pills -- both of which increase debt and thus reduce efficiency, and neither of which increases productive capacity -- just profits for management and some shareholders.

In 1961, to top 100 industrial corporations in the U.S. owned 44 percent of the non-financial assets; in 1970 they owned 51 percent; in 1984, they owned 61 percent.

In the mid-1980s: IBM controlled 65 percent of the computer industry; General Electric and Westinghouse controlled 85 percent of the heavy electrical equipment industry; Boeing and McDonnell Douglas controlled 80 percent of the aircraft industry; American Brands, RJ Reynolds, and Liggett and Meyers controlled 80 percent of the tobacco trade.

CC :: 53

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket "Ninety-eight percent of all companies in the United States account for only about 25 percent of the business in this country; the remaining two percent account for nearly 75 percent. The top 500 industrial corporations, which represent only one-tenth of one percent of this elite two percent, control over two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the industrial workers, account for 60 percent of the sales, and collect over 70 percent of the profits."

1980 Deregulation of railroads (Staggers Act); trucking (Motor Carrier Act); and banking (Depository Institutions Deregulation Act). The collapse and bailout of the savings and loan industry follows in 1989.

1980 Central Hudson Gas & Electric v. Public Service Commission of New York, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) protected advertising as property, ruling that commercial speech is purely between the advertiser and its audience.

1982 Thirteen-year anti-trust suit against AT&T ends with spinoff of regional Bell companies, which were merging again by the 1990s.

1986 Pacific Gas & Electric Co. v. Public Utility Commission, 475 U.S. 1 (1986) overturned state regulation involving utility bills enclosures designed to lower utility rates, ruling that the envelope was property belonging to PG&E. 1988 Pentagon military-industrial procurement scandal followed by the mergers of the major military contractors.

1989 Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago indicted for fraud and racketeering.

Mercantile

--

Exchange

1994 NAFTA 1994 GATT Uruguay Round.

1993 Law passed allowing military contractors to use public funds to pay for corporate mergers.Between 1993 and early 1997, mergers among 21 corporations cost the taxpayers $830 million -with $3 billion in claims pending. For example, the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta merger cost taxpayers $162 million (including $32 million of the $92 million bonuses to executives) -- and may cost $855 million more. The merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas could exceed $500 million. "McBoeing" could end up with two thirds of the Pentagon's $100 billion annual business, with the bulk of the rest going to Lockheed Martin, Hughes, Raytheon, and Northrop.

1994 GATT created.

Uruguay

Round

approved.

World

Trade

Organization

1996 Deregulation of telecommunications industries.

1998 On October 30, the G7 nations accepted the principle that conditions attached to IMF assistance packages should be expanded to include trade liberalisation, government budget

CC :: 54

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket allocations, governance.

[38]

labour

laws,

social

legislation,

and

good

Reclaim Democracy: Corporate Personhood54 project provides a summary

of the hidden history of Corporations in the United States, and how American concepts of Corporate Personhood have been exported to culturally colonize other legal systems around the world: Our Hidden History of Corporations in the United States When American colonists declared independence from England in 1776, they also freed themselves from control by English corporations that extracted their wealth and dominated trade.

After fighting a revolution to end this exploitation, our country‘s founders retained a healthy fear of corporate power and wisely limited corporations exclusively to a business role.

Corporations were forbidden from attempting to influence elections, public policy, and other realms of civic society.

Initially, the privilege of incorporation was granted selectively to enable activities that benefited the public, such as construction of roads or canals. Enabling shareholders to profit was seen as a means to that end. The states also imposed conditions (some of which remain on the books, though unused) like these*: * Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws. * Corporations could engage only fulfill their chartered purpose.

in

activities

necessary

to

* Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose. * Corporations were often terminated authority or caused public harm. * Owners and managers committed on the job.

were

if

responsible

they for

exceeded criminal

their acts

* Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.

For 100 years after the American Revolution, legislators maintained tight controll of the corporate chartering process.

Because of widespread public opposition, early legislators granted very few corporate charters, and only after debate.

Citizens governed corporations by detailing operating conditions 54

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/

CC :: 55

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket not just in charters but also in state constitutions and state laws. Incorporated businesses were prohibited from taking any action that legislators did not specifically allow.

States also limited corporate charters to a set number of years.

Unless a legislature renewed an expiring charter, the corporation was dissolved and its assets were divided among shareholders. Citizen authority clauses limited capitalization, debts, land holdings, and sometimes, even profits. They required a company‘s accounting books to be turned over to a legislature upon request. The power of large shareholders was limited by scaled voting, so that large and small investors had equal voting rights.

Interlocking directorates were outlawed.

Shareholders had the right to remove directors at will.

In Europe, charters protected directors and stockholders from liability for debts and harms caused by their corporations.

American legislators explicitly rejected this corporate shield.

The penalty for abuse or misuse of the charter was not a plea bargain and a fine, but dissolution of the corporation.

In 1819 the U.S. Supreme Court tried to strip states of this sovereign right by overruling a lower court‘s decision that allowed New Hampshire to revoke a charter granted to Dartmouth College by King George III. The Court claimed that since the charter contained no revocation clause, it could not be withdrawn. The Supreme Court‘s attack on state sovereignty outraged citizens. Laws were written or re-written and new state constitutional amendments passed to circumvent the (Dartmouth College v Woodward55) ruling. Over several decades starting in 1844, nineteen states amended their constitutions to make corporate charters subject to alteration or revocation by their legislatures. As late as 1855 it seemed that the Supreme Court had gotten the people‘s message when in Dodge v. Woolsey56 it reaffirmed state‘s powers over ―artificial bodies.‖ But the men running corporations pressed on. Contests over charter were battles to control labor, resources, community rights, and political sovereignty. More and more frequently, corporations were abusing their charters to become conglomerates and trusts. They converted the nation‘s resources and treasures into private fortunes, creating factory systems and company towns. Political power began flowing to absentee owners, rather than community-rooted enterprises.

The industrial age forced a nation of farmers to become wage earners, and they became fearful of unemployment–a new fear that corporations quickly learned to exploit. Company towns arose.

55 56

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College_v._Woodward http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/59/331/

CC :: 56

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket and blacklists of labor organizers and workers who spoke up for their rights became common. When workers began to organize, industrialists and bankers hired private armies to keep them in line. They bought newspapers to paint businessmen as heroes and shape public opinion. Corporations bought state legislators, then announced legislators were corrupt and said that they used too much of the public‘s resources to scrutinize every charter application and corporate operation.

Government spending during the Civil War brought these corporations fantastic wealth.

Corporate executives paid ―borers‖ to infest Congress and state capitals, bribing elected and appointed officials alike. They pried loose an avalanche of government financial largesse. During this time, legislators were persuaded to give corporations limited liability, decreased citizen authority over them, and extended durations of charters.

Attempts were made to keep strong charter laws in place, but with the courts applying legal doctrines that made protection of corporations and corporate property the center of constitutional law, citizen sovereignty was undermined. As corporations grew stronger, government and the courts became easier prey. They freely reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution and transformed common law doctrines.

One of the most severe blows to citizen authority arose out of the 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad57. Though the court did not make a ruling on the question of ―corporate personhood58,‖ thanks to misleading notes of a clerk, the decision subsequently was used as precedent to hold that a corporation was a ―natural person.‖ This story was detailed in ―The Theft of Human Rights59,‖ a chapter in Thom Hartmann‘s recommended book Unequal Protection60.

