Reclaim Democracy!

Restoring Citizen Authority over Corporations

Snuffing Runaway Corporate Power at the Source: Our Money

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“If you don’t like the growth of giant corporations, stop giving them your money,” said Jeff Milchen (Reclaim Democracy’s Executive Director at the time) in 1997. While this does not suggest exercising our power as consumers is sufficient by itself to solve the problem of runaway corporate power, we too often find the importance of our spending choices overlooked or diminished in the work to revitalize democracy. Since most of the world’s largest corporations sell directly to consumers, we certainly do have much to gain by finding opportunities to decentralize power with our own purchases.

Milchen later went on to found the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), a non-profit organization helping communities build vibrant local economies based on independent community-based businesses rather than absentee-owned companies. It also builds a genuine pro-small business / pro-community voice to counter the corporate advocacy of entities like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which often pretend to speak for small business. While AMIBA focuses heavily on providing direct support to the community organizations that comprise its indie-week-douglas-quotemembership, it also coordinates two national campaigns each year.

Independents Week is a campaign that occurs the first week of July each year. While AMIBA provides a wide array of templates and support material, the campaign is executed through community organizations and individuals around the country. Independents Week engages citizens in celebrating entrepreneurial spirit and the freedom to control one’s own livelihood, rather than being dependent corporations. It also emphasizes the importance of local ownership and control for communities and affirms citizens’ role in shaping their community’s future.

We encourage readers to recognize both the value of integrating a pro-local business perspective with work to revoke illegitimate corporate power, and make clear that one can be an active advocate for community-based businesses while working to stop corporations from wielding illegitimate power.

Taking advantage of the ready-made tools for Independents Week is one simple step that just might spark interest in more ambitious initiatives, such as starting an Independent Business Alliance to differentiate between the interests of Wall St. and Main St., and help your hometown businesses prevent corporatization of your community.

 

Exxon CEO Now Concerned About Local Fracking Impacts…In His Community

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By Dr. Walter Brasch

Rex W. Tillerson, a resident of Bartonville, Texas, like many of his neighbors was upset with his city council. That’s not unusual. Many residents get upset at their local governing boards. And so they went to a city council meeting to express their concerns that the council was about to award a construction permit.

The residents were upset that the Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp. planned to build a 160-foot tall water tower. That tower would be adjacent to an 83-acre horse farm Tillerson and his wife owned, and not far from their residence. The residents protested, and then filed suit to stop construction. The tower would store water to be sold to companies that needed it for high-volume horizontal fracturing of oil and gas wells, the process known as fracking.

Each well requires three to nine million gallons of water, up to 10,000 tons of silica sand, and 100,000 gallons of toxic, often carcinogen, chemicals. The process of horizontal fracking, about a decade old, to extract oil and gas from the earth presents severe health and environmental problems.

The residents, all of whom are in the visual distance to the water tower, said that construction of the water tower would impact their views. They argued that during construction and after the tower was built, there would be excessive traffic and noise.

Michael Whitten, who represents Tillerson, told the Wall Street Journal his client was primarily concerned about the impact the tower would have upon property values. The plaintiffs bought their homes so they could live in an “upscale community free of industrial properties, tall buildings and other structures that might devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy,” according to the suit.

Rex W. Tillerson isn’t your typical resident. He’s the CEO and the chairman of the board of ExxonMobil, the third largest corporation in the world, and the company that leads all others in exploring, drilling, extracting, and selling oil and gas. It’s also a company that has had more than its share of political, social, and environmental problems. Tillerson was an engineer when the Exxon Valdez fouled the western shore of the United States in 1989. By 2004, he was the company’s president.

In 2012, Tillerson was given $40.3 million in compensation, including salary, bonus, and stock options, according to Bloomberg News. His company had $453 billion in revenue for the year, and a net income of $45 billion.

When you have that much money, every million or so dollars matters, especially if a large ugly tower impacts not just your view but your quality of life and the value of your property.

Large ugly rigs, the kind that go up when ExxonMobil and other companies begin fracking the earth, also affect the people. The well pads average about eight acres, mostly cut from forests and agricultural areas. Access roads, some of which upset or destroy the ecological balance of nature, need to be built. Other roads receive heavier-than-normal damage because of the number of trucks, often more than 200 a day, that travel to each well site.

As early as 2010, a PennDOT official told the Pennsylvania state legislature that the cost, at that time, to fix the roads was over $260 million. Increased diesel emissions, concentrated in agricultural areas, also affect the health and safety of the people.

The noise from the traffic and from around-the-clock drilling affect the people, causing stress and numerous health issues, according to psychologists Diane Siegmund and Kathryn Vennie, both of whom live in the Marcellus Shale part of Pennsylvania.

