[Reader-list] Corporate Dominance of Every Aspects of Our Lives Is Suffocating Us (By Helaine Olen, in AlterNet. )

[Venugopalan K M]

http://www.alternet.org/media/141828/corporate_dominance_of_every_aspects_of_our_lives_is_suffocating_us/?page=entire



Corporate Dominance of Every Aspects of Our Lives Is Suffocating us

By Helaine Olen, AlterNet. Posted August 7, 2009.

Author Doug Rushkoff warns of the dominance of profit and consumerism
in our mindsets, and offers a way out of the corporate culture.
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Are we all corporate shills? That's the thesis of Doug Rushkoff's
provocative new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and
How to Take it Back.

Rushkoff, the new media theorist who came up with the term "viral
media" in the early 1990s to describe how advertising concepts
replicate in the virtual world like fast moving viruses, is now
arguing that the corporate values of business, profit, and consumerism
have so infected our lives that we are no longer cognizant life can be
lived any other way. We are victims of a dysfunctional societal
relationship -- one that has come to seem so normal we are almost
incapable of processing of how screwed up it really is.

The corporation, one might say, has gone viral.

Rushkoff's epiphany came via a Christmas Eve mugging in the leafy
brownstone liberal Brooklyn enclave of Park Slope. When he turned to a
local parenting listserv to tell of his experience, his virtual first
responders did not offer sympathy. Instead, they castigated him for
publicly naming the block where the crime occurred, for fear it would
damage local real estate values.

"It's as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward
self-interested, short-term decisions, made more in the manner of
corporate shareholders than members of a society," Rushkoff writes.
"The more decisions we make in this way, the more we contribute to the
very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape."

The corporation developed in the Renaissance, as royal governments
attempted to hold onto their power and wealth in the face of rising
capitalist merchant class tide. Corporations, in a sense, even founded
the United States; We forget that colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth
were not simply go-it-alone adventurers and religious zealots seeking
wealth and religious freedom, but were sponsored by chartered business
enterprises.

The corporation's most recent heyday occurred post World War II, where
government officials, desperate to avoid another calamitous economic
depression and violent upheaval, instead convinced Americans of the
value of consumerism and business to save our lives. We are now living
with the results of that decision. Everything from the deserted and
boarded up main streets of our small suburban towns to the
winner-take-all financial economy of bloated bonuses, banking crashes
and flat-out fraud is the result.

So what to do? Rushkoff argues the answer is within all of us. Think
local, think small, think about your community as a collection of
individuals in need of help and support, not a temporary real estate
investment. In the end, his message has much in common with another
cri di coeur of 21st century American life, Sam Lipsyte's 2005 novel
Home Land. In his marvelous speech near the end of the book, Home
Land's narrator/protagonist Lewis Minor tells his fellow high school
alumni how to live their lives, which includes many of the points
Rushkoff hits on in his non-fiction jeremiad. "Don't expect a goddamn
handout from the very people who have worked so hard to hijack your
opportunities …Have faith. Take stock. Take five. Never surrender.
Live to fight another day. Better a dead dog than sleeping all the
time."

AlterNet sat down with Rushkoff recently to discuss how the
corporation became us and what we can do to recover.


Helaine Olen:  How do we internalize corporate values?  How does it happen?

Doug Rushkoff:  It happens over time. What happens is corporations
like automobile industry have a need for roads or the energy industry
has a need for regulation that doesn't let people use solar. So they
go to government and get laws written that change -- they get laws
written to get the things they want.  So they basically steer the rail
road through the real estate that they want to own or the automobile
industry wants more people to use cars, so they get their guy in to be
Secretary of Defense and he builds roads for cars and develop suburbs
that require people to use cars to get to work.  The next generation
that grows up with things being that way, thinks that things just are
that way.  So the way we internalize corporate values is by assuming
that the rules that are in place are pre-existing conditions of the
universe rather than rules made by certain people at certain times.

Helaine Olen:  Do you think Americans are susceptible to the lure of
corporate values than other nations? We were founded as a corporation.
Jamestown was sponsored by a corporation. So was the Mayflower. Is it
in our blood?

Doug Rushkoff:  What's in our blood more it is the need to believe. We
are very, we are idealistic, optimistic, Calvinist spiritual people.
So we have got that Frank Baum yellow brick road and that longing for
heaven for reward that disconnects us from the moment That's why we
are so susceptible to consumerism and propaganda. It's so beautiful
that we want to believe. But the belief itself is disconnecting.

Helaine Olen:  When do you feel it took off in this country? Reaganism
is the traditional blame period but in Life Inc. you reference an
earlier period.

Doug Rushkoff:  I would say that the last great reset moment we could
have had was when veterans were returning from World War II. FDR and
his administration feared that the veterans would be crazy and have
all this civil unrest. The government with folks like the Levitt
Brothers to develop communities that isolated men from one another,
focus them on the nuclear family and pre-occupied them instead with
collecting consumer goods which would in turn keep the industrial age
economy growing as needed to.

