THE POWERS THAT BE
ENTER THE THIRD CORPORATE REGIME
The third corporate regime is the house we live in today. George W. Bush is just the current master of the mansion. The architecture of the house is changing under Bush but it follows the basic design established by Reagan a quarter century ago.
Hidden power is still the story of our ruling regime. It is a tale of anti-democratic power concentration that might surprise even C. Wright Mills, who wrote about a veiled power elite fifty years ago. Ironically, the regime's hegemonic ideology is that it is bringing American-inspired democracy all over the world even as it erodes democracy both abroad and at home.
I am not suggesting a past democratic paradise in the United States. All corporate regimes have created a debilitated democracy in their own way. Nor am I implying that the current regime has stripped away all meaningful democracy. Quite the contrary. It is the very persistence of substantial democratic freedoms, including elections and constitutionalism, that allows the regime to persuade so many Americans that they are a shining hill of democracy when so many of our freedoms are now threatened.
Certificate of Birth
Name:??????? Third Corporate Regime
Date of Birth:???? Election Day, 1980
Father:??????? Ronald Reagan
Mother:?????? Corporate America
Headquarters:???? Washington, D.C.
Current Presider:???George W. Bush
Brief Biography
The regime is twenty-five years old. It took form under the Reagan Administration. The regime consolidated itself under Bush I, secured legitimacy from Democrats under President Clinton, and radicalized itself under Bush II. The aim of the regime is to shift sovereignty from citizens to transnational corporations, and to transform government into a business partner committed to maximizing global profits for a small number of global executives and shareholders. It is showing signs of age and is viewed by much of the world as dangerous. Caution is advised.
Registry of Regimes, Washington, D.C.
MEET THE PELLARS
Dominant Institution: The Transnational Corporation
?Corporate robber barons own this house.
Mode of Politics: Global Corpocracy
?Money runs the house although all tenants have a vote.
Social Contract: Social Insecurity
?Tenants have no long-term lease.
Foreign Policy: Empire
?The house rules the neighborhood.
Ideology: The Corporate Mystique
?The house calls itself free and open for business.
THE TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATION
The foundation pillar of the regime is the transnational corporation, the biggest concentration of cold cash in human history. The companies dominating the regime—giants such as Wal-Mart, General Motors, General Electric, Exxon, Citigroup, Bank of America, Verizon Communications, Philip Morris, and Microsoft—are bigger than most countries. Citigroup has total assets over a trillion dollars![1] The top ten corporations have assets worth about $4 trillion. That is $4,000,000,000,000! Wal-Mart employed 1.34 million workers in 2003.[2] General Motors' annual sales are larger than the GDPs of Hong Kong, Denmark, Thailand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and 158 other countries.[3] Big business has existed under every U.S. regime since the Civil War, but the third corporate regime is creating a world where companies are replacing countries as the super-powers. They make the companies of earlier regimes look like pygmies.
But while the size of the current regime's corporation is impressive, it is just one part of the story about what makes it new and uniquely dangerous to democracy. Today's corporation has a new transnational and constitutional identity that leads it to function more easily beyond the popular control of any government or people. The larger picture is about the structure of the corporate system itself that now links hundreds of transnational corporations with each other and the U.S. government into a global corpocracy, allowing the regime to constrain democracy over much of the planet in the name of promoting it.[4]
We have long had global corporations, but never the transnational form of today. Corporations of earlier regimes acquired raw materials abroad and sold to foreign markets. But their ownership was not global and they did not produce a significant fraction of their products with cheap foreign labor all over the world. When I walked into Toyota headquarters in Toyota City, Japan, I saw a world map lighting up the scores of different countries in which the tires, seats, engine parts, body, and other components were each produced. The entire globe was lit up like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.
The transnational firm is a different and far more empowered entity than the corporation of the two earlier corporate regimes. A leading business group, the New York-based Conference Board, defined the earlier "multinational" firms as "national companies with units abroad."[5] In contrast, this regime's transnational is a firm whose identity lies in its global horizons. National borders are its enemy and national governments its handmaidens.[6] The new ethos of a transnational dream is well demonstrated by this quote from Dow Chemical's CEO in the 1970s:
I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Chemical Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society. If we were located on such truly neutral ground we could then really operate in the U.S. as U.S. citizens, in Japan as Japanese citizens and in Brazil as Brazilians rather than being governed in prime by the law of the United States…. We could even pay any natives handsomely to move somewhere else.[7]
This is truly a dream, for the current regime is based on a tight marriage between the transnational corporation and the U.S. government. But it accurately reflects changes in the identity and aspirations of the current corporation from those of earlier regimes. It also creates new tensions in the current corpocracy that did not exist in either the first or second regimes.
