THE CORPORATION A EMPIRE ECONOMICS:
Sale, Kirkpatrick
BOOKS THE CORPORATION & EMPIRE ECONOMICS KIRKPATRICK SALE Global Reach RICHARD J. BARNET & RONALD E. MULLER Simon & Schuster, $11.95 Of the power and menace of the global corporations there...
...He manages to free Anne from madness and death, but he sacrifices himself in the process...
...And the American press apparently felt honor bound to follow the game plan...
...Collected Poems, 1924-1974 JOHN BEECHER Macmillan, $8.95 JOHN DRUSKA About the time that John Beecher was discovering poetry in a Birmingham steel mill, Henry Miller was finding that in the American workaday world, as he later recounted in Tropic of Capricorn, "The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life...
...BOOKS THE CORPORATION & EMPIRE ECONOMICS KIRKPATRICK SALE Global Reach RICHARD J. BARNET & RONALD E. MULLER Simon & Schuster, $11.95 Of the power and menace of the global corporations there can no longer be any doubt...
...While acknowledging the failure of both Allende's peaceful quest for socialist revolution and numerous rural and urban guerrilla movements during this decade, Hodges concludes that these revolutionaries were simply dramatic ripples in the inevitably seaward movement of a Latin American river of revolution.ply dramatic ripples in the inevitably seaward movement of a Latin American river of revolution...
...And Beecher invites comparison with poets like Ginsberg and Carl Sandburg, who have offered incantations of various kinds over the nation...
...a noose around the neck of...
...but he returns to the mill as a human billboard...
...Some of Beecher's poems are expressly hortatory, in a way his cautionary State of the Union addresses...
...Most of their heads had been crushed . . ." How did American editors react...
...They would have been better served by a more judicious editing and honing of the book-always especially necessary with two authors-to eliminate the extraneous material (much too much time is taken up with descriptions of big business in general, unnecessary here and familiar from other studies) and by a more careful organization that would have eliminated the deadening repetitions (in the first section we learn how bad the global corporations are, in the second how bad for other nations, in the third how bad for us, and by the end the record seems stuck...
...Beecher's poetry, addressed as it is to a grassroots audience, might be just what we need to bring poetry closer to the public arena, to get people speaking the truth to each other, to begin putting people back in touch with themselves...
...They were the Chileans, the workers and the destitute, who rode an historical roller coaster upward for three years with Allende, achieving better pay and unprecedented participation in their government, before a military coup sent them pitching down a precipice...
...But, after all, Nixon's out, and this could be the best time for poets who talk plain and tote fair, like Beecher, to speak up and speak louder...
...Corporate imperialism replaced national imperialism...
...The ghost, we slowly learn, is a runaway named Abe...
...We do not see Phil returning to his task-unless the entire novel is his?- but we read the words of his dead infant...
...b) abbreviations (one six-page romp encounters: CP, FAR, MIR, PGT, POR, FALN, FLA-FALN, MR-13, ELN, Che's original ELN, the revived ELN, Bolivian ELN, Colombian ELN, etc...
...There is no gloss upon them...
...However, I cannot-as the dust jacket does-recommend this book to the general reader...
...Congress, for example, were capable of even a start in this direction, it would long ago have raised corporate income taxes and prevented the incredible 15-year decline in the percentage of national revenues provided by U.S...
...And it is all to malevolent purpose...
...After all if, as these authors say, global corporations are more powerful than single nations and have a true international scope, they will not be broken or controlled by simple intra-national regulations-especially regulations written by legislators or rulers lobbied so heavily, supported so well, and propagandized so effectively by these companies...
...that will tell me what's to come...
...Phil gives up his craft when he is forced to explore an abandoned church: "I went on down, barely looking at any place, hardly seeing the step I stepped down to, feeling with my hand on the dusty wooden bannister, hearing my breath, then hearing my heart beating over the sounds of my breathing-they were two separate rhythms...
...Others have compared his more austere narratives to Masters' Spoon River Anthology, and works like To Live and Die in Dixie and Phantom City: A Ghost Town Gallery, both included in Collected Poems, bear out this resemblance...
...One can flip from declarations by Chilean leftists, both underground and exiled, to an interview with the junta's ambassador to Washington, Walter Heitmann (who explains, "It is not a military dictatorship, it is a military government . . . some of the liberties are limited or restricted right now because that is necessary for the recovery of the country...
