“The goal is not to bring your adversaries to their knees but to their senses.” -- Mahatma Gandhi
It’s sad to watch: pundits laud Steve Jobs design efforts on the relatively insignificant frill of an iPhone while treating with cavalier disdain the efforts of Occupy Wall Street. There are good reasons, of course. Steve Jobs epitomizes the rags to riches story we hold dear in America. It’s easier to make a hero out of one man’s effort, his vision, than it is to champion what seems an inchoate force, a multitude of sometimes conflicting voices demanding not just one thing, but many. Finally, Occupy Wall Street isn’t as pretty as an iPhone. It doesn’t deliver intimate eye candy or sexy functionality. Rather, it tells you the world is broken. It might even mention that the iPhone and Apple devices the pundits lavishly praise are the results of an array of intellectual achievements, none of which belong to Steve Jobs alone, and only a few of which he managed to harness. Furthermore, if Occupy Wall Street does its work right, you might realize that the iPhone upon which you text your colleagues and like your Facebook friends is the product of an army of slaves who work twelve hours a day for thirteen days straight for months on end, earning, as little as 130 dollars a month, or approximately 40 cents an hour. In fact, Foxconn, the Chinese based plant in Shenzen province has draped a series of nets and steel poles jutting out 20 feet above the sidewalk to catch workers attempting to commit suicide by jumping from their windows. Foxconn is the reason most Americans can afford an iPhone at all. Altogether, the company employs about a million people. Working conditions are so bad that 17 workers have killed themselves, thus far.
Steve Jobs knew this too, and tried to do something about it, but failed, because he was constrained by the same neoliberal system that constrained his competitors. The same neoliberal system that, for example, demands austerity cuts in a time of recession, and rules out most, if not all labor and environmental concerns when negotiating the minutia of free trade agreements.
For some reason, this doesn’t get much press, but it should; it’s the dominating feature of our world. Free trade agreements espoused by Democrats and Republicans alike are at the heart of what ails much of our current system. In theory these agreements seek to protect business and ‘growth,’ not people and the environment, with an underlying assumption that the wealthier a country becomes, the better it is able to protect its people and its environment. But this is actually the reverse of what happens. Corporations seek the lowest labor costs and the least restrictive regulatory environment in an effort to produce their goods more cheaply than competitors. Since the lawyers who craft the agreements are often working for the corporations in question, environmental regulations and labor rights are essentially ignored. A race to the bottom ensues for the cheapest labor costs and least restrictive regulatory environment; a race which sees destroyed ecosystems and basic slavery as ‘the winners.’
Here’s an example. According to Paul Hawkens in Blessed Unrest, In 1996, the Clinton administration went to war for Chiquita Brands International, a $4 billion dollar corporation. The administration filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization whose task it is to decide trade disputes. They registered their complaint against the European Union, alleging that EU import and tariff policies favored a few small, family owned growers in the Caribbean who make a living wage, instead of from the US owned multinational banana conglomerates that have a long and sordid history of union busting, near slavery levels of low wages and toxic poisoning due to the use of agrochemicals. Initially, the EU acknowledged the charge and was rightfully proud of their progressive efforts to set aside a small slice of their market –only 7 percent – for Caribbean imports from Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent.
Chiquita brands donated $500,000 to the Democratic Party in 1996 and then donated $350,000 to the Republican party which was sufficient lubrication to get the Republican controlled congress to introduce a retaliatory law against European products, including goat cheese, cashmere and biscuits. By 1999, the EU was forced to rescind its preferential quotas for the small, family owned Caribbean growers. So who won? The US or the EU? Neither, really. The EU preferred the family owned bananas because they actually tasted better and because they represented a best effort at ameliorating a lopsided playing field. The US citizens have never had the opportunity to sample the family owned products and, in the mean time, were forced to pay dramatically higher prices for cashmere and goat cheese. Only two entities came out ahead: The Chiquita corporation and the politicians that served it.
Here’s another example. In 1990 fewer than 50 million people in the world brought their water from private companies. Ten years later, that number rose to 460 million. Why? Countries borrowing from the World Bank must have a water privatization plan as a precondition for all loans. This is part and parcel of the ‘Washington Consensus,’ a neoliberal world view that seeks to privatize / corporatize all aspects of public life.
Over a decade ago, Seattle had what might be called the first ‘Occupy’ event. On November 30, 1999 hundreds of small citizen organizations gathered to decry the undemocratic policies established by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in their neoliberal drive to privatize the world. Probably about 60,000 individuals took part in protests against the WTO’s Third Ministerial in Seattle. As Paul Hawkens notes in Blessed Unrest, the demonstrators and activists who took part were not against trade, or globalization, per se, “…but against what it actually entails, which is the corporatization of the commons.”
What does that phrase mean ‘the corporatization of the commons’?
