I’ve seen quite a few boycotts happening this past year. One of the biggest ones, naturally, was (is?) the BP boycott following the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As a corporation, BP certainly seems evil; the neglect of safety regulations caused an oil spill of monumental proportions in an area that had not even recovered from devastation from Hurricane Katrina. Safety regulations cost money, and somewhere down the line, someone or several someones made decisions to cut corners in order to boost profits. Placing a higher regard for the bottom line than for the environment–and not just “the environment” as an abstract entity, but the people and creatures who rely on that environment for life–seems, to the outsider, to be a callous and cruel set of priorities.
Target is another corporation that found itself the subject of public outrage. Target made a campaign donation of $150,000 to Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who believes that Minnesotan women do not have a constitutional right to choose, who believes that pharmacists should not have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives, who wanted to amend Minnesota’s constitution to make Minnesota a sovereign state that is not regulated by federal law (except if the law is passed by a 2/3 majority in the Minnesota legislature), and, what was most outrageous to Target boycotters, has an active anti-LGBT platform that includes defining marriage as solely between one man and one woman. Target, of course, was much more interested in Emmer’s stance on tax laws; many frequent Target shoppers, however, were incensed by the indifference Target displayed in supporting Emmer despite his views, views that many people consider immoral or unjust.
Other corporations, while not being boycotted in a widespread manner, are making the news for questionable practices. Monsanto is appearing in food documentaries and news stories because of the way that they have modified seeds for products such as corn, soybeans, and potatoes. Many people are squeamish about genetically-modified foods in general; Monsanto takes their GM practices to places that many people might find uncomfortable. One modification that poses a potential danger down the line is the “suicide” gene that has been bred into seeds that Monsanto produces, causing the crops to, in essence, shoot blanks when it comes to producing new seeds. Seeds harvested from crops with this gene will not produce crops if re-planted, making farmers–and we, the people–completely dependent on Monsanto to produce a new crop every year. Other practices that Monsanto has put into place to control the seed supply has been to patent its GM seeds so that farmers cannot legally harvest and re-plant any seeds, whether they would produce a new crop or not. Monsanto has taken legal action against farmers who try to save and/or plant seeds that came from the crops rather than from Monsanto. Monsanto has also taken legal action against farmers whose non-Monsanto crops were supposedly cross-pollinated with Monsanto crops from nearby fields, and whose seeds now contain Monsanto genes, or whose fields contain seeds from Monsanto that may have been carried over from nearby fields. From a business perspective, Monsanto has been brilliant–by creating a dependence on Monsanto for seeds, and thus for food, they create perpetual demand for their product. From a human perspective, the notion that most our food supply is in the hands of a corporation that works primarily for profit motive can be terrifying.
Corporations, by law, must consider the profit motive ahead of everything else. This law protects the shareholders–not just the CEO and the Wall Street fat cats, but employees with stock options, people with 401k’s who happen to be invested in stock, and Joe Investor buying and selling stocks from his home PC. In this sense, the laws regarding corporations and profit are not a bad thing; in fact, they are only part of the problem. Corporations are entities that have many of the same rights as human beings, and this is another part of the problem. While it is good for corporations to have some rights as entities–after all, given that they are not owned by a single person who can consider them his or her property and extend his or her own rights over the corporation, it would be all too easy for the government to overstep its bounds regarding corporations if there were no rights in place–the slope is slippery when we begin to define corporations as people rather than non-human entities. When corporate interests are pitted against human interests, the answer should be clear in that what is good for human beings should rank over what is good for corporations. Regulations which protect us from hazards such as oil spills, meat that contains e.coli, products that contain poisonous lead, and so forth, are imperative to public welfare. Defining a corporation as a person muddies the legal lines when it comes to public welfare by forcing the legal system to consider the needs of the corporation to be as vital as our needs. And what are the needs of the corporation? To follow the law, to do what they are designed to do–maximize profit.
I just watched a documentary on Netflix called The Corporation. In the documentary, a rather bold point was made by comparing the “personality” of a corporation to symptoms in the DSM. They demonstrated that corporations had a callous disregard for other human beings; corporations are irresponsible; corporations are manipulative; corporations are not able to form mutually-satisfying, long-lasting relationships with most people; corporations, much of the time, do not have respect for laws when it comes to their own self-interests; many corporations have no problem being deceitful to further their profits. Corporations, in other words, are psychopaths.* They must be evil, right?
(* “Psychopath” is no longer the appropriate term in the DSM-IV; it’s now called “anti-social personality disorder.” Same diagnosis, more politically correct term.)