From that point on, the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect rights of freed slaves, was used routinely to grant corporations constitutional ―personhood.‖ Justices have since struck down hundreds of local, state and federal laws enacted to protect people from corporate harm based on this illegitimate premise.

Armed with these ―rights,‖ corporations increased control over resources, jobs, commerce, politicians, even judges and the law.

A United States Congressional committee concluded in 1941, ―The principal instrument of the concentration of economic power and wealth has been the corporate charter with unlimited power….‖

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/santa_clara_vs_southern_pacific/ http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/index.html 59 http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequal-protection/excerpt-theft 60 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/book_review_unequal_protection_hartmann/ 57 58

CC :: 57

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket Many U.S.-based corporations are now transnational, but the corrupted charter remains the legal basis for their existence.

[39]

Significant

U.S.

Court

Cases

in

the

Evolution

of

Corporate

Personhood / Commercial Free Speech: [39.1]

Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)61 - Corporate charters

are ruled to have constitutional protection.

[39.2]

Munn v. State of Illinois (1876)62 - Property cannot be used to unduly

expropriate wealth from a community (later reversed).

[39.3]

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)63 - The substance

of this case (a tax dispute) is of little significance. Though the court did not make a ruling on the question of ―corporate personhood,‖ thanks to misleading notes of a clerk, the decision subsequently was used as precedent to hold that a corporation was a ―natural person.‖ This story was detailed in ―The Theft of Human Rights,‖64 a chapter in Thom Hartmann‘s recommended book Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights65.

[39.4]

Noble v. Union River Logging Railroad Company (1893)66 - A corporation

first successfully claims Bill of Rights protection (5th Amendment) [39.5]

Lochner v. New York (1905)67 - States cannot interfere with ―private

contracts‖ between workers and corporation — marks the ascension of ―substantive due process‖ (later mitigated after President Roosevelt threatend to add Justices to the Court).

[39.6]

Liggett v. Lee (1933)68 - Chain store taxes prohibited as violation of

corporations‘ ―due process‖ rights.

[39.7]

Ross v. Bernhard (1970)69 - 7th Amendment right (jury trial) granted to

corporations.

[39.8]

U.S. v. Martin Linen Supply (1976)70 - A corporation successfully claims

5th Amendment protection against double jeopardy. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0017_0518_ZS.html http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=94&invol=113 63 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/santa_clara_vs_southern_pacific/ 64 http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequal-protection/excerpt-theft 65 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/book_review_unequal_protection_hartmann/ 66 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=147&invol=165 67 http://www.lectlaw.com/files/case37.htm 68 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=288&invol=517 69 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=396&invol=531 70 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=430&invol=564 61 62

CC :: 58

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [39.9]

Marshall v. Barlow (1978)71 - The Court creates 4th Amendment

protection for corporations — federal inspectors must obtain a search warrant for a safety inspection on corporate property.

[39.10] First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978)72 - Struck down a Massachusetts law that banned corporate spending to influence state ballot initiatives, even spending by corporate political action committees. Spending money to influence politics is now a corporate ―right.‖ Justice Rehnquist‘s dissent is a recommended read. (Related articles: Ballot Initiatives Hijacked73 / Behind the Powell Memo74).

[39.11] Central Hudson Gas v. Public Service Comm. of NY (1980)75 - This oftcited decision concerns a state ban on ads promoting electricity consumption.

[39.12] Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990)76 - Upheld limits on corporate spending in elections.

[39.13] Thompson v. Western States Medical Center (2002)77 [39.14] Nike v Kasky (2002)78 - Nike claims California cannot require factual accuracy of the corporation in its PR campaigns. California‘s Supreme Court disagreed. The U.S. Supreme Court took up the case on appeal, then issued a nonruling in 2003.

[39.15] Randall v Sorrell (2006)79. While this case dealt with the legality of Vermont‘s contribution limits, not corporations directly, it carried important implications for corporate political influence (Daniel Greenwood amicus brief80 to the U.S. Supreme Court).

[39.16] Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010)81. In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court overrules Austin and a century of federal legislative precedent to proclaim broad electioneering rights for corporations.

[39.17] Western Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Attorney General of Montana82. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled Montana‘s Supreme Court ruling, which had upheld a challenge to the state‘s century-old ban on corporate electioneering.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=436&invol=307 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=435&invol=765 73 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/overturn_bellotti_initiatives/ 74 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/ 75 http://epic.org/free_speech/central_hudson.html 76 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=494&invol=652 77 http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-344.ZS.html 78 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/nike/ 79 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_v._Sorrell 80 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/political_reform_amicus_vermont_supreme_court/ 81 http://reclaimdemocracy.org/who-are-citizens-united/ 71 72

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [40]

Reclaim

Democracy:

Corporate

Personhood83

page

has

excellent

additional Resources on the history and effects of Corporate Influence, via Corporate Personhood on Courts, Politics and AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence.

Additionally, an absolute must read is Thom Hartmann‘s book, Unequal Protection: The rise of Corporate Dominance and theft of human rights84, which includes an overview of corporate personhood, the history of the Boston Tea Party, as America's first revolt against transnational corporate power, Jefferson‘s reasons for opposing "corporate monopolies", how corporate personhood became law, its impacts, a resolution for abolishing Corporate Personhood and much more.

[41]

Corpotocracy, Ecology and Politics:

[42]

in The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of

Globalization (1997), Joshual Karliner reports how American corporations, together with pro-corporate allies in the House and Senate: * help write and promote laws that use 'risk assessment' formulate to make economic considerations the determining factor over health protection when setting environmental standards * work to slash the budgets for enforcing agencies such as the EPA and the Interior Department * continue to deny the scientific bases of many environmental problems * attempt to undermine laws mandating clearn water and and air, and protecting endangered species and wilderness * moved to delay the phase out of ozone-depleting chemicals * sabotage food safety laws * undermine laws making them liable for defective products or force them to pay for their pollution crimes.

AnthroCorpocentric Influence on Judicial Decision Making AnthroCorpocentric Influence in Judicial Decision Making Models: [43] According to Kearney and Merrill in The Influence of Amicus Curiae Briefs on the Supreme Court, there are three different models of judicial decision-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Tradition_Partnership,_Inc._v._Attorney_General_of_Montana http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/ 84 http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequal-protection/ 82 83

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket making: the conventional legal model, the attitudinal model and the interest group theory model.85 [44] Under the conventional legal model of judicial decision making, judges regard themselves as ―seeking to resolve cases in accordance with the requirements of law, as understood by professional acts in the legal community.‖ Amicus briefs impact their judicial decision-making if they contain ―new information-legal arguments and background factual material-that would be relevant to persons seeking the correct result in light of established legal norms‖.

[45] Under the ‗attitudinal model‘ of judging, it is argued by political scientists, that judges have ―fixed ideological preferences,86 and hence ―case outcomes are a product of the summing of the preferences of the participating judges, with legal norms serving only to rationalize outcomes after the fact‖. If or where a Judge consequently holds fixed ideological preferences contrary to the information in the Amicus brief, the brief will have ―little or no impact on the outcomes reached by a court, because each judge's vote in a case is assumed to be the product of his or her pre-established ideological preferences with respect to the issue presented.‖ The attitudinal model suggests that ―a judge can obtain all the information needed to determine his or her vote, by reading the "Question Presented" and the statement of facts contained in the parties' briefs‖. If or where amicus briefs ―provide additional legal arguments and factual background, under this model they offer information of no relevance to judges‖.