The transnational firm of the third corporate regime feeds overwhelmingly on "exit power," one of the great sources of power in any social system. In a marriage, the partner who has the emotional or financial ability to leave wields power in the relationship. In prior corporate regimes, the American corporation used exit power by threatening to move from one state to another, a form of extortion that companies still use today to pit state governments or workers against one another. A big inequality in exit power is a recipe for abuse.[8]
This regime is constructing a new system of global exit power for the transnational firm. It threatens democracy far more powerfully than the exit power of earlier corporate regimes. If exit power is exercised across states, citizens can organize to ensure that the federal government, as in the New Deal, can step in to establish national minimum standards, such as a federal minimum wage. But since there is no true global government, that democratic option is currently off the table. Organizations most similar to global government, like the World Trade Organization (WTO), enforce international property rights, such as rights of equal treatment for foreign firms and global copyrights. But they view labor standards as beyond their constitutional purview, and there is no global agency with the teeth to enforce even the most minimal democratic worker protections.[9]
The United States and its allied global authorities, such as the WTO, formally strip away impediments to corporate mobility by enforcing unfettered trade requirements and open markets that are conditions for entry into the world economy and the WTO itself. In doing so, they erode democratic capacity in the nation-state, since the nation lacks exit power and is becoming more subordinate to the hypermobile transnational firm. The rights of the corporation to leave and protect its property rights globally are defined as part of a global constitutional order promoting freedom and democracy. If you challenge free trade, international property rights, or the corporation's freedom to exit, you are challenging freedom itself. Globalization is justified by the regime's ideology of global democracy that the regime itself is subverting.
A small number of transnational corporations sit at the heart of the regime, led by the Top Ten. Each of these Top Ten are bigger than one hundred countries. In 2004, eight of the top ten global companies in the Wall Street Journal's ranking by market value were U.S. based, with GE, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Pfizer, Citigroup, and Wal-Mart being the six largest (BP and Royal Dutch/Shell were the only two non-American firms represented).[10] But you'd have to add on GM, Ford, J. P. Morgan Chase, and scores of other behemoths to get the picture. $4 trillion is just a fraction of the wealth controlled by the two hundred largest intertwined giant companies who rule the regime and produce slightly more than one-quarter of the world's total wealth.[11]
In the first corporate regime, Rockefeller and Morgan helped build the interlocking corporate web that knit together all major robber corporations into an integrated system.[12] It is this intercorporate spider web, with the capacity for collective corporate identity and action, that underpinned the regime. While the robber barons and their individual companies were highly visible, the interlocked system itself was less transparent, part of the earlier regime's partially hidden power grid.
In the current regime, we have a new corporate spider web that is also more hidden than the individual brandname companies. It is a byzantine maze of interlocking directorships, contracting networks, and strategic alliances. Economist Bennett Harrison notes that the biggest corporations themselves have decentralized into a "network" system linking workers, designers, contractors, suppliers, and corporate headquarters.[13] But these networks have networked themselves into intercorporate alliances across global economic sectors. Nearly every top 200 firm is networked with every other, including its biggest competitors. Think of the collaboration between GM and Toyota, or the airline partners, or the cross-marketing collaborations between companies such as McDonald's and Toys R Us.
While this interlocked system, as in earlier corporate regimes, is most dense in the United States, it is rapidly becoming a global affair. British sociologist Leslie Sklair, the authoritative chronicler of this emergent global hidden power grid, believes that it is already dense enough to have created a "transnational capitalist class (TCC)."[14] Its inner circle, he says, has included some of the best-known global executives, such as Citibank's David Rockefeller, News Corporation's media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Sony's founder Akio Morita, and Nestlé's former CEO, Helmut Maucher. The inner circle is highly interlocked globally, just as the robber barons were interlocked nationally in the first corporate regime. They function, as Rockefeller and Morgan did a century ago, as Sklair puts it, as "a unity to the diverse economic interests, political organizations, and cultural and ideological formations" that sustain the current global regime.[15]
Popular movements have launched anticorporate campaigns against almost every individual Fortune 500 transnational corporation—from Wal-Mart to Nike to Philip Morris to Nestlé. But these attacks glance off the regime and barely scratch it. The underlying interwoven corporate spider web is largely off the public radar screen, a sign of its hidden power. The movements themselves can sometimes unwittingly reinforce the perverse hegemonic democratic ideology of the regime. By permitting attacks on individual firms, the regime shows its democratic colors, all the while realizing that the core of its hidden power remains secure. The stronger the anticorporate attacks on individual companies, the more the regime can proclaim its democratic credentials in giving them free rein.