The thing is, corporations are not intrinsically evil. In fact, I wouldn’t use the word evil, at all–that implies that they purposely want to hurt people, and this is not the case. Many American corporations supported Nazi Germany during World War II–not philosophically, but by continuing to do business with them. In The Corporation, they chronicle the relationship between IBM and the Nazis, which was a purely business-motivated relationship. IBM created the machines that Nazis used to keep a particular sort of record. On punch cards, the fates of human beings who were imprisoned during the holocaust were recorded with IBM equipment. They had codes designating your classification (homosexual, communist–Jews were #8) and what had become of you. They had a code for what they called “special treatment.” I can’t tell you that I hold IBM remotely accountable for the holocaust, despite having worked with Nazi Germany; even without their efficient record-keeping IBM machines, the Nazis would have done what they did. I don’t think that IBM is evil for doing business with the Nazis; I don’t believe that their intent was to cause harm. I don’t believe that a corporation is capable of evil; however, I also don’t think that corporate entities, because they are not under the ownership of a person or a group of people who are beholden to their conscience, are capable of doing good for the sake of doing good. I don’t believe that corporations are capable of discerning between good and evil, which is why they sometimes do business with people that most citizens couldn’t stomach partnering with. Everything, to the corporation, is just business. Everything, when it comes down to it, returns to the bottom line.
Whether or not corporations are evil, we, the people who buy from them, largely are not. And we, who make choices every day about who to give our hard-earned pay, have to live with our consciences.
I think this is an important distinction to make. Even if I don’t believe that corporations are capable of evil, they still have a negligent disregard for humanity. The crime may be manslaughter instead of murder, but the acts are still criminal. Regulations that bind corporate activity are a joke; many times, it’s cheaper for the corporation to continue unsafe, illegal practices–when they’re even being regulated, which is less and less often thanks to special interest lobbies–and pay the fines than it is to overhaul their systems in accordance with the law. And what is the government to do–throw a corporation in jail? Corporations may have nearly every legal right short of voting that human beings have, but they are not human entities. Fines are assessed, fines are paid, and very little changes until consumers begin to push back. When Jack in the Box revolutionized the way that fast food beef is tested for safety, they didn’t do so out of the goodness of their hearts–they did it because they got cripplingly bad press. I’m sure the individuals who worked there probably felt bad, the same way you feel bad if you read about someone’s untimely death in the paper, or maybe the way you feel if you park too close to someone and nick their car opening your door. Public outrage over the incident spread like wildfire, though, and Jack in the Box was forced to swiftly mend its ways to regain the public trust. When we push back, we win.
There’s quite another problem in the works here, though–news media. Corporate-sponsored news media, to be more precise. When a pair of investigative reporters uncovered a huge safety issue with milk-producing hormones given to cows, the company in question caught wind of the story and threatened legal action. When the reporters stood their ground, they say that Fox News, for whom they worked, asked them to kill the story. They say that Fox News asked them to resign. They say that Fox News threatened to fire them. When none of that worked, they say that Fox News and the company worked together to throw wrenches in the gears and, effectively, kill the story through delays and technicalities. Why not break the totally-verified story about this huge public safety issue? The company was a frequent sponsor on the many Fox media outlets. Score one more for corporate America. Meanwhile, we’re still drinking milk containing unsafe hormones and infected pus.
(Want to know who that company is?)
How do we push back against corporations when corporations pay the news media–media which, itself, is owned by a corporation whose primary objective is the profit motive?
I think one of the best things that we can do as Americans right now is to shop locally and shop independent whenever we can. We need to send a message to irresponsible corporations by using the only medium they understand–their profit margins. This doesn’t just extend to what we purchase, but also the services we use; switching our money to local banks, for example, rather than continuing to use corporate banks that have participated in practices of reckless disregard for our well-being. Corporations are not capable of caring about us–even the real people who work for corporations can’t make the corporation itself be good. There are too many decisions spread among too many people, all of whom know that the bottom line is legally their top priority. To make these changes, we have to convince the corporations that their bottom line is completely dependent on making and carrying out policy that is beneficial to citizens rather than cutting corners to inflate profits further. To do that, we have to make their profits go down. Capitalism is a system that is only mutually beneficial when both sides participate; that means that we, as consumers, have to consider it our solemn duty to seek out those corporations that would endanger us and make them pay for their negligence by withdrawing the support of our dollars. Our role is not to blindly spend; we have a good deal of power, and we must begin to exercise it.
