THE GREENING OF AMERICA by CHARLES A. REICH

[islandboy]

The tendency of administration, while it may appear to be benign and peaceful, as opposed to the turbulence of conflict, is actually violent. For the very idea of imposed order is violent. It demands compliance; nothing less than compliance will do; and it must obtain compliance, by persuasion or management if possible, by repression if necessary. It is convinced that it has "the best way" and that all others are wrong; it cannot understand those who do not accept the rightness of its view. A growing tension and anger develops against those who would question what is so carefully designed to be "best"-----for them as well as for everybody else. Administration wants the best for everybody, and all that it asks is that individuals conform their lives to the framework established by the State.

[islandboy]

3. THE  CORPORATE  STATE IS  AUTONOMOUS.
What controls the amalgamated power of the Corporate State? We usually make at least three reassuring assumptions. One: power is controlled by the people through the democratic process and pluralism in the case of government, and through the market in the case of the "private" sector. Two: power is controlled by the persons who are placed in a position of authority to exercise it. Three: power is subject to the Constitution and the laws. These assumptions stand as a presumed barrier to the state power we have described.
If pure democratic theory fails us in both the public and private spheres, we must nevertheless consider whether a modified version of democracy can permit large competing interests to achieve a balance which represents a rough approximation of what people want; this is the theory of pluralism. Here again the theory does not work out.
"Pluralism" represents not interests, but "organized" interests. Thus, "labor" means large labor organizations, but these do not necessarily represent the real interests of individual employees. "Labor" may support heavy defense expenditures, repressive police measures, and emphasis on economic growth, but this may not be at all an expression of the true interests of the industrial worker.
Indeed, at the organizational level there is far more agreement than difference among the "competing interests," so that they come to represent the same type of cooperation as conglomerate mergers produce among interests in the private sphere.

[islandboy]

Even if the people had power to give orders, the orders might have little or no effect. Increasingly, the important part of government is found in the executive departments, which are staffed by career men, experts, professionals, and civil servants who have specialized knowledge of technical fields. These persons are not elected, nor are they subject to removal on political grounds. They are thus immunized from direct democratic control. Congress and the state legislatures, however, have neither the time nor the specialized knowledge to oversee all of these governmental activities. Instead, the legislatures have increasingly resorted to broad delegations of authority. Even if a statute tries to set more definite standards, such as the Federal Power Act, which lists some factors to be considered in building hydroelectric projects, the factors are simply left to be considered and weighed in the agency's discretion. What really happens is that government becomes institutionalized in the hands of professionals, experts, and managers, whose decisions are governed by the laws of bureaucratic behavior and the laws of professional behavior. These laws mean that decisions will be within narrow compass, tend to the status quo, tend to continue any policy once set, tend to reflect the interests of the organization. These organizations, then are unprepared to respond to any outside direction even if the people were in a position to give it. The same is true of the private corporate bureaucracies. If the people do not control the Corporate State, is it at least controlled by those who give the orders---the executives and the power elite behind them? Such control might not satisfy those who favor democracy or the rule of law, but it would still be control that had to consider the broad trends of public opinion--still a major difference from no control at all.

[islandboy]

Let us focus on an imaginary organization---government or private (an agency or corporation)----and its executive head---the personification of the "power elite." We enter into the paneled executive suite or, in the case of a more sophisticated organization, a suite in the most advanced taste, and there we expect to find an individual or "team" who really do exercise power. But the trappings, from the modern sculpture to the console telephone, do not tell the whole story. Any organization is subject to the demands of technology, of its own organization, and to its own middle-management. The corporation must respond to advances in technology. It must act in such a way as to preserve and foster its own organization. It is subject to the decision-making power of those in middle-management whose interests lie with the advance of organization and technology. If the organization is a private corporation, the power elite must take much else into consideration; the fact that there are financial interests: bondholders, stockholders, banks and bankers, institutional owners (such as pension funds and mutual funds), potential raiders seeking financial control, possible financial control by a system of conglomerate ownership.This is not to suggest that stockholders or bondholders have any significant part in management, that there is any investor democracy, or that conglomerate structure necessarily means guidance of management. But the very existence of these interests creates certain impersonal demands upon the corporation; for example, the demand for profit, for growth, for stability of income. The manager cannot act without an awareness of the constant demand for profits. Thus a television executive's decision about whether to put on a special news broadcast and "sacrifice" a paying program is made in the oppressive awareness of the demand for profit---a demand which, because it is so institutional and impersonal, literally "cares" about nothing else than profits.

