GOD BLESS CORPORATE AMERICA

(All photos are from Genoa’s G8 conference and are taken by Juggs Magazine’s Mathew Licht)

14-year-old squeegee punks have been trying to tell us for years, but now everybody knows: corporations hate us. The collapse of energy trading giant Enron is a watershed in the history of corporate America because it woke up the whole world. The essential strategy of any corporation is to maintain the vitality of its market share, stock value and revenue stream as long as possible – no matter what. While this can be construed as solid business practice, we now know what it really means: bleed the bitch dry. This is what Enron did when they tricked their employees into investing their 401K contributions into Enron stock by misrepresenting corporate earnings. Setting an all-time record in malicious irony, they accompanied this act of fraud with employee gifts: inspirational rocks engraved with the word “INTEGRITY.” The more money that came in from the employees, the more money the CEOs made secretly dumping their own shares. When the employees caught on and tried to get some of their pensions back Enron froze the cash citing some fine print in the employment contracts.

Thanks to a political system based on bribery, corporate America can behave like this with impunity. Enron was a huge contributor to politicians and political parties. In the 1996 election, Enron gave over a million dollars, mostly to Republicans, and in the 2000 election, it gave nearly $100,000 to the George W. Bush presidential campaign alone. In addition to these campaign contributions to Bush, the Texas-based company provided a corporate jet for the campaign travels of candidate Bush.

Enron stealing from its employees is not an isolated incident. Big business in America is built on fucking over Americans.

Jack Welch, the just-retired head of GE and “the most admired CEO in America,” was one of the first American CEOs to wash his hands of old-fashioned notions of “nation” and “patriotism” and proclaim his giant corporation a global entity. He believed GE wasn’t an American company but a “global” one, and their allegiance was with the least expensive. With ruthless focus, he forced suppliers to produce ever-cheaper components, and his suppliers had to oblige, moving operations to where the cheap labor (and poor environmental regulation enforcement) was - Mexico and now China. Welch, the new corporate hero, helped gut much of the American industrial base and helped turn northern Mexico into a vast Sinclairian slum with no local culture.

Post-NAFTA and post-GATT, ravenous American businesses dived in after GE. The proud titans of U.S. commerce gorged themselves on the recently unprotected world in a frenzy of roving exploitation. Boeing, Motorola, Citigroup and a host of others did their best to trade technology and the stable American civic structure for access to the burgeoning populations of less developed countries and their dirt-cheap labor.

The Wall Street Journal printed report after glowing report of the wonders of a world turned into a vast corporate feeding ground and the American government agreed.

Even America’s safety was for sale. Bill Clinton personally overruled security recommendations by helping Loral Space & Communications, Ltd. of New York enter into a hugely lucrative business deal with China that included transferring sensitive missile technology to the People’s Republic. Clinton ignored the fact that China has nuclear weapons pointed against us because Loral was the Democratic Party’s biggest campaign contributor in 1996.

Not to be out-whored by Clinton, the Bush campaign raised an unprecedented $68 million in campaign contributions in 1999 alone (much of which came from oil companies). The result is a government that is loyal to corporate interests and disloyal to Americans.

The notorious H1-B visa program is a good case in point. H1-B is the so-called “high tech visa,” the foreign holders of which Silicon Valley claims it would collapse without. The program was up for a House vote last year, and activists like Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis had made a good case that the program was just another way for corporations to import 20-something single foreign males who would be locked into their jobs by law, and willing to work longer hours for less pay than middle-aged American programmers with families and mortgages, and who might insist on things like health benefits, vacation time and job portability.

Thanks to grassroots activism, there seemed to be a real chance that Congress might reconsider the H1-B program. However, in the weeks leading to the vote on H1-B in Congress, the industry’s army of lobbyists descended on Capitol Hill and dumped millions of dollars in “contributions” into Congressional pockets. When the vote came up, not only was the H1-B program continued, the industry even got a raise on the cap to 195,000 per year; in other words, the industry is allowed to import a small city of indentured servants every year. And another chapter was written in which American companies and their underlings in Congress shafted Americans all in the relentless pursuit of ever-increasing profits.

Whether the cheap labor is imported or we bring it to them, everyone loses. Nobody knows this better than Mexico. When NAFTA was signed, everyone assumed it would mean Mexico’s standard of living would rise in exchange for a slight lowering of America’s. In fact, both sides lost. As corporate profits reached the highest they’ve been in 20 years, Mexican production workers went from earning 23 percent of US wages to 11 percent, and the real wages of low-income American workers, the most vulnerable in our society, has remained stagnant and, relative to other wage earners, has actually declined. After all this abuse, it is particularly upsetting to see these same corporations now unfurling the flag in the wake of September 11. Now they want to go back to being an “American company.” They are using the attacks and patriotic rhetoric to push for new tax breaks and bailouts (called “stimulus packages”) from American taxpayers — the very people they have so cynically disdained for all these years. What makes it even more disturbing is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be laid in large part at the feet of corporate America. Much of the American foreign policy that has so many in the world hating us has been driven by the primary tenet of that policy: making the world safe for American business interests (think oil companies in the Mideast). So American citizens suffer huge loss of life, and pay to send our soldiers off to fight and die to protect the very corporations that have long proclaimed their post-Americanism. It’s enough to make you want to riot.

BRENT WYTHE

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