On the rec list today there is an amazing diary with links to Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA executive, apologizing to Michael Moore. Wendell Potter relates the PR strategies health care companies used to smear SicKo and suggest that the film was inaccurate. In a vein deeply related to Potter's account of the campaign against Moore's documentary, I would like to relate a story that fundamentally changed my political worldview. Follow me past the fold for my story of political awakening and discovery that economics is not a field of apolitical free enterprise.
I've remained silent about this for a long time on dailykos, but I think it's an important story for me to share because, given the debates that take place here, I think that there are a number of people who lack an understanding knowledge/understanding of all the relevant facts and that therefore take the positions they take, especially with respect to compromise, that are, how shall we say, rather naive. However, as someone who has had limited insider experience of how corporations work and their impact on national and global politics, I believe this is a tremendous mistake.
Back in the 90s my father was a mid-level marketing executive for one of the world's three largest pharmaceutical corporations. With the election of William Jefferson Clinton, my father received a substantial promotion from mid-level management to an upper level executive position at corporate headquarters. Consequently, during my junior or third year of high school, we were transferred to the location of corporate headquarters (and no, I can't get any more specific than this because my father still works for the corporation), I began my education at a new school and he began a new, very powerful, position.
Now my father is a marketing and public relation genius. He is the guy that always gives the tear jerker of a speech at weddings, funerals, anniversaries, who is able to immediately form a connection with any person he happens to encounter at the grocery store or out in public, and who is full of big, exciting, dynamic ideas. He is a dynamic and commanding presence, full of intelligence and charisma, all of which was tempered and honed by years of pharmaceutical sales prior to entering management and the executive level. Chances are you've seen commercials for pharmaceutical projects that he conceived and executed. Hell, who knows, he might have even been the one to come up with the very idea of advertising pharmaceuticals.
So what, you might ask, prompted my father's big promotion? The election of Bill Clinton. During Clinton's first term, the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies knew that Clinton was going to push for healthcare reform. This posed a serious problem for the bottom line of the pharmaceutical companies. The three major pharmaceutical companies-- and, no doubt, the others --worried that with healthcare reform pharmaceuticals would become heavily regulated to keep price down. Not only would this price regulation cut into the profits of each corporation, but it was likely that it would lead to "pharmaceutical wars" between the three major players as each of them vied for governmental privilege. In other words, the worry was that one corporation in particular would take the lion's share of the market through government contracts, leaving the others out in the cold. The interests of their stock holders demanded that something be done. And here's a first point that everyone should take home: The sole obligation of any corporation is to its stock holders, whether domestic or foreign (multi-nationals know no national boundaries), not to country, the welfare of the country, or the people of a country.
The division that my father was promoted to thus had two purposes: First, the aim was to establish market dominance for his particular corporation in the new environment that would emerge as a result of healthcare reform. Second, and more importantly, the task of their taskforce was to defeat healthcare reform if at all possible. Yep, you heard right. My father, a genuine marketing genius, was on a high ranking task force to defeat healthcare reform back in the 90s.
Yet why would they choose a marketing person to defeat healthcare reform rather than some other type of expert? Don't marketing execs just sell products? Wouldn't the corporation be better served by having a policy expert or lawyer head up such a committee? No. Why? Because corporations think of policy debates as selling a product (their position), and set about selling their product or policy position as an advertising problem. Again, why? Because they understand that if they can form the mind of the public (often in ways involving fear, misinformation, and desire just like the sale of any other product), they can put pressure on legislators and defeat legislation that is to their fiscal disadvantage.
Thus began a multi-pronged advertising blitz that involved lobbying various members of congress, endless commercials on televisions, "unaffiliated experts" appearing on news shows across the political spectrum and radio, home mailings, and a variety of other things. Hell, who knows, perhaps my father came up with the infamous "Harry and Louise" commercial.
Predictably the corporations were successful. They convinced the American public that Canadian healthcare and other "socialized" forms of healthcare were death sentences where no one would get any care, terrified them with stories of rising tax costs, regaled them with stories of the wonders of the American healthcare system as the best system in the world (if you can afford it, that was always left out), and funneled thousands of dollars into campaign contributions to various members of congress. Ironically, after healthcare reform was defeated, the corporation dissolved my father's division and summarily fired him after 15 years of service to the company. He spent the next year out of work, actually doing "temp" work as a "temp executive" (who knew such a thing existed) and was then rehired with the same corporation for the same pay at the sales level (very humiliating given how far he had risen earlier). Ironically he had cut off the very branch he was sitting on by assisting in the defeat of healthcare reform. So it goes.