When the rigs go up, property values decrease. Banks and mortgage companies are refusing to lend money to families who wish to take out second mortgages or who wish to buy property that has wells on it or is even near a well pad. Insurance companies are not writing policies, even if the homeowner opposes drilling but whose home is near those well pads.

In 2012, Rex W. Tillerson said that opponents of fracking are manufacturing fear, and then laid out a corporate truth when he said that his company has in place “risk mitigation and risk management practices . . . to ensure [oil and gas development] can be developed in a way that mitigates risk—it doesn’t eliminate it, but when you put it into the risk versus benefit balance, it comes back into a balance that most reasonable people in society would say, ‘I can live with that.’”

Thus, the energy industry is telling the people there will be accidents. There will be deaths. There will be health and environmental consequences. But, they are acceptable because “mitigation” allows a corporation to accept errors, injuries, illnesses, environmental destruction, and even death if they believe there is a “greater [financial] good” that outweighs those risks.

It is the same argument that Ford used in the 1970s when it decided not to recall and repair the Pinto because it estimated the cost to pay compensation for injuries and deaths from faulty construction would be significantly less than the cost of a recall.

There is something more about Rex W. Tillerson. He’s proud of his association with the Boy Scouts. He’s a former Eagle Scout and was president of the national Boy Scouts of America. (Both the Boy Scouts and ExxonMobil have their headquarters in Irving, Texas.)

Part of the Scout Oath is to “do your duty to God and your country.” A partial interpretation of that is “by working for your country’s good and obeying its laws, you do your duty to your country.” Within the past six months, ExxonMobil has paid more than $5 million in fines and penalties for not obeying the country’s laws.

The 12th part of the Scout Law is to be reverent. A widely-accepted interpretation of that law, according to Scouting Trail, is: “As a Scout experiences the wonders of the outdoors, stormy weather and calm blue skies, pounding surf and trickling streams, bitter cold and stifling heat, towering trees and barren desert, he experiences the work of God. . . . We need to play the role of steward rather than king—tending and caring for our world instead of taking all we can for our own comfort.”

Protesting the construction of a water tower because it might lower property values, even for selfish purposes, is Tillerson’s right as a citizen. But, destroying God’s world to maximize your profits is not his right.

Guest commentator Dr. Brasch, an Eagle Scout and an award-winning journalist, is the author of 20 books. His latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, an in-depth investigation of the economic, political, environmental, and health effects of fracking.

NY Times Rails Against Fake Drugs, but Ignores the Role of Corporate Power in Creating the Demand

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by Reclaim Democracy staff
December 3, 2012

a victim of fake drugs? Among the many awful consequences of  many essential pharmaceuticals being priced beyond the reach of those who need them is the proliferation of fake drugs. While some counterfeit drugs are  manufactured by unauthorized producers and simply flout patent law, less scrupulous people are making pills or serums with no active ingredients or even toxic substances.

It’s a deadly problem in need of solutions, so it’s unsurprising the New York Times devoted a recent editorial to “The Problem of Fake and Useless Drugs.”But while the Times editors called for several sensible measures, they did readers a huge disservice by neglecting to mention the primary reason why fake drugs are so prevalent: federal actions that ban market competition, creating artificially high prices that are unaffordable to many who need them.

First, our patent laws grant pharmaceutical corporations long monopolies on essential drugs — even though a majority of the most medically-significant drugs derive from taxpayer-funded research (a situation we described a decade ago, but continues today). These exclusive patents enable companies to charge prices unrelated to costs of research and development or production. *

Further, pharmaceutical corporations routinely employ legal manipulations, illicit non-compete agreements and other tactics to further extend patent monopolies and block production of generic competitors that lower prices.

To make matters worse, federal laws ban importation of drugs or even re-importation of genuine drugs manufactured here. Under the guise of protecting consumers from counterfeit drugs, such laws enable gouging that forces us to regularly pay double or triple the price people pay for identical drugs in other nations, driving the demand for cheap counterfeits.

Of course, when privately-funded research yields an important new drug, the creators should be able to reap significant rewards in order to create strong incentives for real research and development. The trouble is, our present patent system rewards political power above innovation.

And when drugs are developed with publicly-funded research, we should contract private companies to produce them at a fair profit, not give away rights to valuable public property.

We’ve been thrilled to see the Times editors call for amending the Constitution twice in recent months to revoke the runaway political power of corporations, in recent months. This excessive power over agencies that purportedly serve the public underlies the tragedy of fraudulent drugs and the lives they claim.

The  arguments by the NY Times editors, and those made by all who call to revoke corporate personhood, will possess more power if they make such real-life impacts clear.

* See, for example, the current controversy over the AIDS drug Norvir.

Sources for further reading on this topic:

image courtesy bayat