Tea parties for economic democracy

"Ultimately, we must design a corporate system in which all economic rights are equally protected, not only the rights of shareholders," Marjorie Kelly, author of The Divine Right of Capital, says in an interview with Hope magazine (3-4/02). "We start by changing our minds, by changing our internal pictures of reality that tell us shareholder primacy is normal and legitimate. The way to do that is with pranks. How did the American Revolution start? Not with writing laws, but with folks dressing up like Indians and throwing tea off ships. It started with a prank. Same with the feminist revolution, where women crashed the Miss America pageant, and did a sit-in at The Ladies' Home Journal. We need some great pranks. I'd love to see some folks stage a sit-in at Business Week or Fortune, and refuse to leave until they put out a special issue on economic democracy. Or, in the spirit of Rosa Parks, refusing to sit in the back of the bus. How about employees running John Q. Employee for the board of directors? They could put up bogus campaign posters all over the company and wear sandwich-boards at the stockholders meeting: "No Governance Without Representation." It might lead to some interesting conversations with the press: Why can't employees run for the board? Aren't employees part of the corporation? ... At our web site, DivineRightofCapital.com, we're hoping to encourage tea parties like these around the country. ... Pranks help us wake up. And they allow us to have fun along the way -- which is the only way to do things, when you are a marginalized group fighting a huge entrenched power. You've got to be light-hearted. You need esprit-de-corps, so you don't feel overwhelmed. The aim is to educate people that the problem isn't greedy executives or evil individual corporations like EXXON. The problem is the system design. The problem is state law that says corporations exist only to maximize gains for shareholders."

Forks can lift a culture

"Europeans, along with many Asians, too, look at agriculture as a culture," David Andrews, executive director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, said in an interview with U.S. Catholic (3/02). "They want to keep the landscape, the villages, the farmers on the land; they want to keep a food system that's nutritious, healthy and safe. They invest heavily in the cultures of rural communities.

"I think the way we in the U.S. maintain ties to our rural roots is through country music. The Europeans do it by way of public policy. Here in the U.S. we've valued the music but not the land or the farmers or the villages.

"When people go shopping, they look for the cheapest food. They don't realize that their fork is a powerful lever. Change could happen if people who eat -- and I don't know too many who don't -- would think about how the food got to their fork, about whom they bought it from, and about what impact this food has on the environment, on farmers, on their own nutrition. ...

"Europeans are willing to pay up to 20 percent of their income on food because they care more about the food they eat. We pay 9 to 10 percent -- of course poorer communities pay a lot more. Actually between our doctor bills, health clubs, and subsidies to large food companies, not to mention the taxpayer bills for environmental cleanup, we pay plenty. If we looked at our fork as a lever that can lift a culture, we'd realize our food choices carry a lot of power."

Nuclear "firewall" crumbling

The Pentagon's nuclear policy review, revealed in March, is a culmination of a movement over the past several years "to make nuclear weapons more 'usable,' or pertinent, in a world troubled by terrorism, rogue dictators, crumbling Russian might and ascending Chinese power," Raffi Khatchadourian writes in the April 1 issue of The Nation. "The review states that countries such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Libya should be added to nuclear targeting plans. It also advocates new, smaller nuclear weapons that would be incorporated into conventional war-making tactics. However, these ideas have long been in the making.

"If current policy does not change course, 20 years from now we could experience the following: Rather than pursue the path to total nuclear disarmament, Washington will command a new class of small-scale atomic weapons intended for use on the battlefield. The cold war arsenal will have been substantially reduced, but in case unforeseen threats arise, the deactivated warheads will have gone into storage, rather than been destroyed. Meanwhile, America's remaining cold war atomic weapons will be targeted not just at Russia but also at an array of developing countries. The conceptual firewall currently separating nuclear weapons from conventional ones will have largely crumbled, and the United States will have openly abandoned its unwillingness to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear threats."

Disembodied finance

The largely invisible system of international finance is more destructive than global trade, former Jubilee 2000 coordinator Ann Pettifor said in an interview with Megan Rowling (In These Times, 3/18/02).

"'You know, the anti-corporate left sometimes gets it wrong,' [Pettifor] confides. 'They focus on what they can see and touch, which is trade. And because the international financial regime isn't visible, it isn't attacked. But in reality, it has a much greater power of determination than trade.'

"It's not McDonald's or Nike that rule our world," [Pettifor] argues -- 'at least they make things' -- but the international giants of the banking world like J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup. 'The problem with globalization lies in the liberalization of cash flows, [not] trade flows. Those who own capital operate in a global economy detached from real political, social and environmental relations. And this detachment has not come about accidentally' -- it is a result of 'structural imbalances' that have been deliberately constructed by those in power."

Cincinnati reaches racial-profiling agreement

In early April, negotiators in Cincinnati reached a tentative agreement on steps to end racial profiling in the city. The agreement was the result of a year-long collaborative process undertaken as a result of a civil rights lawsuit filed by the Cincinnati Black United Front with the A.C.L.U.

"The proposal includes a court-sanctioned monitor to oversee the agreed-upon changes in police training and patrolling," The New York Times reported (4/4/02). "It also provides for a new Citizens Complaint Authority intended to allow the public a more responsive way of filing grievances against police officers. ...

"Mayor Luken requested a Justice Department inquiry into the city's policing methods last April after four days of street protests and violence followed the fatal shooting of a young black man by the police. The Justice Department recommendations for improving police methods eventually became part of the agreement. ...

"The unusual collaborative process, conducted under federal court oversight, was an alternative to full-scale litigation. Negotiators sought a wide spectrum of proposals in interviews and meetings with 3,500 people, including police officers, residents of all ethnic groups and government officials."