[islandboy]

The business executive is also required to be aware of many different kinds of state and federal law. The corporation is quite likely to be influenced by another set of relationships to government. It may possess valuable government contracts, subsidies, franchises or licenses, any of which can be modified or revoked. It may be the beneficiary of favored tax treatment that can be changed. It must therefore act in such a manner as to preserve whatever special privileges and advantages it has. Inside a corporation, there is the important influence of the system of decision-making. Most managements consist of a committee rather than a single head; all students of group behavior know how a committee is limited in ways that a single executive is not. Beyond this, management is limited by the many kinds of specialists and experts whose views must be consulted: the experts in marketing, in business management methods, the technicians, the whole class of people who occupy the "tech-no-structure." The structure of any large organization is bureaucratic, and all bureaucracies have certain imperatives and rules of their own. The bureaucracy acts to preserve itself and its system, to avoid any personal responsibility, to maintain any policy once set in motion. Decisions become "institutional decisions" that can be identified with no one person, and have the qualities of the group mind. The bureaucracy is so powerful that no executive, not even the President of the United States, can do much to budge it from its course. Top executives are profoundly limited by lack of knowledge. They know only what they are told. In effect, they are "briefed" by others, and the briefings is both limiting and highly selective. The executive is far to busy to find anything out for himself; he must accept the information he gets, and this sets absolute limits to his horizons. The briefing may be three steps removed from the facts, and thus be interpretation built upon interpretation--nearer fiction than fact by the time it reaches the top.

[islandboy]

Thus the man in the chic office turns out to be a broker, a decider between limited alternatives, a mediator and arbitrator, a chairman, but not an originator. And such a position tends to be utterly inconsistent with thought, reflection, or originally. The executive cannot come up with reflections on policy, he cannot be the contemplative generalist, because he is too pressed and harried by the demands upon him. Increasingly, it is also inconsistent with the realities of the outside world, as the executive is insulated from them.
From all of this, there emerges the great revelation about the executive suite--the place from which power-hungry men seem to rule our society. The truth is far worse. In the executive suite, there may be a Leger or Braque on the wall, or a collection of African masks, there may be a vast glass-and-metal desk, but there is no one there. No one at all is in the executive suite. What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He ( or it), does not run the machine; he tends it.

[islandboy]

4. THE  NEW  PROPERTY
If the Corporate State were merely autonomous, its effects would be profoundly harmful to human beings; but the State is worse than autonomous; its machinery is influenced by private manipulation for power and gain, yet those who use it in this way have no power to influence it in a more positive direction, and ultimately they become captives as well as profiteers. These paradoxical results follow from the development of what we may call the New Property. With the rise of organization as the governing principle of American life, a change in the nature of private property and wealth necessarily followed. Organizations are not really "owned" by anyone. What formerly constituted ownership was split up into stockholder's rights to share in profits, management's power to set policy, employee's right to status and security, government's right to regulate. Thus older forms of wealth were replaced by new forms. Just as primitive forms of wealth such as beads and blankets gave way to what we familiarly know as property, so  "property" gave way to rights growing out of organizations. A job, a stock certificate, a pension right, an automobile dealer's franchise, a doctor's privilege of hospital facilities, a student's status in a university---these are typical of the new forms of wealth. All of these represent relationships to organizations, so that today a person is identified by his various statuses; an engineer at Boeing, a Ford dealer, a Ph.D. in political science, a student at Yale. The growth of status with respect to private organizations has been paralleled by a rise in statuses produced by, and related to, government. The more that government has become "affirmative" in nature, engaging in regulation, allocation of resources, distribution of benefits, and public ownership, the more it has become a status-dispensing organization. These statuses, public and private, achieve their great importance because they become, for most individuals, the chief goals of life. Instead of seeking happiness in more tangible ways, the Consciousness II person defines happiness in terms of his position in the complex hierarchy of status.