[46] Under the ‗interest group theory‘ model of judicial decision making, it is assumed that judges do not have strong ideological preferences about most issues.

Instead they are ―empty vessels who seek to decide cases so as to reach those results supported by the most influential groups in society that have an interest in the question at hand‖.

[47] In this model, Amicus briefs are ―important to the judicial process because of the signals that they convey about how interested groups want particular cases decided‖. As such, as in Jaffee, if a number of parties from an influential corporate, political or media group file amicus briefs, that endorse a particular outcome, ―this tells the judges how to rule if they want to secure the approval of [those] organized groups‖.

Kearney, Joseph D, and Merrill, Thomas W (2000/01/01): ―In writings about judicial behavior, Judge Posner has suggested that appellate judges are primarily motivated by the pleasure they derive from participating in the "spectator's game" of deciding cases. See RICHARD A. POSNER, OVERCOMING LAW 126- 35 (1995) [hereinafter POSNER, OVERCOMINGLAW]; Richard A. Posner, What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Everybody Else Does), 3 SUP. CT. ECON. REV. 1, 23-30 (1994) [hereinafter Posner, What do Judges and Justices Maximize?]. This theory does not precisely conform to any of the three models of judging we will discuss, but in practice it would appear to fall closer to the legal model than to either the attitudinal model or the interest group model. If judging is like observing a game of tennis or chess, then presumably an important part of the process is understanding and following the rules of the game.

86 See JEMEY A. SEGAL & HAROLD J. SPAETH, THE SUPREME COURT AND THE ATTITUDINAL MODEL 6573 (1993) (describing the rationale and historical antecedents of the attitudinal model).

85

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [48] Consequently it shouldn‘t surprise readers that the organisations with the highest carrying capacity footprints, i.e. those effectively robbing and raping the planets resources from future generations, are the ones that have been, and are over-represented in Amicus filings, and naturally have laid the jurisprudence foundation of the Human Factory Farming War Economy Racket Anthropocentric outcomes – and current Anthropocentric legal doctrine - reached by the courts.

Lawyers are co-conspirators in perpetuating the alienation and symbolism of the legal culture and its message of power and authority.

[49] In Black Rage Confronts the Law, Paul Harris writes in Chapter 3: The Law: Its Myths and Rituals: The law is the most powerful expression of a society's rules.

The dominant purpose of the law in every country is to preserve the status quo, to protect people and institutions who have privilege and power, whether in goverment or in civil society.

The law fulfils this purpose by the peaceful resolution of conflicts, but also by coercion. An example of the resolution of conflict through the legal system is the immense amount of time, money, and energy used in dealing with business arrangements.

Politicians complain about criminal cases clogging up the courts, but in reality most lawyers' time and a large amount of litigation concern capitalist business deals and conflicts. A 1995 University of Wisconsin survey reported that only 3 percent of lawyers focus on criminal law. In San Francisco in 1995, the public defender's office had sixty-eight lawyers, eleven investigators, and thirty staff personnel. In contrast, one of the largest corporate law firms, Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro, had 294 lawyers and 335 staff personnel, in their San Francisco office alone. They also have ten other offices, including one in Hong Kong and one in Tokyo.

Criminal law gets most of the media attention, but corporate law is where billions of dollars are negotiated and litigated, and where decisions are being made which control our environment, our jobs, and the very quality of our lives. The law is necessary to facilitate and mediate these decisions, thereby avoiding an anarchy that would severely disrupt the free market and societal relations.

The law also mediates thousands of other conflicts in civil society, from landlord-tenant conflicts to consumer-related product liability suits; from simple car accident cases to major constitutional issues; from divorces to bankruptcy proceedings, In the United States in particular, law seems to surround us.

Peaceful resolution of conflict through the mutual acceptance of a judicial forum is one method of keeping society on an even CC :: 62

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket keel. Another method is coercion -- using the force of the state, or the threat of that force, on individuals in order to secure their obedience. And when they fail to obey, they state uses that force to inflict punishment. Robert Cover gets to the heart of the matter when he writes, "The Judges deal pain and death. That is not all they do. Perhaps that is not what they usually do. But they do deal death, and pain" If law's primary purpose is to protect the powerful and keep things as they are, in America its secondary purpose is to protect individual rights. The Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of these protections. ... If human history teaches us anything, it is that governments cannot rule by force alone. In every period of history people have fought against tyranny. ..

Therefore for a goverment to continue to hold power it must create a legal system that has an image of justice and some sense of fairness. It must also win the psychological acceptance of the majority of its citizens. How it does this has been the subject of increasing academic scrutiny.

One of the more prevalent theories of this process is put forward by Peter Gabel, a founder of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies, and the president of New College and New College School of Law: "The principle role of the legal system within these societies is to create a political culture that can persuade people to accept both the legitimacy and the apparent inevitability of the existing hierarchical arrangement. The need for this Legitimation arises because people will not accede to the subjugation of their souls through the deployment of force alone. They must be persuaded, even if it is only a "pseudopersuasion," that the existing order is both just and fair, and tht they themselves desire it. In particular, there must be a way of managing the intense interpersonal and intra-psychic conflict that a social order founded upon alienation and collective powerlessness repeatedly produces.

"Democratic consent" to an inhumane social order can be fashioned only by finding ways to keep people in a state of passive compliance with the status quo, and this requires both the pacification of conflict and the provision of fantasy images of community that can compensate for the lack of real community that people experience in their everyday lives.

Society fashions this "democratic consent" through what has begun to be referred to as legal culture. Law has a culture of its own, including education, training, rules of behaviour, philosophy, folkways, habits, language, economics, tradition, and stories. The courtroom is one of the key elements of this culture. The structure and rituals of the courtroom are intended to communicate the "three M's" of the law: majesty, mystique, CC :: 63

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket and might. The architecture of the courtroom divides the lawyers and the judge and his staff from the lay people. The judge's seat is elevated above everyone else. There is an American flag near the judge, who wears a large black robe. There is a bailiff, usually a law enforcement officer in uniform, who enforces the judge's rules for the courtroom. Sometimes these rules have no relationship to the process of justice. For example, some judges won't allow members of the public to chew gun. When I was a law student observing a regular trial in Oakland Superior Court, I was told to leave the courtroom for chewing an antacid tablet. In the OJ Simpson trial, Judge Lance Ito called a reporter into chambers for sucking on a cough drop.

A number of years ago, in the United States District Court in San Francisco, the chief judge had a standing order that children were not allowed in the courtroom. My client's wife was told by the bailiff to take her two children, aged ten and seven, out of the courtroom on the day their father was being sentenced to prison for five years. I refused to allow this clear violation of the Sixth Amendment's right to a public trial, the First Amendment's right of association, and the general constitutional right of privacy, which protects family relationships. Although the judge allowed the children to stay in my case, the standing order continued in force and lawyers continued to obey it.

Lawyers are co-conspirators in perpetuating the alienation and symbolism of the legal culture and its message of power and authority. .. A defendant's case is dependent on her attorney's ability to translate human experience into legal dogma. Her future depends on the judge's acceptance of the defendants confessional as translated by her probation officer and attorney.

