Under Capitalism: Introduction to a Series of Articles

Stoney Bird formerly served as an international corporate business lawyer. After college and Peace Corps service in Libya and Tunisia, he went to law school at UCLA, and then directly into the international legal department of Mobil Oil. Later he joined the legal department of Harris Corporation, a Fortune 300 electronics firm, and ended up as Harris' European lawyer based in England, engaged primarily in corporate transactions. In 1990, beginning to think that he might like to spend his life in some way more consistent with his values, he ceased the practice of law and moved to the Skagit Valley. There he became involved with the life of the community in which he was living for the first time, engaging with growth management, environmental concerns and transportation issues. In order to reduce his ecological footprint, he decided to stop using a car in 2002. Wanting to find a way to use his extensive corporate legal experience for purposes that he valued, he eventually came to learn of the widespread movement for local communities to adopt Community Bills of Rights. Because the local movement was so strong, he moved to Bellingham in 2011 and now lives in the York Neighborhood.

Under capitalism, the world is collapsing — both the human part and the rest of it, upon which human life depends. As a long-time corporate lawyer, I was a direct servant of capitalism. As a consumer, I still serve it. As a voter, my choices are between two capitalist candidates.

The capitalists are comprehensively in charge, now dominating the media, the political parties, the politicians, the universities, the courts, and the very terms of public debate. The interests of ordinary people, of working people, and of nature are ignored. Instead of being full-fledged participants, we are objects of exploitation. Instead of having government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have government of, by and for the plutocrats — not to say kleptocrats.

As citizens, as human beings, existingbeside many other living beings in nature, we have both greater rights and greater responsibilities.

In 2012, hundreds of people in Belling-ham worked hard on a campaign to begin righting the balance of power through a Bellingham Community Bill of Rights. We had been preparing through study and organizing for two years before that. The Bellingham Community Bill of Rights would have replaced corporate rights with the rights of our community, with our rights as individuals, and with the rights of nature. It would have asserted the fundamental right of the community to govern itself. It would have acknowledged the right of local ecosystems to thrive. It would have asserted the rights of both the people and the ecosystems to a sustainable energy future and to a natural climate.

To the legal system as it stands, these claims were intolerable. The right of the people even to vote on these issues was suppressed. Our city government, being perceived as tool of the system — even though we elected them — participated actively in the suppression.

If anything could more clearly illustrate the oppressiveness of our hierarchical system, I don’t know what it is. The system that we have is top-down, pre-emptive and privatized. Neither government nor business is accountable. On a certain level, this lack of accountability — of responsibility — can be attributed to indifference, either individual or collective. More fundamentally, it is systemic: many interlocking features of the legal system provide for corporate control of our lives, the life of our community, and the life of the natural systems around us.

We can no longer sit idly by. We can no longer be led by the nose. People on all parts of the political spectrum understand this. In Bellingham, the first great Tea Party demonstration, attended by 3,000, was a protest against the kleptocratic, corrupt 2008 (and continuing) bank bail-outs. The outpouring of public action in relation to the threat of the coal port at Cherry Point — including the campaign for a Community Bill of Rights — is another example.

The question is what to do now.

My plan over the next months is to describe in Whatcom Watch both the system of oppression and the changes that are needed. Some 15 years ago, the Buddhist Joanna Macy observed that we only had to change three things: our ideas, our institutions, and our practices. This is also my understanding, and so the writing that I do will address all of these levels.

There is indeed an intricate array of inter-linking and mutually supportive ideas, institutions and practices supporting the capitalist, plutocratic system that have been developed over centuries. Owing to the human tendency to view the way things are at the moment as “right,” “necessary,” “inevitable,” “just,” and “advanced,” there are inclinations in every society to resist change or even criticism. Who has not been at some time involved in a group that is going wrong and yet persists because “we’ve always done it that way,” or “that’s the way the system works,” or “that’s what we are”?

Unraveling these ideas, institutions and practices is particularly difficult because many of them are in practice hidden, since they are “assumed.” Some ideas — or at least their harmful consequences — are hidden because they are the water in which we have swum all our lives. Many constricting legal rules are hidden for most people because they are not discussed in our institutions of education or the corporate media.