[islandboy]

A new job, he says, cannot be a mistake as long as it is "a step up," an individual gets satisfaction from "having people under him," a title can compensate for the absence of many other things. The individual feels he must be happy because he has status, as a student or a teacher, at a high-class university; if he is "at Yale" he glows with an artificial inward warmth. Statuses involve money, security, convenience, and also power, but these things do not quite express what they mean. They are a substitute self. The organizations of the Corporate State are empowered to confer and take away selfhood, and this fact, perhaps more than any other, explains the State's ability to dominate all the thinking and activities within it. In theory, all of these benefits and statuses, whether originating in the government or in "private" organizations, are distributed according to "the public interest" or the interests of the organization concerned, but never simply to advance private interests. An airline route or television channel is given to the applicant who will "best serve the public interest"; the windfall to the successful applicant is supposedly compensated by its services to the public. Likewise a government contract is awarded to the bidder who will best serve the government's interest, or who submits the lowest bid. The theory is extended to taxicab medallions and turnpike concessions; these privileges are valuable because they are partial monoplies, and they are given to the "best" applicants, just as in a private organization the promotions supposedly go to those who most "merit" them and will do the company the most good. On a grander scale, Congress votes subsidies or tax concessions to large groups, such as farmers, or the shipbuilding industry or the oil industry, on the theory that these serve the national interest.

[islandboy]

But the whole concept of a society that assumes responsibility for allocating resources, benefits, and privileges is undercut if private interests are able to manipulate the system for their own advantage. If an airline can get a new route, not because of "merit" but because of its political influence in Washington, the allocation system becomes not an instrument of public policy but a vast and corrupt grabbag for the shrewd and the powerful. In turn, this maneuvering alters public policy. The machinery of the State begins to be influenced by these private interests. It is still autonomous, but autonomous in an even more antisocial direction. The marriage of the machinery of the Corporate State with private profiteering can be illustrated by the television industry. Technology gives us television, and the imperative of technology, unguided by other values, insists that we produce it and use it without attempting to consider what it should and should not be used for, what harm it might do, what controls are essential to its use. When private manipulation is added to the equation, it produces programs expressly designed to win huge audiences so that mass-produced products can be sold, even if this means a degradation of popular taste and consciousness. It is the worst of all possible worlds: uncontrolled technology and uncontrolled profiteering, combined into a force that is both immensely powerful and irresponsible. The combination of forces bears a large responsibility for much of what is wrong with our society, from universities where the professors care more about advancing their status than teaching, to the oil industry, where the land, sea, and atmosphere are wantonly polluted. But it should not be thought that because private interests can successfully use the Corporate State, they can influence its course in any affirmative manner. On the contrary, individuals or organizations which depend on the New Property lose their own independence of action and thought; some may become rich and powerful, but they are irrevocably tied to the source of their advantages.

[islandboy]

Those who get few advantages may, however, be equally dependent on the system as it becomes all-pervasive. We can see this most clearly in the case of individuals who are beneficiaries of the New Property. When status and relationships to organizations replace private property, the result is a change in the degree of independent sovereignty enjoyed by the individual. Private property gave each person a domain in which he could be independent, and it enabled him to tell the rest of the world to go fly a kite. But a person whose "property" consists of a position in an organization is tied to the fate of the organization; if the organization goes down he goes with it. More important, he is subject to the power of the organization, for his "New Property" relationship is invariably conditional. There are conditions to be met for acquiring a status, maintaining it, advancing it, or avoiding its loss, and these conditions significantly affect the individual's independence. These conditions are set by the organization, not the individual, and they may be unilaterally altered by the organization. And except as specifically enacted by law, there are no limits to the conditions that may be placed on status---they may demand anything that serves the needs of the organization. A high school boy must cut his hair or be suspended, a civil servant must refrain from political activity, a college teacher must publish in scholarly journals. What are the consequences that follow from this conditioning power? It allows the rise of broad new legislative power with respect to individuals. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,"  Sherlock Holmes was consulted by a young lady who had been offered a position as a governess provided that she would agree to cut her hair short, wear a designated dress at certain times, and sit in a certain chair when requested. These conditions puzzled her enough to seek Holmes advice, but nobody questioned that the prodigiously stout man with the very smiling face, who had offered her the position at his country home, had a perfect right to make these or any other "requests" of a would-be employee. Miss Violet Hunter had only to refuse the job.