The lawyer, like a priest, is the middleperson between life and judgement. He suffers the initiation rites of his calling, wears its vestments, legitimizes its authority, speaks its language, partakes of its rituals, and maintains a monopoly on its mystery.

For the lawyers clients, the lawyer, and the public, the result of the courtroom process is an acceptance of authority and a conditioned submission to its philosophy and rules. People enjoy rituals and symbols. Watching the court process is frightening, but it can also be exciting for the public. They feel secure observing authority in action. They admire and identify with the judges and the people in power, while at the same time accepting their own position as lower in the hierarchy of societal relationships. Just as a formal church service legitimates

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket established religion, the legitimates the legal system.

traditional

courtroom

ritual

Another major structural support of the existing legal culture is legal reasoning. This is a form of thought that presupposes existing societal relations. It does not allow for questioning of political decisions that have led to our institutions. It makes it seem as though our laws are a consequence of existing societal relations. This area of law presupposes the unequal distribution of property, which is justified by the philosophical notions that in America everyone is free and that if a person has enough talent he or she can acquire property. If an individual fails to "make good," it is his or her own failure based on lack of merit. What is fascinating about the law is that it incorporates the existing system of inequality, but then the law itself is used as a rationale for legitimating the very system that is embedded within it. In other words, the law enforces rules as the natural order, when in fact those rules have already assumed on set of philosophical tenets and rejected alternatives.

The term real property refers to houses, buildings, and land, as contrasted to personal property, which includes most other things one owns. Real property law in the United States allows one to own all the houses, buildings, and land one can afford. A person can make a living sitting in his home and collecting money from other people living in their homes, which he owns. An individual can own a tree or a beach. This arrangement is called capitalism. If a lawyer brought a lawsuit in an American court on behalf of neighbours who wanted occasional access to a "private" beach, the lawsuit would be dismissed immediately. A judge would not allow legal arguments regarding the public nature of a beach and whether it should or should not be owned by an individual.

This legal result is not common to all societies. Historically, among many Native American tribes land could not be owned by an individual.

There was no proprietary interest in the environment. One could no more own a beach than one could own the ocean. People made fun of the Indians for allegedly selling the island of Manhattan for a few beads. But in Native American legal thought people could not own Manhattan Island, and therefore they could not sell it.

In modern-day America a tenant cannot refuse to pay rent on the grounds that the landlord owns more homes than she needs. But in Cuba one could raise such an argument and win. The Cuban General Law on Housing adopted in 1988 provides as follows: "Personal property in housing must be understood ... essentially as a right of enjoyment of the house by the owner and his/her family, CC :: 65

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket without having to pay anything after paying its price, but in now case can this right of personal property in the house become a mechanism of enrichment or exploitation."

Another major factor in legal reasoning is the myth that the law is made up of neutral, fair rules. Rules are supposed to become evident to any educated and legally trained judge or lawyer who objectively analyzes the facts and the previous legal decisions.

This myth is articulated perfectly by California Court of Appeals Judge Edward Wallin: "I am never troubled by making a decision. I just decide the way the law dictates."

The judge's statement assumes that reason and logic determine judicial results. It denies the influence of the judge's personal political views. The statement also carries the message that the "law" is just floating out there in space, majestically dictating the correct (fair and just) result. This denies the fact that judges must interpret conflicting arguments to arrive at a result, and that their interpretation is based on a myriad of factors that are rooted in present-day political conditions.

Anyone who does not believe that judges are influenced by public pressure, social movements, and their own prejudices and opinions should read The Brethren by Scott Armstrong and Bob Woodward, the journalist who helped uncover the Watergate story.

This was the first popular book to go behind the black-robed mystique of the United States Supreme Court and expose the myth that judges interpret the law based on objective, neutral principles untainted by politics and predisposition.

Corporate Controlled Jurisprudence: Binding Mandatory Arbitration: [50] In The Ballooning Number of Corporate Kangaroo Courts Is Destroying Our Seventh Amendment Rights87, Jim Hightower writes that ―If you've been gouged by your bank, discriminated against, sexually harassed, unfairly fired, you'll most likely find that you're barred from the courthouse door.‖ Being wronged by a corporation is painful enough, but just try getting your day in court. Most Americans don't realize it, but our Seventh Amendment right to a fair jury trial against corporate wrongdoers has quietly been stripped from us. Instead, we are now shunted into a stacked-deck game called "Binding Mandatory Arbitration."

All you really need to know about today's process is that it's the product of years of conceptual monkey-wrenching by corporate Jim Hightower (27 March 2013): The Ballooning Number of Corporate Kangaroo Courts Is Destroying Our Seventh Amendment Rights; Alternet http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/ballooning-number-corporate-kangaroo-courts-destroying-our-seventhamendment-rights 87

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket lobbyists, Congress, the Supreme Court and hired-gun lobbying firms looking to milk the system for steady profits. First and foremost, these fixers have turned a voluntary process into the exact opposite: mandatory. Let's look at this mess.

— Unlike courts, arbitration is private business.

not a public system, but a

— Far from being neutral, "the third-party" arbitration firms are — get this! — usually hand-picked by the corporation involved in the case, chosen specifically because they have proven records of favoring the corporation.

— The corporation also gets to choose the city or town where the case is heard, allowing it to make the case inconvenient, expensive and unfair to individuals bringing a complaint.

— Arbitrators are not required to know the law relevant to the cases they judge or follow legal precedents.

— Normal procedural rules for gathering and sharing evidence and safeguarding fairness to both parties do not apply in arbitration cases.

— Arbitration public.

proceedings

are

closed

to

the

media

and

the

— Arbitrators need not reveal the reasons for their decisions, so they are not legally accountable for errors, and the decisions set no legal precedents for guiding future corporate conduct.

— Even if an arbitrator's decision is legally incorrect, it still is enforceable, carrying the full weight of the law.

— There is virtually no right to appeal an arbitrator's ruling.

That adds up to a kangaroo court! Who would choose such a rigged system? No one. Which is why corporate America has resorted to brute force and skullduggery to drag you into their arbitration wringer.

By "force," I mean practically every business relationship you have with a corporation (customer, employee, supplier, etc.) begins with you blindly signing away your right to go to court.

Written in indecipherable legalese, these sneaky provisos are usually secluded in the tiny-type of pre-printed, take-it-orleave-it, non-negotiable contracts.

By "you," I mean everyone one of us who: takes a job, gets a credit card, subscribes to cable TV, buys an insurance policy, rents an apartment, purchases nearly any new product (from cellphone to house), has a home remodeled or car repaired,

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket enters a nursing home, becomes a franchisee supplier or signs up with a landscaping service.

or

corporate

If you seek justice because you've been gouged by your bank, discriminated against, sexually harassed, unfairly fired, cheated on wages, sold a shoddy product, denied health care coverage or otherwise harmed by a corporation, you'll most likely find that you're barred from the courthouse door. That document you unwittingly signed has shackled you to the corporation's own privatized court.

Since binding mandatory arbitration "agreements" are written by corporate lawyers, it's no surprise that they stack the deck in favor of corporations. But — wow! — the percentage of rigged wins is disgusting.

For example, Public Citizen found that one giant firm, the National Arbitration Forum, heard over 34,000 consumer-versusbank cases in California. It sided with financial giants 95 percent of the time. Even more astonishing, the city of San Francisco found that of the 18,045 cases brought by banks and other powers against overmatched California consumers, NAF's private judges sided with the corporations 100 percent of the time.

