(This is my first ever diary on Kos. It is kind of a long rambling rant, but hopefully you will give me a little slack as a newbie).
The word "corpocracy" doesn't appear in my Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, although a related term, "corporatism" is defined as "the control of a country, etc. by large groups, especially businesses." But I like the word "corpocracy" better. I found it in David Mitchell's beautiful lyrical novel, The Cloud Atlas. Though I suspect that Mitchell sees his book more as a literary work of art than as a cautionary tale along the lines of 1984, it works well as both. Through a series of interlinked storylines, he describes the rise of the corpocracy starting in the 19th century and the consequent decline of the human race at an indeterminate time in the future. In real life, it looks like we're getting there at breakneck speed
"I don't predict the future," said writer Ray Bradbury, "I try to prevent it." The idea that corporations will govern our future, with little interference from more traditional government, is an increasingly prominent idea in science fiction. A friend of mine, sci-fi writer M.M. Buckner, sets her storylines in a post-apocalyptical world dominated by "Coms (see for example, War Surf)." In Neal Stephenson's hilariously prescient novel, Snow Crash, there is a scene where one of the characters is introduced to the President. "President of what?" he asks. "President of the United States," is the reply. The U.S. government had become so irrelevant that the President was essentially anonymous.
I am fearful that if one looked now at an organization chart of de facto power in the world, the office of the President of the United States might be somewhere in the fourth tier of little boxes. I don't know who Bush reports to. But if he offered his bosses the same warmed over mush of strained talking points and excuses that he gives us, he would be gone already. However dangerously incompetent he appears to us, he is delivering to the corpocracy: tax cuts, rollbacks on environmental regulations, no-bid contracts, cheap labor, higher oil and natural gas prices, and pork and pork and pork. The Hell of Iraq is just another profit center to them.
Bushco speeches are full of false patriotism and references to the "American people" but if one looks at what they do, rather than what they say, it is clear that 98% of the people are simply irrelevant beyond their ability to cast votes. The country itself is irrelevant. Bushco didn't even blink at the novel idea of having an Arab monarchy in charge of U.S. ports, because after all, the Dubai royalty are well-known, Bush-associated corprocrats in good standing. Just some good old boys--the international aristocracy. Our ports, their ports, Chinese ports--its all part of the same infrastructure.
Full Disclosure
I should make it clear that I am not against corporations, per se. I own stock in corporations directly and indirectly through mutual funds. It would be economic suicide not to. In addition, I get paid to write articles in which I tell other people what stocks to buy. I also write a blog (http://www.nanotechnology.com/... ) at nanotechnology.com where I discuss (mostly very small) nanotechnology companies. I am the originator of the Edwards' Real Nanotech Index and have also written a book, The Nanotech Pioneers: Where are they taking us? (Wiley VCH, 2006), which discusses nanotech in the context of the entrepreneurial companies that are developing it. I don't hate corporations or capitalism. But I do hate corpocracy; I don't believe that corporations should run the country or the world.
One thing that has changed during my lifetime is that corporations have grown truly monstrous in size, some with economic clout far larger than nations. WalMart, for instance, is China's 8th largest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Canada and Australia (http://walmartwatch.com/... ). ExxonMobil will have revenues in excess of $400 billion this year.
Antitrust and anti-Antitrust
There was a time when antitrust laws were used to insure competitive markets. In 1911, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust was broken up into pieces. It has been trying to get back together ever since, like a giant slime mold in the process of aggregation. How long before we get the ExxonMobilChevronTexacoShellBritishPetroleum Corp.? In your wildest dreams can you imagine Bushco interfering with this inevitability?
Like Standard Oil, AT&T is trying to reassemble itself; it recently announced the acquisition of BellSouth, and I believe it has already swallowed a couple of other Baby Bells.
The last major antitrust case, against Microsoft, has been dropped by the Justice Dept, after a few minor palliative gestures by the software giant. The government's suit was doomed to failure from the beginning; Microsoft can afford to pay its lawyers a lot more than the government can.
Mission Statements and Other Bullshit
Go to any corporate website and you are apt to find something called a Mission Statement, which is supposed to give you an idea as to what the Corporation thinks its job is. Monstro Pharma plans to bring on a new generation of therapeutic solutions designed to keep you chronically addicted to their drugs. Minimicronanochipco is developing better, faster, smaller, cheaper chips to run video games to entertain the next generation of obese, glazed-over vegetables-masquerading-as-kids. Mission statements are a waste of time and an insult to our intelligence. The mission of the corporation, ANY CORPORATION, is to make money for its stockholders. This is actually how it should be (Secondary missions sometimes creep in--the purpose of the corporation should not be aggrandize and to line the pockets of the CEO. These things happen, but eventually the workings of the market, regulatory commissions and federal and state prosecutors act to correct them).
