dear Jill, me too I am a subscriber of this list only since very few weeks, and
now I find that most postings are about Al Rushanan`s private problems he has
with feminist women. Of what use is it for women to teach men feminism over and
over again,not having time for the questions concerning us? You say that he
sometimes has new arguments - I "heard" him once saying that no person in this
world should be oppressed. Revolutionary, indeed. I find his statements boring
and/or offending, and I am not the only woman thinking this way. So I am a litt
le bit astonished that you defend him. I would love to discuss what could be th
e special link between ecology and feminism (despite the wellknown gender troub
les at ecological action and structure of action groups), but I just don`t want
to think "loudly" about feminism with a person uttering such narcistic and wom
an-offending statements - I just could not say a single word of critique.
Someone proposed we should just ignore those "macho" postings
and go back to the themes of our interest, and she was right, so pleas let us
not make Al`s problems our own any more.
Sincerely, Claudia
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Jul 6 08:01:06 1995
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 10:01:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jennifer Greenamoyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: bravery
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In-Reply-To: <A11ZVVLDTQCS*/R=DER/R=A1/U=RUSHANAN_A/@MHS>
let's please stop this. nothing seems to be getting resolved this way. I
don't have any suggestions as to a 'better' way. only that I would like to
move on.
I have had discussions with people about how everyone is so brave on
electronic communications, saying things they would never say in person, I
think this may play a role in many of the recent nasty exchanges. Has
anyone else run into situtations like this? at work, in one case, some of
us were told not to use electronic communications anymore...we had to pick
up the phone!
On Thu, 6 Jul 1995, Al Rushanan TAL (904)487-1855 wrote:
> Lorraine:
> If you're so concerned about this list getting "messed up," may
> I ask why you redundantly posted 5 messages of mine back to the
> list (where they were already posted) without any response? Is
> something wrong with your computer?
> Al
>
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Jul 6 08:49:58 1995
MR-Received: by mta DER1; Relayed; Thu, 06 Jul 1995 10:51:36 -0500
MR-Received: by mta EPIC66; Relayed; Thu, 06 Jul 1995 10:51:38 -0500
Alternate-recipient: prohibited
Date: Thu, 06 Jul 1995 10:46:03 -0500 (EST)
From: "Al Rushanan TAL (904)487-1855" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RACHEL
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Posting-date: Thu, 06 Jul 1995 10:51:00 -0500 (EST)
Importance: normal
UA-content-id: A39ZVVLFIMJB
A1-type: MAIL
Hop-count: 2
The latest issue of RACHEL (below) looks like an excellent outline
on corporate behavior. Rule number 5 ties in directly to
ecofeminism:
I N T E R O F F I C E M E M O R A N D U M
Date: 05-Jul-1995 05:27pm EST
From: montague
[EMAIL PROTECTED]@PMDF@EPIC66
Dept:
Tel No:
SUNCOM:
TO: erf ( [EMAIL PROTECTED]@PMDF@EPIC66 )
Subject: CORPORATE BEHAVIOR
=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #449
---July 6, 1995---
HEADLINES:
CORPORATE BEHAVIOR
==========
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
==========
To subscribe, send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It's free.
Back issues available via anonymous ftp from
ftp.std.com/periodicals/rachel and from gopher.std.com
=================================================================
CORPORATE BEHAVIOR
In an editorial last month (6/18), the NEW YORK TIMES noted that
the environment of the Western states is under siege by
commercial interests (grazing, mining, timber, developers, big
commercial farmers), and a small but noisy group of property
rights activists, engaged together in a full-scale mutiny against
Federal and state regulations meant to protect what is left of
America's natural resources. "The war in the west and the war in
Congress on basic environmental protections have much in common,"
the TIMES said. "First, both are being driven and in some cases
underwritten by big business. Second, both are being waged to
save the 'little guy' from Federal tyranny. Third, this alleged
little guy is nowhere to be found when the time comes to draft
crippling legislation. Indeed, his wishes have been largely
ignored. Poll after poll suggests that what ordinary citizens
want is more environmental protection if it means a cleaner
environment and a healthier society."
Most citizens want the environment protected, but Congress and
the states are giving us the opposite. How does that happen?