GLOBAL CORPOCRACY
The global corporate grid, by itself, cannot create or sustain the regime without its relation to the U.S. government. As in earlier corporate regimes, it is the marriage between corporation and state, the corpocracy, that makes the regime tick. In the current regime, it is a fusion of the transnational firm and the American government. To see the current corpocracy, look at George W. Bush's cabinet:
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
?CEO, Texas Rangers; Board of Directors, Harken Energy
VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD CHENEY
?CEO, Halliburton, Inc., the huge energy and defense conglomerate
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD
?CEO of General Instrument Company and the drug giant, G. D. Searle and Co.
PAUL O'NEILL, FIRST BUSH SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
?CEO of Alcoa and of International Paper Co.
SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY JOHN SNOW
?CEO of CSX, the railroad giant, and Chairman of the Business Roundtable, the leading big business group in America
FIRST TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY NORMAN MINETA
?Corporate Vice President, Lockheed Martin
LABOR SECRETARY ELAINE CHAO
?Vice President, Bank of America
FIRST AGRICULTURE SECRETARY ANN VENEMAN
?Board of Directors of Calgene, Inc., a subsidiary of Monsanto Corporation[16]
Bush's cabinet illustrates the marriage between transnational corporations and the U.S. government that is the second pillar of today's corporate regime. The corporations are giant transnationals, but all headquartered in the United States. This reflects both the dominance of U.S. firms among the world's largest corporations and the fact that this is a regime rooted in the power of the U.S. government. The marriage of corporation and government, as in earlier corporate regimes, is fundamentally antidemocratic, since it creates a governance system unaccountable to the voters, who are not partners in the marriage and have different interests than either spouse.
While this antidemocratic core is consistent with earlier regimes, there is a new schizophrenic dimension at work here. The transnationals in the marriage ultimately seek to break down nation-states and create global corporate sovereignty. But they depend on the economic, political, and military backing of an American state which has little interest, at this stage, in eliminating the nation-state or national sovereignty.
In earlier corporate regimes, such schizophrenia was impossible, because the regime was rooted in national corporations and the corpocracy was a purely American affair with exclusively U.S. interests. Today, the corpocracy must wrestle to reconcile global corporate interests with the nationalist interests of the state. The government largely seeks to satisfy its transnational patrons but not so flagrantly that it openly breaks faith with the U.S. workers and voters to whom it is supposed to be democratically accountable.
In responding to this hegemonic challenge, the United States tilts globally but in a way that favors U.S. transnationals and the U. S. government itself. Rigging global rules threatens global hegemony, since around the world, the United States is seen as creating an unfair playing field. Nonetheless, hegemonic control of ordinary Americans is far more important to the regime than winning the hearts and minds of citizens around the world, who can be controlled militarily. The regime is prepared to tolerate strong anti-Americanism abroad to tamp down dissent from anxious American voters who fear for their jobs and need to believe that their government is still representing them.
Inside the United States, the antidemocratic structure of the corpocracy is similar to both the first and second corporate regimes. Big business representatives sit in the cabinet with the president, their lobbyists work with Congress, and together they all write the rules, under the hegemonic cover of American democracy and free elections. Consider the corpocracy's response to the outbreak of the mad cow epidemic. When the epidemic was discovered in the United States in December 2003, Alisa Harrison, the spokesperson for Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, was telling the American public not to worry—American beef is safe. She didn't say that she used to be the PR director of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. In fact, the Department of Agriculture, which is supposed to protect the public from mad cow disease and other health risks, is packed with former lobbyists for the cattle and agriculture businesses. Dale Moore, who is Veneman's chief of staff, was previously chief of staff for the same Beef Assocation. And another high-ranking Agriculture Department official used to be president of the National Pork Producers Council.[17]
Give due credit to Reagan for the construction of today's corpocracy, the regime's second pillar. Despite Reagan's rhetoric that "big government is the enemy," the regime is a vast, unaccountable federal apparatus, hugely expanded by Reagan himself and so entangled with global big business as to be indistinguishable from it. Reagan's cabinet of former CEOs, like Bush's, functioned as a board of directors for corporate America.[18]
Today's corpocracy functions with the same brazen antidemocratic style as the robber-baron regime. Imagine a Las Vegas slot machine with a surefire chance of winning—and let's take the pharmaceutical industry as an example of a sure corporate winner in the regime. In 2000, the industry put millions in the Washington slot machine to help reelect Bush. The industry then used its lobbyists in the House of Representatives alone to draft the huge Medicare overhaul bill passed in 2003. See the schematic summary of the corpocracy in action for the pharmaceutical companies.