Corporate Media’s Growth Agenda Censorship of Growth- Overshoot – Scarcity – Conflict Connection ―The insurance industry, which is a key barometer of these things, has reached the conclusion that whatever your politics are on [climate change], the costs of extreme weather are so great and the patterns over the last couple of decades are so distinct that the corporate establishment absolutely must recognize these risks.‖ - Paul Barrett, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter88 ―We didn't find many climate change deniers in the insurance industry. They probably have a commercial interest in taking the risks seriously.‖ - Chris Nicholson, Bloomberg News

Mainstream Connection:

Media’s

Silence

of

Overshoot-Scarcity-Conflict

Joe Strupp (3 July 2013): Business Journalists: Climate Change Deniares No Place in Our Reporting; Media Matters http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/03/business-journalists-climate-change-deniers-hav/194736 88

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [51] Max Greenberg (3 July 2013): Study: Media Still Largely Fail to Put Wildfires in Climate Context89; Media Matters:

89

http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/07/03/study-media-still-largely-fail-to-put-wildfires/194733

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [51.1] Just 6 Percent Of Wildfire Coverage Mentioned Climate Change. Major television and print media outlets improved over last year in connecting climate change to wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico, California and other Western states, but still generally failed to mention the link. Only 6 percent of total wildfire items mentioned climate change, including 9 percent of major print coverage and 4 percent of TV coverage. In a 2012 study encompassing a similar period, only 3 percent of wildfire coverage mentioned climate change (6 percent of print articles, 2 percent of TV segments). Coverage of July 2012 wildfires improved on those numbers. [Media Matters, 7/3/1290] [Media Matters, 8/6/1291] [52] Jill Fitzsimmons (14 May 2013): Nightly News Covered the Royal Family More than Climate Change in 201292; Media Matters: [52.1] Even during the warmest year on record in the U.S., the nightly news programs combined devoted only 12 full segments to climate change. By contrast, these programs dedicated over seven times more coverage to the royals in 2012.

[52.2] The disparity was greatest on ABC World News, which dedicated 43 segments to the royal family and only one to climate change. NBC Nightly News wasn't much better, devoting 38 segments to the royals and only 4 to climate change. CBS Evening News covered climate change the most -- in 7 segments -- but still less than its 11 segments on the royal family.

[52.3] This ongoing imbalance was illustrated just last week when scientists announced that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is set to surpass 400 parts per million, likely for the first time in human history. ABC World News and NBC Nightly News ignored the story, even as NBC found time to cover Prince Harry's visit to the United States.

[52.4] A previous Media Matters report found that the broadcast networks covered Donald Trump more than climate change in 2011.

[52.5] When the broadcast networks did report on climate change, they often failed to connect the dots between climate change and particular extreme weather events like last year's record-breaking heat, massive wildfires in the West, and Hurricane Sandy. Continuing this trend, these networks have failed to report on recent near-record flooding in the Midwest in the context of climate change, which has increased the frequency of large rain storms and exacerbated flood risks.

http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/07/03/study-media-avoid-climate-context-in-wildfire-c/186921 http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/06/study-media-begin-to-connect-the-dots-between-c/189144 92 http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05/14/nightly-news-covered-the-royal-family-more-than/193795 90 91

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [53] Jill Fitzsimmons (9 May 2013): "New Normal" of California Wildfirers Doesn't Make the News93; Media Matters [53.1] As wildfires swept through southern California over the past week, experts warned that the state is in for an especially dangerous wildfire season due to unusually hot and dry conditions. But in their coverage of the fires, several of California's major newspapers have entirely ignored how climate change has increased wildfire risks in the region.

[53.2] California's wildfire season kicked off early this year, with record temperatures, heavy winds and ongoing drought conditions fueling fires across the state that have threatened thousands of homes and businesses. California has already experienced 680 wildfires this year -- about 200 more than average for this period -- and the National Interagency Fire Service is predicting "above normal" potential for significant fires in northern and southern California this season.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service is preparing for a higher number of significant fires across the West.

[53.3] Climate experts warn that rising global temperatures are already leading to more frequent and more severe wildfires and longer fire seasons in the Southwest, calling large fires like those in California "the new normal." But several major print outlets in California have failed to make this connection, even after Governor Jerry Brown noted the link Monday.

93

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05/09/new-normal-of-california-wildfires-doesnt-make/193991

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [53.4] The San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and U-T San Diego have not mentioned climate change while reporting on the recent fires. These papers also printed several stories from the Associated Press, none of which mentioned climate change. By contrast, the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times mentioned climate change in 33 percent and 27 percent of coverage, respectively.

[54] Jill Fitzsimmons (7 May 2013): Study: Media Ignore Climate Context of Midwest Floods94; Media Matters [54.1]

Less Than 3 Percent Of Midwest Flood Stories Mention Climate Change

[54.2] ABC, NBC And CNN Entirely Ignore Climate Connection. ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN devoted 74 full segments to flooding in the Midwest, but only one -on CBS Evening News -- alluded to the fact that heavy downpours have increased 94

http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/05/07/study-media-ignore-climate-context-of-midwest-f/193936

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket (one percent of coverage). That segment did not explain that scientists have attributed this to climate change, and did not feature any scientists. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in Nexis.

[55] Jill Fitzsimmons (11 March 2013): CBS Ignores Temperatures Are Highest in 4,000 Years95, Media Matters

Study

Finding

[55.1] CBS News is the only major TV news network other than Fox News to ignore a new study finding that global temperatures are higher now than at any time in the past 4,000 years, further evidence of the threat of rapid manmade global warming.

[56] Jill Fitzsimmons (8 January 2013): Study: Warmest Year on record received Cool Climate Coverage96; Media Matters [56.1] Media Matters analysis finds that news coverage of climate change on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX remained low in 2012 despite record temperatures and a series of extreme weather events in the U.S. When the Sunday shows did discuss climate change, scientists were shut out of the debate while Republican politicians were given a platform to question the science.

[56.2] Even In Record-Breaking Year, Broadcast Climate Coverage Remained Minimal. In 2012, the U.S. experienced record-breaking heat, a historic drought, 95 96

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/11/cbs-ignores-study-finding-temperatures-are-high/193003 http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/01/08/study-warmest-year-on-record-received-cool-clim/192079

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket massive wildfires in the West, and Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice extent shattered the previous record low and the Greenland ice sheet saw the greatest melt in recorded history. According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history for the contiguous U.S. Yet despite these illustrations of climate change, the broadcast news outlets devoted very little time to climate change in 2012, following a downward trend since 2009: [57] Shauna Theel (27 June 2012): Study: Kardashians Get 40 Times More News Coverage than Ocean Acidification97; Media Matters: [57.1] Carbon dioxide emissions are not just warming up our atmosphere, they're also changing the chemistry of our oceans. This phenomenon is known as ocean acidification, or sometimes as global warming's "evil twin" or the "osteoporosis of the sea." Scientists have warned that it poses a serious threat to ocean life. Yet major American news outlets covered the Kardashians over 40 times more often than ocean acidification over the past year and a half.

