----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Johanning" <jjohanning at igc.org>
> So although it’s true Walmart can make your life
> miserable, they can’t proclaim you to be an ‘enemy
> combatant’ and remove you in shackles, facing the
> business end of an M441, to Gitmo or charge you with
> tax evasion and dispatch legal and police enforcers
> after you… and so on.
I think he has something of a point here (he's not completely stupid). Of course, the error here is that the economic power of the corporations is completely ignored, although it is much more relevant to people's daily lives than the government's power for the majority of citizens, who are not likely to be arrested or sent to Gitmo on the average day but who are definitely subjected to the power of any number of corporations on that day.
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That the authoritarian powers of corporations vis a vis workers flow from delegative powers of the State via the commodification of the law is a great storytelling device we can use in this election season. Enron could not have wreaked the havoc it did without engaging in regulatory capture and legislature capture. Ditto for the Fortune 500. Neopopulists are trying to tell this story w/in their vernacular, it's one place we can actually help deepen the analyses.
An important step forward here would be to change the frames through which government vs. corporate power are viewed and discussed in the culture. (The concept of frames in politics is being tackled by George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute <rockridgeinstitute.org>). Corporations are framed as beneficent friends of the common person, whereas government is routinely pictured in much of the culture as nothing but a bothersome, unnecessary intruder on private happiness. Precisely reversing these frames is not exactly what is needed -- rather, corporations, along with government, need to be framed as dangerous beasts which can do a lot of damage and which need to be brought under popular control.
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Amen.