This article by David Sirota over at Alternet.org got me thinking about something that has, quite frankly, bothered me for many a year. It was incoherent, vague, and inarticulate, until I saw the headline and read the article; I now understand what bothers me about this line of reasoning, and what bothers me are several things. Before I detail my reasons for not liking such nonsense (and nonsense it is), I shall state my heresy, making it public for all to see - I do not believe it is productive or helpful for progressives to automatically exclude corporations from policy-making discussions. I will go further, and state unequivocally and categorically, that to exclude corporations from discussions that have the potential to effect their businesses, their profits, and their stock values is immoral, unless we are going to state that corporations should not make profits, or shareholders not expect a return on their investments.
OK, I've got the heresy out of the way. Now to the explanations. First, I have read articles like Sirota's for years, as I was a subscriber to The Nation for about six years, and such "reporting" was rampant. To note that such-and-such a person, claiming to be a liberal, had some kind of relationship with some Fortune 500 company, or that Public Television routinely solicits from, and receives money from, corporations and charitable foundations that have right-leaning agendas, or corporate-criminal records, should automatically make us question the liberal bona fides of those involved is guilt-by-association I find abhorrent. A good example is Public Television, which still solicits money from right-leaning foundations, but was much more influenced by the appointment of an anti-CPB chair to the board than by any strings attached to grants for funding by the MacArthur or Vining Foundation.
At the heart of such reporting is a kind of political Manichaeanism, in which corporations are the embodiment of evil and labor and workers are the embodiment of virtue. I will not disagree that corporations wield tremendous influence in the political sphere; I will also not disagree that corporations that routinely violate fair labor standards, workplace safety, and environmental laws - not to mention anti-trust and tax law - need to be held accountable in a far more strict manner than is currently the case; giving such law penalties with teeth would go a long way toward ensuring corporate compliance. To me, however, none of this is even remotely relevant to the way the issue is too often framed; usually, it is the big ugly, horrible, worker-hating corporation against the ground-down, struggling-but-virtuous worker, with the end result always being the worker loses. Along with the Manichaean guilt-by-association, such reporting too often ignores the complexities of the stories involved, not the least of which is this fun fact that is too often overlooked - corporations exist to make a profit; thus they have an interest in doing business in a way that minimizes costs. This is neither sinister nor hidden, but should be plain for all to see. That profit-seeking sometimes skirts - or even more than skirts - across the boundary between lawful and unlawful does not negate this fundamental reality.
As far as the particular issue in question, why the deathless prose in Sirota's piece? The Democratic leader of the Senate is holding hearings with large corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce on the issue of free trade - Oh. My. God. Horror of horrors! A politician is meeting with business leaders on a matter that impacts their business and profits!
C'mon.
We can operate in a variety of ways in this country. We can be right-wing Manichaeans - "Axis-of-evil" types. We can be left-wing Manichaeans - corporations-and-churches-are-out-to steal-our-liberties-and-our-money types. Or, perhaps, we can recognize that corporations have interests that, both by law and by moral imperative, need to be considered in any complicated policy involving their interests. In so doing, such consultation should not exclude other interests, interests which, up till now, have been largely ignored - organized labor, environmental, workplace safety - but there is nothing untoward about meeting with corporate representatives as well.
Sirota's piece is redolent with a constant, whining, lefty-leaning subtext, close to but not quite conspiracy mongering, in which corporations act as nefarious, behind-the-scenes Rasputins, stealing from virtuous workers, evilly manipulating gullible, greedy, or otherwise corruptible politicians for their own ends. We the people stand by helpless as corporations run our country from smoke-free back rooms.
Please. Unless one is to deny that businesses and business leaders have the same rights to address issues of concern to them with our political leadership, then I suggest, perhaps, we actually investigate what is said and why, rather than standing in our holier-than-everyone Amen corner and crying about big evil corporations stealing the Democrats from the people who elected them. That kind of nonsense is both old and, well, nonsensical. We need to think about these things, people, not just react.
