Sam Smith
It’s becoming
more widely understood that America’s corpocracy has badly damaged the middle
class, greatly weakened the labor unions that helped create it, grossly
diverted wealth to the top of society, overpaid its executives and underpaid
its employees, hidden its profits in tax free offshore havens, transferred
large number of jobs to other countries, and convinced the Supreme Court to let
it buy our elections.
But that’s just the financial side of the story. Allowing
corporate greedsters to take over our society has affected every aspect of our
culture, and not in a happy way. Here are some examples
Values such as
integrity, kindness, cooperation and community no longer lead the list.
Instead profit, dominance, branding, marketing and control have replaced them. Image
has taken over from actual achievement, public relations has assumed the place
of logical argument, status is more significant than substance, and a good
pivot is more admirable than a good principle.
Our language
has dramatically changed as we adopt more of the clichés of corporations, their
lawyers and business schools. This language does not reflect reality, but only the
abstractions of advertising, legalese and selling. It is enough to use trite
words and phrases such as best practices, comprehensive approach, due
diligence, entrepreneur, envision,
iconic, optic, pivot, proactive, rigor, robust, silo, stakeholder, strategic,
synergy and transparency to give the illusion that you’re actually talking
about something. One sad indication of how fully corporate gibberish has
invaded our language is to see how often it is used by non-profits wanting to
prove how financially skilled they are - to an extent that starts to conceal their
actual purpose.
Arts: The
expansion of copyright and its enforcement by corporate police such as RIAA has
had a largely unreported and counterproductive effect, namely it deflates
participation and audience for music or literature not currently being produced
and promoted. A few years ago we noted some of the effects:
One
survey has found that the percentage of adult population performing or creating
any of the major genres of music never surpasses 4% with the exception of those
in choirs of chorales (about 6%).
On
the other hand 14% engage actively in photography, 13% in weaving and sewing,
and 9% in painting or drawing.
A
study by the National Endowment of the Arts found that between 2002 and 2008,
attendance at jazz events was down 28%, classical music performances down 20%,
and opera down 34%. There was no evidence that the missing audience was
illegally downloading these performances.
What
is even more striking is another study that found a huge drop in attendance by
those aged 18-24 between 1982 and 2008. The worst hit was jazz with a decline
of 58% but even musicals fell by 13%. For adults as a whole the decline ranged
from 19% for jazz to 30% for opera.
And
there are other considerations. For example, in 2004 Rolling Stone pubished what it said were the 500
best songs of all time. Let’s leave aside the question of whether they ignored
a few centuries of western music by only choosing numbers from the 1940s on.
What is truly amazing about this selection – made by critics widely considered
among the hippest – is that only 5% of the songs came from 1990 and later.
Forty percent came from the 1960s and 28% came from the 1970s. Even the 1950s
did better than the 1990s.
Copyright owners are in the business of collecting royalties on
existing works, so they advocate extending copyright terms in order to
perpetuate revenue streams. Once a work has been published, however, lobbyists
lose the ability to make pro-extension arguments based on incentive-to-create
rationales because the work already exists. Instead, they argue—without
empirical support—that bad things will happen to the work when it falls into
the public
The
public interest, so the story goes, requires term extension to prevent a public
domain calamity. The history and effectiveness of this argument has been
chronicled at length elsewhere, but one persistent assertion bears repeating:
Creative works need owners who will assure their availability and adequate
distribution.
Although Congress in 1998 relied on this argument in extending the term of protection in the U.S. by 20 years, empirical studies have thus far failed to support this key assertion made by copyright lobbyists.
Although Congress in 1998 relied on this argument in extending the term of protection in the U.S. by 20 years, empirical studies have thus far failed to support this key assertion made by copyright lobbyists.
…
In fact, Heald (2008) studied bestselling novels from 1913 to 1932 and found
that public domain status significantly increased the chance that a book would
be in print and increased the number of publishers of it.
The paper
also notes:
Random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com
shows more books for sale from the 1880’s than the 1980’s. Why? This paper
presents new data on how copyright stifles the reappearance of works. First, a
random sample of more than 2000 new books for sale on Amazon.com is analyzed
along with a random sample of almost 2000 songs available on new DVD’s.
Copyright status correlates highly with absence from the Amazon shelf.
Together with publishing business models, copyright law seems to deter distribution and diminish access.
Together with publishing business models, copyright law seems to deter distribution and diminish access.
Our educational system – at every
level – is being badly damaged by the corpocracy. Common Core and Race to the
Top were not designed by actual educators but by those seeking ways to
privatize the education system whether by making it heavily dependent on the
corporate testing industry or by draining public education with private charter
schools. And it’s not just at lower school level. As Jackson Lear noted in
Commonweal:
One
consequence of this seismic cultural shift is the train wreck of contemporary
higher education. Nothing better exemplifies the catastrophe than President
Barack Obama’s plan
to publish the average incomes earned by graduates from various colleges,
so parents and students can know which diplomas are worth the most in the
marketplace, and choose accordingly. In higher education as in health care,
market utility has become the sole criterion of worth. The monetary standard of
value has reinforced the American distrust of intellect unharnessed to
practical purposes: the result is an atmosphere toxic to the humanities.
Our military, aka foreign, policy has long
been overwhelmingly driven by the desires of the defense industry rather than
the best interests our country. We’re talking about a country that could cut
its military budget by a third and still have one twice as large as China. A
country that since the Cold War has deployed its military 5 times more often
than in the preceding 19 decades. It is the largest misappropriation of
government funds in human history – welfare for the defense industry.
Not content with its massive profits from the
conventional military, the corpocracy has gone on to militarize our police
departments with grim results like those seen of late in places like Baltimore
and Ferguson. No small part of the profit comes from defining the weakest
segments of our citizenry as the enemy. It
inspired the war on drugs, private
prisons and the corporate gold mine of a war on terror.
Our health care system has been
incredibly distorted by a desire for continued domination by private insurance
companies. In creating Obamacare, for example, neither the White House nor
Congress had the courage to include a public insurance option by expanding Medicare
in some way.
The media, which should
be telling us things like the aforementioned, has become a loyal partner of
other large corporations and the politicians who support them. Major media are
now some of the largest corporations in America and act like the rest while
pretending to be something different. Among the consequences: you don’t hear
about the virtues of cooperatives, union involvement in corporate management, the
assault on unions or how to protect small business from the mega-corpocracy.
And, of course, they won’t let you hear about such huge problems as the TPP
plan. Further, probably the most powerful educational institution in America
today is the advertising industry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t teach well at all.
So,
bad as things like Citizens United and offshore tax havens are, the modern
corpocracy is having enormous cultural effects on our society as well. And the
fact that we hardly ever talk about it shows how serious the problem is.
3 comments:
This cultural damage runs in parallel with that of a theocracy, with a similar degree of justification: 'because.'
So change yourself...sew clothes, cook dinner, sing songs...stop underwriting all this with the almighty dollar and passivity.
Great blog post. Amen to every word.
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