CHAPTER 9
Monday afternoon, Bill Gates Sr. and Joe Jamail announced their drive to make "America the Beautiful" the National Anthem of the United States. It would take an act of Congress. Bill Hillsman had created an ad comparing the beauty of the American countryside -- amber waves of grain -- with the martial flag symbolism of "The Star-Spangled Banner," written during the War of 1812 against the British, who were now our allies.
The right-wing media took the bait at comedic speed. "Our Anthem was born in blood and guts," thundered Bush Bimbaugh, "and that is what America stands for. America is not a tourist attraction, not a languid landscape. Our Anthem is masculinity, 'America the Beautiful' is femininity. Which do our enemies and adversaries abroad fear the most, I ask all you feminazis?" Joe and Bill knew that Bimbaugh and his ilk would use up their air time and print space ranting about the Anthem for weeks to come while overlooking the real power shifts taking place right under their noses. A perfect feint and decoy. For Bill Hillsman, it was his chance to prove that the right ad pays for itself many times over when it generates a cascade of free reporting, media commentary, and person-to-person conversation. So vituperative were the denunciations by the nationally syndicated right-wingers that the network television news devoted a minute or two to the ruckus and played part of the Hillsman ad. Joe left a message for Bill Gates saying simply, "I think we got the baying pack's number."
On Tuesday, the valedictory at the National Press Club was delivered to a packed luncheon ballroom by a retired Wal- Mart vice-president who came loaded for bear with copies of internal memos. One proved that the company's top executives were well aware of the hiring and mistreatment of illegal aliens. Another dealt with the more than accidental divergence between the posted prices of the products on Wal-Mart's shelves and the higher prices rung up on the computerized checkout registers, justifying it on the grounds that the customer was given an itemized receipt and could always return the merchandise before leaving the premises. "Pennies by the billions add up," as some irreverent "associates" liked to say. The former VP pointed to a big chart mounted behind him, comparing the pay of top Wal-Mart executives -- about $10,000 an hour, forty hours a week, plus perks and benefits -- with the median worker wage of less than $8.00 an hour, not the $9.58 claimed by management and swallowed uncritically by the media. He explained how Wal-Mart cranked the figure up by averaging in higher-paid supervisory workers and truck drivers, and then he took questions from the press with precision and aplomb. His presentation dominated the wire services and cable news channels all day, and Wal-Mart's stock dropped by 3 percent. So popular were these Press Club events, which were now almost thrice weekly, that tickets were sold out a month in advance. Tomorrow a retired credit card executive would disclose the secrets of overcharging in his former industry.
On Wednesday, Luke Skyhi of the PCC completed his plans for the sustainable economy arena shows in ten cities. The events were designed to close the loop between means and ends by demonstrating exactly how sustainable companies would improve the living standards of ordinary people. Having received the approving nod from Jeno and Sol, Luke decided to move fast, scheduling the ten shows for the Friday-to-Sunday weekend of what would be Maui Five, unbeknownst to him. The Secretariat touched base with the core group, and after much consultation they decided to skip Maui Five, further consolidate the infrastructure, give themselves a breather to allay their slightly suspicious families, and participate in the shows whenever they could. Luke and his best and brightest team gave themselves one month to pull off this historic visual and economic breakthrough. Fortunately there were timely cancellations at two of the biggest arenas, Madison Square Garden in New York City and the Target Center in Minneapolis.
The Thursday after Maui Four became known nationwide as the day when four hundred thousand Americans announced their incorporation at Bill Gates Sr.'s jamborees. People from all walks of life flocked to parks and stadiums across the country sporting their corporate charters around their necks, and wearing caps and T-shirts printed with the slogan "People Are Corporations Too." To roars of approval, accompanied by the famous Roman Army drumbeats -- boom! boom! boom-boom-boom-boom! -- speakers extolled one privilege and immunity after another that now accrued to these converts to corporate status. "People are fed up being people," declared leading corporate analyst Robert Weissman, at the Pittsburgh jamboree. "They desire upward mobility and power, the power to evade, escape, disappear, reappear, to be in many places at once, to deduct their entertainment and lobbying expenditures and delight in the loopholes and amenities of the tax code and the corporate bankruptcy laws." Charles Cray, a speaker at the Las Vegas event, particularized the benefits unique to Nevada-chartered versus Delaware-chartered corporations. Delicious buffets half a football field long provided free food under banners that read, "Corporations Are Eaters Too."
For the reporters in attendance, the whole scene was so far outside their normal frame of reference that they ran around with their cameras, mikes, and pens as if lost in a labyrinth. "Is this some kind of gag? April Fool's Day has come and gone, you know," said one of them to a woman in a nurse's uniform at the Birmingham jamboree. "I'll thank you to show some respect when addressing Birmingham Can, Unlimited," replied Jane Harper tartly. "You manufacture cans?" asked the bewildered reporter. "I manufacture can-do's," said Jane. Eventually, toward the end of the daylong jamborees, the press began to absorb the message. If the double standard in American law favored corporations over people, then why not have the people become corporations? This wasn't a giant gag, it was a giant demonstration of seriousness about a fundamental inequity.
