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This presumption of rivalry has gone the way of the musket and the stovepipe hat. The ludicrously pro-business policies of the past few presidents stand in sharp contrast to the words of earlier presidents. Jefferson wasn’t taking any shit from the bankers: He writes in an 1816 letter, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” Twoscore and five years later, that commie Lincoln said, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

After the Depression, FDR was of the opinion that big business hadn’t held up their end of the deal, and chastised the financial class, declaring that they had failed even on their own terms. “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” he said, “we now know that it is bad economics.” Doesn’t that sound like a breath of fresh air? Wouldn’t you, just once, love to hear a president chew out a business that blew a wad of private and public money and went bust, instead of simply helping them up, dusting them off, and writing them a check?

The past twenty years have seen a veritable orgy of industry deregulation and breaks for corporations. If you think of corporate personhood as a Pinocchio story, the election of Ronald Reagan marks the point where the Blue Fairy finally makes the wooden puppet a real boy. Reagan did deal with the old antagonism between big business and the state, but he was pitching for the other team and helped inaugurate the absurdity that is anti-government governance. He summed up the previous governments’ view of the economy thus: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Reagan insisted he would change this, and change two out of three he did. Businesses paid less tax and faced less strict regulations, but they didn’t have to worry about missing out on the rich, creamy subsidies. This was particularly so with favored industries like defense, aerospace, and energy.

Bush the Elder dismissed Reagan’s supply-side blend of heavy defense spending, reduced taxation, and attempts to balance the budget as “voodoo economics” before he joined the ticket, but proved to be a manipulator of the old chicken entrails himself once he was installed in office. His most fiscally responsible action, raising tax rates, got him booted out of office, even though it was a significant factor in the government surpluses during the Clinton administration. Those surpluses have, of course, gone down the drain, under the reign of the most corporate-friendly president of them all. Corporate tax revenues as a percentage of all tax revenues have been decreasing under Bush. According to Treasury Department figures, they fell 36 percent between 2000 and 2003, from $207 billion to $132 billion. Then, a couple of weeks before the election, Bush and the gang wrapped up their first term by passing another corporate tax cut package worth an estimated $143 billion.

Even the previously blithe Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, grew less sanguine about the administration’s pro-rich, pro-corporate policies. He repeatedly warned Bush that his proposed tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, and would lead to huge deficits. Cheney dismissed O’Neill’s fussing and fretting: “After Reagan, deficits don’t matter anymore,” quoth the vice prez. By December of 2002, O’Neill was asked to resign. In his book about his time in the inner circle,
The Price of Loyalty,
he describes the intransigent president as “a deaf man in a room full of blind people.” Whether or not you agree with that withering assessment, the fact remains that the president has always been a rich man in a room full of rich people.

The collapse of companies like Enron and WorldCom says more than I can about corporate power, and the perils of too many prevailing trends. All the typical bullshit is there: the emphasis on speculation and accounting gimmickry rather than production, the morbidly obese CEO bonuses, the disastrous effects of rapid telecom and energy deregulation, the cozy political connections, the contracts and tax breaks, the cooked books, the 401K retirement funds disappearing as loyal employees get dismissed over the phone or are given thirty minutes to pack up and leave. This is what happens when states allow corporations to do as they wish, and to flout the laws of the land. This is what happens when bullshit artists are allowed to flourish, their phony empires unimpeded by regulation or scrutiny. They certainly weren’t scrutinizing themselves, and seemed utterly enthralled with their own feats of bullshit artistry.
The New York Times
ran a lovely photo of the paperweights management used to hand out to Enron employees. They were smooth polished rocks emblazoned with the corporate logo and the word
Integrity,
which introduces the possibility of a deliciously ironic stoning in lieu of jail time.

The corporation is a wonderful way to privatize vast amounts of wealth, while externalizing factors like labor costs, production costs, and costs for raw materials. Externalizing is biz-school speak for making someone else pay, and that’s what corporations do every time they leave a big smelly mess for citizens and taxpayers to clean up and sort out, be that in the form of GE dumping PCBs in the Hudson or the financial fallout of the WorldCom bankruptcy filing. Call me old-school, call me paleo-Pennsylvanian, but the appalling behavior of a number of corporate persons makes a little of that antiquated “injurious to the citizens” clause sound pretty good to me. I’m glad to be living among the glorious bounty that corporations have cranked out, of course, but I hardly think it traitorous for us, the real, to say something like, could we please cut it out with the poo puddles, mass firings, insulting wages, denial of benefits, rampant profiteering, flagrant tax evasion, and floods of brain-, white-, and hogwash?

If you find this request impertinent, if it offends your free-market loyalties, just think of how lousy your neighborhood would be if all the real people started doing the kinds of things artificial people get away with. Put it to the Kant test. What if everyone did it? What if everyone behaved like the artificial people? Would it kill ’em to pay their fair share and clean up after themselves? That’s the least we ask of real people. Why don’t we demand it from the artificial people, the world’s Ltds and Cos and Incs?

This is one of my vintage gripes. If this bad juju were Scotch, it would be aged to perfection. I grew up in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. If you’ve heard of Cape Breton, which is about as far east and north as you can go in Canada before you find yourself swimming to Newfoundland, it’s probably for one of three reasons. There’s the culture thing: maybe you’ve heard of writer Alistair McLeod, or fiddler Ashley McIsaac. There’s the pristine natural beauty of landmarks like the Cabot Trail. And then there’s the giant toxic lake of tar in Sydney, arguably the largest open environmental disaster in Canada, a leftover from the long-gone steel industry.

