I was driving to work on Saturday, yes, Saturday (I'll get to that) when I passed the Novo Nordisk corporate complex on Route 1 at around 7 am. There were cars in the parking lot. Not a lot, and maybe some of them were the cleaning staff and that was their regular hours, but there were definitely a bunch of cars there owned by people who were working, on a Saturday morning, outside of their regular work hours. And it got me angry. The client I was traveling to on Saturday is a major American corporation (or at least a subsidiary of one) and due to this project I'm working on, the non-hourly staff has been working, unpaid, 10 to 12 hour days fairly regularly over the past couple months and will be pulling at least that many hours over the next couple. And in this case, several of them were forced to work on Saturday, from 8 to 5, after working all week. As was I. And it got me angry.
I recently finished a book by Douglas Rushkoff called Life Inc. which wasn't really all that well-written but was a fascinating study on how America has become ruled by corporations, particularly in the last 30 years. Nearly everything we do is not only affected by a corporations but is practically programmed by multi-national mega-corporations whose ad dollars and lobbying efforts have fully taken over the day-to-day life of all Americans. Even those of us who consider ourselves "independent" or progressive or removed from the stranglehold of the horrible practices of Wal-mart or McDonald's or Microsoft do so because we associate with the mega-corporations Whole Foods or Apple or Google. Corporations are killing us with their food, killing us with their drugs, killing the environment, raising our prices for everything from gas to drugs to baggage handling, and then when they fuck up badly, are getting bailed out by us in the form of our tax dollars and yet are laying us off in record numbers to protect their shareholders' profits. We are all working longer hours, to hold onto jobs that seem more tenuous than ever, and for what? Not for a raise -- everyone's under a pay freeze. Not for bonuses (unless you're in the upper management of one of the banks that got bailed out and then made record profits). Nope, just to keep those tenuous jobs, and to keep the profits up at our corporate overlords. And that gets me angry.
The question that I have is why. Why do we put up with it? Why do we let the same companies that caused the recession use our tax dollars to lobby the government to keep the rules that created the recession unchanged? Why do we let the oil companies raise the price of gas despite record profits? Why do we let the car manufacturers keep the EPA standards lower than any in the rest of the free world and then need us to bail them out because the gas prices ruined their profits? Why do we let corporate polluters continue to pollute? Why do we let Wal-mart move into our towns and kill all the local businesses in the name of "competition" and then celebrate the fact that we can pay $3.99 for a 12-pack of socks from China? Why do we buy cheap toys from China that poison our children? Why do we continue to support a corporate food chain that has an outbreak of E.coli or Mad Cow or some other massive, deadly recall at least 2 to 3 times a year? Why do we eat at McDonald's, even when it's killing us? Why are we sucking down Coke and Pepsi by the gallons, even when it's killing us? Why did half of this country actually fight FOR the super-profitable health care industry, including the insurers we all say we hate, when Obama actually tried to change the system? Seriously. Why? It took us 50 years to get cigarette manufacturers to finally cop to the fact that their product was killing us. How long before Phillip Morris admits that 99% of the shit their subsidiary Kraft makes is killing us too? And why, despite all this, do we work for these companies, putting in ridiculous hours with no reward other than keeping our jobs, when all it does is add to the profits of these companies that are killing us?
I think I have an answer, at least to the last question. As Americans, we have become convinced that work ethic is the most valuable ethic one can have. It's more important than family. It's more important than charity. It's more important than staying healthy, or doing the things that will help us stay healthy. It's the single most important thing in American life. "What do you do?" -- which means "where do you work?" -- is the first thing a stranger will ask you, not about your family or where you might spend your leisure time or your time spent volunteering. No, it's work. And the guy that puts in 60 hour weeks without complaint, well, he's just a hard-working American. And the woman who works three jobs and tries to take care of her kids in her spare time., she's just a hard-working American. And that lazy fuck who doesn't want to stay late to help the corporation make another penny for its shareholders? Well, he's just a lazy fuck.
It doesn't make any sense to me. Why are we busting our asses for companies that don't give two shits about us other than what we can contribute to the corporate bottom line? In Europe, their workers regularly work less than a 40 hour week, get much more vacation time (in France, they have August "off" -- all of August!), get free universal health care unassociated with any corporations, and are, not unsurprisingly, much, much happier than Americans. But we make fun of them. France is a four-letter word on Fox News, which is owned by Fox Corporation, a super-profitable enterprise owned by an Australian, and one that is practically worshipped by many right-wing Americans. Even moreso than their church, which in a lot of cases for right-wing Americans, is a corporate mega-church. Why? To me, we should be striving for a system closer to Europe, one that gives us more time off and cheaper health care instead of calling that socialism and associating it with the end of the world because goddamn it we are Americans and we want to work harder and longer so that Novo Nordisk can make a few extra bucks and then lay us off anyway when an economic crisis caused by corporations occurs.