PLAY THE CORPOCRACYGAME
DRUG COMPANIES
Give Bush $21 million in 2000 to elect him.
Spend $100 million in contributions, entertainment, and lobbying of Congress between elections (2000—2004).
Use your 467 lobbyists on the Hill to pressure representatives and draft the Medicare Overhaul Bill, which returns billions in new profits to you, enhancing your status as the most profitable industry in America, making more than five times the profit rate of the average U.S. industry. Just by restricting government bulk purchasing of drugs, your lobbyists deliver an extra $139 billion in profits to the industry[19]
Spend $100 million in 2004 to reelect the president and make sure that the new Medicare program continues to deliver the goods.[20]
This is not just a game played by pharmaceuticals. With all corporations pulling together, it's even more profitable.
ALL CORPORATIONS
Give Bush $2 billion in 2000 to elect him.
Give Bush $2 billion in 2004 to reelect him.
Get Back: corporate-friendly legislation on energy, trade, media, pharmaceuticals, health care. Receive back, in 2004, a Congressional tax bill delivering an additional $210 billion in corporate tax breaks.[21]
The share of federal taxes paid by corporations dropped dramatically from the New Deal to the current regime, and it just keeps falling as ordinary citizens pick up the slack. The data are a measure of who the government really serves—and it isn't the ordinary taxpayers with the biggest and growing burden. In the New Deal regime, the corporate tax burden averaged about 30 percent. In the 1980s through the mid-1990s, as the new regime took hold, it fell to 15 percent. By 1998, it fell to 11.8 percent[22] and in that year Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, WorldCom, McKesson, and the world's biggest corporation, General Motors, paid no federal taxes at all.[23] Since then, the corporate tax burden has lightened even further. Robert McIntyre, director of the respected Washington-based center Citizens for Tax Justice, reported in 2005 that "large Fortune 500 companies now report less than half their actual profits to the IRS, and that almost a third of such big companies paid no income tax in at least one of President Bush's first three years in office. One company, General Electric, which enjoyed $9.5 billion in tax subsidies over the three years analyzed in the study, is widely conceded to be the biggest beneficiary of the just-passed corporate-tax-subsidy bill."[24]
How does the regime sustain hegemony and maintain the fiction of democracy in the light of such brazen corporate political influence over both the White House and Congress? The answer can be found partly by looking at the regime's courts, another part of the corpocracy that both creates and is driven by corporate power, all in the name of democratic constitutionalism.
In the first corporate regime of the robber barons, as discussed in Chapter 1, the courts helped redefine corporations as private persons with constitutional rights. During most of the New Deal, the Supreme Court did not extend any new constitutional rights to further empower companies. But as the New Deal faded in the 1970s and the current regime took over in the 1980s, the Supreme Court began finding new corporate constitutional rights that would cement new hidden power and dramatically erode democratic rights.
Corporate historian Ted Nace has chronicled the corporate constitutional rights emerging with the new regime:
The Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial in a civil case (Ross v Bernhard, 1970)
The First Amendment right of "commercial free speech" (Virginia Board of Pharmacy v Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 1976, and Central Hudson Gas, 1980)
The Fourth Amendment right against unwarranted regulatory searches (Marshall v Barlow's, 1978)
The First Amendment right to spend money to influence a state referendum (Bellotti, 1978)
The First Amendment right of "negative free speech" (Pacific Gas and Electric Co. v Public Utilities Commission, 1986)[25]
In these decisions, corporations gained new rights to corporate "free speech" that, as Nace suggests, give them a "megaphone" that can drown out speech by the rest of us. In the Pacific Gas and Electric case, the Court struck down a regulatory agency's ruling that the utility had to include a consumer rate-paying newsletter in its billing envelope. The Court said that forcing the company to include the newsletter would violate its speech rights not to be associated with views that it doesn't support ("negative free speech"). But since Pacific Gas is a monopoly controlling information about the industry for millions of consumers, defending the free speech rights of the company muted the popular voices seeking to challenge the utility firm.[26]
This illustrates how this regime's constitutional corporate rights empower the companies in the name of the very democracy that they are weakening. The First Amendment rights give the corporations new power to control information and promote their own political agenda in the name of protecting the cherished speech rights of all of us. The Fourth Amendment rights allow the corporations to claim privacy rights restricting spot checks on its pollution in the name of protecting the privacy rights of you and me. As in the first corporate regime, the rights awarded by the courts dramatically increase hidden power in the sense that these landmark constitutional cases and their political implications are invisible to most Americans. The new power is dressed up in the third corporate regime's unique hegemonic strategy: constitutionally equate new corporate rights with the democratic rights of you and me. If you challenge the new constitutional corporate rights to speech, of a Nike or Philip Morris, you appear to be attacking your own constitutional rights to speak freely. The Supreme Court of the regime is, in fact, melding the two together. The Court thereby undermines democracy in the name of expanding it to protect both corporate citizens and real ones.