...The Wall Street Journal even gave space to a member of the Chilean oligarchy named Pablo Huneeus to write that Barnes had exaggerated the number of bodies he saw in the Santiago morgue...
...I will not go mad...
...None of which is meant to deny the value of this book, only to suggest its limitations...
...They are without the restraint of laws-international business law is virtually nonexistent, and there's always some country where anything is allowed (one global bank executive has noted, "U.S...
...they are empty and strangely hopeful...
...for slaughtering mortgaged stock" ("In Egypt Land...
...I could not sleep for sadness too, to think how these great hearts are gulled with lies...
...Phil writes about the "triangle...
...They are without the restraint of political or patriotic allegiance-though mostly American-run, they owe nothing by custom or sentiment to the established nation-states, including the United States...
...They control assets of more than $200 billion, monopolize the largest part of world trade, and, more than any single government are able to dictate how people are to live, work, buy, play, congregate, teach, learn, and perceive the world...
...After all you have to know the enemy before you can defeat it...
...He continues at his labor, knowing as did Anne earlier, that words are somehow "corpses": "I will not lie again, not this way...
...Investigate the roles of Kissinger and the C.I.A...
...He has his own story to tell...
...and c) jargon...
...an anti-imperialist and democratic state managed by a populist coalition in the form of a unitary party of the three principal classes...
...Assign reporters to investigate the killing of 10,000 to 20,000 Allende supporters...
...under Comintern discipline and controlled from abroad by persons unfamiliar with the complex problems and realities of Indo-America...
...If the American flag and the American gunboat were no longer able to protect the markets and permit the exploitations, then something new had to be devised, a more sophisticated way of assuring worldwide operability and imperial control, based not on military but technological might, not on national diplomacy but international finance...
...Although his words are supernatural, they suggest the fact that they, Phil and Anne Sorenson, are driven to confront the meaning of infant mortality, their disjointed marriage, and the mysteries of life and art...
...Secondly, perhaps because they lack an understanding of corporate imperialism, Barnet and Muller are at a total loss for ways to deal with it...
...Manual Labor is a novel about marriage-it affirms the tense vitality of relationships and, by doing so, it exorcises past ghosts...
...There is great irony...
...the Latin American goose that lays golden eggs...
...the superintendent saw what an ad the Negro would make with bis peg leg so he hung a sandwich on him with safety slogans and he told the Negro just to keep walking all day up and down the plant and be an example ("Report to the Stockholders," V) In the '30s there's the sharecropper, trapped in a spiral of rising costs, who raises his kids on "cornbread, buttermilk and greens," and who could be sent to the chain-gang "If he killed a calf to feed his family...
...But to think, as Barnet and Muller sometimes seem to, that American lawmakers want to destroy global imperialism is of course the height of folly: might as well ask flies to clean up horseshit...
...I could not sleep for pride in these my people, still square-shooters, still ready to tote fair with the other man...
...All reasonable ideas, I suppose, but the point is that none of them stands a chance of being enacted as long as corporate imperialism is working and the world managers don't fall asleep at the switch...
...Given their size, their reach, their wealth, and their technology, they can manipulate workers and governments alike and feel no compunction about distorting political or social processes as they do so...
...But I don't mean to carp on the book's form: it makes for a tough read, as they say in the trade, and keeps it from being as powerful and popular as it should be, but the facts and figures are all there, the analysis is intelligent and the biases sound, and anyone wanting a complete and up-to-date portrait of the new phenomenon of global corporatism, told in language neither shrill nor sectarian, should start here...
...His manual labor symbolizes his artistic endeavor...
...Even worse, as MacEoin writes, "The Allende victory emerges simply as a happening, not as the culmination of a long and harsh struggle by the workers for recognition...
...When Beecher pulls away from anecdote and exhortation to generalize ("Beaufort Tides"), or when he strikes a more formal rhetorical pose ("The Camaldolese Come to Big Sur"), his poems seem less successful, perhaps because we lose the ease of his voice talking to us plain, we miss that sense of rage he pens in the bitter ironies of his tales, or at times makes patent...
...Like the My Lai massacre, Americans just wanted it to vanish...
...And ultimately this odd chauvinism leads them to call for American solutions to global corporatism, action by American communities, American lawmakers, even, strike me blind, American bureaucracies...
...He learns that "life" is as empty as the blank page...
