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A hopeful account and an encouragement to act on it.
>The Mayor of Palermo, Sicily, Leoluca Orlando, was in Washington,
>D.C. the other day, telling reporters how the citizens of his fair city
>led a cultural revolt against the Mafia. Make no mistake, the Mayor
>cautioned, the Mafia still had its grips on some of the city's businesses,
>but the Mafia no longer dominates Palermo's institutions.
>
>After especially brutal Mafia executions of two Sicilian judges, one
>citizen scrawled anti-mafia signs on a bedsheet and hung it from her
>window. Then others joined in. The "Committee of the Sheets" was formed.
>
>The bedsheet protest caught on until the vast majority of city
>residents were hanging bedsheets.
>
>"On certain days, you could look up at an apartment building and
>see where the Mafia don lived -- it was the apartment without a bedsheet
>hanging from its window," the Mayor told reporters.
>
>The bedsheet protest was followed by marches, sit-ins,
>demonstrations. The populists didn't let up until the Mafia's grip on the
>city was broken.
>
>Orlando was touring the United States earlier this month,
>inviting fellow activists and reporters to come to Palermo in June to
>attend a conference on democracy and the rule of law.
>
>We asked Orlando whether lessons from Palermo's fight against the
>Mafia's grip on Sicily could be applied to break the grip of corporations
>in the United States. He cracked a little smile, then begged off,
>muttering something about not wanting to interfere in the internal affairs
>of a foreign country.
>
>But we believe the lessons are applicable.
>
>After all, 100 years ago, the citizenry viewed corporations as
>soulless, amoral, sometimes evil conglomerations of capital.
>
>As Roland Marchand, the late University of California Davis
>Professor of American History, makes clear in Creating the Corporate Soul:
>The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big
>Business (University of California Press, 1998), for all the legal
>legitimacy that the courts bestowed upon corporations at the turn of the
>century, corporations "conspicuously lacked a comparable social and moral
>legitimacy in the eyes of the public."
>
>"The big business corporation, as a rising chorus of American voices
>chanted insistently from the 1890s onward, had no soul," Marchand writes.
>
>The corporation had no soul, it had no conscience, and was driven by
>a bottom line profit urgency that often trampled on the rights of living,
>breathing persons.
>
>"If some of the great entrepreneurs of the 1870s and 1880s had
>proved greedy and ruthless in their pursuit of profits, the new
>corporations of the 1890s and 1900s would have even fewer scruples,"
>Marchand writes. "After all, one might appeal to the conscience of an
>individual businessman. But the soulless corporation, driven by a cold
>economic logic that defined its every decision as a money equation, had
>none."
>
>Big Business realized that this public perception of the corporation
>as a cold, impersonal "thing" would hinder its domination of the political
>economy. So big corporations launched a 100-year public relations campaign
>to "create the corporate soul" -- to convince Americans that corporations
>had a moral purpose and were serving the public good.
>
>And it is clear today, to all but the most conflicted observers,
>that the campaign Marchand documents in his book has succeeded beyond the
>wildest dreams of its creators.
>
>Marchand amassed copies of thousands of corporate image ads, many of
>which illustrate Creating the Corporate Soul. In a chapter on AT&T,
>Marchand reprints a turn-of-the-century ad titled "Democracy: of the
>people, by the people, for the people" showing workers who are
>shareholders of AT&T. A similar AT&T ad from 1919 titled "Our
>Stockholders" shows a mother surrounded by two young sons perusing her
>stock certificates. Marchand dryly notes: "No plutocrats were visible
>here."
>
>Today, the corporate hucksters have taken their public relations
>campaign to a laughable extreme, portraying, for example, corporations not
>just as friendly beings, but as friends of workers -- even as
>revolutionaries.
>
>As cultural historian Thomas Frank points out, Pizza Hut has a
>television commercial that sympathizes with labor organizers. According
>to Frank, the ad, titled "Strike Break," juxtaposes a group of "angry
>workers stomping around outside a factory with a group of generically
>concerned executives inside the building."
>
>A truck pulls up and delivers pizza to the striking workers, "who
>drop their picket signs and smile gratefully at the white-collar figures
>looking down on them from above."
>
>"And so, thanks to the management team, a century of labor struggle
>has been swept away," Frank concludes. "The world of business is the
>world, period. There's nothing outside of it. Get as mad as you want --
>the pizza trucks are standing by."
>
>In the face of this corporate onslaught, some may want to throw in
>the towel. We'd rather reach for the bedsheet.
>
>
>Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
>Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
>Multinational Monitor.
>
>(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
>Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
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