Just about any attempt to hold large corporations to any standards of accountability or personal responsibility is sure to be met with a large scale disinformation campaign - if it is getting some measure of popular support. If it is not, then one can count on the commercial [mercenary?] media giving it as little coverage as they can get away with. A friend of mine posted an excerpt from a conservative "feel good" style of book which equated environmentalism with communism. Admittedly, this nonsense is priced out of the range of nearly all readers, especially for a work of such dubious intellectual merit, but it is sympomatic of the attitude promoted by today's neoconservatives to the general public. This mythology bears little if any relationship to reality, but is voice loudly and often much like the propaganda in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union [and China, for that matter].
Former presidential candidate Barry Commoner who is known to most solely for his barnyard epithet on the radio airwaves, stated in his 1980 bid that while there may be public ownership of assets in socialistic countries, control is reserved for the few with access to political power. With regards to environmental issues communistic dictatorships are abysmal failures. Irresponsible CEOs today probably drool over the abuses perpetrated by the commissars [much as conservative politicians drool over the control of political enemies].
In Oregon, we have over half the land owned by the federal government - theoretically by the taxpaying citizens of the entire country. Yet our forest lands are logged by a handful of private logging companies at a cost far below the market cost. What's more is that the taxpayers even pay for logging roads to expedite their harvest. There is a quid pro quo however - for government employees, not taxpayers - in that many high level forestry civil servants gain 2nd careers with logging companies helping them to overcome the burdens of government oversight. This could explain why nearly all disputes between environmentalists and logging companies are resolved in the logging companies favor and why many activists have an "attitude" - but that's another story.
Well, this cozy relationship worked out OK for the disinterested majority of us for several decades. Unfortunately for many, during the past 2 years Oregon has been blessed with an extra 2 feet of rainfall. This has led to much flooding and some mudslides, many attributable to the practice of clearcutting which leaves little in the way of trees to keep soil in its place and off roads and cars.
If there were a citizen watchdog group - or as some conservatives have suggested a consumer group - in place they could hold the logging companies accountable for their irresponsible behavior. If there were a real taxpayers union - one funded by taxpayer checkoff, instead of corporate donations as today's "taxpayer" unions are - they could hold forestry officials responsible for their behavior in both allowing mismanagement of public resources for private gain and subsidizing private profits with taxpayer monies. Instead, nearly all legitimate criticism of theft and abuse of so called public assets by well connected private industries is smeared with the broad brush of "socialist" by industry propagandists and their defacto neoconservative apologists and the lapdog media dutifully reports any and all misdeeds of their critics along with further marginalization of their ideas.
Well, so much for "free enterprise" and so much for the good of public ownership in curtailment of corporate excesses. Next time you hear accusations of "socialists" and "class warfare", carefully consider the source and give the inane comments the ridicule they deserve.
4/13/97