SOCIAL INSECURITY
The regime is systematically dismantling the social contract of the New Deal that promised security to a generation traumatized by the Depression. That contract was expensive and protected people by regulating corporate excesses. The current regime seeks a new social contract—its third pillar—that trades the social security of workers and citizens for profit maximization, essentially a blow to social democracy.
Social insecurity begins with the job. The regime now aims to abolish the traditional concept of a job that developed under the New Deal regime, the secure full-time form of work prevailing at mid-twentieth century but now seen as an unacceptable limit on profits. "What is disappearing," writes organizational analyst William Bridges, "is not just a certain number of jobs—or jobs in certain industries…but the very thing itself: the job. That much sought after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species that has outlived its evolutionary time."[27]
Jobs survived in the new regime, but they wouldn't be government or union-protected. This required all-out assault on the 1935 New Deal Wagner Act, which enshrined unions as democratic counterweights to corporations. The regime has made a frontal attack on organized labor, and it has been the most consistent element in all three corporate regimes.
The third corporate regime wasted no time in busting unions, with Reagan's first act being the dismantling of PATCO, the air traffic-controller union. Reagan then started the long-standing regime policy of breaking unions: by making antiunion appointments to government laborboards, encouraging companies that broke union contracts and demanded concessions, and facilitating the ultimate corporate weapons against labor: exit power. As companies under the new regime fled overseas for cheap labor, aided by Reagan's new tax breaks for companies operating overseas, massive downsizing became the regime's signature, along with the creation of the new breed of contingent and outsourced jobs that have turned America's "middle class" into a new "anxious class."[28]
I talked to Allen, who is forty and a software engineer freelancing with computer companies in the United States and living in Boston. Allen told me that his father "was a salesman for an electrical company and he worked for the same company his whole life." But Allen, although well educated with graduate degrees in business and accounting, has worked "for about forty companies," and he says "fifty percent of the employees on the payroll are temps or contractors like me. The companies don't want to pay benefits and they're greedy." Allen claims his father's era is finished, and Allen does not expect to ever get a permanent job.
By stripping away the protections and security of the New Deal job, the new regime is endangering the middle class. Allen declares flatly: "The middle class is disappearing." Allen says his own American dream is shrinking. "Lots of things I thought I was going to have I may never have. I may never own a home. I may never marry and I definitely will not have children." Allen is thinking not just of his own difficult economic circumstances but of his brother and wife, who have four children and are not making it. His brother has been downsized twice out of well-paying corporate jobs.
In a transnational corporate regime, corporate globalization becomes the ultimate hammer for beating down U.S. job protections and security in the name of "free trade." The U. S. social contract is dragged down toward the horrendous social contract long prevailing in Third World countries, thereby globalizing the third corporate regime's social contract on terms that favor the transnational corporation at the expense of workers in both rich and poor countries.[29]
The new social contract also requires dismantling the New Deal social welfare system—the American version of what Europeans call social democracy. Reagan attacked social democracy by taking a sledge hammer to domestic social spending and arguing that the New Deal's welfare system undermined the entrepreneurial spirit at the heart of the new regime. Reagan bled nearly every domestic program—education, health care, food stamps—to finance his tax cuts for the rich and his military spending.[30]
Reagan's social policies continued under Bush Sr. and into the Clinton years, when Newt Gingrich spearheaded the Contract for America that proposed cutting nearly all social spending and leaving a government devoted entirely to corporate welfare and the military. Clinton did his part by calling for "the end of welfare as we know it." Clinton targeted 130 federal programs for extinction, many for education, scientific research, or the environment, and proposed to abolish or radically downsize the Department of Housing, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies devoted to social ends. One Washington observer noted that "You expect to see Republicans when they are in power doing this—it's what they've been pushing for years. But to see the Democrats doing it, and to see the competition between the White House and the congress as they race to privatize—it's amazing."[31]
Bush is pursuing the regime's social contract in yet more brazen ways, openly pursuing tax cuts worth more than a trillion dollars for the rich while underfunding virtually all vital social needs, including his own touted education act, called "No Child Left Behind." The regime is moving under Bush toward its ultimate conclusion: privatizing Social Security itself and ultimately eliminating the concept of social insurance developed during the New Deal. While the collapse and scandals of the financial markets postponed Bush's plans to privatize Social Security for a second term, Bush announced after his reelection that "reforming" Social Security and turning it from a social insurance plan into a system of private accounts was his top domestic priority.
