2.4.4 Linking ‘Corporate Closed-Ness’ And ‘Power And Control’

In the previous two Sub-Chapters I, firstly, described how the corporate world keeps all of us ordinary people in our place, (or, at least, in the place where it would like us to be), and secondly, offered an historical and sociological context to its power.

This Sub-Chapter will draw the two previous Sub-Chapters together and explore how it impacts on our work with vulnerable families in the Focus Group.

From the end of the Second World War to now, the only major conflict in Europe has been the terrible war in the Balkan states in the nineteen nineties.  The European Union has been established, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and while many regional, historical tensions boil over (for example we have had our own years of the Troubles in Ireland, and more recently, Ukraine), the continent has been relatively peaceful.

And despite the power of the military-industrial complex, and its penetration into our political classes, I believe that the level of awareness of our populations has now risen a little, to at least the point where people are beginning to question whether military alliances and the continual obscene build-up of arms really keeps us safe.

In our modern, open, free democracy haven’t we changed a lot for the better?  Surely we will never go back to the days when we were dominated by corrupt royal families, fascists and imperialists!

Over the next number of posts I will explore this question a little……

There are, and have always been, powerful forces of wealth and privilege that control society.  When true democracy challenges their superiority and sense of entitlement, they work hard to preserve what they have, and what they feel they are entitled to.

Because assembling an army to stage a coup is not that easy to do nowadays, the vested interests of power and wealth have to fight in a very underhand way to keep society from being too open, or the (now quite powerful, aware and well educated) general population to be too questioning.

Nowadays the shameless, bully-boy disingenuous room values that portray genuine concern as disloyalty, and/or truth as betrayal still prevail, but the strategy is to undermine openness rather than engage in all-out war like the White Army after the Russian Revolution.

If a government is elected that tries to challenge the perpetuation of unfair privilege in society, the cartels that are affected try to jeopardise this process of change by withdrawing their cooperation. This is a kind of work to rule by the rich.

When they see their money and status diminishing they do their best to make it very difficult for a government to implement the policies that may cause them to lose whatever they are trying to hold on to.

Virtually all major decisions of any consequence are done on rich people’s terms. In my life’s experience, I have always observed that when the rich have taken what they want, whatever is left over is divided among the rest of us. 

Significant inroads could be made into the housing and health crises currently affecting our country by a little generosity – a little giving away of power – but such action is anathema to the rich and powerful!

The forces of wealth and privilege are ruthless and very determined.  They have honed their fighting skills to the point where ordinary people often don’t realise that they are fighting at all, (high impact-low noticeability) whereas they really are!

Unlike the easily-spotted brutal punishment of the totalitarian regime, they employ their considerable articulation skills to discredit open and honest debate.  And similar to the slave owners of old in the Southern States of the USA, they maintain that whatever system that they are protecting will collapse (and then we’ll all surely be in deep trouble) if they don’t get their way.

They subvert, obfuscate, deny others their rights, spread fear and panic, control the media to disseminate false information, while all the time using their political, business, educational and even sporting links to influence policy so that whatever happens they won’t be disadvantaged.

Let us consider this a little!

In olden times, pressure came on ordinary people from kings, emperors and the like, i.e. their rulers.  Nowadays, because of our democratic, constitutional societies, generally speaking it is the other way round – pressure comes on rulers from ordinary people.

Therefore, (like the examples in this post) in order to get rulers to do the bidding of the corporate world or the wealthy cartels (for example build motorways costing billions instead of cycle lanes costing thousands, permit saturation advertising of things that contribute to our ill-health, or, indeed, maintain salary levels and pensions of top people at exorbitant levels) the corporate world and cartels need to influence ordinary people so that a critical mass of us will want society to be ordered along the lines of what they demand, and then vote for people who will effect the values espoused by those on the inside. (I described this as corporate closed-ness already).

The corporate world tells us that something is good for us, that we need it, can’t do without it etc. as it cajoles us into buying into it. (I am sure that you will have experienced this process of softening up). If, then, we don’t buy into it, the cajoling turns to bullying as we experience the dire consequences that befall us when we don’t.

So a major factor in the ability of the select few to control the vast majority is the unending effort by the corporate world to reduce us to shallow-thinking, passive consumers with wall to wall advertising and marketing, rather than free, creative beings determining our own destiny and taking responsibility for the effect that our actions have on ourselves, our families and communities, and wider society.

This (a mixture of scaremongering and dumbing down) and our subtle and gradual acceptance of the values, standards, images, and ultimately the intentions of the corporate world – an ever-increasing desire to get us to consume – starts (both explicitly and subliminally) in the cradle – or, indeed, in the womb – and through subtle and very clever marketing we are unaware of its tyrannical nature.

And to cap it all, the corporate world has now achieved through social media, with our compliant acquiescence, huge diminution of the privacy of ordinary citizens.  Our level of privacy nowadays is practically zero – a level that a totalitarian leader of old could only dream about!

The 19th Century black activist, Frederick Douglass (who actually toured Ireland during the Great Hunger of 1845) said that power never concedes without demand. And it is so true. But such is the power of the corporate world that we are now demanding what it wants us to demand, as we willingly concede our right to privacy, health, clean air, even life itself.

