=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #452
—July 27, 1995—
News and resources for environmental justice.
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Environmental Research Foundation
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Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@rachel.clark.net
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THE BIG PROBLEMS–PART 3: CORPORATE DANGER
Congress has taken hammer and tongs to the nation’s health,
safety and environmental laws. In committee hearings, corporate
lawyers are sitting right up there beside members of Congress,
dictating the changes. [1] The chairman of the House Subcommittee
on Energy and Power, Dan Schaefer, a Republican from Colorado,
says bluntly, “We go to industry and we ask industry, ‘What is it
we can do to make your job easier and to help you in this
competitive world we have,’ rather than writing legislation and
having industry comment on what we write.’” There is nothing
subtle going on. The “Contract With America” is a corporate Bill
of Rights.
How can the majority of Americans sit by while corporate
polluters openly run Congress? There are at least four reasons:
1) Most Americans feel a deep insecurity, and are focused on
their own problems. Good jobs are disappearing, especially for
people without college degrees (which in 1993 was 78.1% of
Americans over age 25). [2] For young men without college
degrees, wages have declined 20% over the past 20 years at the
same time that worker productivity has increased 25% [3]and
corporate profits have soared. [4] Employers simply aren’t
sharing the wealth as generously as they used to. The old
bargain –you work hard for me and I’ll help you take care of
your family, including health care and pension –has been, for
the most part, scrapped by the nation’s employers. Now that the
bipartisan wisdom of Congress has given us “free trade” (NAFTA
and GATT), American capital can flow abroad with few
restrictions. American workers are now in direct competition
with workers in Bangladesh, Chile, and Mexico. Back home in the
U.S., employers are sitting in the catbird seat, offering
low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs with no benefits –and
finding plenty of desperate takers.
Jobs with employer-paid pensions are pretty much a thing of the
past. [5] Even the pensions that exist have been badly undercut
by a series of Congressional actions during the past decade. The
41 million workers with traditional company-financed pension
plans are in for a rude awakening when they try to collect in the
next century because Congress has whittled away at their
benefits. “The unintended consequence of all the changes, the
experts contend, is a further unraveling of the safety net that
American workers have long counted on for their later years,”
says the NEW YORK TIMES. [6] Unintended? Perhaps. Social
Security and Medicare are now on the Congressional chopping
block. Meanwhile, people are taking second and third jobs to
make ends meet and hoping they don’t get sick. In a recent poll
by the NEW YORK TIMES and CNN, three quarters of working people
said they believe they will face a “financial crisis” when they
retire. Asked if they believe the Social Security system will
have money in it for them when they retire, only 35% said
“yes.” [7]
Leisure time is diminishing steadily as people work harder to
keep up. [8] Parents, working more and earning less, have less
time to devote to their children. A study by the Annie E. Casey
Foundation in 1992 found that, by 9 “measures of child
well-being,” conditions for 82% of the nation’s children worsened
during the 1980s. “These trends constitute a pattern of national
child and family neglect,” the Foundation said. [9]
As a result of all this, many people don’t have what it takes to
devote energy and time to civic issues. They have to work to pay
down their credit card, and to figure out how to pay for a little
more education for their children because they sense that,
without it, the future for the next generation is bleak.
In sum, public and private policies, all of which originate in
the board rooms of leading corporations and in the think tanks
they employ to develop winning strategies, now hold a majority of
the population in a cold grip of insecurity. Insecure people
tend not to get involved, and certainly not to rock the boat.
2) Most people also don’t know the details of what’s going on
because the media don’t tell them. It is rare to find serious
analysis of what Congress is doing to the environment and how
corporations are calling the shots. If you scour the NEW YORK
TIMES, you can catch disconnected bits of what’s going on, but if
you only get your news from TV or a local paper, you simply won’t
be able to inform yourself about what’s going on. Of course it
is possible that this is accidental.
On the other hand, to a surprising degree the media are owned and
controlled by a tiny corporate elite. The executives who make
policy for most of the mass media in the U.S. would fit into a
modest-sized room. Ben Bagdikian, the retired dean of the School
of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley, has
documented for 20 years the consolidation of media ownership and
control into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. “It is
quite possible –and corporate leaders predict–that by the 1990s
a half-dozen large corporations will own all the most powerful
media outlets in the United States,” Bagdikian said in 1990. [10]
His prediction is coming true.
3) When the public encounters an “environmentalist” it is usually
a quotation in a newspaper or a sound byte on TV by a