On Friday, Bill Gates made it a double whammy with a press conference announcing the candidacies of five corporations for five state governorships. The corporations all met state requirements for elective office. They would be running under new names that signified the principal issue for each campaign, and that had been duly filed with the relevant secretaries of state: the Clean Up the Corrupt Texas Legislature Corporation, the Dethrone Corporate Welfare Kings Corporation, the Outsource CEOs Corporation, the Living Wage Corporation, and the Stamp Out Corporate Crime Corporation. Volunteer petitioners, identified by colorful headbands reading "Corporations Are People Too," were already on the streets collecting qualified signatures and were meeting with an enthusiastic response. The first wave of political advertisements for each corporation candidate would roll out over the weekend. When Bill Gates was finished with the formal announcements, the press corps was treated to a hilarious skit depicting the five corporations on the stump and in debates with perplexed opponents.
Over the weekend, the Meliorists took a well-earned rest from their exertions and relaxed with their families. On Sunday they read with interest the Washington Post story about the average citizen's response to the extraordinary activities of certain older individuals whom the paper called "the Three R's -- respected, resolute, and rich." The story confirmed the reports from Kyle Corey and other field organizers for the Congress Watchdog Groups. Like the conversation in Clancy's Cave, the responses of those interviewed by the Post revealed a mix of skepticism and support, though the balance seemed to be tipping in the direction of support.
On the second Monday in April, Warren Buffett's poll of investors came out. Buffett was always news, but this was big. Among its more significant findings, the poll showed that 88 percent of individual investors and 91 percent of institutional investors believed in investor control over executive compensation packages. A large majority also believed that after passing a reasonable ownership or petition threshold, they should be given printouts of the names of all the shareholders in their companies so that they could propose competitive slates for the boards of directors and mount credible campaigns on their behalf. By a margin of four to one, they supported cumulative voting and their right to approve any merger that totaled more than 5 percent of the larger merging partner by revenues or employees. The full poll was posted on Warren's website, along with links to related articles in the press.
On Tuesday, Barry Diller and Bill Cosby awaited the first television airing of the "Pay Back, Pay Up!" advertisement exposing the broadcast industry's fleecing of the public through its free use of the airwaves. Once again, Bill Hillsman came through with a knockout ad. A full minute long, it showed a representative cross-section of Americans with hundred-dollar bills flying out of their pockets and purses into the coffers of suitably jowled media moguls. "Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch?" asked the voiceover. "There is, when it's on all of us. You own the public airwaves. Like any landlord, you should make sure you receive your rent. Contact the FCC and demand that it collect the millions you're owed. Then you'll have the money to put on the kind of programming that will make you proud, engaged, stimulated, and happy to have your children watching television. Call your members of Congress at 202-224- 3121, or write them. They can't resist two hundred million landlords." The narrator was none other than the esteemed former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite.
Channel 7 (ABC) in Washington, DC, was scheduled to run the ad first, before it went national. At the last minute, the station pulled it on instructions from the higher-ups. No surprise. Promotions had anticipated censorship and was ready. It sent the ad out to the electronic and print media with a sharply worded statement pointing to a historic pattern among broadcasters of suppressing news about their privileged and subsidized status. From congressional hearings to critical conferences and reports, these FCC-licensed companies had long been deciding what was not in their commercial interest to tell the people, using the people's own property.
The print media and Barry's networks went to town on the Channel 7 blackout. Some broadcasting conglomerates that also owned newspapers and magazines did not report the story, but the New York Times and the Washington Post front- paged it and ran editorials strongly taking Channel 7 to task. They also printed the entire text of the ad, which was replayed all over the Internet and discussed endlessly in Blogland. The debate was on. Demands that Congress and the FCC act came from all quarters as liberals and conservatives joined hands on this simple matter of fairness. What a buildup for the huge rallies planned for the end of the month!
As the second week of April went on, these latest provocations of the Meleorists gathered force. The whole idea of the corporation candidates struck a chord among more and more people, especially those with a mischievous streak. The press was fascinated and started profiling the directors and officers of the five corporations, who had all educated themselves on the issues described by their corporate names and were highly articulate. Business reporters fell over each other covering this maverick phenomenon, which they recognized as something fresh and a little zany, but backed by money and influence. Almost breathlessly they ignited a public debate over corporations as "persons" and what that meant if the consequences were pursued. Could corporations be imprisoned if convicted of a felony? If so, how? By blockading the headquarters and padlocking the door? What about capital punishment? How would the state carry out the corporate death penalty? By pulling the corporation's charter? Forcing it into bankruptcy, firing all the directors and officers? John Stewart of The Daily Show had a field day with the material.
There arose such a clamor from Oregon, stimulated in part by Greg Kafoury and Mark MacDougal, two hyperactive trial lawyers, that Bill Gates located a sixth corporation willing to run for that state's governorship as the Draft Corporations Yes Corporation. Veterans comprised the board of directors, and peace advocates were the officers. Meanwhile, citizen groups began circulating petitions demanding that corporations pay their income taxes at the higher federal rate that applied to individuals -- after all, corporations were people too. Right-wingers insisted in screeds to the nonplussed letters editor of the Wall Street Journal that corporations, as "persons," should have the right to vote, as should their independent corporate subsidiaries and holding companies, as long as they were eighteen years old.
Warren's investor poll also continued to attract attention in the business and political press. Opinion was divided, with slightly more than half of the commentators endorsing the changes in corporate governance favored by most of the polled investors. The rest said that such changes would hamper management, make executives less venturesome, and prove unworkable in practice. Another rollicking debate was underway, in the course of which there were additional disclosures, such as company ruses to hide higher executive pay by covering the tax obligation on the already lavish compensation packages. A pro-investor advertising campaign designed by the indefatigable Bill Hillsman fueled the controversy further. His theme was that corporate executives were destroying capitalism, whose principles included control by owners and excluded government bailouts that would nullify or circumvent the discipline of the free market. "The ads make a fair point and are historically accurate," the Wall Street Journal was forced to admit, but went on to discount Warren's poll as stemming from "the dubious motivations of a disgruntled aging executive." Right, Bill Hillsman thought to himself. Warren Buffett, the second-richest man in America, and getting richer by the year. Extremely disgruntled.
