Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It (10 page)

During the lawmaking process, the industry complained about costs and claimed that giving information to people would only cause “fear and uncertainty.”
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Employing odd euphemisms, the corporate lawyers called cows injected with the Monsanto drug “supplemented cows,” while natural cows became “unsupple-mented cows.” Covington & Burling explained why “fear and uncertainty” would result from the truth: “Mandatory labeling of milk products derived from supplemented cows will have the inherent effect of causing consumers to believe that such products are different from and inferior to milk products from unsupple-mented cows.”

What about farmers or dairies that did not want to inject the Monsanto genetically engineered drug into the blood of their cows; they should be free to tell people about the natural way they make their milk, right? Oh, no, said the corporate lawyers: “The industry’s experience in recent months demonstrates that voluntary ‘rBST-free’ type labeling of milk and milk products has a high potential for misleading consumers and for sowing the seeds of uncertainty, distrust, and fear about the quality and safety of milk and milk products.” Thus, according to Monsanto and Covington & Burling,
it is your right to know about your food—not Monsanto and its drug that is banned in most of the civilized world—that sows the “seeds of uncertainty, distrust and fear.”

Monsanto and the industrial dairy corporations not only threatened to sue Vermont but also began to intimidate and silence farmers, dairies, and stores that tried to sell “rBST-free” milk.
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Monsanto would even file a federal lawsuit against a Maine dairy that used its labels to tell people that the dairy would not use rBST. The dairy label that Monsanto sued to eliminate stated, “Our Farmers Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones.”
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Nevertheless, people like Dexter Randall stood up to the corporate intimidation, and Vermont went ahead with its right-to-know law. Covington & Burling and the industry then followed through on their threat to sue. Now that Vermont law supported the people’s right to know about rBST, the cry of “free corporate speech!” became the cry of “corporations are like people and have the right
not
to speak!” Covington & Burling argued that the “public right to know” must fall to “a manufacturer’s right to decide when to speak and when to remain silent.” According to a Covington & Burling brief filed in court, “Corporations have the same rights to remain silent as individuals.”
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At first, Vermont had some success in the case. The chief judge of the federal court in Vermont, J. Garvan Murtha, concluded that corporate rights do not overpower the people’s right to know:

Apparently, a majority of Vermonters do not want to purchase milk products derived from rBST-treated cows. Their reasons for not wanting to purchase such products include: (1) They consider the use of a genetically-engineered hormone in the production unnatural; (2) they believe that use of the hormone
will result in increased milk production and lower milk prices, thereby hurting small dairy farmers; (3) they believe that use of rBST is harmful to cows and potentially harmful to humans; and, (4) they feel that there is a lack of knowledge regarding the long-term effects of rBST.

According to Judge Murtha, “the First Amendment … does not prohibit the State from insuring that the stream of commercial information flow cleanly as well as freely.”
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The industry appealed to the same federal court of appeals that had decided the Bad Frog case. In the Vermont milk case, the court of appeals again sided with corporations and struck down the Vermont law. The court of appeals said that Judge Murtha had “abused his discretion” by failing to agree with the corporations that the law violated corporate speech rights. According to the court of appeals, the people of Vermont had caused a “wrong” to the industrial dairy manufacturers’ “constitutional right
not
to speak.”
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That was the end of the line for the Vermont law and for disclosure laws around the country. “It was a long, hard battle getting the legislation passed, and it wasn’t in place for any length,” says the dairy famer Dexter Randall. “We saw the end coming before it happened. I learned a lot about the power of corporations—about Monsanto’s power.”
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Corporate Rights Weaken People
and Citizenship

Look again at how the court of appeals labeled what dairy farmer Dexter Randall and so many other Vermont people had done by deciding to participate in our government of the people. According to the court, by passing a right-to-know law, the people of Vermont
committed a “wrong” to the constitutional rights of others, specifically, to the industry’s “constitutional right
not
to speak.”

This is how the fabrication of corporate rights hollows out American citizenship. A successful demand by a person or class of people for rights amounts to a declaration that such a person or class is equal to everyone else and has an equal share of sovereignty in our nation. Government then is accountable to that person, rather than the other way around. When we accept that people have constitutional rights, we quite properly have disdain for those who deprive our fellow people of rights, and we will resist. At a minimum, we are careful, or should be, not to press for government action that might hinder rights of others. After all, in a society of people with equal rights, when the government violates the rights of any of us, none of us is secure.

When courts strike down laws where they conflict with constitutional rights, they make a statement about who we are as a people and as a country. As we come to accept these judgments of the courts (or when we do not), our culture and politics, and even our way thinking and acting, can change.
Brown
v.
Board of Education
ruled that segregation violates the equality rights of African Americans; that helped transform who we are and how we act.
Reed
v.
Reed
ruled for the first time in 1971 that laws that discriminate against women are wrong; that contributed to a transformation of how we view gender in America. Court cases about rights may reflect and accelerate, rather than cause, movements and change. Yet when the courts rule, an insistent proposition about American life begins to become a fact.