And yet, there is no part of the system that we have, much less the system as a whole, that humans did not invent and then specifically put in place. These parts were adopted into the system because whatever group was in power at the time thought that it would serve their interests.

Another human tendency is to try to “focus,” and to achieve short-term measurable results. Almost by definition this tendency cannot get at the basics. Getting rid of one threat, one harmful legal doctrine or one bad institution does not change the system — and it is change to the system that we need.

Since humans invented the entire system and put it into effect, humans can take it apart and replace it. Not only can we replace it, we must replace it, whether the reason be justice, good health, well-being, a renewed sense of moral obligation to one another and to our fellow creatures on Earth, or simple survival as a species.

The List of Topics to Address is Long

The rest of this first essay will name some of them. It is not intended as an exclusive list. Many readers will be able to think of topics to add. No doubt, in the course of writing the essays from this initial list, I will think of some more, too.

In the realm of ideas, it includes the notion that nature can be the “property” of a human being or of human beings generally. The deeper idea is that humans are different from and superior to nature, and that she is therefore there for our exploitation.

The list includes the idea that in order to have the wherewithal for life you have to have a wage-earning “job.” We will examine the similarities between having a “job” and being a slave. And we will see how the job system is a key component of the current overall system of social control.

The ideology of neo-liberalism is a key part of the problem, containing as it does the sub-ideas of the “free” market, of commoditization, of nature and people simply as resources for exploitation.

Based on the idea of “property,” the concept that the planet can be divided into “nations,” each with a separate character and entitlements, leads directly to the miseries of war and imperialism.

Mediating human relations through money has, through the ages, been tied intimately to officially perpetrated violence, war, imperialism, and slavery. These tendencies are exacerbated in a system in which control of the basic decisions relating to money are in private hands. In our system, money is created (or not) by the private decisions of banks and by the private decisions of financial speculators. In our system, the Federal Reserve, ostensibly a government agency put in place to protect the public interest in the money system, is actually controlled by the major banks. Examples exist in the world where banks are owned by the government and are managed for the general well-being instead of for providing the CEO with his next yacht. We will look into the cases of the Bank of North Dakota, a state bank, formed during the Progressive Era, and the major banks in Costa Rica, all owned since the 1940’s by the national government.

Luckily, many of us persist in pursuing activities that are not subject to the monetary system and that do not adhere to the economists’ model of the self-interested man. Yet the primary score-keeping system — the GDP — takes account only of money, with the result that a.) it does not deduct for the activities (like car crashes or pollution) that are evidence of harm, and b.) it ignores entirely realms of life where money doesn’t change hands.

We’ll look at some alternatives like the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Happy Planet Index that measure a broader set of values.

This private control of the money system has led in turn to vast inequalities in wealth. As we will see, these inequalities are directly related to a great array of social and health problems that include lower life expectancy, lower literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teen births, lack of trust, obesity, mental illness and a lack of social mobility. Among rich countries, the United States is both the leader in inequality and in these ills. We are not rich. We do not have well-being, for all the consumer clap-trap that we possess. A few of us have simply exploited the rest, and have led us in the rape of our surroundings as well. Sadly, even the grasping wealthy are less well off — in a social and psychological sense — under these circumstances. The rest are living lives of distrust and anxiety — all constructed by the system of consumption and competition.

This system of exploitation did not come into being unintentionally or inevitably. It was planned, and then the elements of the plan were carried out comprehensively, single-mindedly and over the long term. The notorious Lewis Powell memorandum of 1971 was a key statement of the plan for a capitalist takeover. The growth of neoliberal think tanks, of massive business lobbying, of massive corporate campaign contributions, of a Congress responsive to campaign funders and not to the voters, of a corporate media mouthing corporate propaganda day in and day out, of a judicial system in the hands of corporatists, of entire university departments devoted not to scholarship but to furthering corporate interests, and the conversion of the Democratic Party into the second face of our single Corporate-Militarist Party — all these were given strong impetus by Powell’s essay. We’ll go into the details when we get to that in this series of essays. For example, we’ll see how Powell, a tobacco lawyer, wrote his memo, got appointed to the Supreme Court and then participated in the Court’s decisions in the 1970s declaring that money is speech, in effect helping to carry out the plan for privileging the wealthy that his memo of 1971 had laid out.