***
On the first day of the congressional spring recess, seventy-year-old Billy Beauchamp, chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee, headed home to southwest Oklahoma in a corporate jet owned by the Viscous Petroleum Corporation. A thirty-eight-year House veteran, he had had no opponent for the last thirty of them, except for the occasional accountant or attorney looking for free publicity on a campaign budget of $20,000 or less. Politically, life was so easy for Congressman Beauchamp that he had grown more and more portly and courtly over the years, and more and more powerful. All House bills had to go through his Rules Committee before getting to the floor, and he was one tough gatekeeper, quick to block any legislation he didn't like, or to attach rules barring amendments and restricting the time for debate. Part of his power stemmed from the fact that there was nothing he needed, neither legislation nor favors. Campaign funds and PAC money for his loyalists came to him in boatloads from corporate interests as a matter of course, and he had no burning causes of his own, other than to maintain the power of business. He regularly entertained lobbyists who came to his office bearing their road maps for congressional action -- or inaction -- and served a special brandy when the oilmen and gasmen dropped in.
But on the flight home, Billy Beauchamp was not reminiscing about his triumphant legislative career. He had other things on his mind. His long-slumbering rural district was bursting with political agitation, and he wanted to get a reading from some of his old friends, the farmers and ranchers and small businessmen who were the backbone of his past reelection coronations. There was no better place to do that than Fran and Freddy's Feed, a family-owned restaurant in Lawton, the Comanche County seat. Despite his worries, the congressman was looking forward to the house specialty, chicken-fried steak with cheese grits.
That evening, seated in a big booth with his friends after much hearty backslapping, Billy asked them what they thought was going on lately. To a man, they expressed their loyalty to him, and to a man they conveyed warnings about what was looming on the horizon.
"This year is different, Billy," said Ernest Jones, a Lawton banker. "It's as if everything's turned on its head. None of us have seen anything like it. Folks here are putting together the pieces of what's been troubling them for a long time."
"I've been getting that feeling for a while now," Billy said as a gum-chewing waitress shuffled over to take their orders -- house specials all around. "Look at her," he went on as the waitress ambled back to the kitchen. "Everyone in this restaurant used to treat me with deference and respect, but now what I see in their eyes is that I'm history. And what the hell is that weirdo button they're all wearing? Is this some kooky anti-establishment mood like in the sixties, or is it a real movement?"
"Might could be," said farmer Gil Groundwork. "I got me one of them buttons myself. Came with the lightbulb I sent for when that Yoko Ono letter came around. It's the Seventh-Generation Eye."
"Say what? You going hippie on me?" Billy looked at Gil in disbelief.
Gil pointed at a busboy clearing a nearby table. "See that T-shirt? What does it say?"
Billy squinted at the busboy as the waitress arrived with five large platters. '''Sooners Rather Than Later.' Very funny. I take it they're losing their patience."
"I reckon they've just about kicked it into the ditch," Gil said. "This kid is probably making five-fifty an hour before deductions. He can't pay his way with that, and lots of people are telling him he doesn't have to if he just takes up with all these marchers and organizers."
"And the old-timers are talking to the kids, showing them their calluses and their poverty after a lifetime of working their asses off for rich guys." Hal Horsefeathers looked down at his work-roughened hands. "We're telling them not to let the same thing happen to them."
"Hey, let's call a spade a spade," said John Henry. "It's all about greed and power, Billy, greed and power that won't let up. For greed and power, nothing is ever enough. It's time for the populist posse to ride again. Myself, I'm sick of my own repossession shop -- too many people in debt, can't pay their monthly charges, the interest and penalties pile up, and my guys move in. It's a nice living, but it stinks. Wasn't going to do anything different, but then along come these rich old guys, and by God, they make sense."
Congressman Billy Beauchamp frowned and looked down at his plate for consolation, cutting himself a big bite of chicken-fried steak. It wasn't as good as it used to be.
***
April 17 was not only tax day. It was also a very taxing day for big business. In Washington, DC, George Soros was about to give his seismic speech on the inefficiencies of corporate -- he emphasized corporate -- capitalism. In New York, the mother of all Wall Street rallies, whether labor, civil rights, environmental, or antiwar, was surrounding the New York Stock Exchange. It was an unprecedented gathering, a rally of nearly two hundred thousand investor-owners -- Leonard had delivered on his promise to Warren -- demanding that their ownership guarantee control. The first speaker was a law professor who had served on the SEC. "Ownership means control. It's been said that trying to organize the sixty million individual investors in this country is like herding cats, but don't you believe it," he declared, and went on to lay out a step-by-step action plan.
Other speakers detailed the corporate crimes responsible for the loss of trillions of pension and trust dollars supposedly held by Wall Street brokers, investment bankers, and bank trust departments. African American investors spoke of the backbreaking toil of the slaves who built so much of the Financial District, including the wall that gave Wall Street its name; they called slavery and its aftermath "centuries of affirmative action for white males." Authors of books about "corporate lying, cheating, and stealing," as one prosecutor phrased it, raised bullhorns to the crowded windows of the surrounding office buildings and bellowed appeals for more whistle-blowers. The ralliers roared their anger and shouted in unison, "Down with the tyranny of self-enriching bosses!" Working off sets of photo cards passed out by Leonard's organizers, they called out the names of the Fortune 100 companies and their CEOs one by one in earsplitting decibels. Representatives of some of the multibillion-dollar institutional investors spoke out in support, as did managers of university endowments. The big mutual funds were reserving judgment -- and small wonder, since they had ownership-without-control problems and investor-gouging traditions of their own.