...If ITT and Chile wasn't enough to convince everyone, then surely Exxon and the "oil crisis" have, or the American grain marketers and the Russian wheat deal, or the Rockefellers' IBEC and its Latin American exploitation-not to mention the Vietnam war and the worldwide commodity shortages...
...The novel is patterned carefully...
...to liberate themselves from imperialist domination...
...A never-to-be-bom infant "thinks": "After I died they moved from Massachusetts where they rose early and worked all day at projects with their hands...
...Just as Nixon's Vietnamization made the killing there nearly invisible, his overthrow by proxy of Allende helped keep the bloody drama off American television...
...She writes rapidly, madly, and painfully...
...The workers expect to see him "on the street with a tin cup," if at all...
...Although he writes painstakingly, unlike Anne, he is unsure of his complete power (artistic, masculine, spiritual...
...He often reminisces through ironic anecdotes, forked with his sympathy for the disenfranchised and their champions and with his distaste for the boss-sanctioned injustices that hem in men's lives...
...The literature of global imperialism is still not so very extensive-a few academic journals and conference reports, a couple of AFL-CIO pamphlets, several Congressional committee studies, a cluster of specialized works, parts of Gaibraith, some of Heilbroner, and some popular books like Anthony Sampson's ITT and Servan-Schreiber's American Challenge -and this particular volume is without question a welcome addition...
...And I like his way of writing about things-migrant camps, loyalty oaths, Kittredge's classroom- from the inside looking out...
...we have completed, however, a significant cycle...
...Phil writes the next section...
...Or turn to an article by Marlise Simons, a courageous and brilliant free-lance correspondent, revealing the machinations of right-wing businessmen and government officials in Brazil, America's regional surrogate sheriff, in financing the coup and setting up a police state...
...she "dangles," nevertheless, when she breaks off her letter: "You can die of words...
...If their intention was to alert the general reader and convert the expert, they have certainly gone a long way toward that-but they have simultaneously overwhelmed the former and bemired the latter...
...But I hope they do...
...In the hands of the upper-level managers of no more than 300 global corporations lies power heretofore denied to all but a few leaders of nations...
...If the U.S...
...Americans may not want to read this superb book...
...The novel is about various marriages...
...As much as he risks those plain-speaking pitfalls of sentimentality and banal rhetoric, I think his poems usually work well within the limits he sets for them...
...The fact that multinational enterprises became economically significant only in the mid-1960s, just as the American empire was collapsing and the Vietnam adventure proved its weakness, is not an accident: the global corporation was American capitalism's answer to the end of empire...
...This figure is of tremendous significance for Chile,' it commented, 'if one compares it with the fact that the gross national product achieved throughout the entire existence of the country, that is, approximately 400 years, amounts to $10.5 billion . . .'" If MacEoin appears to be building his case with the plodding relentlessness of a lawyer defending a black before a redneck jury, he has his reasons...
...Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it...
...is becoming, Heaven forbid, like an undeveloped country, that its people are being impoverished, that gaps between rich and poor are growing-in fact, that things are going to be as bad for us and for them...
...companies have had virtually complete freedom to do what they pleased in Mexico, as compared to the restrictions that are imposed upon them in the United States...
...For instance: "According to a statement of the Chile Copper Corporation in 1971, the four big United States companies who had been exploiting Chile's copper, nitrate and iron resources for 60 years had in that time taken out of Chile wealth to the value of $10.8 billion...
...Al-lende, a physician and the former dean of the Chilean Senate, was ridiculed by American correspondents as "an acrobat," "a plump little doctor" and "a former country coroner...
...He dies in jail, after rebelling and leading a shootout with the local deputies...
...Throughout his work he attends to America's need to become American, to allow each of its people a real stake in the land...
...We'll survive...
...Among the analyses is a description by Richard J. Barnet, a member of the research-orientated Transnational Institute, of Kissinger's cynical assumption that a Pax Americana-with all the economic exploitation and military repression it implies- will be tolerated by a world desperate for any kind of peace...
...he tells himself that "I'm sure that narrative leads to sanity, and slowly, carefully, chiseling the details, I must make what's happening come from what's happened...
...He counts on the moral force of his voice, rather than its music, and on his evocation of real scenes to move us...
...When he is unable to construct correct patterns, he is uneasy...
...It is this unquestionably frightening picture that Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller seek to portray in the 500 large pages of their much-acclaimed book...
...Not that they have any Visible love for the American empire, but they do keep worrying about American well-being-they spend several chapters bemoaning that the U.S...