The same phenomenon tends to occur when courts declare corporations to hold constitutional rights, as Dexter Randall found out. Lewis Powell’s advice to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 sought not merely to propose policies but to change American
society. As Powell made clear, the creation of corporate rights is an “instrument for social, economic, and political change.”
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These corporate rights cases, then, mean much more than allowing the Bad Frog Corporation to say whatever it wants on its product labels or the cigarette corporations to target children for addiction to a fatal product or Monsanto to deprive people of information about food. All of that would be bad enough. The impact of these cases goes beyond their specific facts; they push people back from exercising vigilance about corporate power. Even mild proposals that might serve the public good, from environmental stewardship to disclosure and transparency in the financial system, now get buried under savage attacks from corporate interests. Those who might serve as potential public champions are accused not merely of being “wrong” but of violating constitutional principles. Public champions retreat into defensiveness and uncertainty. As with other major developments of previously unrecognized constitutional rights, the fabrication of corporate rights is changing American culture.

The new metaphor of corporations as people in our understanding of the Bill of Rights and self-government threatens to erode, perhaps we can say “corporatize,” the American character. We can see this in many areas of American life, from the state of our media to declining civic participation and voting. What was public for generations, from the sublime, such as mountains or groundwater, to the utilitarian, such as prisons, is shifting away from us. A combination of political, economic, and legal corporate power is shifting not only the law and not only our public assets but even how we think about ourselves and what we teach our children. Perhaps the most poignant effect on our culture and society of the corporate power campaign is what we now seem willing to tolerate in the education of children and young adults.

Learning to Be Corporate

Education in America has long been linked to our egalitarian vision of a free, democratic people who govern a republic. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Of all the views of this law [for public education], none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people safe as they are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty.”
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The Supreme Court has relied on Jefferson’s view of public education “as a bulwark of a free people against tyranny” in concluding that “providing public schools ranks at the very apex of the function of a State.”
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Now schools and children have joined the Constitution, legislatures, and courts as subjects for increasingly aggressive assertions of corporate power and influence. The critical civic function of our schools—teaching equality, citizenship, the critical thinking and competence needed to participate in a vibrant, free society—is deteriorating to make room for corporate access to children’s minds and wallets. More corporations seek to turn schools into marketing outlets; more corporations seek to teach children, regardless of the views of their parents, to be consumers rather than citizens; and more corporations seek to make the curriculum itself reflect the corporations’ position on public issues. As corporations increasingly “embed” in education, will the next generation recognize when the promise of American self-government has evaporated, let alone summon the will to restore it?

Joe Camel was not lurking alone outside the playground and school gates. In fact, compared to some other corporate child-targeting efforts, Joe Camel was downright shy by waiting
outside
the gate. The McDonald’s Corporation, a Fortune 150 global corporation in 117 countries, with $24 billion revenue in 2010, sends employees or contractors dressed up as clowns with enormous shoes, bright clothes, and glistening red grins (the ubiquitous
“Ronald McDonald”) into schools to talk to children about “character education” and “fitness.”
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In 2008, some schools in Florida began “branding” report cards with the McDonald’s logo and the clown-costumed pitchman promising a free “happy meal” to reward student performance.
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Eight thousand middle and high schools in the country have contracted with the Channel One Corporation. Channel One beams into classrooms ten minutes of video “news” and two minutes of mandatory advertisements, which children are compelled to watch. The Channel One contracts require that the advertising content “must be shown when students are present in a homeroom or classroom (i.e. not before school, after school or during lunch)” on at least 90 percent of the days in which school is in session.
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Most schools, to which we are required by law to deliver our children each day, now serve as corporate marketing outlets. In 1983, corporations spent $100 million per year on child-targeted marketing; they now spend $17 billion per year.
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Virtually every school in the land now carries corporate advertising.
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School districts such as Los Angeles negotiate corporate naming rights, logo placements, and “school visits” during which corporate representatives can pass out samples to the children.
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One Los Angeles school board member reluctantly voted for the corporate plan in 2010 but he knew that “the implications of doing this are really disconcerting and really bother me to the core.”
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Since 1998, the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado (previously at the University of Arizona) has issued an annual report on “schoolhouse commercialization trends.” The 2010 report, titled
Effectively Embedded: Schools and the Machinery of Modern Marketing,
reveals that corporations now spend billions of dollars on “embedding” advertising into the schools, including into the curriculum. They do so because “students are generally unable to avoid these activities; moreover,
they tend to assume that what their teachers and schools present to them is in their best interest.” According to the National Education Policy Center, “Advertising makes children want more, eat more, and think that their self-worth can and should come from commercial products. It heightens their insecurities, distorts their gender socialization, and displaces the development of values and activities other than those associated with commercialism.”
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Revenue-desperate schools also are turning to “exclusive” contracts with Coke, Pepsi, and other corporations to sell and advertise their products in schools. These corporations do not only target older children. Even near-infants are not out of bounds. Coca-Cola denies that it markets to children under twelve but still “sells toys such as
Coca-Cola Uno
for children as young as eight,
Coca-Cola Checkers in a Tin
for children as young as six, and a
Coca-Cola Wipe-off Memo Board with Coke Magnets & Dry Erase Markers
for children as young as three.”
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In school and out of school, corporations now spend billions of dollars to make kids fat and unhealthy. The U.S. food and beverage industry spends over $12 billion per year to market to children, and the vast majority of advertisements on television shows watched by children are for snacks, fast food, and candy.
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“Nearly 20% of caloric intake among 12-to-18-year-olds comes from fast food, compared with 6.5% in the late 1970s.”
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Since 1980, as those billions of dollars in youth targeting got spent, the number of overweight children and adolescents has soared.
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In 2005, Congress requested that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conduct a study of food and beverage marketing to children and adolescents. The FTC found that forty-four companies alone spent $1.6 billion in a single year to advertise fast food, soda, snacks, and other food and beverages to children as young as two years old.
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