Toward the end of the rally, a retired CEO of a brokerage firm took the podium to announce that the head of the New York Stock Exchange had been invited to speak and had turned the invitation down flat. A deafening chorus of boos arose from the crowd, which surged forward toward the steps of the Stock Exchange. Startled police panicked and began pushing the demonstrators back with billy clubs or dragging them off to paddy wagons. The scuffles and arrests, the handcuffing of some unresisting demonstrators trained in passive civil disobedience, the spectacle of police force trained on a gathering of small investors-- all made great visuals for the print photographers and television cameras. Once again the Meliorists had conceived an event that bridged the conservative-liberal divide.
***
Every April, the American Society of Newspaper Editors descended on Washington, DC, for its annual convention. Over the years the convention had been a command performance for the prominent political, business, and academic personages chosen as speakers. In most cases, the speeches were soporific, routine, predictable anthems of self- promotion, but every now and then an electrifying presentation came along, like the now largely forgotten Cross of Iron speech delivered by newly inaugurated president Dwight D. Eisenhower in April 1953. In powerful language, Eisenhower delineated the folly of the US-Soviet arms race and the inhumane opportunity costs borne by the civilian populations of both nations, especially the children.
Today, anticipation was running high in the giant ballroom of the Washington Hilton. The advance buzz was that George Soros's speech was going to be one for the capitalist ages, a sort of "Move over, Adam Smith -- what you forewarned in 1776 in your Wealth of Nations has come to seamy maturity beyond your wildest nightmares." George had laid down two stipulations when he accepted the invitation. One was that the speech be carried live, at least on C-SPAN, and that there be full media access. The other was that he speak before lunch, not after. Something of a gourmet, he had seen many a stomach full of food and drink dull the brain and wilt the attention span. Mild hunger had the opposite effect, producing almost undivided attention.
At high noon, the society's president, James R. Rant III, introduced the speaker briskly. "The highly successful financial speculator and philanthropist George Soros needs no introduction. Therefore, I give you George Soros." More than polite applause greeted George as he took the podium, and then utter quiet fell over the room.
For a few seconds, he looked out over the audience. Meeting heightened expectations always made him nervous. He preferred to exceed lowered expectations. Earlier, he had waved away the teleprompter, saying that he was going to extemporize from his notes. That way he could give an impression of informality without sacrificing the precision of his remarks. He could not afford to wander. The last thing he wanted to read in the press reports was, "In a rambling speech today, George Soros said that ..."
In spite of himself, he began stiffly. "O editors of large, medium, and small newspapers, lend me your open minds. For I will not pander to you with sonorous platitudes. Nay, I will respect you by asking you to join me in a journey toward reality. The free mind engages realities; the indentured mind is enslaved by myths. Concentrated power sustains its hegemony with myths that pacify its subjects. Systems of intolerable control fueled by limitless greed have to justify their domination. Myths serve that purpose.
"Today, the dominant institution in our country is the global corporation. Never have corporations been larger, with revenues comparable to or exceeding the gross domestic product of entire nations, with a grip on government that is scarcely challenged, with technologies of unprecedented reach, with workers who are theirs to hire or jettison at will, with a limitless mobility and capacity to evade the jurisdiction of our laws while continuing to profit from their presence in this land of ours.
"The global corporation's principal claim to legitimacy is its efficiency and productivity. The cold hearts and monetized minds of these corporate behemoths rationalize their autocratic decisions on grounds of superior efficiencies and increased productivities. They will admit of only one master they cannot challenge -- the market. The market made me do it, the market is all-wise. They espouse this market fundamentalism shamelessly when in fact they spend their days trying to insure that they are the market. They labor to make government and its laws dutiful servants who keep them ensconced as the market powers. With their immense capital they can turn the governments of smaller nations into debtor putty, and when matters become shaky they can download their risks to national and international governmental institutions.
"The global corporation completes its occupation of our minds -- and many sharp, learned minds are no exception -- by controlling the definitions of efficiency and productivity. Under these definitions, slavery can be and has been justified on the grounds that well-treated slaves enhance the efficiency of any given enterprise. But the time came in our nation's history when it was no longer the market that controlled the outcome. A war was fought and laws were passed to make slavery a grave crime, notwithstanding the fact that it reduced labor costs. How often must we return to the verity that those who define our terms and our yardsticks of economic progress control our dialogue, our very thought processes? That is why so many of us are unable to see that these yardsticks, determined entirely within the corporate sphere, are short-term, shortsighted, and only further reinforced by the stock market, quarterly returns, and executive stock options, barring external intrusions such as effective regulation, litigation, or a civil war. When corporations so overwhelmingly control the premises of the discussion that they are part of the daily catechism in our schools, is it surprising that we all bow to their conclusions?
George paused to take a sip of water. He was hitting his stride. "With your indulgence, let me take you down the abstraction ladder. Let me pose some organizing questions that are based on some of your own finest reporting, your finest hours in journalism, which I choose to take very seriously.
"Is it efficient and productive to dump toxic pollutants into the air, water, soil, food, and property used by millions of innocent women, children, and men? By the corporate definition -- reducing costs by using the environment as a free private sewer -- the answer is yes. By any reasonable societal definition of efficiency and productivity -- where costs have to include the damage to health, safety, and property values -- the answer must be no.
