I was on the phone earlier with my friend Sara talking about all the trouble she's having finding furniture. Hitting the thrift stores or customizing something or any of the other ways that most people I know can route around typical corporate options just aren't viable for her anymore. She's got cerebral palsy, really does work absolutely as many hours as her body allows just to pay the bills, and lives in London, Ontario. So for her the internet, in reality, and a few carefully budgeted trips to stores are the ballgame.
And I was surprised at how long the list in my head was of places that, ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't really have had a problem suggesting. I think that maybe we've lost track of how many of the corporations we've grown used to loathing used to be, by and large, admirable. They used to be entities that most people I knew were proud to support and be connected to. Let's go over some of that list. I think that it's worth bringing back some concrete examples because I think that we've all been deafened a bit by our own drumbeat of more recent and justified conflict.
Remember the days when Banana Republic was a catalog with innovative hand-done drawings and detailed descriptions? One that sold clothing actually meant for traveling in the developing world? I do. We had gotten their catalog for years already but the one time I ordered from it was when I was preparing for a trip to Panama and Costa Rica in, iirc, '85 and my mother chose them on the advice of my father and friends of both of them who lived in places like rainforest research stations regularly and had found that this little catalog on rough-finished paper was a great source for when you needed The Good Stuff.
Remember when many Pier 1 employees could go on for half an hour without a break about the crafts coops in countries like Honduras who they partnered with to make many of the goods in their stores? I furnished my first places in Portland, back in '84 to '87 largely with items I was proud to buy from them. I bought more for my place in Astoria in the early nineties and, again, was proud to do it.
Remember when Lands' End had detailed essays on their production techniques in their catalog and had everything made in America? When the Conran's store was a reliable source of excellent design? When J.Crew founded their product line on the dual principles of classic clothes that wouldn't change season to season and of using all-natural materials in simple, timeless ways?
The list goes on and on and on. It really didn't used to be this bad. Marshall-Fields working to rebuild their flagship store and bring out respectful reissues of turn of the century fabrics and pottery. Crabtree & Evelyn working with glassmakers and woodworkers to make authentic, old-fashioned displays. Barnes & Noble being a book business institution that ran the best used textbook store in New York City. And so on.
Many of the eighties companies who developed the biggest and fastest reputations as admirable and responsible were never really all that great. Let's face it, Snapple always sold thinly disguised sugar water and Mrs. Fields was always a franchise system with a pretty face and a good marketing campaign. Jennifer Convertibles was racking up fraud complaints from the year they opened their doors. And plenty of famous corporations were founded with a fundamental structure built around, I'm sorry, I don't see a lot of ambiguity here, evil. General Motors and General Electric were built to win through undermining, bullying, and fraud. Microsoft was rotten from, at best, 1983 on.
These kinds of companies were architected in ways that, if our laws were fairly applied, would subject them to comprehensive dissolution, not just through antitrust laws but through the RICO statutes. [See my note below on RICO.] They were created as corrupt enterprises whose evil was written into their compensation structures, product lines, subcontractor relationships, and everything else. They are stained throughout with the taint of their original sin. And like the artifacts of J. Edgar Hoover's rapacity and prejudice that came up in the hearings about intelligence failures connected to 9/11, these things don't just drift away like mist when the founders are gone.
But I don't think that all of the companies we've grown used to fighting grew out of such parasitic ways. And, frankly, I was there for more of this than probably ninety-nine point nine percent of people alive, so I've got some small degree of confidence in my conclusions. And in those days, as those places were, I was, by and large, proud to be there. When my friend Eliza hooked me up with a job at Citibank, I was proud to get it, proud to be good at it, and proud that two years after I left they were still calling me asking me to come back. And that, by the standards of the time, was about as evil as a corporation could get. Just ask any government still trying to pay off their Citibank debt.
I'm not going to go down my long list of marquee corporations I was inside of but frankly, it's a damn long list and none of it was working at the margins. I met and worked with quite a few of the people who made these companies what they were and I do not believe that most of them were evil. Short-sighted? Yes. Self-interested? Certainly. Dismissive of approaches outside of their authority-approved playbooks? Undoubtedly. And, frankly, most of them were never terribly comfortable with having me there precisely because a lot of my job was to deal with the cracks and flaws their approaches created so I got to see a lot of how they solved problems and interacted with each other. After all, I was the guy who didn't need to play nice.
But my point is that they weren't all the same. It is wrong to treat all that they did and who they were and are as interchangeable. Make no mistake, I also dealt with Wall Streeters and Andersen Consulting staffers and various others who, if it were up to me, would be tied to posts to be slowly beaten to death by Louisiana housing project residents. And if you think that I'm not writing literally, you don't know me very well.
But I think that, as we think about what our society is and what we want to work to turn it into, it is dangerously misleading to consider Bernie Ebbers as the same as Bernie Madoff. It is dangerously misleading to conflate Whole Foods and ConAgra. They are not the same. And to sweep the broad brush of CORPORATE EVIL over it all and dismiss it all in one satisfying but stupid gesture is the kind of waste we simply can't afford.
We just ain't that rich.
I find most of the Obama Administration's stimulus spending decisions something between disappointing and repellent. I find his corporate bailouts, by and large, disgusting and grotesquely wasteful. By no means am I suggesting that we should forgive and forget.
But we should be ready and willing to do three things.
- Firstly, concede that not every organization big enough to have an ad campaign should be burned at the stake.
- Secondly, to look into these companies for things worth adopting. Did you know that McDonalds was heavy and early into efficiently and cleanly converting used oil into biofuels? They were and are.
