The Corporations Will Eat Your Soul

25 April 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

You may know the story of the frog and the scorpion. A scorpion wanted to cross a swift river, and asked a frog to carry him on his back. The frog asked “How do I know that you won’t sting and kill me as soon as you get on my back?” “Well,” answered the scorpion, who was good with words when he wanted something, “then I wouldn’t be able to get across the river.” “Well,” said the frog, “then how do I know that you won’t sting and kill me as soon as we’re across the river?” “Oh,” said the scorpion, “because I’ll be so grateful for the ride, why would I want to kill you then?”

This convinced the frog – apparently, frogs are easy to convince in stories – so he let the scorpion on his back, and began swimming across the river. They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging river, when, to his great surprise, the frog felt a painful sting and looked around to see the scorpion pulling his stinger out of the frog’s back. Very soon, the frog felt himself becoming numb. Just before he was completely paralyzed, the frog had the breath to ask “Why?” “It’s just my nature,” said the scorpion, as they both sank into the river and drowned. “It’s just my nature.”

Of course, the story was never really about scorpions. It was meant as a warning against certain rare but dangerous kinds of people whose nature, like that of scorpions, is to destroy others even if it destroys them too.

I think the reason this is such a frightening story is because a person like the scorpion, a person who lacked even basic compassion, isn’t quite human.

One of the scariest things we can imagine is a machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and feels nothing when we suffer, cry, or die. Think of those android-type men in the “Matrix” movies, for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in “Lord of the Rings,” or the governor of California as The Terminator, that robot programmed only to destroy until it was destroyed.

I suppose the most famous story like this is still Mary Shelly’s 1818 tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created from spare parts. For nearly two centuries, the Frankenstein monster has been a symbol of creating something inhuman, giving it life and immense power without a soul, then living to see it turn on us, as the monster even killed Frankenstein in the end.

There have been a lot of movies on this theme in the past decades. The Terminator, Total Recall, Darth Vader in Star Wars, the casual indifference to life in “Pulp Fiction,” the powerful forces of greed and destruction in “Lord of the Rings” – you can probably each think of another half dozen.

When I was growing up, the most powerful movie like this was the original 1956 version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” For me, it was a movie about the difference between real people and pathological people. You probably know the story. A mindless life force from outer space drifted from a desolate, dead planet and wound up on this one.

It operated under a simple program. When a human fell asleep near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person, taking their body, looks, even their memory, and draining their life, then destroying the original and taking their place. You could hardly tell the difference. They looked the same, had all the same memories. But they had no soul. They had no compassion, no feeling for anyone. The squeals of a dog getting hit and killed by a car in the road twenty feet away didn’t even make them care to look.

Life didn’t matter to them. Only reproducing their kind, to no other end than reproducing their kind. Eventually, like the frog and the scorpion, they kill everything. Then if the cosmic winds are right, they may blow across the galaxy and suck the life out of yet another planet. I’ve met a half dozen people who grew up when I did, saw that movie, and were similarly moved to think of real versus unreal people, the way kids 150 years ago probably thought in terms of real people versus Frankenstein monsters. In both cases, they were persons lacking humanity, lacking the concern for others that makes them frightening and dangerous persons.

When humans act like this, we think there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Theologians call them evil, novelists call them monsters or body snatchers, and psychologists call them psychopaths. Since psyche means soul, the word really means people with sick souls. Here’s a list of psychopathic traits I recently read. Psychopaths are:

Irresponsible

Grandiose, self-absorbed

They lack empathy

They won’t accept responsibility for their destructive actions

They are unable to feel remorse

They’re finally quite superficial: all power, no depth; all manipulation, no connection

(Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 57)

I can see you making a mental list of some of your ex-friends .

Now what is this about? Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths and scorpions whose nature is to destroy, even if it also destroys them? What on earth does this have to do with a respectable church sermon?

It’s a way of introducing the business of trying to understand the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world. That sounds so dramatic it almost needs a science fiction movie with special effects to make it scary enough.

But I am talking about a person that we have created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense power, more money than God, and which, like the invasion of the body-snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in, destroying the compassionate qualities of both societies and real people.

You’ll think I’ve badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real person is the corporation. So let me try and persuade you.

Only a very few of these insights are mine. I got the rest from a remarkable new book of only 167 pages by a Canadian law professor named Joel Bakan. The title of the book is The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. He also made a movie of the interviews he conducted in writing the book, and that movie, called “The Corporation,” is playing to sold-out and standing-ovation crowds in theaters all across Canada right now, where it has become a national phenomenon. I spoke with the film’s promoters last week, who said they are now arranging a tour of more than 200 cities in the US for the movie, beginning on June 4th in San Francisco, with Austin tentatively scheduled for July 29th, at a location still to be determined

The author explains the nature, the character and the danger of large corporations in a few pages, and I’ll try to reduce it to a few minutes. But make no mistake: this is like a horror movie. Even though there is some hope at the end, I want to scare you.

