Local power

[mqbush]

With all the manipulation of acceptable thought patterns by
controlled media outlets, it’s amazing that people in America
still manage to get anything right.  But people do understand,
perfectly well, that industry is socially useful when it is
many small businesses, and harmful when these small businesses
combine into global corporate monopolies that co-opt
governments, destroy cultures, ruin economies, and impoverish
the people to enhance a tiny elite.

Any group that unites becomes powerful.  This includes
citizens.  Understanding this makes sense out of the constant
drumbeat from that faceless source of national narratives,
that manages to talk us into buying the unexplained need for
competition and individualism; as long as we go along with the
notion that we have to fight each other ruthlessly to survive
(in this land of plenty), we are weak.

Governments achieve power by dividing and weakening the
people, by telling you that your neighbor is your enemy, that
you need car alarms and deadbolts and guard dogs.  Always the
message that family comes before society, that society
snatches food from your child’s mouth, that society is a bunch
of welfare cheats.  Marginalize groups so they don’t feel
invested in society, feel threatened by society, and these
outcasts will provide the vandalism and addiction and assault
and theft needed to encourage “class” hatred and isolation. 
Make up long lists of illegal acts, and you have to build
prisons in every district of the country to hold all those
“dangerous” felons that reinforce the notion that people are
animals.  Build gated “communities” so you can brood about the
terrifying unwashed outside the gates.  For governments, there
is no more valuable resource than fear, that isolates
everyone.  Huddle in your self-imposed prison, focus on the
propaganda tube, stay out of trouble, and maybe they’ll let
you stay in their good graces.

If governments are often clumsy and heavy-handed with their
manipulation of people, corporatists are cleverer, subtler,
more unified and coherent in their tactics of control.  They
can buy the best rewriters of cultural narratives to make us
believe the most astounding lies about each other.  They can
buy any legislation they want, at the highest levels of
government.  They can reshape our culture in ways that
stimulate greed and selfishness, inequality and exclusion. 
This helps corporations get away with what any coherent
society would not allow.

What can we do to break the stranglehold that corporations
have on our society?  Thomas Linzey, of the Community
Environmental Legal Defense Fund, in a speech reprinted in
“The Hudson Valley Green Times” said that groups trying to
deal with corporate abuses are always REACTING, waiting for
corporations to do some harm and then trying to apply
regulatory rigor to repair the damage.  When local businesses
are destroyed, local lives ruined, it’s too late then to
repair the damage.  Once a cohesive community is destroyed,
there’s no putting it back together.  We can’t afford to let
corporations have free reign and then try to put things back
the way they were.  People, Linzey says, need to be proactive,
by getting local, municipal governments to declare that the
contrived legalities granted to corporations by the federal
government simply are no longer recognized in these
municipalities.  This is, apparently, a valid power that has
worked before; the Alien and Sedition Act, Linzey says, was
effectively rendered null and void by cities and towns all
across the country passing local legislation not recognizing
the authority of the federal statute.

Wow!  What a powerful tool that can be used to take back the
country from corporations!  NAFTA, of course, has language in
it that is “used to strike down state and federal laws that
‘interfere’ with commerce,” and state legislators are as much
in corporations’ pockets as federal legislators.  But, at the
local level, you can find people who are still believers in
people’s democracies (or who haven’t been bought yet).  The
power of the people is at the local level.  That is where we
have a chance of making a change.  Washington is now so
bunkered in and so thoroughly bought that we can accomplish
very little by going there looking for a just society.  You
could say that we have to fight them here at home so that we
don’t have to fight them over there.

Can you imagine how profoundly Washington could change if
there were no big corporations, and lobbyists could only offer
a few votes instead of pallet-loads of money and CEO
positions?  Congress might actually start legislating based on
bread-and-butter concerns, ideals of social justice and the
refinement of civilization.  Foreign policy would seek to make
America a good neighbor in the world community, because,
without a profit motive, only a mad dictator would start a
war.

As much as we feel the urge to take action, what we need is
thought, not haste.   We have to figure out ways to redefine
what society should be, how to make it so, what part, if any,
limited corporations should play in this society.  We need to
imagine how to translate local governance power into societal
power.  Whatever corporations, via the federal government, put
down as law that goes against the good of society will be
simply declared invalid, and whatever is good for society will
be the ultimate law of the land. 

With a clear sense that social justice IS the law of the land
BECAUSE society has more authority than the federal
government, more influence than Exxon-Mobil, we CAN remake
this land into something that we, the people, want.  We just
have to know WHAT we want.  Do we want our society to be a
lost continent of tooth and claw and night, where a dollar
less or a dollar more determines if we are vermin or people?
Or do we want better?

According to Pew Research and other pollsters, the vast
majority of Americans share many universal values. 
Respondents to a Business Week poll (“Too Much Corporate
Power?” 9/11/2000) were nearly unanimous that, if corporations
are to have the rights of a human being, they also need to
have the sense of social responsibility of a human being (One
without the other makes the perfect monster).  We’re NOT
divided, as we’re constantly being told.

If   we are to make a coherent and synergistic society from
the rubble of our ongoing civil war, we have to first take out
the civil war mongers.  Bell the capitalists at the local
level, make them socially useful again, and Washington will
follow.  It’s time to think.  Don’t look at the clock.  We
don’t have to rush, because once we know, we’ll be unstoppable