Democracy Talk 

Chapter Four explored four framing "measures" constricting our society's well-being and showed how each touches on economic life-whether it's money corrupting politics or dogma destroying the market.

At the center of it all is a particular way of organizing economic life we call The Corporation. Over time, it's grown to become the proverbial elephant in our collective living room. That huge, awkward thing right in our faces, the one whose influence few want to own up to, much less challenge. Most of us aren't even sure how it got there, right in the middle of things.

With eighty-two corporations controlling over a third of our economy of 297 million people, and the sales of just one, General Motors, bigger than any of the GDPs of 190 countries, the corporation can feel omnipresent, monolithic, unstoppable.

In just the past decade, "eleven thousand independent pharmacies closed, and chain drugstores now account for more than half of all pharmacy sales," laments Stacy Mitchell, author of The Hometown Advantage. "More than 40 percent of independent bookstores closed during the same period. Barnes & Noble and Borders capture half of all bookstore sales. Local hardware stores are disappearing too as Home Depot and Lowe's now own nearly 45 percent of that market. Five firms now capture about 45 percent of grocery sales nationwide. Blockbuster rents one out of every three videos. . . .

"Most striking of all," she adds, "a single firm, Wal-Mart, controls more than nine percent of all U.S. retail sales. It is now the largest grocer as well as retailer in the country and captures more than one-third of the U.S. market for numerous products from dog food to diapers."

The elephant seems to be swallowing everything in sight.

But what might happen if we were to see the corporation not as an "it" but rather as a pattern of relationships created moment to moment by our own beliefs and behaviors? What would change if we were to recognize that it exists in the middle of our living room because we keep walking around it, as if it really lives apart from us?

What could change if we realized that the corporation and the rules of property by which it functions are of our own making?

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were clear on this point. "Private property . . . is a Creature of Society," Franklin wrote in 1789, "and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it."

To Jefferson, property is governed by man-made laws, whereas access to the essentials of life is a "natural right," which takes priority. "Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor," he wrote in 1785, "the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

But if on reflection you are a bit bewildered that our nation's Founders, in all their wisdom, didn't put some rules into place to prevent today's concentration of economic might-the modern corporation-I sympathize. Consider, though, how different things looked to them. At our nation's founding, the threat of economic tyranny-one person depriving another of life's economic necessities-was almost unthinkable: America's unique geographic endowment, our vast and fertile unsettled land, meant that any able-bodied soul could turn hard work into food and income.

Plus, democratic theory has lacked any framework for understanding the role of today's corporations in our public lives. "The large private corporation," writes the Yale political philosopher Charles Lindblom, "fits oddly into democratic theory. Indeed, it does not fit at all."

Political theory has no place for entities that call themselves private but influence public opinion and the pace and safety of our workdays, our livelihoods, the air we breathe, the water we drink-in other words, that more powerfully determine our well-being than governments do.

Sometimes I wonder, though, whether corporations' splashing their names on our precious civic spaces-such as Houston's ballpark, "Minute Maid Park" (admittedly, an improvement over "Enron Field")-will speed up our awakening to their public nature.

Our Constitution doesn't mention corporations. Why would it? How could our forebears have foreseen a populace transformed from the small, independent shopkeepers and farmers of their time into what we are today-employees of corporations with resources and influences over our lives so vast that they dwarf those of local and state governments and even those of entire nations?

To give credit where credit is due, though, Thomas Jefferson did at least foresee a misfit, as noted in Chapter Four. He feared "the aristocracy of our monied corporations," imagining the scary possibility that without built-in rules of democratic accountability, some economic players-the biggest-would run roughshod over the rest of us. He got so worried, in fact, that he sought to include in our Bill of Rights protection against "monopolies in commerce," which as early as the 1790s he identified as a threat to freedom.

His concern was ignored.

Jefferson failed, but we don't have to. He had worries; we have evidence.

For More, Please Click to Buy the Book