This plan was the pivotal assault on the New Deal legacy, since the 1935 Social Security Act was the central accomplishment of the New Deal regime. It created a retirement system based on the assumption of a pact between generations, on a commitment to redistribute wealth to ensure a decent retirement for all, and on the core New Deal idea that American individualism had to be balanced with strong commitments to community and solidarity.
Bush's proposal to create private accounts is a direct assault on all these New Deal precepts. It argues that each generation must now look out mainly for its own interests. A system of private accounts would lead to significantly less redistribution, across gender and class, as John B. Williamson and others have documented in rigorous studies.[32] And it would weaken the moral commitment to solidarity by individualizing the responsibility for retirement. Under a privatized system, how you fare in your retirement depends on your wealth and on your talent or luck as an investor. In the New Deal system, your individual retirement was determined by the contributions of the entire community. What could better sum up the difference in the social contract between the New Deal and the current regime? From a corporate regime's perspective, let us also not forget about the multibillion-dollar bonanza for the Wall Street managers who are salivating about the new money to be made on your retirement money and mine.
EMPIRE
The foreign policy aim of the current regime—its fourth pillar—is to shape a U.S.-led corporate global order: to be blunt, an American empire. Empire is by its nature antidemocratic but it is essential to transnational corporate interests. As in the progressive age of President Woodrow Wilson, empire is thus defined as a way to secure global democracy, even as it subverts democratic prospects both at home and abroad.
Empire has a long American history, beginning with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. It picked up steam in the imperial adventures of the Progressive era, including the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines in 1904. But the creation of a fully global empire began in the New Deal regime after World War II. The collapse of European colonialism opened up a power vacuum that both U.S. corporations and the U.S. government were eager to fill. By the early 1950s, the United States was busy building both the international economic institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the global network of military bases and client states that was the first step toward full-scale global hegemony[33]
The third corporate regime thus changed domestic policy far more than foreign policy. Rather than transforming the nation's foreign policy, it has accelerated and deepened the nation's antidemocratic, empire-building, expanding U.S. military presence and intervention, particularly in the Middle East, and justifying it with new neoconservative doctrines. It remains, however, as in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a corporate-driven process for expanding markets and profits, making clear that corporations played a major role before the current regime in shaping New Deal foreign policy.[34] The best-selling book Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man, by John Perkins, offers a compelling personal account by a corporate insider of how this process played out from the New Deal through the current regime. Perkins describes himself as a "hit man" because he was personally collaborating from the 1960s to the 1990s in the dirty work of deceiving poor countries to accept loans that would force them to open and subordinate their economies to U.S. firms, backed by the U.S. military. The personal stories and Perkins's own deep spiritual remorse make clear how this practice has undermined democracy and moral principles in both the New Deal and current regimes.[35]
As the third corporate regime has aged, changes in corporate interests and political power, as well as in the ideology of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, have nonetheless produced some important new directions. Global capital has become more concentrated and powerful, while new technology has facilitated the move offshore, where cheap labor increases profit margins. The acceleration of corporate globalization during the current regime has increased the foreign policy and military U.S. government stakes in securing the entire planet as a friendly base for U.S. corporations, leading to the establishment of the now more than 700 U.S. military bases around the world. This ensures that the regime's global dominance will be enforced at the barrel of a gun if necessary.
