The Committee of the Sheets

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

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

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