"Is it efficient to produce energy-guzzling consumer products such as motor vehicles and household appliances so that the electric and gas utilities and the oil and coal companies can sell more of their products? For Exxon Mobil, Peabody Coal, El Paso Natural Gas, and General Motors, the corporate efficiency answer is yes. For the population as a whole, for the country as a whole, for consumers as a whole, the inbuilt waste of stagnant technologies requires that the answer be no.
"In the context of the growing peril of global warming, is it efficient to keep expanding the use of fossil fuels, to oppose renewable fuels, and to resist enforceable standards for greater energy efficiency? Within the frame of planet Earth and its peoples and its economy over time, the answer is a resounding no.
"Is it efficient for the corporations to protect their entrenched wasteful technologies by actively opposing alternative technologies that are better for the human race in the long run? No. It's a case of a powerful inefficiency, so to speak, repressing a powerless efficiency. But the corporation answers yes in all its destructive myopia and continues mortgaging the future while the general public pays the bills.
"Is it efficient for the timber companies to twist the arm of the Forest Service so that they can clear-cut more of the people's land while using totally subsidized roads and paying Uncle Sam absurdly low prices for the logs? And to do it at the expense of protecting the national forests from serious damage and expanding their recreational use for generations to come? For the timber companies, it's efficient to take every last tree standing in our national forests, which supply less than five percent of the country's total timber harvest. For posterity -- may we resurrect that word so oft employed by our forebears -- it is distinctly inefficient. One only has to look at the denuded upper Midwest and other regions where forests disappeared in the nineteenth century to anticipate the wasteful long-term economic consequences. There was once a thriving lumber business in the upper Midwest; there is none today.
"How efficient was it, in the thirties and forties, for General Motors to conspire with a tire company and an oil company to buy up trolley systems -- their remaining competitors -- in twenty-eight metropolitan areas, including the world's largest electrified mass transit network in the Los Angeles area, and then proceed to tear up the tracks and lobby government for more highways? Clearly, neither the Justice Department, which moved the indictment against the three companies for criminal violation of the antitrust laws, nor the federal district court, which convicted them, thought it was efficient for the country, but the damage was done. The economic inefficiency of the failure to create a more balanced surface transportation system can be seen today in the daily bumper-to-bumper traffic at commuter hours -- more fuel wasted, more time wasted, more air pollution in our lungs, and more accidents on our roads. The work done by innovative transit engineers and at such universities as Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois, gives us a glimmer of the modern, flexible mass transit systems that could have graced those once valuable rights of way.
"Is it efficient for the defense industry to lobby for larger and larger military budgets and unneeded weapons systems when those wasteful and inefficiently contracted tax dollars could be spent on the people's needs instead? Standing before this convention in 1953, President Eisenhower itemized the number of schools and hospitals and public transit systems that could be funded if the United States and the Soviet Union would only lift 'the cross of iron' from their citizenry's shoulders. And yet the industry's top executives have the nerve to complain about all the uneducated workers coming their way. I suppose it's too much to hope that the 'military industrial complex,' as Eisenhower called it in his farewell address in January 1961, would ever miss a chance to raise the military budget even higher than the one half of the entire federal operating budget it represents today. To the Lockheed-Martins, enough is never enough. To be on the receiving end of tax dollars from Uncle Sam is an efficient result for these companies' bottom lines and executive compensation packages. It is not an efficient result for a country that should have been reaping an annual peace dividend since 1991, following the internal collapse of our major military adversary.
"Is it efficient that the healthcare industry rakes in an annual two-hundred-billion-dollar bonanza through gross billing fraud for services rendered -- or not rendered -- as documented by the Government Accountability office of the Congress? Is it efficient for the patients? The taxpayers?
"Is it efficient that the corporate health insurance industry uses about twenty-five percent of every premium dollar for administrative, executive, and bureaucratic expenses when the government's health insurance program, Medicare, only uses three percent on such expenses before paying out? Aren't company efficiencies supposed to advance consumer efficiencies rather than enter into a zero-sum relationship with them? Yet the latter is exactly what the wheelchair manufacturing monopoly and the virtual GE lightbulb monopoly and the automakers with their fragile vehicles did to their customers for many years before consumer advocacy groups and competitive forces finally came to the rescue.
"The Great Lakes once had a thriving commercial fishing industry. No more. Apparently the lakeshore chemical and petrochemical industry found it efficient to dump mercury and other poisons into these wondrous natural creations.
"Of late the outcry from corporations demanding that government activities be turned over to them through the outsourcing of procurement programs has become thunderously loud. The grotesque increase in taxpayer costs from this commercialization of so many military and civilian services has been camouflaged by the corporate ideology that companies are more efficient than government. Tell that to the Pentagon's civil service procurement officers, who, like Admiral Hyman Rickover before them, can point to one case study after another detailing the massive cost overruns they have had to endure and absorb. Tell it to the auditors of the Hurricane Katrina contracts. Tell it to the Seabees and the Salvation Army, who know a thing or two about efficiency.
"Very few people, even in the Pentagon, know that deep inside that department, at the Walter Reed army research complex, the government maintains its own 'drug company.' For nearly four decades it has been discovering and testing crucial drugs at less than five percent of the development costs that the big pharmaceutical companies claim to justify the exorbitant prices patients pay for drugs. The astonishing expediency of the corporations emerges here as well. The pharmaceutical industry has managed to shape federal policy in such a way that the medicines researched and developed by the government are given free to one or another of the big drug companies under what are essentially monopoly marketing agreements. That is to say, no royalties to the government from profits, and no price controls to keep the companies from gouging their patients, many of whom are the taxpayers whose dollars funded the research to begin with. To add to the windfall, the pharmaceutical firms are always hiring away the government's medical officers and other scientists, with their taxpayer-funded years of experience. These companies obviously think the whole arrangement is a model of efficiency. They're wrong.