During the New Deal, the U.S. acted in the service of nearly the entire range of U.S., Japanese, and European global companies to establish the beginnings of a corporate global order. Over the course of the current regime, and particularly since the Bush II years, U.S. oil and military companies, such as Halliburton, Exxon, and Lockheed-Martin, have gained power relative to other corporate sectors. While these firms have obviously benefited from the wars and enormous military expenditures in Iraq, the Gulf, and the broader Middle East, the broader costs of empire, including massive U. S. government deficits, fall not only on ordinary Americans but to some degree on corporations in other sectors. This could open up cracks within the current regime, not only between U.S. corporations and U.S. workers, but among different sectors of the American corporate world itself. Bush Sr. spoke more for the eastern Wall Street financial sector from which the Bush dynasty hails. Bush Jr.'s shift of the corporate center of gravity to Southwest military and oil companies has produced consternation among the New York-based traditional Republican elites, who fear that the son's "cowboy capitalism," symbolized by the unilateralism of the Iraq invasion, could help drive deficits disastrous to the financial system.[36]
The current regime is now in a phase of dismantling much of the multilateral framework and the system of international law created under the New Deal. Remember that Franklin Roosevelt helped to create the United Nations, and his regime successors, such as Truman and Eisenhower, pursued global power with some deference to multilateralism and U.N. conventions, seen as essential to a democratic world order. Like Bush II, Reagan was impatient with international treaties and other multilateral restraints on American power. He began the process of rejecting much of the New Deal international framework, and was openly contemptuous of the United Nations, of arms control, and of restraints on military spending. President George W. Bush has accelerated these regime tendencies begun under Reagan and pursued more quietly under his father and Clinton. Following Reagan's disdain for international law and his fondness for interventions and regime changes abroad, Bush has used the new climate after 9/11 mainly to institutionalize these long-standing regime policies. In its more extreme form, as former White House advisor William A. Galston described the regime's current approach, it "means the end of the system of international institutions, laws and norms that the U.S. has worked for more than half a century to build."[37] Princeton political scientist Richard Falk, one of the nation's leading scholars on international law, writes that the preemptive invasion of Iraq "repudiates the core idea of the United Nations charter. … It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability to the U.N. or international law."[38]
The neoconservatives' revival of Wilsonian idealism puts on display the hegemonic function of democratic rhetoric and elections. Empire is once again justified as a way to make the world safe for democracy. As in the domestic sphere, the regime's spread of elections to the Middle East, symbolized by the 2005 election in Iraq, exploits democratic procedures abroad to disguise the continuing U.S. dominance of Iraqi politics and the enforced opening of the Iraqi economy to U.S. corporations and the International Monetary Fund.[39] Elections abroad have become the hegemonic wedge legitimating the U.S. empire, just as they are used to hide and legitimate corporate rule at home.
THE CORPORATE MYSTIQUE
Free markets! Free trade! Free people! Free Iraq! Free world! Free after-Thanks giving sales! Freedom is the seductive mantra of the third corporate regime. Most Americans buy it.
Liberty, of course, has always been at the heart of American ideology. What is new is a rhetoric of freedom for all—at home and abroad as Bush proclaimed in his second bold Inaugural address—that translates into unimagined freedom for big business and big problems for the rest of us. Bush's rhetoric opens up new political opportunities for those who seek not just the rhetoric but the promise of new democracy, but I return to that much later in this book.
The expansion of freedom for the First Citizens of this regime, that is the corporations, is the real aim of the current regime and is now equated with personal freedom and the expansion of democracy. It is all part of the corporate mystique, the regime's ideology telling us that a "free market" based on unfettered corporate liberty is the best of all possible worlds. The mystique says there really is no other way. The freedom of the market is the cornerstone of the freedom of every citizen and a free corporation is the precondition of a free society. The corporation is the Golden Goose, but it needs free range. When freed to do what it wants, it delivers the goods. If we shackle it, we shackle ourselves and our prospects for the good life. Kill corporate freedom and we kill off democracy.[40]
The mystique, while rhetorically embracing personal liberty, in truth nourishes mainly one form of personal freedom: the right to splurge at the mall. Consumerism! It is the highest form of freedom in the corporate mystique, and the regime encourages us to use our plastic cards to keep consuming long after we can afford to. Consumerism replaces citizenship as the operative value in the regime. I buy, therefore I am. I am what I buy!
The freedom dreamed of by the Founders is at high risk. Citizen choice in this regime is the right to decide between Coke and Pepsi. The regime argues that choice at the marketplace is the most powerful act of citizenship. One dollar, one vote. That is the democracy of the corporate mystique, which legitimates the regime. The current regime's hegemonic strategy knits together the rhetoric of democracy and elections with the ideology of consumerism—all under the rubric of freedom. If we are free to vote and to consume, how can we not regard ourselves as a genuinely free society? The corporate mystique manufactures the consent of the people, in the name of freedom and democracy, to a system that is less and less free and democratic. And it continues to hide systemic corporate power, an astonishing accomplishment in a regime of such brazen and open corporate influence.
Citizenship is effectively redefined as freedom in the mall, not the town hall. A corporate regime makes this seductive since we grow up as kids addicted to magical corporate goodies, whether Disney films or PCs. Creature comforts are the great blessings of the regime, and they are not easily dismissed by anyone, especially a population brought up on Toys R Us and Big Macs. How can you challenge the producers of the Magic Kingdom, who have brought you happiness your whole life? How can you challenge the makers of Mickey Mouse, our best friend for life?