Now I'm not saying being lazy is an ethic I espouse. (I do, but I'm not saying that). And if you own your own business or are working for a small company that rewards your efforts directly through bonuses or profit sharing or some other means then it's completely understandable why you might work long hours to make more money. Hey, money is important in this world, I won't deny. Is it more important than family or friends or happiness? Certainly not, but I'm not here to bash money. I'm here to bash an American cultural belief that working our asses off for our corporate overlords with no financial reward (or very little, compared to our efforts) just to have enough money to buy the crap that our corporate overlords make us believe that we need (through advertising) is just insane. And we do it every single day. And not only does no one complain, but we actually have a wide swath of the country (all Republicans, for instance) who would defend to their death this way of life. I don't understand.
So how do we fight it? According to Rushkoff's book, we can't take on corporations directly. And a screed like mine here will just get people who are so ingrained in the corporate culture to instinctively defend the status quo against "liberal whining about successful business". The free market! We have to save the free market, they'll say, even though clearly nothing about the market is free, as we've seen through the bailouts, corporate giveaways, and legislation designed to help Big Pharma and Big Oil and Big Auto and Big Banks, just over the past couple years. In fact, even when we do finally get enough public support to take on a major corporate enemy, like Big Oil, the results may not work out like we'd planned. Big Agra seized on the whole Al Gore global warming debate to get government concessions and support to sell corn-based ethanol, which as it turns out, is almost as bad a pollutant as oil, yields only twice the amount of energy it costs to produce (unlike non-Big Agra crops like switchgrass or hemp -- which offer five times) and exacerbated the farming/corn problems that are ruining our national food supply. So yeah, taking on these corporations directly isn't going to work. Plus, we can't quit our jobs and forfeit our 401Ks. Not under today's system.
But Rushkoff argues that if we act locally, the effects can end up affecting corporations nationally, and our way of life. The food system is an excellent example, where the recent enlightenment from books like The Omnivore's Dilemma and movies like Food Inc. (excellent movie, by the way, but tough to watch), have led to a surge in support for local farmers and farmers' markets and community-supported-agriculture groups (CSAs) which have grown from 50 in the United States in 1990 to over a thousand in 2008. The more demand there is for CSAs, the less there is for mass-produced, highly processed, and long-distance vegetables that are killing our bodies and our environment. We can do the same through volunteering -- every Little League game we coach is an assault on obesity (Big Agra and Big Pharma and Big Health Care); every hour we spend with friends is that many fewer eyeballs glued to television (Big Media and all the corporate advertisers supporting it); every gallon of gas we don't burn is a few bucks less going to exploit someone in the Middle East (Big Oil). It sounds simple, but I think he's got a point. Maybe acting locally in our own self-interest instead of in the interest of corporations (in the guise of the American work ethic!) we can in fact ween ourselves from our corporate overlords. And make me less angry about driving to work on Saturday.
then there is the sly silver fox makes his money
telescamming notch babies
he says the end is near, buy my policy
I'll make you young again
I'll make you young again
Loan sharks will circle, until they can make sure it's paid
take the cash from my hand
hear the register sing
and the roar of the lion logo on the screen
he is hungry
I should buy some popcorn!
so I exit the dark, feeling blind in the sun
and the bobcats look tired, they ate their fill of asphalt
because we need more parking
with so many rows
with so many up at the pulpit rams and bugs
the news cameras capture guerilla warfare
eagles into buildings crash landed
despair is all that there is now
in a cubical cage that smells like a rat
whose smile gets bigger along with your debt
don't take it personal its just business
Dear brothers and sisters
dear enemies and friends
Why are we all so alone here?
All we need is a little more hope, a little more joy
All we need is a little more light, a little less weight, a little more freedom.
If we were an army, and if we believed that we were an army
And we believed that everyone was scared like little lost children in their grown up clothes and poses
So we ended up alone here floating through long wasted days, or great tribulations.
While everything felt wrong
Good words, strong words, words that could've moved mountains
Words that no one ever said
We were all waiting to hear those words and no one ever said them
And the tactics never hatched
And the plans were never mapped
And we all learned not to believe
And strange lonesome monsters loafed through the hills wondering why
And it is best to never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever wonder why
Fight the Power!
Posted by: Flavor Flav | January 18, 2010 at 11:17 AM