- And thirdly, it is past time that we started paying attention to what went wrong in a way that goes beyond "wow, they suck" or movies that tell it all like horror flicks. It is more than past time that we looked at *how* they got corrupted. We need more people to talk to the executives at places like Lands' End and articulate the mechanics of why they gave up on making anything in this country and what it would take to get them to come back. We need to be looking at employee-owned companies like Bi-Mart and WinCo and engaging them. Seeing what makes them work and how. Encouraging them to cut down on the agribusiness ties and help them figure out how to make those transitions profitably. Looking into "activist" organizations that work (like Portland's own Red & Black Cafe and Freegeek, like Milwaukee and Chicago's Growing Power) and documenting in ways that the average person can understand and will find interesting what exactly is involved in running a business that isn't exploitative, that is scalable. In particular to find ways to do this without either selling stuff that's so expensive that only rich people can buy it (Real Goods and Smith & Hawken, I'm looking at you) or are occasional luxury purchases where customers have to compromise some other part of leading healthy lives to buy their goods (Ben & Jerry's, this spot is yours). Or, for that matter, is subsidized by some kind of unending and usually downplayed stream of donations.
We also, for that matter, need a hell of a lot more readable, detailed, carefully researched work on the cultures and practical power dynamics of our business schools. We've done plenty of complaining about all the asshole MBAs and the damage they do but what exactly does that mean, and what can we do about not just countering their creations but bringing more sunlight into places like the University of Chicago and the Ivies? Who do they choose? How much debt do those graduates come out with? How does that debt get paid off? Where do they end up ten years later? Twenty? Fifty? What are their conclusions about what their impact was once they're retired and can afford to be a little more open? How does this contrast wiht the conclusions of those who work with them?
It's very easy to complain. It's very easy to bemoan how terrible all those evil corporations are and how they own everything and there's nothing to do but blow it all up and start over. But it's bullshit. Not once in all of human history has that worked. The closest we've seen to a "fresh start" was the Khmer Rouge and if you think that's a model you admire then fuck you, may you die soon and you have no place in this conversation. For the rest of us it's time to not only grow up and accept a certain degree of compromise, of responsibility for what will happen now, it's time to take fields like industrial organization, the very study of how groups work and how organizations become what they do, and make them our own.
Let's be honest here. We now have plenty of people making home-brew biodiesel setups. You REALLY want to change the world? Take a couple of YEARS (yes, I said "years") and study up on some famous organization in a field you care about. Really study up, Don't just read Fast Food Nation. Talk to employees. Read newspaper articles for their hometown in the years when they were starting up. And really think about WHY did they do the things that they did? What were they thinking? What did it cost them to not do something else? What do we know they rejected? Don't spout that wussy bullshit "Oh, they're just like that." That's for cowards and the intellectually feeble. People have real world reasons for their decisions and many of them, news flash, aren't just about short term material gain. They're about the interpersonal dynamics between the decisionmakers. They're about looking good to outsiders. They're about emotional comfort. They're about all sorts of things and until we know them well and address them effectively they won't ever really change. You think that making everything you dislike illegal will "fix things"? Then you understand neither the dynamics of law enforcement (who exactly will pay for all those cops, what will keep them from corruption, and how will they detect all these things, just for starters?) nor the basics of human nature. (Shall we discuss the effectiveness of drug laws for a start?)
And then, when you know that organization the way that Green Bay residents know the Packers, start to talk about it. Partner with good writers. Become a good writer. Put stuff on YouTube. Do zines and poems and songs and bloody frackin' puppet shows if that's what it takes to get your conclusions into the heads of people who are looking to make things better.
We don't need more whiny, "well-meaning" children wating for the New Age to dawn. We need workers willing to take on the job, to mine deep into dark, lonely, and scary tunnels, and emerge with nuggets of insight and knowledge.
If we're going to build a world in which the scammers and bullies don't keep coming out on top, then the very bones and muscles and organs of our society need to be changed. I don't know how that should be done and neither do you. We need to get serious about why things keep going the way that they do and what, in the face of real world human nature, we need to create to make organizations and laws and citizen dynamics that act not just as antibodies to such scum, but keep them from having such advantages in the first place.
I'm doing my part. Will you?
-Rustin
A note on RICO - I'll bet that many of you read that and thought, yeah, there Rustin goes again, exaggerating just when it seemed like he was making a good point. But, you see, RICO isn't just supposed to be about locking up guys with Italian names for violent crimes. It's about the concept of a PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR, about organizations where criminal acts, including intimidation, blackmail, and sabotage, are intrinsic to how the organization is run. After all, if you buy cement from a mafia-run cement company, they do have trucks. they do deliver cement. It's that the way they run is fundamentally interwoven with the illegal stuff that makes it actionable.
Let's think about that list again. Intimidation. Blackmail. Sabotage. Hmm. You mean like what General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil did to the streetcar companies? Or what GM did to dealers who refused to use GMAC? Or the intimidation Microsoft did to Compaq when they tried to sell PCs without Windows? These are criminal enterprises. Don't let anybody tell you different.
Think I'm wrong about RICO? Go ahead, read up on it. This page isn't going anywhere. You can start here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
And when you're done and have given it all some thought, look again at companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland. When they got busted for collusion, wasn't that evidence of a pattern of behavior? When Starbucks opens a location run below cost right across from a successful and loved local coffeehouse and, as soon as the local goes bankrupt, cuts back the hours or stops most of their specials or simply closes up, isn't that a pattern of behavior? Aren't those businesses whose model is now implictly built around sabotage and fraud and collusion engaging in racketeering?
'Cause it sure looks that way to me.
Comments