The corporate mystique, and its consumerist brand of democracy, was born in the first corporate regime and turned into a national religion in the second corporate regime of the Roaring Twenties. But in the earlier corporate regimes, leading ideologues were busy enough persuading just Americans to embrace the new corporation and get serious about consuming. Now, they have turned their attention to persuading the rest of the world. Globalization is the spread of the corporate mystique as the universal religion of the planet, and it is the cutting edge of the third corporate regime's ideology.
Global democracy is the corporate mystique as God's way. The third corporate regime aims to make everyone on the planet a believer.
注释：
[1]Citigroup, Inc., Annual Financials, Hooveronline. www.hoovers.com/citigroup/—ID__58365—/free-co-fin-annual.xhtml.
[2]Stan Cox, "Wal-Mart Gets Greedy," AlterNet, October 28, 2003. Posted at
[3]Anderson and Cavanaugh, Field Guide to the Global Economy (cited in Introduction), 68.
[4]This global theme has been developed by Noam Chomsky. Most recently, on global control, see Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (New York: Broadway, 2004). For the corporate roots, see also Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).
[5]Conference Board, cited in Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 19.
[6]This distinction is made by Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class.
[7]Cited in ibid., 50.
[8]For a discussion of exit power in globalization, see Derber, People Before Profit (cited in Introduction).
[9]Ibid.
[10]Wall Street Journal Market Data Group, August 31, 2004.
[11]Forbes magazine calculates one of the most comprehensive rankings of major corporations, by assets, market value, profits, number of employees, etc. As of this writing, the latest data are available from 2003. These rankings are posted at the site: Parameter.
[12]See Chapter 1 and Wasserman, History of the United States (cited in Chapter 1).
[13]Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Face of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
[14]Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class.
[15]Ibid., 21.
[16]For the official biographies of the Bush Administration cabinet, which include the corporate histories of cabinet officials, go online to
[17]Eric Schlosser, "The Cow Jumped over the USDA," New York Times, January 2, 2004.
[18]For extensive documentation of these corporatized political trends, see Lee Drutman and Charlie Cracy, The People's Business (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004).
[19]The profitability of the pharmaceutial industry is well documented. See the report by the Minnesota Attorney General's Office, "Follow the Money," September 30, 2003, posted at an overview of trends in health care costs and pharmaceutical profits compiled by the Democratic National Party, which refers the reader to more detailed research by government investigators and academic researchers, go to the website at
[20]Data on the Medicare Overhaul bill and pharmaceutical spending can be found at the website of the Center for Responsive Politics, from figures compiled by Congressman Sherrod Brown (D, Ohio) at his office, and from the following posting of the watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting):
[21]Robert McIntyre, "Congress Passes $210 Billion in New Corporate Tax Breaks" (newsletter), Washington, D.C., Citizens for Tax Justice, October 13, 2004. This report, along with others from McIntyre and Citizens for Tax Justice, offers extensive details on corporate tax benefits delivered by the Bush Administration.
[22]See Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 140.
[23]Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America (New York: New Press, 2000), 100–102.
[24]Ibid. For the data on the changing new corporate tax burden, see McIntyre, "Congress Passes $210 Billion in New Corporate Tax Breaks."
[25]Ted Nace, Gangs of America (cited in Chapter 1), 167.
[26]Ibid., 169ff.
[27]William Bridges, "The End of the Job," Fortune, September 19, 1994, 62–74, quotation on 62. See also William Bridges, Jobshift (Boston: Addison Wesley, 1994).
[28]Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage (Boston: South End Press, 1998).
[29]This "race to the bottom" is well documented in Brecher and Costello, ibid.
[30]See Charles Derber, The Wilding of America, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1996).
[31]Cited in Derber, The Wilding of America, 3rd ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2003), 93–94.
[32]See John B. Williamson, "A Critique of the Case for Privatizing Social Security," The Gerontologist 37 (5): 561–571.
[33]Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (cited in Chapter 1). Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).
[34]See Bacevich, American Empire, especially Chapter 1 and his discussion of the work of Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams.
[35]John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004).
[36]The division between the Southwestern-based military and oil sectors vs. the Eastern financial and service sectors has been discussed by a growing number of authors since the very beginning of the regime. It is getting increasing attention under Bush II, who has accelerated the division.
[37]William A. Galston, "Perils of Pre-Emptive War," The American Prospect 13(17), September 23, 2002.
[38]Richard Falk, "The New Bush Doctrine," The Nation, July 15, 2002.
[39]For the new "free market" Iraqi economic system imposed by Paul Bremer before his departure as U.S. overseer, see Derber, Regime Change Begins at Home, Chapter 6.
[40]Derber, Corporation Nation, Chapter 10 and 13.