One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘We reject this approach,’ he says. ‘We see the corporation as a machine – like all machines, it’s designed to do a specific job: to maximise returns to shareholders at the expense of everything else; to grow in perpetuity, to externalise its costs on to society as a whole, to minimise the returns to its employees. To expect it to do otherwise is like expecting a toaster to . . . to, er, well, to do something completely different. You get the point: to expect a machine to be “socially responsible” is a great distraction.’

  Jeff is making a fundamental point. Over the last few years, a drive to persuade corporations to be ‘socially responsible’ has taken off, supported by everyone from politicians to ‘reformist’ activists to corporate executives themselves, keen to embrace voluntary attempts at niceness rather than be forced by law to act differently. Yet people like Jeff and Paul reject this approach almost as strongly as they reject corporate authority itself. A ‘legal fiction’, as Paul Cienfuegos would have it, cannot make moral decisions; it cannot be ‘responsible’. A corporation cannot be moral or immoral; it is amoral, a machine programmed to pursue the narrow agenda of financial profit. Trying to persuade it to behave itself, they stress, is not likely to get anyone very far.

  ‘Ultimately,’ says Jeff, ‘the folks in the abolitionist movement decided they needed to take a strong stand – to say, simply, “slavery is unacceptable”. When they did that – when they took civil disobedience, decided to ignore the law and seek to change the existing paradigm, that ultimately led to their success, and they changed the constitution, fundamentally. They completely transformed the paradigm, and the law, and they changed the course of US history.’ Jeff is clearly an ambitious man.

  ‘We want to engineer a similar paradigm shift,’ he says, confirming my suspicion, ‘and we want to persuade other people out there to do the same. To be bold, to say, simply, “Here’s what’s right, here’s what needs to be done, now we have to figure out how to get there.”’

  Figuring out how to get there is, of course, the tricky bit. Reclaim Democracy has decided that the starting point is a local base. Boulder’s would-be paradigm shifters, like Humboldt County’s, are feeling their way as they go, because no one has provided them with a roadmap. Even so, as Jeff and Jennifer explain to me over dinner, the distance travelled in just a few years is already impressive.

  ‘If you’re working on this thirty-, forty-year timeline, as we are,’ says Jeff, ‘it’s about slowly changing the attitudes of a huge proportion of the public. It’s not enough just to work in your little activist segment, you have to work with everyday folk, across the political spectrum. This stuff appeals to people on the right as much as on the left.’ Jeff and Jennifer have various ways of working to make this happen. Jeff writes articles for anyone who will take them, and gives talks across the country. Then there are the various national efforts that emanate from this little house on the edge of the Rockies: campaigns to get corporations out of schools, to open up national presidential debates to candidates who aren’t from the two main corporate-funded parties (there is a bumper sticker on Jeff’s rarely used car which says ‘Unrepentant Nader Voter’), to introduce laws that would allow for the winding-up of corporations that commit serious crimes.

  Then, of course, there is the law. Like the good citizens of Arcata, the law is one of the avenues down which the paradigm shifters of Boulder have travelled. One of Reclaim Democracy’s initiatives, put together with local business owners and other citizens in 2000, was the ‘Community Vitality Act’. Like Humboldt County’s effort, it sought to strike a blow for people’s right to determine the shape of their own community. The Act would have required the city council to create a ‘local purchasing preference’, ensuring that city money was spent first with locally owned businesses; ensure that city-owned commercial property was leased to locally owned businesses; and – the most controversial clause – introduce a cap on the number of chainstores in Boulder.

  ‘All we were saying,’ says Jeff, ‘was “this far and no further”. At the moment we have hundreds of chain operations in this community, but we also have loads of small and community businesses – the balance is OK, so we said, right, at this point let’s put on a cap, see if people agree that we should stop things here. That created a huge amount of controversy and interest in the community . . .’

  ‘It was fun!’ laughs Jennifer. ‘One man took out a full-page ad in one of the papers explaining why the Act was a bad idea. We really enjoyed that. The level of debate it got going was huge.’

  ‘That was fun,’ admits Jeff. ‘It’s nice to have the other side protesting about your agenda for a change, instead of the other way round. It was a proactive vision and it created just an incredible amount of public interest. One of the city council members who’s been there for twenty-five years said it was by far the most public communication they’d ever received on an issue. It really struck a nerve.’

  The debate engendered by Boulder’s Community Vitality Act, like that kicked off by Measure F in Arcata, strikes me as a fascinating demonstration of how much passion can be inflamed by even a mild incursion into corporate power. The Act, after all, was hardly the kind of thing designed to bring the corporate edifice crashing down. It also seems to show how popular such an incursion can be among the public. The debate, as in Arcata, was also at least half of the point: ‘At even the most basic level, it made people think about how they spent their dollars, and about who was making decisions about the shape of their community,’ says Jeff.