So much for the corporate world – what about the wealthy cartels?

Well, they don’t have to work half as hard as the corporate world.

The old-boy networks of the wealthy and privileged ensure that the Pillars are well placed to resist demands for meaningful change. Such networks have been in existence so long that no-one, (elected or non-elected), outside the networks, is in a strong enough position to challenge them – not to mention change them! [1]

If they were, the world would be a different place…………

[1]. Former pupils of private, fee-paying schools in England have always had high representation in Government institutions. But lately there is some movement by prestigious Universities to increase the level of students from state funded schools.  Reacting to this, a headmaster of a private fee-paying school in England compared the treatment of pupils who go to such schools as akin to how the Nazis treated Jews in Germany in the 1930’s.  This, of course, is intended to keep up the pressure to perpetuate the inequality that has always favoured the privileged. It is a good example of the way moneyed-privileged people think.

I believe that it is reasonable to claim that the giant corporations which do harm to the world (and – as always – there are some exceptions) do not reveal their ultimate goals. 

That is, corporate domination, maximum profit for shareholders, and accompanying reduction of worker’s rights.  So through double-speak and obfuscation, they try to get us to believe that they are making something better while they are really working to run it down [1].

Once again, I will give some contemporary Irish examples:

~ In housing, they assert that in seeking to provide better housing they reduce the public commitment for providing housing for citizens who are on the public housing list.

~ In making transport more efficient they lobby Government to give licences to private companies to run services but only on routes that they know will be profitable, thereby denigrating public transport (who are in debt because they have to service non-profitable routes) in the public eye.

~ A few years ago they tried to claim that we will have a better water quality if it is in private hands.

~ Zero-contract hours are creeping like a canker into our working lives, undermining workers’ rights and entitlements that have been hard-won over a century or more.

Freedom is for the rich only.  Unaffordable housing, poor transport networks, clogged up, inefficient public hospitals, zero-contract hours or more expensive water will never be popular.

So they have to be dressed up and marketed dishonestly, and then introduced by underhand methods – convincing us that things will be better when really they’ll be worse.

As I said already (bottom of the last post), the first task is using media and old boy networks to get political (of every persuasion) and civil service interests on board, with the long term aim of high-impact low-noticability corporate control.

The old joke that ‘if voting changed things they wouldn’t allow it’ certainly rings true!

[1]. Chapter Three in Section Five of this blog is devoted to Leadership.  I believe that good leadership will always prevent the running down of services that should always be retained in the public domain.  Is there a link between the great successes of corporate closed-ness over the past 40 years in the Western World the nature of leadership within the Pillars over that time?

How our apparently rising anxiety [1] is connected to our constant scramble to keep up with the demands of the enticements of the corporate world is never really apparent, as we are conditioned into being fearful to question the corporate closed-ness norms of the society in which we live.

Generally, the corporate world tries to convince us that something is good for us but then if we don’t choose it; it will punish us.

Here in Ireland we accept things such as child poverty, totally unfair housing policies, lack of integrity in public office, abject public health services, substantial increase in mood-altering medication, invasion of privacy, and (relevant to this blog) unacceptable levels of crime in society, and rarely see the link between them, the subtle repressive type atmosphere generated by corporate closed-ness, and our own level of anxiety.

We seem to accept them, as if nothing can be done about them, even though they are all caused by our behaviour.  And even though we know in our heads that acquisition and possessing more and more does not really lead to long term contentment and being in the world at our ease, we actually do little enough about it.

We, the so-called silent majority, complain incessantly but do little, trapped by trepidation, fearful of consequences of upsetting the apple cart, and conditioned into staying within what is ordained for us from cradle to grave.

[1]. Many and varied sources – here is one from the UK – point to our increasing anxiety.  While I am aware that media may sensationalise rising anxiety there is just too much evidence to ignore it. Can Ireland be far behind?

I am very favourably disposed towards private enterprise.  It is the life-blood of every country.  The hallmark of a successful developed or civilised society is a healthy private sector, where risk-taking and entrepreneurial activity are rewarded and allowed to flourish, and where there is also common-sense regulation to prevent the private sector from boiling over – the market overheating, as the economists say.

Total state ownership of all enterprise doesn’t seem to work that well – as is evidenced from the so-called democratic centralism that prevailed in the Soviet Union and allied countries for many decades in the 20^th Century.

But, even though publicly owned industries and services get a very bad press, and are seen to inefficient and wasteful, London School of Economics Professor David Stevenson, (in a study that he conducted as recently as 2008) proved that nationalised industries did as well as private industry in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties and only lost competitiveness when the UK government forced them (in the nineteen-seventies, during the oil crisis) to freeze their prices in an attempt to curb inflation.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about economics to know exactly how all this works but I will bow to the knowledge of the LSE here.  What intrigued me when I read Professor Stevenson’s article was my sense of surprise!

I was surprised because we all have been programmed over many decades to believe that privatisation is way better in efficiency, profit-making etc.  However I then reflected on my own life and I also remembered the semi state bodies of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties in Ireland that gave great employment, while at the same time making profit for the Government, and ultimately ourselves.  (The semi-states also improved the morale of our country as they were home-grown).

