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Date: 6/27/01
Time: 2:34:25 PM
Remote Name: 209.158.197.2
This excerpt is from Peter Montague's "The Corruption of Our Democracy," on Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly #433:
"It is one of the deep mysteries of American democracy: how did we, the people, allow a truly undemocratic institution - the modern corporation - to assert such powerful influence in all the arenas of self-governance: our schools, our courts, our law-making apparatus, our elections?
As MIT professor Noam Chomsky has observed, the modern corporation is almost completely totalitarian. There is nothing democratic about it. There are only 2 ways an ordinary citizen can relate to a modern corporation: you can rent yourself to it (hire on as an employee), or you can buy something from it (in your role as a consumer). Besides those 2 ways, the ordinary citizen has no handles for making serious contact with the modern global corporation.
The corporation, on the other hand, pretty much determines all the basics of modern life, just as the church did in the middle ages. Today small corporate elites determine what most of us will read (in newspapers, magazines, and books); what we will see (in theaters and tv); what subjects will become 'public issues' permissible for discussion and debate; what ideas our children will absorb in the classroom (school boards may select texts and curricula, but usually only from among the choices offered by the pedagogical publishing corporations); what modes of transportation will be available to us; how our food and fiber will be grown, processed, and marketed; what consumer products will be made by what technologies; whether we will have widely available, affordable health care, or whether we will have a health care system like the present one; how work will be defined, organized, and compensated; how war will be waged (and generally, against whom); what forms of energy will be available to us; how much toxic contamination will be present in our air, water, soil, and food; who will have enough money to run an election capmaign and who will not.
Throughout the 19th century, most Americans thought of themselves as a self-governing people. We fought a revolution to cast off monarchy, to govern ourselves. We published the Declaration of Independence, established the Articles of Confederation, and, later, the Constitution, to embody the principles and create the institutions of a self-governing people: the rule of law with no one above the law; free public schools where the people could gain the knowledge they needed to govern themselves; a system of courts where justice was blind; a public law making apparatus staffed by public servants chosen in open elections, largely free of corruption. Now those institutions of self-governance have all been modified to suit the requirements of modern corporations, and self-governance is, for many, a faded remembrance."