The short answer is "money in politics." Legislators are
beholden to the individuals and corporations who provide
mountains of cash for election campaigns. The solution to that
problem is public financing of elections.
But the full answer is a bit deeper than that. The commercial
interests destroying the environment world-wide are not just "bad
people" or crooks. They literally can't help themselves because
of the kind of organization that propels their behavior: the
corporation. Successful advertising executive Jerry Mander writes
that, "The corporation is not as subject to human control as most
people believe it is; rather, it is an autonomous technical
structure that behaves by a system of logic uniquely well suited
to its primary function: to give birth and impetus to profitable
new technological forms, and to spread techno-logic around the
globe."[1]
Mander suggests 11 rules that describe corporate behavior, which
we offer here in shortened form (we urge you to get and read the
original, which is eloquent):
1. The Profit Imperative: Profit is the ultimate measure of all
corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community
well-being, worker health, public health, peace, environmental
preservation or national security. Corporations will even find
ways to trade with national "enemies"--Libya, Iran, the Soviet
Union, Cuba --when public policy abhors it. The profit
imperative and the growth imperative are the most fundamental
corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's
instinct to "live."
2. The Growth Imperative: Corporations live or die by whether
they can sustain growth. On this depends relationships to
investors, to the stock market, to banks and to public
perception. The growth imperative also fuels the corporate
desire to find and develop scarce resources in obscure parts of
the world.
3. Competition and Aggression: Corporations place every person
in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone
interested in a corporate career must hone his or her abilities
to seize the moment. This applies to gaining an edge over another
company or over a colleague within the company. As an employee,
you are expected to be part of the "team," but you also must be
ready to climb over your own colleagues.
Corporate (or athletic) ideology holds that competition improves
worker incentive and corporate performances and therefore
benefits society. Our society has accepted this premise utterly.
Unfortunately, however, it also surfaces in personal
relationships. Living by standards of competition and aggression
on the job, human beings have few avenues to express softer, more
personal feelings.
4. Amorality: Not being human, corporations do not have morals or
altruistic goals. So decisions that may be antithetical to
community goals or environmental health are made without
misgivings. In fact, corporate executives praise
"nonemotionality" as a basis for "objective" decisions.
Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt
to act as if they were altruistic. Lately, there has been a
concerted effort by American industry to seem concerned with
environmental cleanup, community arts or drug programs.
It is a fair rule of thumb that corporations tend to advertise
the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative
public perceptions. When corporations say "we care," it is
almost always in response to the widespread perception that they
do not care. And they don't. How could they? They don't have
feelings or morals.
5. Hierarchy: Corporate law requires that corporations be
structured into classes of superiors and subordinates within a
centralized pyramidal structure: chairman, directors, chief
executive officer, vice presidents, division managers, and so on.
The efficiency of this hierarchical form, which also
characterizes the military, the government and most institutions
in our society, is rarely questioned.
The effect on society from all organizations adopting the
hierarchical form is to make it seem natural that we have all
been placed within a national pecking order. Some jobs are
better than others, some lifestyles are better than others, some
neighborhoods, some races, some kinds of knowledge. Men over
women. Westerners over non-Westerners. Humans over nature.
That effective, non-hierarchical modes of organization exist on
the planet, and have been successful for millennia, is barely
known to most Americans.
6. Quantification, Linearity, Segmentation: Corporations require
that subjective information be translated into objective form,
i.e., numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of forests,
for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter into
corporate equations. Forests are evaluated only as "board feet."
When corporations are asked to clean up their smokestack
emissions, they lobby to relax the new standards in order to
contain costs. The result is that a predictable number of people
are expected to become sick and die.
7. Dehumanization: In the great majority of corporations,
employees are viewed as ciphers, as cogs among the wheels,
replaceable by others or by machines.
As for management employees, not subject to quite the same
indignities, they nonetheless must practice a style of decision
making that "does not let feelings get in the way." This
applies as much to firing employees as it does to dealing with
the consequences of corporate behavior in the environment or the
community.
8. Exploitation: All corporate profit is obtained by a simple
formula: Profit equals the difference between the amount paid to
an employee and the economic value of the employee's output,
and/or the difference between the amount paid for raw materials
used in production (including costs of processing), and the
ultimate sales price of processed raw materials.