representative of the Big 10 (sometimes called the Big 15). The
big environmental groups are increasingly identified with the
corporate elite. Executives of these environmental bureaucracies
often emulate the corporate elites in dress, in office
furnishings, in speech, in hierarchical style of organization, in
the way they treat their employees, and in the “messages” of
accommodation and appeasement that they put out. A vast majority
of the public (on the order of 77%) doesn’t trust ANY visible
leaders (political, corporate, or civic), so to the extent that
big environmental organizations are visible on the policy scene,
they are not trusted. [11] And for good reason: they have shown
little sympathy–or even awareness–over the last two decades for
the concerns of working people, the disenfranchised, and the poor.
3) The real power of the environmental movement has –for more
than a decade –been the locally-based grass-roots activists who
are fighting for their children’s health, their property values,
and the future of their communities. A significant portion of
the movement is African American, Hispanic, Native American, and
also poor. Now African-Americans and Hispanics have been
targeted by leaders in Congress, and by other red-necks in suits
who call themselves “conservative” (a misnomer if there ever was
one), as a privileged class needing their privileges revoked.
Keep in mind that the 1994 STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED
STATES shows that in 1992 those living in poverty included 24.5
million whites, or 11.6 percent of the white population; 10.6
million blacks, or 33.3 percent of the black population, and 6.7
million Hispanics, or 29.3 percent of the Hispanic population.
Keep in mind, too, that many of the poor are children. For
example, half (51.4%) of the 27.3 million people receiving food
stamps are children. [12] Twenty-one percent of all children in
the U.S. live in families in poverty. [13]
As if poverty isn’t difficult enough by itself, African-Americans
and Hispanics are being targeted in numerous other ways. Bob
Herbert, a columnist for the NEW YORK TIMES, summarized it
recently: “Voting rights are under attack with the goal of
ousting black representation from government. The always shaky
edifice of affirmative action is being dismantled by folks who
argue with a straight face that not only has life’s playing field
been leveled, but that it is now tilted in favor of blacks.
Education and job training are being scuttled. Funding for summer
jobs and other youth programs is being dropped. Support and
funding for public school systems with large black enrollments is
eroding. Plans are being drawn to deny unwed mothers and their
babies even the most minimal government assistance. Food is
being taken from the tables of the poor, shelter is being denied
to homeless people, and efforts are under way to close the doors
of hospitals that treat the poor.” [14]
Because no overarching national organization has developed to
give expression to the combined vision of the grass-roots
environmental movement, there has been no organized national
environmental response to the Congressional offensive against
people of color and the environment. The strength of the
grass-roots lies in its local bases, but therein also lies its
weakness because the movement remains fragmented, unable to speak
with one coherent, angry voice.
Probing even more deeply into our sea of troubles, a recent
letter in the NEW YORK TIMES summarized the contemporary
situation: “…The core issue of our time [is]: How can you have
a stable, safe society when the labor of a large and increasing
segment of society is not needed? The real meaning of the
‘deindustrialization’ of the formerly ‘industrialized’ societies
is that there are no more jobs for those who are not highly
educated or entrepreneurial.
“Economic productivity has created a large, permanent class of
those whom society cannot use and does not respect. We have
marginalized those who would once have been productive factory
workers and agricultural workers.
“Further economic forces are now marginalizing portions of the
middle class, as corporations have discovered that they no longer
need the labor of this segment of society either. The results
will not be pleasant.” [15]
But make no mistake. Those “economic forces” have names and
faces. They have intentions. And they operate through the legal
form called the corporation. They are enriching themselves,
harming the health and the substance of the nation, answerable to
no one.
American institutions of self-governance are premised on every
member of society having a stake in the outcome. With that
premise canceled out by corporate policies, how long can our
institutions stand? This is a real danger.
                
                
                
                
    
–Peter Montague
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[1] George Miller, “Authors of the Law,” NEW YORK TIMES May 24,
1995, pg. A21.
[3] Paul Krugman, “Long-term Riches, Short-term Pain,” NEW YORK
TIMES September 25, 1994, pg. F9.
[6] David Cay Johnston, “From Washington, The Fading Pension,”
NEW YORK TIMES May 4, 1995, pg. D1.
[9] “Report Says Poor Children Grew Poorer in 1980s,” NEW YORK
TIMES March 24, 1992, pg. A22.
[10] Ben H. Bagdikian, MEDIA MONOPOLY 3rd Edition. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pgs. 3-4.
[14] Bob Herbert, “Renewing Black America,” NEW YORK TIMES July
14, 1995, pg. A25.
Descriptor terms: congress; legislation; employment statistics;
leisure; income statistics; children; media; jobs; civil rights;
poverty;