"There is no end to the elaborations of the myth of corporate efficiencies, which in fact arise from the imposition of inefficiencies on consumers, workers, and taxpayers. I was just reading a new book by the eminent John Bogle, one of the pioneers of the mutual fund industry, and the founder of the low-fee Vanguard series of funds. His sad and angry conclusion was that the aggregate take in fees charged to the average mutual fund investor over time amounts to one third of investment gains. That, I suppose, is an efficient figure from the viewpoint of the mutual funds' management. I doubt that investors would agree if they were aware of the vigorish.
"You may note that I have scarcely touched upon what economists call the diseconomies of the business corporation. Consider if you will the well-documented human damage from the overprescribing or misprescribing of drugs peddled to the public through massive television advertising and other industry promotions. The adverse effects of these drugs claim more than one hundred thousand American lives a year and produce far larger numbers of serious problems such as gastrointestinal bleeding. When you factor in the warnings of leading medical scientists that the reckless promotion and prescribing of antibiotics overloads patients and generates resistant strains of bacteria, the casualty toll just keeps rising.
"Or what about the epidemic of corporate crime that your publications have been reporting day after day? Trillions of dollars have been drained or looted from workers, pensioners, and 401(k) holders in the past half dozen years. That is some externality! As are the sixty-five thousand people who die every year from air pollution, according to the EPA, or the fifty-eight thousand workplace-related deaths from disease and trauma every year, according to OSHA, or the nearly one hundred thousand people who die annually as a result of medical negligence or incompetence in hospitals, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.
"These diseconomies and many more reported in the press led Ralph Estes, a prominent professor of social cost accounting, now emeritus, to conclude that corporations have done more harm than good. 'What?' you say. 'Has George Soros gone off the deep end?' Open minds, please. Consider that many of these external costs are reflected in suffering and destruction that escapes marketplace feedback -- for example, the loss of a loved one without recompense where recompense is due, or the depletion of natural resources through land erosion, deforestation, mountaintop destruction, and so on -- or are shifted to future generations. Moreover, and importantly, the very costs transform themselves into many forms of economic demand that fuel business, profits, and jobs.
"Let's take a mundane example -- the ridiculously flimsy bumpers on your motor vehicles, which essentially protect nothing but themselves, and that very poorly. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates annual repair costs model by model. A five-mile-per-hour collision can run you anywhere from five hundred to four thousand dollars, or even more, either directly or in higher insurance premiums. And the other side of cost is sales. The collision repair industry, starting with the original equipment manufacturers and ending with the body shops, takes in billions of dollars a year from the business of fixing preventable damage. It's not as if the auto company engineers don't know how to build simple bumpers that protect other parts of the car in low-level collisions, certainly up to ten miles an hour.
"But, you say, the US economy is the wealthiest and mightiest in the world, despite its huge consumer, corporate, and governmental debt burdens. You're right, as long as we don't ask tough questions about the quality of life it produces. And for whom? And at what expense to posterity? To the global environment? To vulnerable people overseas? At what expense to consumers, workers, and taxpayers, to public services and hollowed-out communities and depleted natural resources? At what expense to distributive justice for the working people of America, to their living standard, their time, their tranquility?
"Let's turn our open minds back to the early 1900s, a period of widespread poverty, insufficient affordable housing, low wages, hungry children. Well, our mighty, wealthy economy roared through the century, stimulated by several wars, and here we are the beginning of the twenty-first century, with an economy twenty to twenty-five times more 'productive' per worker, inflation-adjusted, than in the horse-and-buggy days. So what do the newspapers tell us, sometimes in the most graphic and heart-rending of terms? That we live in a period of widespread poverty, insufficient affordable housing, low wages, and hungry children, that tens of millions of American families are deeply in debt, that disparities of income and wealth in our nation are huge and steadily growing.
"'So why hasn't the capitalist economy collapsed?' you may wonder. Setting aside the fact that it did, during the Great Depression, the answer is simple. Because it is not a capitalist economy, with companies both large and small having an unfettered freedom to fail. Rather, it is a predominantly corporate capitalist economy, with Washington, DC, serving a backstop function of bailing out, guaranteeing, subsidizing, and overcontracting to big business. As the astute restaurateur Nathra Nader once said, 'Capitalism will always survive because socialism will always be there to save it.' Corporate capitalism is in charge, but it is inundating us with manufactured wants and whims instead of delivering the necessities and allowing public budgets to reflect the priorities of a sane and just society.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the task that lies before us is abundantly clear. We must redefine efficiency and productivity as if what matters most is the well-being of our people and their descendants. As if corporations adjust to be our servants, not our masters. Toward this end, we must stop letting the big corporations and their apologists think for us and start thinking for ourselves. We need open minds for an open society. We have nothing to lose but our myths. We have everything to gain by thinking anew about how to create real prosperity for all our citizens, how to protect the environment they live in, and how to insure the peaceful sustainability of our planet.
"Thank you for inviting me to address you this afternoon. May you pursue these inquiries further here at your convention and on returning to your work of opening more minds."