[57.2] Rising carbon dioxide emissions have caused the oceans to become around 30 percent more acidic since the Industrial Revolution, and if we do not lower the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the ocean surface could be up to 150 percent more acidic by 2100. At that level, the shells of some plankton would dissolve, large parts of the ocean would become inhospitable to coral reef growth, and the rapidity of the change could threaten much of the marine food web.

According to the National Research Council, the chemical changes are taking place "at an unprecedented rate and magnitude" and are "practically irreversible on a time scale of centuries."

[57.3] Despite a boom of recent scientific research documenting this threat, there has been a blackout on the topic at most media outlets. Since the end of 2010, ABC, 97

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/06/27/study-kardashians-get-40-times-more-news-covera/186703

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket NBC, and Fox News have completely ignored ocean acidification, and the Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, CNN, and CBS have barely mentioned it at all.

[57.4] In sum, ocean acidification is a major threat to our oceans and the millions of people who depend on them for their food and livelihoods. Yet 77 percent of Americans say they have read or heard nothing about ocean acidification, according to a 2010 survey conducted for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Of the 23 percent who say that they have heard of ocean acidification, only 32 percent understand that ocean acidification is caused by carbon dioxide. In other words, less than 8 percent of Americans understand the very basics of one of the largest threats to our oceans -and a major culprit for that ignorance is the national media.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [58] Jill Fitzsimmons (13 November 2012): Study: TV Media covered Biden's Smile nearly twice as much as Climate Change98; Media Matters [58.1] Climate change was almost entirely absent from the political discourse this election season, receiving less than an hour of TV coverage over three months from the major cable and broadcast networks excluding MSNBC. By contrast, those outlets devoted nearly twice as much coverage to Vice President Joe Biden's demeanor during his debate with Rep. Paul Ryan. When climate change was addressed, print and TV media outlets often failed to note the scientific consensus or speak to scientists.

[58.2] Several Outlets Did Not Interview A Single Scientist. In election coverage of climate change, media outlets often turned to politicians and journalists rather than scientists. Scientists made up less than 6 percent of TV guests and just 5 percent of those quoted by print outlets on climate change in the context of the election. ABC, NBC, Fox News, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket News, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Denver Post, Dallas Morning News and the St. Petersburg-Tampa Bay Times, and the Des Moines Register did not interview or quote a single scientist on climate change.

[59] Jill Fitzsimmons (27 September 2012): Study: TV News covered Paul Ryan's Workout 3x More than Record Arctic Sea Ice Loss99; Media Matters [59.1] Arctic sea ice is declining much faster than scientists expected, which has important implications for the rate and impacts of climate change. But the major TV news outlets have largely ignored the record sea ice loss this summer, while

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket making ample time to cover Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's physical fitness.

[59.2] TV News Covered Paul Ryan's Workout Over Three Times More Than Arctic Sea Ice Loss. Since June, the major TV news outlets have devoted seven full segments to Paul Ryan's physical fitness and P90X workout routine, and only one to Arctic sea ice loss. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have each covered Paul Ryan's workout routine as much or more than Arctic sea ice loss. In total, TV outlets have discussed Ryan's fitness 66 times -- more than three times as much as Arctic sea ice.

[59.3] Cable Outlets Covered Ryan's Workout Over Six Times More Than Arctic Sea Ice Loss. The three major cable news outlets mentioned Arctic sea ice only eight times in four months. Three of these mentions were in the context of how ice impacts drilling expeditions in the Arctic, and the one mention on Fox News dismissed the problem entirely. Meanwhile, the cable outlets have discussed Ryan's workouts 53 times CC :: 78

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

[60] Jill Fitzsimmons (15 August 2012): Study: TV Media Ignore Climate Change in Coverage of Record July Heat100; Media Matters [60.1] Scientists say that human-induced climate change made this year's record heat more likely, and project that extreme heat will become more common in the United States. But a Media Matters analysis of media coverage of record-breaking heat in July finds that major television outlets rarely made the connection between heat waves and a changing climate.

[60.2] Only 14% Of Heat Wave Stories Mentioned Climate Change. In a study of major media outlets, only 8.7% of television segments and 25.5% of print articles reported on record-breaking July heat waves in the context of climate change.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket

Corporate Media’s Pro-Growth Scarcity-Conflict ‘If It bleeds, it leads’ Agenda is the cause of Citizens Eco-Illiterate ignorance of how to contribute to Sustainable Security: Procreate and Consume below carrying capacity, to avoid scarcity induced resource war conflict; and elect Eco-Literate politicians to enact sustainable laws: [60.3]

Maher, Michael (1997/03): How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-

Environment Connection101: University of South-western Louisiana, Population and Environment, Volume 18, Number 4, March 1977; Reprinted in 1997 by the Carrying Capacity Network, Focus, 18 (2), 21-37.

Population researchers Paul and Anne Ehrlich opened their book, The Population Explosion, with a chapter titled, "Why Isn't Everyone as Scared as We Are?" They acknowledged, "The average person, even the average scientist, seldom makes the connection between [disparate environmental problems] and the population problem, and thus remains unworried" (1990, p. 21). But while they noted that the evening news almost never connects population growth to environmental problems, the Ehrlichs chiefly blamed social taboos fostered by the Catholic Church and "a colossal failure of education" (p. 32) for public indifference about population. Howell (1992) also minimized the role of the media in influencing public aptitude about science and the environment, and pointed instead to education: ―The obvious starting point for the individual is the public schools .... Education proceeds into undergraduate programs, which can play more than one major role in enhancing scientific literacy (p. 160).‖ The Ehrlichs and Howell seem to assume that education is the chief factor driving public opinion about environmental causality. But in Tradeoffs: Imperatives of Choice in a High-Tech World, Wenk (1986) offered a more media-centric view of how the public learns: "Whatever literacy in science and technology the general public has reached is not from formal education. Rather, it is from the mass media. That responsibility of the press has been almost completely ignored" (p. 162).

This study will examine press responsibility for the public's indifference to population growth by exploring two questions: * To what extent do press reports about population-driven environmental problems link those problems to population growth?

Maher, Michael (1997/03): How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection ,: University of Southwestern Louisiana, Population and Environment, Volume 18, Number 4, March 1977; Reprinted in 1997 by the Carrying Capacity Network, Focus, 18 (2), 21-37. issuu.com/js-ror/docs/mahertm_journo-env-pop-connection 101

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket * What reasons do reporters give for ignoring population growth in stories about environmental problems? [..]

Why Journalists Avoid Mentioning Population As we have seen, both land development economists and environmental experts acknowledge population growth as a key source of environmental change.

But journalists frame environmental causality differently.

Why? Communication theory offers several possibilities. First is the hegemony-theory interpretation: reports omit any implication that population growth might produce negative effects, in order to purvey the ideology of elites who make money from population growth. As Molotch and Lester (1974) put it, media content can be viewed as reflecting "the practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others" (p. 120). Since real estate, construction and banking interests directly support the media through advertising purchases, this interpretation seems plausible. A number of media critics (e.g., Gandy, 1982; Altschull, 1984; Bennett, 1988) have suggested that media messages reflect the values of powerful political and commercial interests. Burd (1972), Kaniss (1991) and others have pointed out that newspapers have traditionally promoted population growth in their cities through civic boosterism. Molotch (1976) even suggested that cities can best be understood as entities competing for population growth, with the city newspaper as chief cheerleader.