Corporations formed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, to pool the money of a large number of people in order to give the corporation more power than any single business could have. Very early, laws were passed saying investors had no real liability for whatever dastardly deeds the corporation did. This gave the corporation limited liability, but unlimited ability to make money. It’s something you can’t imagine ever wanting to do with a person, isn’t it?

And from the start, as a matter of structure and law, the only purpose of a corporation was to make as much money as possible for its stockholders.

By the late 19th century, the courts had transformed the corporation into a person, a legal person, and even spoke of it in that way. And in 1866, lawyers representing this newly-created “person” won a ruling from the Supreme Court saying that, as a legal person, corporations were entitled to be protected by the 14th amendment for “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws.” These provisions of the 14th amendment, as you may remember, were written for the protection of freed slaves after the War Between the States. But since 1866, it has been used almost never by freed slaves, and almost exclusively to protect corporations – even when they make slaves of workers all over the third world and, some would argue, within our own country. I am betting that not many of you knew that. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know it either. Isn’t that odd, that we didn’t know that?

Since being christened as persons, corporations have done what any person would do: they have fought for both survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor their aims, and buying influence, lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents when they can. It isn’t seen as evil, just doing business, just their nature.

And what are their aims? You might say that it depends on the corporation, that they are free to do whatever they want. That’s not true. If the corporation sells stocks, its sole legal purpose, under U.S. laws, is to make as much money as possible for its stockholders. The corporation can pretend to care about society or the environment, as long as the money they spend makes more people want to buy their products and so increases profits for stockholders. But they may not, legally, spend money for social good unless they really aren’t interested in social good, but only in profits.

Milton Friedman, who had been regarded as a second- or third-rate economist until he was adopted as the official economist of the greediest kind of capitalism, calls making money the corporation’s only moral aim. He compares little acts of apparent social conscience to car manufacturers using pretty girls to sell cars. “That’s never really about the girls,” he points out, “it’s just a trick to sell cars.” Likewise, a corporation can donate to the special Olympics or civic projects, but only if it will sell more of their product. They can’t do social good for the sake of doing social good.

Peter Drucker, perhaps the oldest living guru of corporate character, says if you have a CEO who wants to do social good, fire him fast!

And there are laws supporting this perspective. Ninety years ago, when Henry Ford was becoming astoundingly rich from selling his Model T Fords, he decided that he was making too much money. So in 1916, Ford “cancelled the stock dividends to give customers price reductions because he felt it was wrong to make obscene profits.” (Bakan, p. 36)

Two of his major investors, the Dodge brothers, took him to court, arguing that profits belonged to the stockholders, not the company, and the court agreed with them, establishing a precedent that still rules. Corporations exist as persons only to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their stockholders. Even if it harms people. (Yes, the Dodge brothers then started their own car company.)

In a 1933 Supreme Court judgment, Justice Louis Brandeis finally made the obvious connection, when he stated that corporations were “Frankenstein monsters” capable of doing evil.

The author cites another famous case from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas Day 1993 a mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while stopped at a stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to explode, burning and badly disfiguring all five of them. During the trial, a report was introduced showing that GM knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could explode on impact, killing the car’s occupants. In fact, about five hundred people were being killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new Malibu style cars were being planned. He figured that each fatality could cost the company $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the figure by 41 million, the number of cars GM had on the road. The engineer concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40 per automobile. The cost of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was estimated to be $8.59 per car. That meant the company could save $6.19 per car if it let people die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires. (Bakan, pp. 61-63)

While the jury made a huge award, it was later reduced by 3/4, and GM appealed the case. In support of GM, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a brief defending the practice of using this kind of “cost-benefit analysis in corporate decision making.” The jury’s decision, they said, was deeply troubling, because manufacturers should use cost-benefit analysis to make the most profitable decisions. (63) The corporation’s legal makeup, its nature, requires executives to make only those decisions that create greater benefits than costs for their stockholders. Executives have no authority to consider what harmful effects a decision might have on other people or upon the environment, unless those effects might have negative consequences for the corporation. (p. 64)

Do you see what has happened here? This person we created through our own laws, by following its legal nature, can and does endanger and kill human beings in the pursuit of profit.

Now let’s jump to a very different area of society, one you might not think is even related to corporations. It’s the subject of our armed forces, what they are really serving, and what our soldiers are really dying for.

Joel Bakan’s book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI’s most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

“I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

“I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

“In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested . I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions . I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.” (p. 93)

Given that speech, and Butler’s disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

“Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America’s long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters’ clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control.” (p. 95)

And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation’s profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)

NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, “out-sourcing” them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I’ve had time to sketch for you. I don’t think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a “person” because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if “a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction.” (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn’t anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn’t bad, it’s a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy’s expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.

And now we’re at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven’t even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler’s soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they’re cheap to replace. There’s cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can’t write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn’t belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it’s just its nature.