At first, a stunned silence greeted the conclusion of George's speech -- five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen. Then a single clap was heard, then two, three, four, a dozen, building to a crescendo of applause from a roomful of standing editors, though the ovation didn't quite drown out some loud booing. Maybe a dozen mossbacks, George thought as he took in the reaction. When the audience quieted, a panel of editors chosen for the occasion asked a few unusually thoughtful questions arising from George's points. It was clear that the editors had listened to his remarks and discarded their prepared questions about the IMP, globalization, and the like.
The reporters in the room rushed to file their stories. The Washington Post led with "Global financier George Soros told the American Society of Newspaper Editors today that large corporations are engines of inefficiency and that they get away with it because they hide it in their profit-and-loss statements." The New York Times headline read, "Financier- Philanthropist Says Large Corporations Weave a Web of Myths." The Wall Street Journal ran with "George Soros Attacks Corporate Efficiency Myth, Asks for Open Minds."
"Not bad," George said, reading the clippings back in his office with his project manager. "We went after the central dogma, and maybe others will follow. How was the television?"
"Thirty-five seconds -- a clip of one or two of your pithier lines," replied the manager. "It's not a one-day story. There'll be commentary and editorials, calls and e-mails, and plenty of outrage from the expected quarters to keep it going."
"We'll see," George said. "It certainly was the best possible audience. Before a Chamber of Commerce crowd, the speech would have gone in one ear and out the other, and they'd have jeered me out of the hall. Which is fine, because it wasn't designed for the closed-minded business community, but for market-brainwashed citizens and students around the country. Once the myth starts to collapse, the multinationals will know what it's like when an entombed mummy hits air."
***
By the third week of April, Sols campaign against Wal-Mart was putting tremendous pressure on the company. Sales were down in the two hundred stores subjected to regular and very effective picketing, but not nearly as steeply as in the five stores beset by dozens of small businesses that were undercutting Wal-Mart's prices on its forty leading sellers. These fire sales struck at the heart of the slogan seen on Wal-Mart trucks as they traveled the nation's highways 24/7: "Always the Lowest Price. Always." At the same five stores, the Sol-SWATs were completing their work on the union organizing drive. Company attorneys, Wal-SWATs, and representatives of the National Labor Relations Board were all on location tensely performing their respective roles. As if all that weren't bad enough, Wal-Mart was losing lawsuits unrelated to Sol's crew and all the media attention they were garnering. Denial of lunch breaks caused one judge to rule in favor of thousands of Wal-Mart workers in the West. Women charging discrimination in both pay and promotions won their case. Week after week, Wal-Mart was getting an overdose of bad news.
In response, the company organized demonstrations of satisfied low-income shoppers and loyal workers, but so many Wal-Mart freebies were handed out that the press discounted the turnouts. Meanwhile, the Sol-SWATs organized counter-demonstrations of exploited workers, small family businesses that had been pillars of their communities until Wal-Mart crushed them, and shoppers who felt ripped off by the company's sales practices. Speakers made sure to cover all the bases. Again and again, they compared the hourly Wal-Mart worker wage with the $10,000 an hour or more paid to top executives, and stressed the company's mandatory better treatment of its Western European workers. Again and again, they explained how local property taxpayers were subsidizing Wal-Mart's privileged presence in their communities, and how federal taxes were subsidizing Wal-Mart's low-wage business model. The speeches were sprinkled with contrived leaks about what was coming Wal-Mart's way on an even larger scale. Sol's partial mole on the board of directors told him that it was this credible threat of a sustained and expanded campaign that most frightened the board and the CEO.
Wal-Mart's standing on Wall Street continued to suffer. Controversy and uncertainty were never good for a company's stock. The number of "market underperforms" recommended by the stock analysts was on the rise, and there were no "buys," only "holds" and even a few "sells." One analyst for a major investment banking firm issued a report warning that Wal-Mart's very business model was in jeopardy. He noted that of the model's two underpinnings -- a spectacularly hard- bitten supply chain ending with just-in-time inventory, and low wages and benefits -- it was the latter that was particularly in jeopardy. Wal-Mart's stock continued to slide, not precipitously, but at that gradual pace that drives brokerage firms crazy. As one broker put it, "The China price is one thing, but this is more like Chinese water torture."
***
The last weekend in April -- what would have been near Maui Five -- saw the opening of Luke Skyhi's ten-city arena extravaganzas showcasing the sustainable economy in a way that dispelled the Goody Two-Shoes aura of so many environmental rallies. The displays, which included some props and visuals borrowed from the Sun God festivals, were emotionally and intellectually stunning. There were no corporate-sponsored greenwashing exhibits like the ones that had usurped the annual Earth Day celebration. Just the opposite. The destructive corporate economy was the focus. The sustainable economy, with its here-at-home jobs, was the solution. The contrast between the two -- the portrayal of life under the sustainable economy as compared with the rat race, the disrupted families, the declining living standard of the majority of Americans under the Fortune 500 economy -- was stark and dramatic, just the kind of vivid contrast that works to raise expectations and motivate people to act, to shift their buying habits, to refuse to take no for an answer.