One of the roots of the system of exploitation was the idea that corporations (which had been invented as the way in which public institutions like monasteries, cities and universities could be organized in the Middle Ages) could be turned to the pursuit of private profit. This happened over the course of the 19th century, and we’ll go into the details. Indeed, the very idea that there was some kind of meaningful distinction between “private” and “public” was a social construct of the 19th century intended to put corporations beyond responsibility to the society that created and fostered them.

Another source of exploitation was our American sacred cow: the Constitution. In James Madison’s words, the core purpose of the Constitution was to preserve the prerogatives of the “opulent” against the majority. We’ll see how well it has achieved this effect both through the basic structure of government that it set up, through the concept of corporate legal personhood, and through specific clauses such as the commerce clause and the contracts clause. We will also see how the Constitution was a key part of the system of human slavery under which the United States started its life.

The public relations system will be brought beneath our spotlight and revealed as a means for constructing public consensus (or polarization, if that is what the corporate lords deem to be in their interests) and apathy — all in the interest of the powers that be.

Apart from preaching endlessly the virtues of war, consumption, and private, unaccountable power, the PR system wriggles its way even into the manner in which we name laws. Far from protecting the environment in any significant way, for example, the “environmental” laws will be revealed as ways to justify ever more projects which harm the environment. Instead of stopping the system of industrial devastation, they are an excuse for a belief that we are “doing something.” Far from controlling the corporate perpetrators, they regulate the public and communities, largely keeping them out of the corporate way.

Public relations is a large facet of persuading us that the industrial food system nourishes us and is sustainable, when what it actually does is destroy the soil, monopolize and pollute the world’s limited fresh water, and produce for us denatured and chemicalized food “products” laced with industrial toxins, salt, fat and sugar. The result is our epidemic of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

These are bonanzas for our so-called health-care system, which is designed to profit from illness instead of from well-being. It would be bad enough if doctors, hospitals and drug companies were the only profiteers. In our system — and this has been furthered by the recent health care law — the very financing of health care is a means of exploitation since it is in the hands of profit-taking and socially useless “insurance” companies.

Another fixation of the corporate media propaganda machine in recent decades has been “conspiracy theorists.” One can understand their worry. What, after all, is a corporation but a conspiracy? The corporate staff meets in secret, usually guarded from the rest of the world by armed security forces, and plot to produce financial benefits for the corporation and the shareholders, to the detriment of everyone else and everything else in the world. There is lip-service for other “stakeholders,” but, for example, when the CEO’s stock options are at stake, the “stakeholders” suddenly have less cachet.

Beyond each company’s intrinsic conspiracy on its own behalf, we look into conspiracies among corporations, for example, to pursue the program against all others that Lewis Powell proposed. I will write about Lewis Powell.

Apart from these corporate conspiracies, we have the secret and oppressive activities of such agencies as the NSA, often with the connivance of giant businesses. The heroic disclosures by Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden, among many others, deserve our highest praise and support. As we know, both the government and the corporate media have continued to repeat lies about “terrorism,” successfully diverting our eyes — so far — from the official terrorists in our midst. 9/11 has infected our national and international lives ever since, with the government diverting ever larger segments of the federal budget to war, disappearances, secret prisons, and assassination on wider and wider portions of our fellow humans on the planet, and claiming to excuse ever tighter “security” controls on us whom they claim to protect. Both Republicans and Democrats are united in these abuses.

So, it is a long list. It reminds me of another famous list: the list of abuses attributed to George III in the Declaration of Independence. Our task is not just to declare independence of our corporate overlords, it is to replace their regime with one actually based on government of the people, by the people and for the people, and to actually live in harmony with the natural systems of which we are a part. That is the path that I hope to illuminate, one that I believe we must tackle so that the world (and we ourselves) will not die in flaming agony. Si se puede.