[islandboy]

Today, in the public-private state, where organizations are nationwide, and are connected both to other organizations and to the government, the smiling request is no longer a private whim but a matter of public concern. If the telephone company, or IBM, beaming with prodigious good nature, asks that employees cut their hair, wear a certain dress, or sit in a certain chair, the fact that such companies have almost monopoly control over various areas of the labor market makes them the possessors of a legislative power never contemplated by the framers of the constitution, who said that the United States would never be a country where a man could be told whether or not he must wear a hat. This legislative power may cut deeply into the private life of the individual. Each step forward in job technology and organization means a further refining of job specifications, and today employers justify as fully relevant to the job an official inquiry into a prospective employee's home life, psychological make-up, friends and associates, political and cultural activities, and past history. No part of an employee's life is so private that it could not be deemed, by the accepted process of reasoning, a matter of legitimate concern to his employer. Today's forms issued by organizations such as the Peace Corps and VISTA ask former teachers, employers, and friends to make evaluations of an applicant based on "all they know" of the individual. Whether in the hands of "private" or "public" organizations, the new legislative power may in many circumstances be exercised without regard to existing constitutional and Bill of Rights protections. A private employer may dismiss a man, or a private university may expel a student, for an act which, as a citizen, he has a constitutional right to do; the rationale is that these "private" organizations are not limited by the Constitution. The government, which is  limited by the Constitution, can nevertheless evade those limits when in its capacity as a regulator of statuses.

[islandboy]

Would-be government employees, candidates for admission to the bar, applicants for radio or television channels, have their opinions, speeches, friends, and associations subjected to scrutiny. Here the theory is that the particular status is "not a right, but a privilege"; the individual, if denied the status, can continue to exercise his constitutional liberties, and therefore the government claims it has not taken away anything protected by the Constitution. By a similar chain of reasoning, a driver's license can be revoked although the driver has not been convicted of any violation, or a franchise can be denied because of arrests, even though they did not lead to convictions.
Power over the New Property leads to all sorts of procedural innovations unknown to the Constitution. Organizations set up investigatory procedures that take no account of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches, conduct trials where the rules of evidence are unknown, and impose punishments that may violate the principle of double jeopardy---all in the process of determining whether a student has broken university rules, or an employee of the Post Office is a security risk, or a welfare recipient is not qualified to receive one type of payment. It was the entertainment industry that instituted private boycotts and loyalty tests for those suspected of left-wing political views. All of these invasions of constitutional limitations tend to increase gradually but steadily. Job specifications increase with the technology. Competition for positions increases, and so selectivity increases. More years of training are needed to qualify. And the power of new legislation, over time, becomes encrusted with additions; congressmen tack on a loyalty oath or a no-riot provision onto old-age benefits or student aid; having the power, they do not resist exercising it. Or private employers institute lie detector tests and personality evaluation forms. In this sense the battle over liberty is not waged along a stationary line; the whole battle takes place aboard a moving platform where the passing of time alone brings new erosion's of liberty; each time the battle is resumed, it is resumed farther down the line.