  In the end, the Community Vitality Act failed to get off the ground. ‘The city council dissected it,’ says Jennifer. ‘But they also decided to see what they could do to incorporate it into the city’s five-year comprehensive plan . . . so something may come of it.’ Even if it doesn’t, Boulder is thinking hard now about the issues that Jeff, Jennifer and their allies have raised. Down in the town centre, you can see the evidence.

  You can also see what Jeff and Jennifer are up against. The next morning, Jeff takes me down to Pearl Street, Boulder’s main shopping area. In less than a decade, according to locals, it has been transformed. Locally owned shops have closed, chains have proliferated; as a result, less money comes back into the community for every dollar spent, people have to travel further for basic goods, corporations have increasing control over local shopping habits and the place is beginning – though only beginning – to look like everywhere else. In this, Boulder is merely following the route that is being travelled by most of small-town America. Since 1990, for example, more than 11,000 independent pharmacies have closed across the country. The market share of independent bookshops has fallen from 58 per cent in 1972 to 15 per cent today. Five corporations now account for a third of all grocery sales; two corporations for a third of all hardware sales; two for a quarter of all book sales. Blockbuster video accounts for one in every three videos rented; Wal-Mart controls 7 per cent of nationwide consumer spending.6 And the consolidation goes on.

  Jeff and I walk down Pearl Street as blue stormclouds gather over the mountains on the western horizon. We pass a Sunglass Hut, a hip and overpriced clothes shop, a café, a bar, a café, a boutique, a café, the Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Häagen-Dazs, a café. A plague of coffee shops seems to have descended from the mountains. Several of them are Starbucks, playing their usual game of competing with each other to see who can wipe out the most local competition. On the plus side, the local cafés have fought back with white chocolate mocha, of which I take it upon myself over the next few days to drink as much as possible. It’s tough, but I feel duty-bound to support the local economy.

  ‘Five years ago,’ says Jeff, ‘this was full of shops that people could buy useful stuff in.’ He looks despondently along the street towards the branch of Banana Republic on the corner. ‘But then, five years ago there was open farmland between Boulder and Denver. Now it’s all strip malls. We’re becoming a suburb.’ He’s not exaggerating. I travelled here from San Francisco to Denver on an Amtrak train
through stunning scenery: the peaks of the Sierra Nevada; the bleached sands of the Utah desert; the thin sliver of land which carries the train tracks across the water to lonely Salt Lake City; tunnels and cuttings hewn through the pine-swathed Rocky Mountains; men fishing in the gorges of the Colorado River hundreds of feet below. Then I got to Denver and switched to a bus, which took me through a five-mile tarmac-and-neon avenue of Taco Bells, Wal-Marts, McDonald’s and Home Depots to Boulder. I was in a bad mood until the next morning.

  Jeff being Jeff, though, he is not about to take this kind of thing lying down, and in 1998, with a small group of local business people, he founded an organisation to do something about it. The Boulder Independent Business Alliance (BIBA) emerged from the work he was doing with Reclaim Democracy, and represented another way of practically limiting the influence of corporations in the town. BIBA started with a handful of members and now has 150, from bookshops to cafés, bars to video shops; even a local bank. Walk down Pearl Street and look closely at the shop windows: dozens of them bear stickers sporting the BIBA logo. The local businesses are fighting back.

  ‘We wanted,’ Jeff explains, ‘to try to create a model of local and independent businesses that can halt and hopefully eventually reverse the process of national and transnational chains driving out independent and community-based businesses; hopefully it will be something that other communities around the world can look to for inspiration. What was interesting was that creating BIBA meant working with pretty mainstream people; ordinary folk, business owners, not “activists”. And what was interesting is that it appealed to so many different people. Questioning the idea of a national chain being able to open up a branch wherever they want without the local community having a say appeals to people whatever their politics. These kind of ideas really catch on among so many different people. Virtually everyone will say, “Hell, yeah, we have the right to say no to corporations – they don’t have rights to do this to us. How did we get the idea that we don’t have a right to define how our community looks?” That’s it – click.’

  BIBA did click, and it is still growing. Its members form co-operative buyers’ groups to get better deals, work with the city council to promote local businesses and campaign to keep out more chains, produce a directory of local businesses and discount cards for people who shop locally. Four years on, it has two full-time staff, and Jeff has pulled out of running it to take his idea national. BIBA was, as far as he knows, the first independent business alliance in the US. Inspired by it, others have sprung up across the country. When I arrived in town, Jeff had just received the official papers confirming the existence of the next step in his project to rejuvenate small-town America: AMIBA, the American Independent Business Alliance.

  ‘I like to keep busy,’ he explains.