No one was more amazed at the impact on the attendees and the media than the established groups and cooperatives that had been working for a sustainable economy for years, crying tediously in the wilderness, for the most part objects of curiosity or derision to all but their tiny cadre of adherents and practitioners. "All steak, no sizzle," wrote one columnist years ago. Laboring in the vineyards largely in vain, they nonetheless represented the future survival path for the planet. For decades their idealism sustained them in the face of their disappointment in a corporate-saturated public that kept looking the other omnicidal way. But these arena shows were something different. They represented idealism backed by power and driven by a strategy of wholesale displacement of the destructive corporate economy. Even the rhythms of the music exuded power. So did the art, the speeches, the technologies. So did the presence of so many politicians and spotters for the big corporations, who showed up uninvited but were more than welcome to attend. Luke Skyhi wanted the political and corporate scions to feel the power, see the power, taste the power, and be in shock and awe of the power. The large arena shows were not only designed to be powerful in themselves; the PCC made sure they signaled that the drive for a sustainable economy was about to move into other arenas, into the legislatures, courts, executive branches, and executive suites of the soon-to-be powers that were. No more Mr. Nice Guy!
Luke Skyhi was beginning to put the pieces of the Redirections network together all by himself. Emboldened by his sense that there were mighty forces at his back, he told the media, in his keynote address, just how the rubber was going to hit the road. His words conveyed a mood of conviction and determination. "No more excuses! The train has left the station, and the track is branching out in all directions, so stay tuned," he said as a quartet of jazz vocalists broke into the theme song Yoko had composed for the glorious weekend, "If It Takes Forever, I Will Wait for You, but the Polar Bears Won't."
***
Out in California, Warren Beatty's campaign took full advantage of the weekend's arena events in Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland, just as it had been taking full advantage of the Sun God festivals and the increasingly vociferous and media-savvy lunchtime rallies in those cities, as well as San Jose and San Diego.
In recent weeks, the campaign had almost been sidetracked by charges of womanizing against both candidates. A salivating press and blogosphere pounced on a flurry of accusations and visuals from jilted husbands and tearful women relaying their stories often poignant, whether true or not -- over and over until the public felt like it was watching an X- rated soap opera. Salaciousness fatigue set in. It turned out that Mutually Assured Promiscuity was as effective a deterrent in the California gubernatorial campaign as Mutually Assured Destruction is claimed to have been during the Cold War. After a fortnight of TV, radio, and tabloid frenzy, the sex-capades of the two Lotharios became a sideshow, and Warren knew how to keep them a sideshow. He was a different man now, a faithful husband to his adored wife, Annette, and a proud father of their four children. He suavely advised all current rakes in the state to try married life. The reporters ate it up, and the cockhound dustup died down to barroom chuckles and website jokes.
More important political business took center stage. The problems of the state were immense, and perceived as such by most Californians. In ever greater numbers, they felt that their governor had blown the opportunity presented by his initial sky-high poll numbers when he characterized picketing nurses as "special interests" and said he was "kicking their butt." Thus commenced his Waterloo. He had alienated not only the nurses, but teachers, police, and firefighters, with both his style and his policies of protecting the wealthy at their expense. Moreover, with the restoration of the tax on the super-rich over the governor's veto, Warren had staked his claim to the debt and deficit issues that had given the former celluloid action hero some policy credibility.
Barry Diller continued to be Warren's political lifeguard. Quietly he synergized the pertinent initiatives of the Meliorists with his friend's campaign to keep it varied, exciting, fresh, and substantive. It wasn't so much that the agenda was particularly new -- it covered pensions, tax reform, water purity and availability, long overdue public works projects to employ the unemployed, a living wage, universal quality healthcare, modernization of public transport to contain sprawl, safe and clean streets, revamped schools that taught civic skills and literacy from the earliest grades, a crackdown on corporate crime and abuse of power, etc. -- it was the decisive, unambiguous manner in which Warren argued for it, drawing on all his actor's skills. He made reform seem unstoppable. His campaign left Arnold frittering and the Democratic Party dumbfounded -- that is, reviewing his agenda, they found out how dumb they'd been in past election cycles.
Other would-be progressive politicians and candidates all over the country began to take heed. The cliche that as California goes, so goes the nation, seemed less a cliche with every passing week. Nobody took greater heed than the members of Congress -- heed mixed with more than a few flutters of fear.
Warren's caravan of the super-rich had grown to four buses that traveled all over California, from the northern mountains to the southern deserts and beaches, from the inner cities and sprawling suburbs to the valleys where migrant farmworkers toiled. The election was his to lose, but he refused to play it safe. He crisscrossed the state tirelessly, his days of chronic indecision long behind him. A transplanted Californian from Virginia, he was on a journey of public self- discovery as much as a quest for the public interest, and Californians were responding in droves.
***
In Omaha, Warren and the Secretariat spent the Maui Five weekend on a comprehensive ingathering of all the assets and strategies for the coming invasion of the Congress by the people. According to the profiles the Congress Project was compiling, about 15 percent of the members of Congress were as close to first-rate as the voters were likely to get under the present corrupt political-electoral system. The advancement of the First-Stage Improvements would begin with them as the various Redirectional projects sought the most suitable sponsors for the different parts of the overall legislative agenda. But the growing populist fervor would ignore no one on Capitol Hill, not the newly arrived nor the veteran Bulls who commanded the committees. Every member would see just how decisive the stakes were for their ambitions, their parties, and of course their reelection prospects. So entrenched and complacent were the incumbents -- the lifers -- in their one-party districts or states that they would be completely off guard when the tornado hit the Capitol Dome. They would be flabbergasted, not so much by the legislation, but by the blitzkrieg of people power all around them -- especially the people back home who they thought were loyal or simply ignorant or apathetic. The Meliorist legislation that would soon be introduced represented a politically relentless surprise attack on injustices well known to both the solons and the public. The politics of the almighty dollar and the almighty corporation had kept such legislation off the dockets and out of congressional sight for most of America's modern political history.
Which was about to be history, Warren thought to himself as he reviewed the weekend's hard work with weary satisfaction.