Corporate Corpulence Causes Election Dejection

We're in the most important election year of the past 20--because it's the only one we can do something about--and already we're weary of it. The candidates rattle on about how much we need change. The vie for the image of being the "change" candidate. They talk about changing our international posture, ending the fraudulent war in Iraq. They talk about fixing our healthcare with some program. But all their talk of change is just small change. And that's as much our fault as it is theirs.

They know their real job is to market themselves to us. They know that because we've proven it's true over the course of the last 50 years, ever since the first big "TV-campaign" effects were seen after the televised Kennedy-Nixon debate. Candidates learned the need for image control, spin doctoring, perception management, and avoidance of five o'clock shadow. Yes, we really are that shallow.

Pandering to our shallowness and our short attention spans has entailed an escalating spiral of campaign costs, and corporations have generously stepped in to help candidates. That barter is a win-win for the corps and the cands. Somebody gets elected. Contributors' barrels fill with pork. The only loser is us.

Lately, we're losing more and more, faster and faster. The corporate and political marketing engines know that information overload can include a growing percentage of disinformation overload, and we'll never be able to tell the difference. Even with Google's capabilities, we don't have time to do "original research" into all the moot points pitched at us. Each media outlet (Remember when we just had "channels," and each channel had a couple news programs, instead of the 24X7 news cycle?) accuses the others of being conservative or liberal biased, while itself being called liberal or conservative biased by the others.

So we listen to the news of the station that we think is most biased in the direction each of us already leans, and engage in no real intellectual challenges. We know just enough about marketing tricks, campaign contribution over-reaching and side-stepping, and spin in general to not entirely trust any reporter in any medium. Op-ed columnists can be relied upon to adhere to the biases they openly claim, and many are quite enjoyably witty.

Bloggers flourish - yes, like the one you're reading. Bloggers, at least, are sincere in their statements when nobody's paying them. That doesn't mean those statements are well researched or accurately analyzed. And, believe me on this one point only, you shouldn't swallow whole what any of us says, either. Certainly not the logic trail I'm about to carve out of the wilderness here. Please, please ... apply critical thinking. I hope you disagree, and can cite chapter and verse to prove me terribly wrong. Because I don't much like the conclusion I'll reach. But if you think it's correct, let's start doing whatever we can to turn this train around.

Let's explore the explosion of political bloggers for intrinsic meaning of that phenomenon. I suspect that the bloggers are the canaries in the cave of our American political experience right now. I've noticed, amid all the sound and fury of youthfully exuberant bloggers, older and sadder bloggers-as well as writers of letters to newspaper editors-voicing cynicism and despair about the upcoming election and the candidates.

In the December 1, 2007, St. Petersburg Times, the writer of a letter to the editor titled "Democracy's a Joke" chides a political news columnists who was "shocked to discover that the politicians elected to run the government lied to the citizens. He wants a 'do-over,' a new election. Well, he'll get his new election. We've had them over and over for lots of years. But what he won't get is new results. Politicians lie-the ones who were formerly 'ins,' the currents 'ins,' and the next batch waiting in the wings. But [the reporter] and the Times editorial board will probably continue to tell their readers that 'your vote makes a difference.' Don't make me laugh."

I don't know about you, but I like to read blog postings and letters that stick a "so let's do this ..." at the end of their tirade on what's wrong with the world. Something feisty. Something with a plan to rouse the rabble. What I'm seeing, though, is a lot of "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" despair, if you get my euphemistic drift, among those who have been around this block many time before. I think I know why the angst. I'm not sure I can think of a solution.

First, the why. I've been reading a 1999 book, Culture Jam, by Kalle Lasn, a Canadian social commentator on Western culture in North America, and founder of AdBusters.org. One enlightening bit of history recounts "The Unofficial History of America^TM" (pages 65-70). As the section title suggests, America has become a "brand." The brand-promise of American life, with freedom of speech and of thought, with abundant opportunity for those who strive for it, with an ever expanding consumer economy - all that is not exactly as advertised.

One element of that history lesson is something I bet none of us learned in high school - the role of the corporation in this country's independence and, later, dependence. First, the Boston Tea Party and our ensuing revolution was against more than the British Monarchy. It also rebelled "against British corporations. ...the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies. The colonials resisted ... [w]hen the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea ... because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies." Time passes. President Lincoln warns us that 'Corporations have been enthroned.... An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people ... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the republic is destroyed.' Lincoln is assassinated, and in 1886 so is the core of what it means to be a person with inalienable rights in the USA. "In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was "a natural person" under the U.S. Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech. ... But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution-that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates-had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it 'could not be supported by history, logic or reason.' ... Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place. By 1919, corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and produced most of America's wealth. Corporate trusts had become too powerful to legally challenge. The courts consistently favored their interests."

Here in nearly-2008, corporations still employ the vast majority of us and have laid off the rest. We are all subjected to customer service call centers staffed by people who read off automated scripts like automata, and half the time we can't understand the accents in which they read the required excuses ("our policies") that free the corporation from giving us any service whatsoever. Those of us still fortunate enough to have a corporate job cling to it for the health insurance subsidized by our employers. Those of us who own our homes live in fear of their devaluation - at least compared to the absurd price escalations driven by a greedy real estate speculation industry whose practitioners have trademarked the name of their job requiring all media to capitalize it. (Realtor - yeah, that's why you always see it capitalized in the newspapers. What? Did you think it was because Realtors are more respected and accredited professionals than, say, Doctors, who don't give a hoot about capitalization because they're too busy saving our lives?)

Corporations are more privileged citizens than we actual voting human beings are. Each of us may have one vote, and no corporation may have any, but they do form and financially support PACs (political action committees) and support tax exempt 527-groups. And all that money goes into the campaign advertising funds, both within and outside of the candidates' official war chests, that create the ads that confound us, confuse us, outright lie to us, overwhelm us, and, in the end, drive us to either misinformed voting or to despair so profound that-like that letter writer who doesn't want to be made to laugh-we don't bother voting at all.

Depressed yet? Angry yet? Well, there's some hope. In Culture Jam, pages 160-163 present yet more history on the other side of the story. In legal actions from 1884 through 1998, states from new York to California judgments found that, for example, "the life of a corporation is, indeed, less than that of the humblest citizen." In 1998, Alabama, the only state in the union that allows a private citizen to file a legal petition to dissolve a corporation, saw one judge acting as a private citizen do just that against tobacco companies that violated child-abuse laws.

From here on, it's up to us. It's up to us to figure out what we want our candidates to do for us, and let them know in no uncertain terms what that is. Every job in a corporation has a job description, and it's refined and detailed by the hiring manager. That's us. We're the hiring managers here. And if we don't take the initiative, you know who will. Corporate (in)Human Resources. Then we'll be stuck with whoever they hire.

And nobody wants that, do we?