WHAT'S REALLY WRONG WITH CORPORATIONS
by Samuel Francis
After some 30 years or so, The Washington Post finally sent a reporter to the movies to discover the
astounding news that Hollywood doesn't like corporations. The occasion for this revelation is the remake
of the 1962 thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," a film I have never cared for and the new
version of which I have no desire to see. One difference between the two films is that in the original,
the bad guys are Chinese communists; in the new one, they're an "evil corporation" called
Manchurian Global.
The thrust of the Post's story about this major discovery is that it's been going on for decadesâthe
story traces the anti-corporation theme in the movies back to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in
1927âthough the theme became dominant (not to say a cliche) only in the 1970s. I knew something funny
was going on when James Bond, whom his creator Ian Fleming had fighting communists, started popping off
crazed capitalists.
The movies' "evil corporation" theme is of course evidence of the left-wing bias of
the folks who make the movies, and for decades conservatives who like business, capitalism and
corporations have groused about it. They're right. Hollywood has turned what originally was a
somewhat clever twist into a tedious and preachy caricature of both what business is like and
where evil in the modern world comes from. But real conservatives, as opposed to the Economic
Men who pretend to be conservatives, have some good reasons to be wary of corporations.
Reason One is bureaucracy. Corporations from IBM and AT&T to MacDonald's and Wal-Mart are no less huge,
faceless and unresponsive machines than the welfare state, the post office or the other publicly funded
labyrinths that conservatives want to abolish. The difference, libertarian champions claim, is that the
"private" bureaucracies are responsive to the market and the "public" ones aren't.
Well, not really. Corporate bureaucracies have a zillion ways of shielding themselves from
market forces, from propaganda (advertising) that manipulates and massages their consumers to
outright privileges squeezed out of the state itself. The market helps control
"private" bureaucracies effectively when they're really private and small enough to be
swayed by what consumers can see, know and deal with. On the national and global scales of
corporations today, that's seldom possible. The result is that corporate bureaucracies can
swallow small businesses like whales gobbling plankton.
Reason Two is Economism, the belief that economic values are all that's real or
important and that human beings are motivated mainly by economic drives. Business
people tend to believe this, but modern corporations, coupled with both Marxist and
capitalist ideology, have encouraged the belief and made what should be an obvious
myth a commonly held but unacknowledged assumption.
Probably the best exposure of the whole mythology of "economism," who believes it and what's wrong with it is a
small monograph by economist John Attarian called "Economism and the National Prospect," published by the
American Immigration Control Foundation. "Economism," Attarian writes, "clearly serves the agendas of the
corporations and other powerful interests which run this country, and they are not about to drop it.
"Corporations' profits depend on expanding their market shares, which means expanding
exports, and on driving down their costs, which means using cheaper imported inputs, low-wage
immigrant labor and transferring production overseas. Mainstream news and opinion media are
owned by these selfsame corporations, hence are globalist. Most think tanks depend upon
corporate money, hence are unlikely to generate serious criticisms of globalization and
economism."
Which brings us to Reason Three of what's wrong with corporationsâdisloyalty to nation and
people. As corporations have gone global, they have simply ceased to be part of any nation or to
identify with any people, race or civilizationâas their managers love to boast. Some years
ago, Ralph Nader asked the directors of 100 big companies to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance at
their stockholders' meetings. Only one agreed; half never responded; the rest got snippy at the
suggestion.
Corporate disloyalty to nation and people is obvious in corporate support for NAFTA, the
World Trade Organization, and mass immigration and the cheap labor it imports. Much of the
hatred the left exudes for corporations comes from or plays on the theme of disloyalty,
butâsince the left itself doesn't really believe in nation or peoplehood either, it's
limited in how clearly it can make the disloyalty charge.
The people who could make that and other charges against corporations and the global grabfest that they want to replace Western and American civilization are conservativesâthe real kind, not the fakes who are little more than hired guns for Big Business. Maybe if real conservatives started telling us what's really wrong with Big Business, Hollywood would put them in the movies.