It means that what we had once considered a civic virtue, understanding, embracing and protecting the public good, has become, in the speech of higher finance, an externality; a cost of doing business that is deemed superfluous. Individuals are no longer defined as citizens, but consumers. The purpose of government is merely to assure that smooth and orderly commerce can occur, and occasionally to provide the opening of new markets, by war, if necessary. Terms like ‘the public’, ‘the commons’, ‘citizens’ and ‘civic virtue’ are no longer used, or, if they are used, they appear in scare quotes, atavistic claptrap from another century.
Consider the following items and a sampling of their associated corporate owners, heretofore considered ‘public’. Previously, free agricultural seeds are now corporate owned and sold [Montrose], previously free water is now corporate owned and sold [Bechtel], previously local farms are now corporate owned [Archer Daniel Midlands], previously local airwaves are now corporate owned airwaves [Clear Water], previously local media are now corporate owned media [FOX]. These are just small samples of existing ‘owners’… Take, in another instance, the current legal struggle to copyright the Human Genome (our DNA!) a portion of which Myriad Genetics thinks it ‘owns’ thanks to the U.S. Patent office:
“When Lisbeth Ceriani, a 43-year-old Massachusetts woman, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, her doctors recommended that she undergo genetic testing …but when Ceriani’s doctors submitted her blood to Myriad Genetics—the only company that offers a sequencing test for BRCA mutations—the company refused to process it, saying that Myriad did not accept Ceriani’s health insurance. She could not afford to pay for the test herself (it costs nearly $4,000), so she did not have it done.”
Since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Myriad Genetics nearly 9 patents on the Human Genome, in effect giving Myriad ownership of the gene sequence in question, the company is allowed to decide who may study the genes and has written cease-and-desist letters to university geneticists working on alternative sequencing tests that might be more affordable. THe ACLU is contesting Myriad's 'ownership' claim--the case is pending.
Beyond the specter of profit seeking corporations ‘owning’ the blueprint of human life, there’s the less tangible harm caused to what we had once considered the ‘commons’, those things include our culture, our environment and neighborhood, our ability to self determine, our democracy: in other words, the basis for our civilization.
If you remember the Seattle protests on November 30, 1999, you might recall video of a small group of anarchists wearing neckerchiefs over their faces struggling with the police, and maybe a shot of a broken window or two. You might recall the rabid police response and the waves of tear gas. You probably don’t remember that among those attacked by the police were The World Wildlife Fund, Oxfam, or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. There were thousands of protestors that day, almost all of whom were non-violent. In fact, the ‘riots’ at the WTO in Seattle were ‘police riots.’ The police chased demonstrators into neighborhoods and began attacking bystanders, witnesses, residents and commuters. They gassed commuters on passing metro buses. They dragged a member of the Seattle City Council out of his car and tried to arrest him. None of this was relayed in any official news capacity. Instead, what you might recall is Thomas Freidman’s dismissive article in the New York Times in which he wrote that the demonstrators were “a Noah’s ark of flat earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix.”
You probably didn’t learn that one of their demands was protesting slave-like conditions for agricultural labor, or that many of these laborers were being poisoned by American pesticides. They were also advocating a public license (as opposed to a private patent) for the human genome.
Keep that disparity in mind as you read recent news accounts of ‘riots’ in cities like Oakland, Denver, Nashville and New York. The violence, caused by the police in almost every instance, is secondary to what the occupation is trying to highlight: the corruption of corporate money and our political class. Certainly, we should be outraged by the gratuitous attacks on the peaceful U.S. Marine, Scott Olsen and others. Police overreacted badly, going after non-violent protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets and batons. But all of these tactics, from overt police violence to agent provocateurs to the blithe disregard of elitist pundits deep in the pay of corporations are beside the point. We should not forget the reason Scott Olsen courageously stood between non-violent activists and the antagonistic Oakland police arrayed in full riot gear: our homes are being foreclosed illegally, our jobs are being sent overseas to enrich millionaires, our industrial infrastructure has been dismantled to increase the profits of international corporations that neither care nor understand the need for local constraints; banks are ruthlessly ripping off billions in Tarp funds by misrepresenting investment class subsidiaries (casino capitalist joints like Merrill Lynch overnight become commercial banking entities), all the while Wall Street firms are bribing our political class to keep a corrupt electoral and corporate system running smoothly…In short, we’re being sold off at cut throat rates to the highest bidder.
The adulation of Steve Jobs, like the focus on police officers violent responses are distractions. What should be the focus? The failure of our economic and political elite to claim, much less honor any sense of civic duty; the failure of an entire class. As economists Jeffrey Sachs notes in the first sentence of his new book, The Price of Civilization “At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite.”
Our political and economic elite have abdicated their responsibilities and shirked their duty to citizens and the commons. Now, the real work is being done by the 99%, by the Occupy activists who sleep in the November chill and drizzle, using their bodies, their very lives to reclaim our public ground and the public good.