Certainly most reporters would be incensed at the suggestion that they shade their reporting to placate commercial interests. But Breed‘s classic study of social control in the newsroom (1955) showed that news managers‘ values are transmissible to journalists through a variety of pressures: salaries, story assignments, layout treatment, editing, and a variety of other strategies that effectively shape news stories in ways acceptable to management.

Another possible explanation for why journalists omit population growth from their story frame is simple ignorance of other explanations. Journalists who cover environmental issues may not be aware of any other possible ways to frame these stories, thus they derive their framing from other journalists. Journalists frequently read each other‘s work and take cues for coverage from other reporters, particularly from the elite media (Reese & Danielian, 1989). Perhaps the pervasive predictability of the story frames examined in the Part I is another example of intermedia influence.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket On the other hand, it seems difficult to believe that journalists could be ignorant of the role population growth plays in environmental issues, because media coverage frequently ties population growth to housing starts and business expansion.

Furthermore, "Why" is one of the five "W‘s" taught in every Journalism 101 course. A public affairs reporting textbook, Interpreting Public Issues (Griffin, Molen, Schoenfeld, and Scotton, 1991), admonishes journalists: "A common journalistic mistake is simply to cover events —real or staged— and ignore underlying issues" (p.320). The book identified population trends as one of the "big trouble spots," and listed world population as the first of its "forefront issues in the ‘90s" (p. 320). Hence, we cannot say that reporting basic causality is beyond the role that journalists ascribe for themselves. Indeed, a panel at the 1994 Society of Environmental Journalists discussed "Covering Population as a Local Story" (Wheeler, 1994). But ignorance remains a possible reason, for not all reporters have training in environmental issues.

A third possible explanation comes from the "Spiral of Silence" theory by German scholar Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1984): ―The fear of isolation seems to be the force that sets the spiral of silence in motion. To run with the pack is a relatively happy state of affairs; but if you can‘t, because you won‘t share publicly in what seems to be a universally acclaimed conviction, you can at least remain silent, as a second choice, so that others can put up with you. (p. 6)‖ [..]

This study suggests that the working principles of journalistic storytelling create a vast causal dissociation when the news media report population-driven environmental problems. Local media can cover local environmental degradation, but cannot connect these problems to population growth because, in part, reporters and their sources feel that population growth can only addressed at the national level.

National media can address the population issue, but national reporters can‘t peg a story on population to local events that, from a national perspective, seem trivial. Why would Newsweek readers in Iowa or Oregon want to know about population-driven water rationing in a suburb of San Diego, or a protested land development north of Atlanta? And on the other hand, why would a borough of Boston want to address national population growth as an issue? From a systems theory perspective, the information feedback loop that connects the microcosm to the macrocosm is broken in the news we get.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket A spiral of silence also seems to affect journalists‘ framing of population-driven environmental problems.

Most journalists interviewed in this study knew population growth affects the environment they cover, but they were reluctant to mention population either in their stories or in the interviews that formed the basis for this chapter.

Reporters know the controversial nature of population growth, and would rather avoid the issue than mention it —even in questioning sources for their stories.

This study suggests that, from an agenda-setting perspective, the narrative imperative of newswriting keeps issues like population off the agenda. Frequency of mention by the media is the chief means by which an issue asserts itself into the public consciousness (McCombs and Shaw, 1977). But even though population growth causes or exacerbates uncountably frequent events that lower the quality of most Americans‘ lives, reporters don‘t mention this. They can‘t connect event to ultimate cause in daily events reporting, and this effectively keeps the cause off the agenda and out of public consciousness. If, as one interviewed reporter suggested, reporters "cover fires" for six months, then write a single "trend story" that connects the events to causes, this pattern likely keeps population low on the agenda, because an isolated trend story is unlikely to have much effect on public consciousness.

McCombs and Shaw (1977) note that the media serve a useful function by setting the agenda: ―Both by deliberate winnowing and by inadvertent agenda-setting the mass media help society achieve consensus on which concerns and interests should be translated into public issues and opinion. (pp. 151-152)‖ But the agenda-setting process seems useful only if we consider what the media do place on the agenda. This study shows that agenda-setting may have a dark side, when we consider what the media do not cover. To generalize from this study, it seems likely the media have a blind spot regarding the basic layers of multilayered causality. The deep causes that drive daily events remain off the agenda. Certainly this is the case with population growth, but such causal dissociation may keep many other deepseated causes of social problems off the agenda.

Although scholars have not satisfactorily tied the media agenda and public opinion to the policy agenda (Borquez, 1993), many scholars have agreed that the media are very important for determining what does not get on the policy agenda. Spitzer (1993) noted: "The scope of the conflict determines the outcome...more than any other single force in national politics, the media control the scope of politics." In a similar vein Kingdon (1973) said: "In addition to noting how important the CC :: 83

Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket media are in bringing subjects, facts, and interpretations to congressmen, it is also important to mention that the media also play some part in determining which pieces of information will not be brought to congressmen." And indeed, recent U.S. policy on population is pronatalist (Abernethy, 1993). Although in 1996 Congress took measures to reduce immigration, it did so primarily for economic and social reasons, rather than out of concern for the environment. That same Congress dramatically reduced U.S. funding for worldwide family planning programs.

Many environmentalists are frustrated by the low salience Americans give the population issue. Deploring the "primitive stage" of U.S. public opinion on population, Grant (1992, p. 231) characterizes U.S. political discourse as "the kingdom of the deaf" (p. 239). Part I of this study shows that the American public is not deaf; but in the news they read Americans simply have little to hear that explains the environmental costs of population growth. Well-known population researcher Paul Ehrlich has written that a "conspiracy of silence" keeps humanity from taking action on population (1989). Part II of this study shows that journalists are engaged in no conspiracy; they are simply keeping within the storytelling bounds of their craft, framing their coverage of environmental issues narrowly with regard to space and time. Interviewed journalists feel that a limited newshole keeps them from connecting local environmental problems to global causes like population growth. They also know that reproductive matters are a hot button with some readers, and steer clear of the issue if they can.

But population must become more salient if future generations are to enjoy the quality of life we now know. A number of scholars conversant with sustainable levels of agricultural and energy output recently estimated an optimum population for the United States (Pimentel and Pimentel, 1992; Costanza, 1992; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1992; Werbos, 1992). The highest estimates were below current population levels; several low estimates were for a population of less than 100 million. Meanwhile the population of the United States is 265 million and is growing about 1 percent a year.

Walter Lippmann (1922) distinguished news from truth: ―The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act (p. 226).‖ This study shows how and why we are letting signalized events, rather than truth, set the agenda for our demographic and environmental future.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket [60.4] A.

Articles: Wheeler Timothy (September 2003): Skirting the Population Issue: Why Journalists Need to Tackle Growth102; Environment Writer.

Why is it so hard for journalists covering the environment to address population?

Do we lack the guts to tackle really tough, controversial issues?

Or do we lack the smarts to sort out the complicated and oftenindirect role population growth plays in problems such as water shortages, declines in biodiversity and suburban sprawl?

We've been talking for years about how population growth is one of the major under-reported stories on our beat. I remember sitting on a panel at a Society of Environmental Journalists conference in 1994, offering tips for "localizing" what many perceived then as a global issue. That wasn't the first, or last, how-to session.