Regardless, however, of the merits or demerits of nationalisation in profit-making enterprises, I believe that there are areas of society where privatisation should be off-limits.

If we observe carefully, we can see that the increasing power of corporate closed-ness is nudging us in the direction of the worst aspects of privatisation in our country. In terms of our Focus Group, and particular children in our Focus Group, I believe this to be a very retrograde step. 

Privatisation of necessary public services will almost always lead to inferior services for the poor and the powerless.

It already has!

Provision (both quantity and quality) of both housing and health have suffered greatly in the wake of increased penetration (as is said) of the private sector.

In education, the points system through which we select young adults to go to third level is a very good example of the propagation of the corporate privatisation values I mentioned earlier on in education – a totally inappropriate environment to have the comparison and competition that is common in the private sector – if we think about it. These values have also infiltrated social welfare back-to-work programmes and community development in Ireland in recent years. Undoubtedly, corporate values influence provision of services for vulnerable people, such as employment of medical professionals on contract basis, and privately run care homes for children.

And I have mentioned that giant corporations now control prisons in USA and UK.  Privatisation of prisons is a very good example of market penetration of a part of civil society that I don’t believe was ever privatised.

I read an interesting article recently questioning the ethical implications of successful family programmes in private prisons in the UK.  The article claimed that such prisons are leading to a kind of segregation in the prison estate in the UK between the haves and the have-nots, as the private prisons lean towards accepting less problematic prisoners, while the more difficult-to-manage prisoners remain in the public prisons.  This is a bit like the privatisation of transport – but only on profitable routes.  As the article summarised it; we have private schools for elite pupils, and private hospitals for elite patients, now we have private prisons for elite prisoners.

There is, I believe, very little truth in the argument that the private sector is more efficient when contracted to undertake social or community type work.  It is only more efficient when society’s problems are viewed through a very narrow lens and from a shallow, reductionist, short term perspective.

Government (including local Government) is, I suppose, considered inefficient when looked at from only the short-term viewpoint. But viewed systemically, (as we need to do because, as we will argue in the Chapter on Systems Theory, society is open and constantly changing) privatisation is unbelievably wasteful.

When private companies see government grants being given out and want some of them, they identify areas where they can do the job ‘better’ than either the statutory or the voluntary sector, persuading government with figures and stats but leaving out the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is, of course, that when the chips are down, the need to make a profit (the hungry fox that I mentioned at the bottom of this post) will trump the need to be compassionate, inclusive, or even creative.

The monetary cost of the damage done to society by neglecting the needs of vulnerable members is incalculable.

We now come again to this subject which we mentioned in a post in the Sub-Chapter on the Civil/Public Service.

Due partly to the penetration of the corporate world into civil society, organisations supporting the Focus Group often find themselves having responsibility without power – surely a very debilitating thing for any worker.

A typical manifestation of this is the knee-jerk reaction to a crisis.

This often involves the quick setting up – usually because of media pressure to do something, or some new panacea promoted by academia – of an ill thought-out, facile, often very expensive solution, with insufficient and untrained staff while ignoring, hiding and/or doing nothing to challenge the structure that caused the crisis in the first place.

(I will give an example of this in a post in the Chapter on Research And Evaluation).

Further pressure is then brought to bear on the senior staff to get results under the guise of didn’t we give you ……. to solve it?

Low morale ensues from this pressure which filters down through the system to the junior staff and people working on the ground.

I come across examples of the downstream effect of this very often. 

I have often attended meetings where committed, enthusiastic people around a table grapple with really difficult social problems.  As frustrations rise, a tendency to blame partner organisations who should be doing something can creep in, whereas the reality is that all around the table are struggling with morale anyway because they are expected to do far more than their resources allow.

Responsibility without power is a particularly harmful aspect of corporate penetration and arises from shallow thinking and values that are not too far removed from those of the disingenuous rooms that I referred to previously.

The reason why I went on so much about the history of powerlessness, as I perceive it anyway, from the late 18^th/early 19^th century onwards, is that if we think about it a bit there is a definite link between the propagation of corporate values, helpless consumerism, the seeming unstoppable warmongering by the world military industrial complex, the unchallengeable power of the world economic system, our neglect of the environment and the way we treat the poorest of poor families in the Focus Group.

If there is any doubt in your mind about this, we need only to reflect once again on our last recession that I mentioned already when I was discussing the impact of corporate closed-ness. At that time, services to the most needy and vulnerable people in Ireland were cut while the rich were left generally unaffected, the so-called squeezed middle were made carry up to the limit of what they could afford and the gap between the very rich and the very poor widened greatly.

And is it not a terrible indictment on our country, one of the world’s wealthiest, that we cannot even now build houses for those who need them – something we did in times of much greater poverty and hardship in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s.

Very often I think that the way the Pillars allocates (our – actually) scarce resources is akin to parents allowing one of their children go hungry while buying a very expensive Renoir for another because he has an interest in art.

That might seem a bit of an exaggeration to some people but when I ponder on the priorities in respect of decision making in our country that is how it seems to me!