Helaine Olen: One on one level you could say it worked. We've not had
a major war in 60 yrs. Is that a bad thing?

Doug Rushkoff:  It worked but there are some consequences to the way
it worked.  In order to keep the economy growing at that rate,  we had
to create a consumer society of people looking for short term
satisfaction over long term work.  We ended up creating an economy
that's much more dependent on speculation than it is the creation of
real goods.  We ended up having to expand through use of geopolitical
terror because colonialism was over.  So we ended up really destroying
lot of developing nations in order to develop ourselves and we ended
up in the long run bankrupting ourselves.

Helaine Olen:  It was a temporary fix then?

Doug Rushkoff:  It was a temporary fix, I mean everything is a
temporary fix when you look at it as a fix which is why we have got to
the point where, we are going to have to learn to do something and
create, we are going to have to create value.

Helaine Olen:  So we are going to back to reset again?

Doug Rushkoff:  Right, either we would have to create value or the
other alternative is to develop a fiscal policy that's based on model
of abundance rather than the model of scarcity. Creating scarce
markets for things works really well when there is a scarce market for
things. If we can flip that and think or maybe an act we actually have
enough food and stuff that we could probably, I couldn't do believe
this we could get by in just America, we could probably each of those
work maybe two days a week and have all the stuff we need.

Helaine Olen:  Does the Internet help us or does it hurt us? The
Internet was supposed to save us from all this but it seems to have
turned into uber-Big Brother instead. Was it always oversold, did
corporate interest infiltrate it or are we so corporate ourselves we
made it in our image?

Doug Rushkoff:  We are just simply corporate ourselves and we made it
in our image again. The computer and Internet are modeling systems and
we could have used them to model anything and we chose to use them to
model the economy as we currently understood it, but we are still in
the beginning we are still in the opening rallies.  So I think the...
the beauty of the Internet is that it has made people understand an
abundant economy.

Helaine Olen: So how do you work for that?

Doug Rushkoff:  Convincing people to stop outsourcing all of their
economic activity, consumption and production to extremely inefficient
long distance corporations that extract the human value without
creating any values. You lose all your leverage. That's not to say
that everyone has to do everything in some protest against every
corporation out there but what if you reclaim the 90% of stuff that
you can do locally or with friends and just give corporations 10% of
what they need?  It's the most activist  thing you can do. Just the
idea that people are now going to save maybe eight percent instead of
three percent of their money has people shuddering in finance.

Helaine Olen:  Just start with one small step . . .

Doug Rushkoff:  That one small step is so big.

Helaine Olen:  You talked about how that corporation was created
during the Renaissance.  Why does it persist?

Doug Rushkoff:  It persisted because kings rewrote laws to preserve
corporations whenever I mean corporation. Corporations were invented
by kings as a way they could make money by having money and creating
no value themselves.  So they granted monopoly charters to their
friends in return for shares in those companies. And it persisted
because the kings were able to write laws that gave corporations
unfair advantage at every term.  So whenever corporations have been
threatened by some form of competition or another, the king or in our
era government ends up rewriting the laws to favor corporate activity
over competitive local, small business activity. It's just corruption.

Helaine Olen:  One thing I like about your book was, one said it was
not traditionally political, I mean,  you start out by attacking your
former rather left wing neighborhood as much as more traditional right
wing bugaboos.

Doug Rushkoff:  They are not left wing. They convince us of their
virtue by voting for Obama or holding meet ups or buying their stuff
from the people who advertise on a new green shopping portal instead
of some other shopping portal. In the end, virtue is not a consumer
profile. Virtue is a way of actually engaging with other people in
real life.

Helaine Olen:  What do you think of Barack Obama?

Doug Rushkoff:  He went wrong.

Helaine Olen:  Are you surprised?

Doug Rushkoff:  I am surprised because I know that Obama is smarter
than me. I know that he is, but I think he has a false faith or
misplaced faith in central bureaucracies and institutions and he
really believes that the way to save the economy is to bail out
banking.

The second problem is that the people he is entrusted to enact that
model are Goldman Sachs executives and corrupt.  So even if the model
he thought would work could work, the people he is paying to do it are
keeping the money. It's as corrupt as corrupt gets.

Helaine Olen:  So what do you do?

Doug Rushkoff:  I don't think you say fuck it, they are unjust, they
are bad people they are doing bad shit affair with that money.  What
you do is you say that economy they are working in has nothing to do
with me. I am going to, I am going to work two days a week at the
community support agriculture that's close by, I am going to volunteer
in my public school or work in a library.  I am going to just
disconnect from that economy and realize that dropping out is not
dropping out, dropping out of that is dropping back in to the real
world.

They have claimed the virtual world and they built that and they have
convinced us that is where the action is.  The action is not there,
the action is here with your kids and the food and water that are
going into their little cells everyday and that thing that they are
doing up there can't last forever. It really can't.

-- 



You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot
build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you
will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a
whole.
-AMBEDKAR



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