Capitalists argue that this is a fair deal, since both workers
and the people who mine or farm the resources (usually in Third
World environments) get paid. But this arrangement is inherently
imbalanced. The owner of the capital --the corporation or the
bank --always obtains additional benefit. While the worker makes
a wage, the owner of the capital gets the benefit of the worker's
labor, plus the surplus profit the worker produces, which is then
reinvested to produce yet more surplus.
9. Ephemerality: Corporations exist beyond time and space: they
are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do not die a
natural death; they outlive their own creators. They have no
commitment to locale, employees or neighbors. Having no
morality, no commitment to place and no physical nature (a
factory, while being a physical entity, is not the corporation),
a corporation can relocate all of its operations at the first
sign of inconvenience: demanding employees, high taxes and
restrictive environmental laws. The traditional ideal of
community engagement is antithetical to corporation behavior.
10. Opposition to Nature: Though individuals who work for
corporations may personally love nature, corporations themselves,
and corporate societies, are intrinsically committed to
intervening in, altering and transforming nature. For
corporations engaged in commodity manufacturing, profit comes
from transmogrifying [changing] raw materials into saleable
forms. Metals from the ground are converted into cars. Trees are
converted into boards, houses, furniture and paper products. Oil
is converted into energy. In all such activity, a piece of
nature is taken from where it belongs and processed into a new
form. All manufacturing depends upon intervention and
reorganization of nature. After natural resources are used up in
one part of the globe, the corporation moves on to another part.
This transformation of nature occurs in all societies where
community manufacturing takes place. But in capitalist,
corporate societies, the process is accelerated because
capitalist societies and corporations MUST grow by extracting
resources from nature and reprocessing them at an ever-quickening
pace. Meanwhile, the consumption end of the cycle is also
accelerated --by corporations that have an interest in convincing
people that commodities bring satisfaction. Inner satisfaction,
self-sufficiency, contentment in nature or a lack of a desire to
acquire wealth are subversive to corporate goals.
11. Homogenization: American rhetoric claims that commodity
society delivers greater choice and diversity than other
societies. "Choice" in this context means PRODUCT choice in the
marketplace: many brands to choose from and diverse features on
otherwise identical products. Actually, corporations have a stake
in all of us living our lives in a similar manner, achieving our
pleasures from things that we buy in a world where each family
lives isolated in a single family home and has the same machines
as every other family on the block. The "singles" phenomenon has
proved even more productive than the nuclear family, since each
person duplicates the consumption patterns of every other person.
Native societies --which celebrate an utterly non-material
relationship to life, the planet and the spirit --are regarded as
backward, inferior and unenlightened. We are told that they envy
the choices we have. To the degree these societies continue to
exist, they represent a threat to the homogenization of worldwide
markets and culture.
Form is content: The most important aspect of these 11 rules is
the degree to which they are inherent in corporate structure.
Corporations are INHERENTLY bold, aggressive and competitive.
Though they exist in a society that claims to operate by moral
principles, they are structurally amoral. It is inevitable that
they will dehumanize people who work for them and the overall
society as well. They are disloyal to workers, including their
own managers. Corporations can be disloyal to the communities
they have been part of for many years. Corporations do not care
about nations; they live beyond boundaries. They are
intrinsically committed to destroying nature. And they have an
inexorable, unabatable, voracious need to grow and to expand. In
dominating other cultures, in digging up the Earth, corporations
blindly follow the codes that have been built into them as if
they were genes.
We must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves.
To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible
manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are
following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant
behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like
asking an army to adopt pacifism. Form is content.
===============
[1] GET: Jerry Mander, IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED; THE FAILURE
OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE INDIAN NATIONS (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991). Cost is $14.00; phone:
(415) 923-5600. (Chapter 7 is titled, "Corporations as Machines.")
Descriptor terms: wise use movement; property rights movement;
environmental regulations; backlash; agriculture; mining;
grazing; timber; logging; natural resources; jerry mander;
election finance; campaign finance reform; money in politics;
corporations; the corporate form; native people; indians;