Yet we have succeeded as journalists so rarely in making the environment-population connection in print or on the air that it remains remarkable when someone does. Population was one of the environmental journalism "taboos" hashed over at SEJ's annual meeting last year in Baltimore. It's on SEJ's agenda again this year in New Orleans. [..]

It doesn't help, either, that almost no environmental groups will talk about population growth. The Sierra Club engaged in a fierce debate in 1998 over immigration, but ultimately decided not to take a stand against it. No other major environmental group has touched it since.

Recognizing how journalists crave facts that can give them a toehold on such slippery subjects, one population group, Numbers USA, has come out with a study that says only half the land gobbled up in the past decade can be blamed on sprawling development patterns. The rest of the land consumed went to house more people, contends Roy Beck, the group's executive director and another former environmental journalist.

Many are uncomfortable with such calculations, and distinctly uncomfortable with some of the critics of the driving force in America's population growth these days. Beck and his group have been lumped in with "hate groups," after all, for advocating limits on immigration.

I plead guilty to some of the same limitations facing other journalists: Last year, when I was editing The Baltimore Sun's 102

http://www.environmentwriter.org/resources/articles/pop93a.htm

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket environmental coverage, Tom Horton, our Chesapeake Bay columnist, told me he wanted to write a piece calling for limits on immigration because he believed population growth was a long-term threat to the Bay. "Do it while I'm on vacation," I grumbled. I didn‘t getting calls from readers accusing us of xenophobia.

relish

If he was really serious about writing such a column, I told him, I wanted to see evidence that immigrants are somehow more environmentally damaging to the Bay than those folks who are moving into the region from other parts of the United States.

Like many other journalists, I'd missed the proverbial forest for the trees. And I'd shied away from a controversial topic because of the "baggage" it came with.

So maybe it's time to quit lecturing others and start figuring out how to talk reasonably about population again.

[60.5] A.

Google News Search: Your search - michael maher, population, environment, journalists - did not match any news results.

De-Industrialization Factor: Only De-Industrialization can prevent runaway global climate change [61] De-Industrialize: Reduce Consumption to Pre-Industrial levels: Only Civilization Collapse will prevent runaway global climate change: Industrial Civilization/Consumption Developmentism as Heat Engine Root cause of Scarcity-Conflict Climate Change-National Security Impending Near-term Extinction reality.

[61.1]

Dr. Guy McPherson; Former Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources

and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; University of Tucson, Arizona: Guy McPherson speaking in Middleville, Michigan, September 2011103 (at 08:08): ―An article in the refereed journal Climatic Change says that only Economic Collapse will prevent runaway global climate change. That was two years ago. This is among the most important papers I have ever seen and among the least cited in the 103

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket scientific literature. I interviewed eight of the premier Post Doctoral in the world, last January, and of the eight, six said they were a climate scientist, that was their specialty. So I asked each of the six of them about this paper, and none of them had heard of it. These are the people who are at their best in terms of their knowledge of climate science, and none of them had heard of it. Only complete economic collapse will prevent runaway global climate change. .. It was rejected by several scientific journals first, because its just too dire, that can‘t happen here, but then the prestigious journal Climatic Change says ‗Yeah, its bullet proof. There is nothing wrong with his analysis at all‘.‖

[61.2]

Timothy J. Garrett (Nov. 2009), Are there basic physical constraints on

future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?104; Climatic Change [61.3]

University of Utah (22 Nov 2009): Is Global Warming Unstoppable?:

Theory also says Energy Conservation doesn't help105.

University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions – the major cause of global warming – cannot be stabilized unless the world‘s economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. ―It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates,‖ says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Garrett‘s study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online this week.

The study – which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization – indicates: Energy conservation or efficiency doesn‘t really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption.

Throughout history, a simple physical ―constant‖ – an unchanging mathematical value – links global energy use to the world‘s accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn‘t necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society‘s future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. ―Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxideemitting power production capacity annually – approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day,‖ Garrett says.

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket ―Physically, economy.‖

there

are

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other

options

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Getting Heat for Viewing Civilization as a “Heat Engine” Garrett says colleagues generally support his theory, while some economists are critical. One economist, who reviewed the study, wrote: ―I am afraid the author will need to study harder before he can contribute.‖ ―I‘m not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,‖ Garrett says. ―I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have.‖ Garrett treats civilization like a ―heat engine‖ that ―consumes energy and does ‗work‘ in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,‖ he says. ―If society consumed no energy, civilization would be worthless,‖ he adds. ―It is only by consuming energy that civilization is able to maintain the activities that give it economic value. This means that if we ever start to run out of energy, then the value of civilization is going to fall and even collapse absent discovery of new energy sources.‖ Garrett says his study‘s key finding ―is that accumulated economic production over the course of history has been tied to the rate of energy consumption at a global level through a constant factor.‖ That ―constant‖ is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, ―each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption,‖ Garrett says.

Garrett tested his theory and found this constant relationship between energy use and economic production at any given time by using United Nations statistics for global GDP (gross domestic product), U.S. Department of Energy data on global energy consumption during1970-2005, and previous studies that estimated global economic production as long as 2,000 years ago. Then he investigated the implications for carbon dioxide emissions. ―Economists think you need population and standard of living estimate productivity,‖ he says. ―In my model, all you need know is how fast energy consumption is rising. The reason why because there is this link between the economy and rates energy consumption, and it‘s just a constant factor.‖

to to is of

Garrett adds: ―By finding this constant factor, the problem of [forecasting] global economic growth is dramatically simpler.

There is no need to consider population growth and changes in standard of living because they are marching to the tune of the availability of energy supplies.‖

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Control of Consumption: Corporate Cultural Colonialism Racket To Garrett, that means the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions is unlikely to change soon because our energy use today is tied to society‘s past economic productivity. ―Viewed from this perspective, civilization evolves in a spontaneous feedback loop maintained only by energy consumption and incorporation of environmental matter,‖ Garrett says. It is like a child that ―grows by consuming food, and when the child grows, it is able to consume more food, which enables it to grow more.‖ Is Meaningful Energy Conservation Impossible?

Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett‘s theory is that conserving energy doesn‘t reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use. ―Making civilization more energy efficient simply allows it to grow faster and consume more energy,‖ says Garrett.

He says the idea that resource conservation accelerates resource consumption – known as Jevons paradox – was proposed in the 1865 book ―The Coal Question‖ by William Stanley Jevons, who noted that coal prices fell and coal consumption soared after improvements in steam engine efficiency.

So is Garrett arguing that conserving energy doesn‘t matter? ―I‘m just saying it‘s not really possible to conserve energy in a meaningful way because the current rate of energy consumption is determined by the unchangeable past of economic production. If it feels good to conserve energy, that is fine, but there shouldn‘t be any pretense that it will make a difference.‖ Yet, Garrett says his findings contradict his own previously held beliefs about conservation, and he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line dry family clothing and use a push lawnmower.

An Inevitable Future for Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

Garrett says often-discussed strategies for slowing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming include mention increased energy efficiency, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don‘t emit carbon dioxide, including nuclear, wind and solar energy and underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. Another strategy is rarely mentioned: a decreased standard of living, which would occur if energy supplies ran short and the economy collapsed, he adds.

[61.4] A.

Google News Results: ―Your search - tim garrett, carbon, utah, anthropogenic - did not match any news results.‖

B.

Your search - tim garrett, carbon, utah, "heat engine" - did not match any news results.

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