...Barnet and Muller sense this dimly, but they never appreciate its ramifications, and are led thereby into a kind of sentimentality about the old ways of the world...
...Instead, several publications assigned reporters to investigate Barnes...
...Some had been machine-gunned in the body . . . They were all young and, judging from the roughness of their hands, all from the working class...
...They also develop a peculiar attachment to the American nation-state, which takes on the beneficence of contrast: because the multinationals, which have a global reach, are bad, then the American state, which is more limited, must be good, or at least better...
...She begins to understand the need for patterns (even if they distort reality) and word-play...
...Thus his presence contrasts that of the dead infant...
...Corporations which owe allegiance to no country and exact tribute from all have grown in just the last decade to a position of dominance that has never before been known in the economic world...
...I don't want to die, Mamma, I'm like you, I don't want to die, Mamma, Mamma...
...He realizes that he is "tangled in the lines," that life wrenches art out of shape (and vice versa...
...Phil stops writing at last because he must face Abe and Anne...
...The junta's contortion of one of Latin America's few democracies is analyzed in Chile: Under Military Rule, a valuable compilation of 60 articles published by IDOC/North America, a nonprofit educational and religious organization...
...He is afraid, unlike Anne, to court madness and sleep...
...From suburban working class communities and the outlying shantytowns in the shadow of the Andes Mountains, they came down the broad Alameda Bernardo O'Higgins, chanting and dancing in great circles while I, then an Associated Press reporter, scribbled madly...
...I have to organize, pull it into lines, directions...
...Beecher's poetry is his recurrent act of telling stories and talking common sense about things that have happened and are happening-his life and his ancestors' lives, the history of the nation and the news...
...He is more professional...
...Hodges, in displaying a dazzling knowledge of his terrain, presupposes a knowledge of Marxist theory and Latin America...
...Beecher clearly believes in the power of his plain-speaking to cause change, as in "Engagement at Salt Fork," where Beecher and other '60s war-protestors talk things out with some local antagonists, "till they came to see/the meaning of our walk": Long after midnight it was when the last of them went home...
...Hodges, a professor at Florida State University, offers scholars an arsenal of new information, augmented by an index and a 16-page bibliography, on the rapidly evolving ideology and insurrections of the region's Prufrockian Communists, hesitant Socialists, schismatic Trotskyites, calculating Fidelists and daredevil Guevarists...
...Seldom before in America had public language been more distanced from reality than it was under our last regime...
...This letter is an attempt to expiate her guilt, to shore up her existence...
...Even specialists will find Hodges' peregrination obstructed by: a) cliches ("The time is now ripe for...
...He is also haunted by the ghosts of family life...
...They push their cart through the supermarket of solutions, pulling ideas off the shelf apparently at random: more international regulation, more national watchdogs, laws for more domestic investment, and return of foreign profits, laws to break up bank holding companies, stronger labor unions to prevent runaway plants, stronger community controls over what firms move in or out, redistribution of wealth from the richest to the poorest, and self-sufficiency in natural resources...
...he appears more concerned with the replication of themes that have mattered to him all along, voiced in the natural rhythms of everyday speech...
...Phil discovers a "ghost" in the church, and his relationship to this figure (and Anne) takes up the rest of the novel...
...Manual Labor FREDERICK BUSCH New Directions, $8.50 IRVING MALIN Manual Labor begins dramatically...
...First, I think Barnet and Muller fail to understand the underlying reaspns for the rise of the global corporation and thereby misjudge its nature...
...God help the liars when my people awake...
...There isn't much development in method or theme through Beecher's poetry...
...The most notable exception was Newsweek correspondent John Barnes' report shortly after the coup, from the Santiago morgue: ". . . Most had been shot at close range under the chin...
...He thinks change is possible if the nation awakens to its inequities and adheres to the principles on which it was founded...
...The Latin American Revolution, according to its dust jacket, provides "the first comprehensive treatment of the history, politics, and strategy of contemporary revolutionary movements in Latin America...
...And they are without the restraint or social sanctions or cultural ethics- they exist beyond the norms and pressures of any particular society, their managers are designedly made and kept rootless, and the profit motive is their only moral guide (a Caltex vice president on the proclamation of dictatorship in the Phillipines: "Martial law has significantly improved the business climate...
...companies (down by 10 percent while national expenditures have gone up 370 percent...