For corporations, money can sometimes best be made by manufacturing and selling goods and services, sometimes by buying and selling assets, or sometimes just by sitting on huge mounds of cash and collecting interest, depending on the circumstances and the state of the business cycle. Corporations are agnostic about how they make money; their aim is simply to get more of it.
The pursuit of money by the corporation is separable from its other economic functions. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is supposed to see to the economic distribution of goods and services as each player in the economy pursues his own interests. But Smith, who lived in a time when most businesses were mom-and-pop type affairs, did not foresee a day when people could be frozen out of the economy. He didn't imagine a time when, if you weren't big enough (why I never went out for football), you couldn't play.
The Economics of Scarcity
One of the more ridiculous objections I have heard to nanotechnology is that it will call into being an era of such abundance that the economics of scarcity, and the social organization engendered thereby, will fall apart. Wingnutters see this as a bad thing. I have argued that we don't have an economics of scarcity now. The most obvious example is food. In the industrialized nations, we have an epidemic of obesity whereas in some countries, largely in Africa, people are literally starving to death. What makes this so appalling is that the same African countries in which people are starving are exporting food to the West (http://www.ipsnews.net/...). The problem is not one of scarcity, but one of distribution. I would like to believe that if African countries truly had sovereignty, they would take care of their own citizens first. But there is no sovereignty in a world where many corporations are larger and more powerful than most countries. The World Bank has become a perverse corpocratic institution that insures that underdeveloped countries will be enslaved to debt service forever.
Recently, I visited some relatives in the city where I was raised. Superficially, the neighborhood resembled the one where I grew up, except that all the houses were literally one hundred times more expensive than my parent's house was forty years ago. Also, there was a gate on the subdivision to keep out people like those that I used to hang out with.
My relatives, who work as real estate agents, are well off due to the California real estate boom. I was a little chagrinned that I had left behind a present, an action doll, for one of the kids, until I did a tour of the house. One whole room was the playroom for the three boys. There were mounds of brightly colored plastic dolls like the one I had left behind; duplicates and triplicates of the same action figure were present, in some cases. They could literally have stocked that section of a Toys-R-Us. Out in the backyard, in a pile exposed to the elements, there were more of the same. And of course, there were stacks of DVDs and electronic toys and more prosaic stuff, like footballs and noisemakers. A whole village in China could exist for the sole purpose of supplying these three kids with entertainment.
Though the kids were obviously spoiled, the parents don't neglect themselves, either. A digital TV set occupied half of one wall; football came at you life size in detail so high res that it was actually scary. Their two luxurious cars sat out in the driveway because the garage was crammed with stuff. Other stuff still in the boxes was stacked about the house, because there was simply no place left to put it.
Mass Consumption Doesn't Require the Masses
My materialistic relatives are not really rich, just well up in the ranks of the middle class. But their lifestyle led me to a conclusion that had eluded me up to that point.
I had always assumed that capitalism requires a healthy middle class, if for no other reason than because consumer demand is about 70% of the economy. But all consumers are not equal. Consumer demand is not about consumer need; it's about spending money. 1% of the people can spend 99% of the money, and the economy will still work fine. If we all spent like Michael Jackson, there is no way the world economy could keep up. The corporate world is as happy to supply one Maserati as twenty Hyundais. Only two people can travel in the Maserati as opposed to maybe 100, if they're small, in the Hyundais. But utility is not the point. Money is the point.
The Future Doesn't Need Us Anymore (apologies to Bill Joy)
If the point of this rant is not clear by now, here is the punchline: The economy doesn't need us and therefore, corporations don't need us. In the past, there was a middle class in America because we could bargain with the (then much smaller) corporations for a decent wage scale for our services. In the flattened global society that we have today, much of the technical work has been automated, and the jobs that are left have a payscale negotiated (imposed) globally. The whole world will turn into a banana republic with a few wealth holders lording it over a populace trapped forever in poverty. It is already happening. And that future will work just fine for the lucky few.
I don't know the way out of the trap of corpocracy. Don't imagine that your beloved Democratic party is very much different than the Republicans when it comes to obeying money. They may not roll over quite as quickly but they still roll over.
The marches (and riots) by workers in France and in Dubai, the recent protests in LA and Chicago against the immigration bill, are signs that people may yet organize for a future in which people are valued. The daily postings here at Kos and throughout the blogosphere are a hopeful sign that people (at least some people) are awake and paying attention. But be clear in what you are trying to do. People need to be organized not just locally or nationally, but internationally to have any hope of challenging the corpocracy. Something like a worldwide revolution is required.