Consider one example in corporate journalism. An article in the Jan. 28 Business Week online was headlined: “Can You Trust Anybody Anymore? The scope of the Enron debacle undermines the credibility of modern business culture.”

This thought worries the ruling elites. But it conceals more than it reveals. Crucially, such thinking assumes what requires explanation.

I mean the public’s supposed faith in corporations before the “Enron debacle.” When did working Americans believe in corporate rule, with its so-called free trade and deregulation driving down their living and working conditions?

Recall that the tendency for corporations to make the lives of the American public less secure has proceeded legally, well before the Enron meltdown. Here’s one example. U.S.-based corporations have increased their profits and expanded market share by using the NAFTA to shift factories from America to Mexico.

In Mexico, workers are paid very low wages and union organizers are maimed and murdered. This corporate strategy to boost the bottom line was proposed by President Clinton and narrowly approved by Congress.

Circles of power have made political hay by trying to misdirect people’s attention away from corporations and Congress to Mexican peasants, some of whom have come to California. They are people who can no longer live off their land, having been crushed by NAFTA-friendly agribusiness, which is subsidized by American taxpayers.

Such peasants who travel north seek a job. Not the jobs of American workers, but a job. Under corporate rule of the economy, workers don’t own jobs. Their bosses do. Keeping this basic fact hard to see is a tremendous victory for the corporate class.

On a related note, electricity deregulation in California ruined various small firms and brought suffering to many households. The promise of better consumer choice partly from Enron proved to be a cruel hoax. In California and around the world, deregulation of energy has been a disaster for the majority and a cash cow for the corporate few and the elected officials they buy to do their bidding.

Now as before, the American corporate state needs public opinion on its side. Corporate credibility maintains the status quo in the nation, still a free society by many measures.

Such freedom comes at a price, in more ways than one. Billions of corporate dollars are spent annually on U.S. election and public relations campaigns. Corporate propaganda is a way to protect corporate power, scholar Alex Carey noted in his book “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty.”

People aren’t stupid, though some may be stupefied by corporate PR. Those who aren’t recently protested global capitalism in Manhattan at the World Economic Forum. Likewise, so did the people at the World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Elite opinion in America is turning away from the view put forward Jan. 14 by U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on Enron’s rise and demise. Concerning its collapse, he said on Fox News Sunday: “Companies come and go… . That’s the genius of capitalism.”

Well, we can agree or not with O’Neill’s statement. But what can we do about corporations’ ownership of the political system, and what this means for how people live and work here and abroad?

These questions are now on the margins of the debate, where American politicians and pundits hope to keep them. Crucially, their agenda is shaped by corporate competition. Its counterpart flows from social cooperation. Two visions. One is dominating and breeds dependence. The other is emerging and encourages independence. Could the stakes be more important for the future?

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper ssandron@hotmail.com

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