...No Peaceful Way GARY MACEOIN Sheed & Ward, $6.95 Chile: Under Military Rule IDOC/North America, $4.95 The Latin American Revolution DONALD C. HODGES Morrow, $9.95 JOE NICHOLSON JR...
...This dossier documents the junta's abolition of civil liberties, its torture and repression, and the revived (after Allende's overthrow) aid gushing from Washington...
...There are two criticisms, however, I would like to offer, and they go to the heart rather than the form of the book...
...They succeed...
...Union Carbide policy: "It is not proper for an international corporation to put the welfare of any country in which it does business above that of any other...
...No Peaceful Way relates this story- a story which Gary MacEoin calls a microcosm of Latin America where natural resources are legally looted by "the international structures of domination and dependence" and where "some luxuriate in abundance while others starve...
...it must be "constructed" to hold meaning...
...In the '50s there are the communal farmers who "took Negroes in/ and treated them as brothers," and who need "to get seed peanuts/to plant their fields": They sent two women and a little boy aged nine to try to buy peanuts up and down Georgia One place a man cursed these women out for 'dirty niggerloving whores' and yelled to raise a mob ("Just Peanuts") Unlike Miller, though, who turned away from the American social experience to a kind of inspired self-scape, Beecher continued to believe in the perfectibility of the country...
...Indeed, they over-succeed: by the first fifth of the book we are all convinced of their message, and from then on we are loaded with additional restatements of it in one form or another, the weight of which is no doubt convincing but also pretty hard on the back...
...This it does, fortified by Donald C. Hodges' gathering of numerous outlawed documents and his interviews with underground revolutionary leaders in ten countries...
...It is, therefore, an artistic design...
...MacEoin, a journalist, poet, philosopher, lawyer and author of numerous books on Latin America, displays impressive research and writes with understated grace...
...Phil works steadily...
...And he takes it upon himself to help awake the nation...
...We are back at the beginning...
...In the '20s there's the switchman who loses a leg in the mill...
...Her sentences "drown" her, but she manages to recognize some reasons for her contradictions and mistakes...
...When Allende's nationalizations threatened this setup, the legal looters successfully conspired with Henry Kissinger and the Chilean oligarchy to crush him...
...It is, at the same time, a remarkable union of philosophy and manual labor...
...Global corporations, even more than national ones, have only one principle, and that is the maximization of profits at any human cost...
...No more lousy poems, no more still-born narratives: I'll do whatever I do, and then it will be done, and I'll be through...
...After the infant thinks of events which he has not witnessed, he surrenders as it were, to Anne's "letter...
...Anne won't go mad...
...He is a cynical, worldly Thoreau...
...A couple of them were girls, distinguishable among the massed bodies only by the curves of their breasts...
...He is a former government official who has turned his back on false pieties-this is the time of our Vietnam engagement:-and attempted to find roots in the land...
...One of these, "Think It Over, America" ("Americans, you have got to forget all this abracadabra/about what we can afford and can't afford"), sounds in part like a forefather of Allen Ginsberg's "America...
...The last words (within the infant's narrative) are "We'll live...
...Through Beecher's Collected Poems we come across extremes of this syndrome, cases of men harried not by the desire to make it in a big way, but by the need to get enough to survive day by day in a system that severely restricts their means of survival...
...After all, the Pope has no armies . . .) American capitalism-and behind it European and Japanese-learned how to use its monopoly of modern technology, its stranglehold on capital sources, its dominance of production and distribution, and its command of advertising and marketing to control the populations and the countries that heretofore had to be controlled by crude force...
...Americans may be even less inclined to read MacEoin: ". . . this country with seven per cent of the world's population is able to consume nearly half of the world's production only because the United States government and big business use their, power to siphon off an unconscionable part of the wealth produced in poor countries like Chile...
...In fact, he describes the junta's atrocities with such unflappable understatement that I kept waiting for him to get angry and when he didn't, I came to appreciate his way of letting statistics pack the sting...
...I can't say I wholly share his faith in those "great hearts" or in America's coming of age...
...They are spoken by Anne...
...I remember that chilly September day in 1970, standing in front of La Moneda, Chile's presidential palace, and watching them, some barefoot and ragged, streaming into Santiago to celebrate Salvador Allende's victory as the first freely elected Marxist in the Western Hemisphere...
...She is on the way to full recovery...
...When he finally does, he confronts silences, eternal questions...
...Actually there is a more complex geometrical figure in the novel...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 3