[islandboy]

Moreover, a victory may be more illusory than real. Suppose an employee or contractor wins the point. He may nevertheless be denied advancement or denied a new contract when the time comes. The organization may find other conditions which he cannot meet. It is diffcult to stop a private employer, or even the united States government, from establishing new conditions and applying them retroactively to past situations.  But will anyone even want to contest the conditioning power of organizations? The Bill of Rights assumes that the individual has an interest that is separate from, and possibly contrary to, that of government. The Bill of Rights is not self-executing. One must "want" to make a speech which displeases the authorities before the right of free speech comes into play; and status works to undermine the separateness of that interest. It makes an individual decide that what is best for the organization is also best for himself; he has the same interest as the conditioning authority. He "wants" to be investigated, he "wants" to have his privacy invaded, he "wants" to fulfill special conditions because the organization's well-being is identical with his own, and he hopes to be the person who uniquely satisfies the conditions for the next rung on the ladder. Under the circumstances, rights are likely to go unused until they crease to be functional.  Now we can see how the squeeze works against individuals in the Corporate State. In the preceding section of this outline we suggested that the organizations in the Corporate State gain external power as choice is reduced; the individual is compelled to deal with them and belong to them. Statuses apply a different but related kind of compulsion; they erode the individual's basis of independence, his ability and desire to "go it alone."  They offer him a reward for compliance; they purchase an abandonment of independence.

[islandboy]

From the welfare recipient to the licensed physician, from the student with a government scholarship to the man with an executive job, individuals have an "interest" in the compliance which the Corporate State demands. Power is the stick and the status-benefits are the carrot; when combined they leave few people with the means or the will to resist what is, after all, designed expressly to be in their "best interests."  And the status system strikes even deeper. It destroys the potential for solidarity which would be necessary to reassert control over the Corporate State. One consequence of a status system is a rigid hierarchy.  As everyone's property is transformed into relationships, so all relationships are fixed in vertical order. Everyone is above someone and below someone, and this of course gets in the way of community, for people at different levels of the hierarchy cannot join hands. Also, hierarchy results in automatic, clearly defined inequality, so that everyone can feel the differences between himself and those in other statuses. It gets to be in the interest of each status to see that the liberties of those in other statuses are repressed. One man's special status, benefits, and privileges depend upon the proper functioning of the rest of the organization; he wants to see everyone else kept in his proper place. Anyone getting unruly may alter the special laws applicable to someone else. Thus no one has any interest in anyone else's freedom.

[islandboy]

A dramatic illustration of how a status system undermines solidarity and the potential for collective action occurred in late 1969 when the drawing occurred for the draft lottery. Students who previously had a strong sense of solidarity found that, helplessly and much against their will, they were divided; a high number and a low number inevitably felt separated from each other. In time many students managed to regain a feeling of closeness to others differently situated, but they all recognized the power of the system to divide them.
The deepest problem concerning statuses has to do with the kind of individual they create. Each person gets increasingly tied to his own status-role. He is forced more and more to become that role, as less and less of his private life remains. His thoughts and feelings center on the role. And as a role-person he is incapable of thinking of "general" values, or of assuming responsibility for society. He can do that only in the diminishing area outside his role. Consider an automobile company executive. He can propose public housing as a solution to the urban crisis. But he cannot propose that fewer cars be produced, or that models be kept the same, to save money for public housing. Thus his role prevents him from acting for the community in the one area where he has power to act, and it prevents him from even realizing that his cars are one of the things draining money that should be used for cities. As long as he is in his role, he cannot act or think responsibly within the community. Outside his role, if there is any outside, he is virtually powerless, for his power lies in the role. Thus a nation of people grows up who cannot fight back against the power that presses against them, for each, in his separate status cubicle, is utterly apart from his fellow men. What we have said concerning individuals who are dependent upon the New Property carries over to organizations. The large corporations which enjoy privileges as television licensees or holders of airline routes may get rich off the  government, but they cannot and do not contest the government in any area; they are afraid of the government or even of an individual congressman or commissioner at the same time that they are using the government for their own purposes. They have no interest or will to express independent values. Their exclusive interest is simply in government favors. In this way they contribute to the autonomy and ungovernability of the Corporate State.