In Kos's diary today about Obama's plan to meet with the Chamber of Commerce, I read some kossacks suggest that some liberals have become just as bad as Bush supporters. One member of our community wrote:
I'm no fan of the US Chamber of Commerce but there's nothing wrong with Obama speaking to them. Kos and a minority of others on the left seem to want anti-business rhetoric more than anything else, as if just talking trash about corporations would do anybody any good. Most of the electorate is not actually interested in the capitalism is evil nonsense that some on the left seem so eager to hear.
Another person wrote:
Apparently you can't speak with "enemies." It's more of that "you're either with us or against us" thinking that I thought we put behind us when W left town.
Apparently, not.
Yet another person wrote:
You're either with us or against us
It's black and it's white.
Business evil, populist good
Rich evil, middle class good
On every issue we've debated heatedly on this blog since 2008 we've heard comments along these lines from a certain segment of the community. I would give anything to know their backgrounds, their experience, what they know of the world, because their remarks sound blissfully ignorant to me. Either they know nothing of how the corporate world works and therefore just don't understand that compromise isn't possible because it is not in the interests of corporations to compromise, or they are corporate insiders that have no problems with the sorts of things I describe above and don't see how they are destroying the lives of millions of Americans. Neither possibility is pretty.
What Potter describes as to how he made his bread and butter, what I describe in this diary, is taking place every day in board rooms across the country. Rest assured that in every corporation across the country whether it deals with coal and energy, oil, corn, fast food, the production of military weapons, education testing, pharmaceuticals, health insurance, mining, etc., etc., etc., there is a division devoted to PR or the forming of American opinion in the interests of the corporation. What Potter describes is not an extraordinary or unusual operating procedure arising in relation to Moore's documentary, but a specific instance of daily operating procedure for corporations.
During the last two years we've endured a number of lectures about pragmatism and realism. However, pragmatism and realism involves having a genuine and true understanding of the world around you. What political activists of all stripes need to understand is the way in which corporate powers function both in the country and throughout the world. It is not that corporations are "evil", but rather that corporations are entities pursuing one interest: the profit of their shareholders. Corporations do this not just because they are "greedy", but because their own survival depends on it. If they don't constantly expand and grow they lose out to their competition and go the way of the dinosaurs. As a consequence, they have to perpetually reinvest a portion of their capital in the company so as to expand in the next market cycle and insure market dominance.
The key point, however, is that the interests of a corporation are often at odds with the interests of the American people. Corporate interests involve making profit. This entails keeping wages and benefits as cheap as possible, diminishing regulations to the greatest degree possible, keeping their tax burden as low as possible, and keeping tariffs low and borders open. They want tariffs low because they're multi-nationals and therefore wish to import goods to the country cheaply, and they want to import goods elsewhere because they can find cheap labor in other countries. And they want all of this because one of the key ways in which they increase profit is by keeping production costs (wages, benefits, taxes, tariffs, regulations) as low as possible so they can reinvest their capital to expand in the next annual cycle. 3% annual growth is their goal and markets are only so big. That therefore has to come from elsewhere.
The net results is that the interests of a corporation are more often than not opposed to the interests of the majority of Americans. The interests of average Americans is to have good wages, good benefits, a clean environment, a job, safe products, and so on. Corporations are opposed to the interests of average Americans on each of these points. This is a fundamental contradiction, a fundamental reality, not some knee-jerk reactionary hatred of corporations. It's the reality of the world we live in.
Since we're talking about pragmatism, the "cash-value" (one of the pragmatist's James's famous phrases) of these points is that the corporations are not interested in compromise. They aren't interested in compromise because they can't compromise. They will use every means at their disposal to advance their interests. That's just the nature of the beast. Thus when we hear Obama toying with the idea speaking with the Chamber of Commerce we can only conclude that this is madness. There's nothing to talk about. We know their position already. But even from the perspective of re-election prospects, it's madness because it's yet another message to the middle and working class that Obama represents the interests of Wall Street, not the American people. As one person brilliantly put it in Kos's diary, can you imagine the headlines if Bush had decided to speak with the Sierra Club? If we are to have effective politics we need to understand these realities and strategies accordingly.
Apologies for the length of this diary.