The Sydney Steel Plant is as sad an example of artificial-people power gone horribly awry as one could ever hope to find. It’s a monument to the slow painful death of North American manufacturing, and the loss of the job security that went with it. I don’t want to romanticize the factory: the work was dirty and unhealthy. But at least factory workers were well paid, unlike their coevals in multinational manufacturing today, and their counterparts in rapidly growing fields like the service industry. Those good jobs were what justified the growing puddle of goo; besides, no one really figured out definitively until at least the eighties that industrial shit could hurt you. Once the jobs started to go, and only the waste remained, we all started to notice it more—not like it’s exactly hidden or anything. In fact, the tar pond is a couple of miles away from the main mall downtown, which is but a block away from my old high school, fantastically bad city planning on both counts. Moreover, Sydney was no more forward-looking with its human wastes than it was with its industrial ones. All that went, and continues to go, straight into the harbor. A network of creeks and brooks runs throughout downtown, connecting the harbor, the ponds in the park, and the great big lake of toxic tar. For some strange reason, Sydney’s cancer and unemployment rates are higher than the national average.

I haven’t even gotten to the insane part yet, which is that governments have thrown millions and millions of dollars at the mess, either trying to keep the dying corp up and running, or whoring for new industries. If they had pitched all the money straight into the pond, it would have been plugged up, if not cleaned up, a long time ago. My father particularly savored the tale of Hustler Industries (I kid you not). They got an incentive package from the government and the jobs lasted less than a year before the board of directors cried bankrupt and bailed, like so many other less aptly named ventures.

If you want to see what years of corporate mismanagement and government waste look like, hie thee to the thumping heart of downtown Sydney. Gaze out upon that great big gross lake of deadly goo. Given the current state of the cleanup plan, which nobody wants to pay for, it should be there for a good long while. I like my niceties as much as anyone, but there’s something about that pond of poison tar smack dab in the middle of my hometown that leaves me a smidge skeptical about the glories of the free market and the wisdom of the government. And when those two hold hands and get smoochy, you had better watch out.

Fat state subsidies for corporations are not just bad policy. They’re bad economics. When corporations and states get too cozy, it brings out the worst in both of them. You get the inefficiency and glacial slowness of bad government mixed with the shortsighted greed of big business on a tear. And this seems to happen whether they cuddle up for right-wing reasons, or ostensibly lefty ones. Under the Reagan-Bush model, you end up with lax regulatory agencies, inordinate subsidies and tax breaks, and a lack of corporate accountability to the community. Under a state-owned Crown corporation like Sydney Steel, you end up with lax regulatory agencies, inordinate subsidies and tax breaks, and a lack of corporate accountability to the community.

If people are going to flap their lips about the glories of the free market, maybe we should try having one first. It would be swell to put a little capitalism back in the capitalism, and a little governance back in the government. The entitlements that corporations enjoy are not merely unfair. They’re also antithetical to competition, which is supposedly one of the engines that drives our glorious economy. This lack of competition leads to a lack of choice as well. Not a lack of choice between products; nope, there are plenty of those. Why, you could pick and choose from thousands of just one product—like a computer, say. But the odds are pretty good that whatever computer you buy, it’s going to be running Windows, and the chips inside will come from one of the couple of companies that dominate the industry. No matter what we buy, all our money pretty much ends up in the same few places. The wrappers and the ads are different, but the same few folks, artificial and real, pick up the bucks. Most sectors today are dominated by a few colluding concerns, which hardly squares with classical economic notions like transparency, competition, and free trade.

The global marketplace is riddled with de facto monopolies and oligarchies, neither of which Adam Smith was down with back in the day. When Smith was writing about businesses, he meant something more like a small business, so that the owner’s interests were bound up with the quality of the product. Today’s free market bears little resemblance to Smith’s version of the market: instead of running itself via Invisible Hand, our markets are inextricably entwined with the world’s governments, propped up on a cushion of subsidies and reclining on lax laws.

It is clear that corporations excel at churning up a profit. What is unclear is exactly how much we all pay so that they may do so, and what we get out of it. When those profits are skimmed off the top and handed out to CEOs and major shareholders, they aren’t shared with mutual fund and pension plan investors, or plowed back into the continued health of the company or into the care and feeding of its workers or into the management of wastes the company produces or into the quality of its products and services. The past twenty years demonstrate that corporations will not invest in such long-term interests, let alone serve the public good, unless they are made to do so, either by law or by force of consumer, shareholder, and employee ire. Corporations evade taxes, cook their books, create big toxic messes, and screw their workers for the best possible reasons: because they can; because it pays; because we, the chumps, are willing to pay for it so long as we get our little sliver of the tasty pie.

The Bush administration has another term to keep on out-Reaganing Reagan, slashing taxes on the rich, spending billions on defense, and racking up record-breaking deficits. After the 2000 debacle, a friend pointed out the limited upside of the election of a fresh batch of familiar Republicans: at least music would get better. He rhymed off lists of great Reagan/ Thatcher–era singles, angry desperate rawk and melancholy pop fueled by the general sense of economic and social malaise, like old REM and the Clash, the kind of stuff you hear at a bar on Retro Night. And it started to make sense; Reagan begetting Bush begetting Bush,
Dynasty
sequins and Sid Vicious belts on the runways, the new sad punks, the same old shite. We are living in the undead eighties, all the more powerful for coming back from the dead, like Jesus and zombies. Culture wars, a new evil empire, that Jennifer Lopez video that is
Flashdance
—it’s the eighties all over again, even though they only just happened. Now that Dubya is back for four more years, one Retro Night track strikes me as especially apropos: a song by the marvelously mopey Smiths from their 1987 release,
Strangeways, Here We Come,
a bitter little ditty called “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”