  Jeff provided the impetus behind BIBA, but David Bolduc provided the money. Bolduc owns the Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street. He is tall and slow-talking. He has the obligatory paradigm-shifter’s beard. I’ve come to seek him out among the floor displays and the special-offer bins.

  ‘A lot of book chains started to come into Boulder six or seven years ago,’ he says, ‘which was a catalyst for me. Some of us got together and said, “What can we do? What makes us different to them?” The obvious answer is that we’re local, but we had to work out why that mattered, and what it actually meant. I think that a town, a place, a region has some kind of identity that people like – that they’re proud of where they live, they want to keep it that way, or at least they want to define how it changes, and on whose terms. But frankly, if I hadn’t gone out there myself, and put my money into this, and if others like Jeff hadn’t done the same, nothing would have happened. It doesn’t happen by itself. If people value something about their local area, they have to get out and do something about it themselves, because no one else will.’

  The Boulder Bookstore has been around for twenty-eight years. The local branch of Borders – one of the two biggest book chains in the US – has been around for less than five. Since the creation of BIBA, and the debate over the Community Vitality Act, though, something odd has happened – Bolduc’s takings, despite the presence of the chain, have increased.

  ‘The idea of a nation of shopkeepers,’ he says to me, as he walks me round the store pointing out various books that he really thinks I ought to buy, ‘was historically a very important part of the original American vision; a nation of independent small property-owners and local traders. In a town like Boulder you can talk about these things, and people get it; people talk about it with you. BIBA and the debate about the Community Vitality Act have made a real difference to local attitudes. Borders opened down the street about five years ago, and it doesn’t seem to have affected my trade at all. Possibly it has even helped me. I can’t think of another town in which that could happen. And it’s just a rumour, but I heard that the Boulder branch of Borders is one of the worst-performing in the country.’ He considers the ramifications of this for a second.

  ‘You know,’ he says, deadpan, ‘that makes me feel terrible.’

  ‘At some stage,’ says Jan Edwards, ‘you have to do more than go on marches and make puppets. I mean, it’s great fun, but at some stage, if you really want to make change, someone’s got to sit down and read the stupid court cases.’ She sighs. ‘I just can’t believe it has to be me.’

  I had to hire a car to find Jan. There’s no other way to get to the light, airy timber house, surrounded by woods of pine and birch, where she lives with her husband, Bill Meyer, back up on the wild coast of northern California. Paul Cienfuegos told me I had to visit Jan and Bill, who turn out to be a couple of charming forty-somethings who call themselves anarchists, and who have caught the corporate paradigm-shifting bug. Jan has black hair, and is on crutches – she broke her ankle recently. Bill has a beard. So does his friend, Doug Hammerstrom, who is also there when I arrive. Doug looks a bit like Donald Sutherland, and wears a blue T-shirt with frogs on. I am late, but nobody minds. This is California, after all.

  ‘Would you like a cookie?’ says Jan. ‘I just baked them. They’re still hot.’ It seems rude to refuse, so I have a cookie, and a glass of milk to go with it. Call me a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, I think, but this is my kind of anarchism.

  Bill, Jan and Doug are also members of the growing but scattered tribe of Americans who are worried about the place of corporations in society. Friends of Paul Cienfuegos and Jeff Milchen and others like them, they too can be heard comparing their work to abolitionism, comparing corporations to toasters and using the word ‘paradigm’ with their heads held high. They can also be heard discussing legal technicalities, constitutional niceties and how to change the law. Jan, Bill and Doug, and especially Jan, are the sort of spirited amateurs who have been almost accidentally sparking off societal change for centuries, in the face of expert derision. Jan says that this thought is what keeps her going.

  ‘I’ve found stuff in the constitution that even lawyers hadn’t worked out,’ she says, as we all sit round Jan and Bill’s big wooden table, the birch trees swaying gently through the windows. ‘Loopholes and stuff. I’m much less educated than either of these people,’ she says, indicating Bill and Doug.

  ‘In the formal academic sense,’ interjects Bill, hurriedly.

  ‘Right, well, I’m not a lawyer. Actually I used to work in theatre, but that means I don’t look at things in the same way. It can be helpful. I got into all this when I heard someone on the radio talking about corporate personhood. I looked into it, I got outraged, I put an ad in the paper to see if anyone else was outraged and Doug answered. Actually, he was pretty much the only one who answered.’

  ‘Was I?’ says Doug. He sounds surprised.

  ‘Well, pretty much. So we started to get people together for meetings to see if there was anything we could do to challenge this corporate personhood stuff around here. I’d been worried about corporations for a long time, and wondering what could really be done to control their activiti
es. I realised at this time that we couldn’t tackle them because they were us – they were people, for God’s sake, they had the same rights as us! No wonder we couldn’t tackle them. So we thought we might try and get a law on the local ballot to revoke corporate personhood, but we found that we couldn’t – it’s not legal to vote to take away the rights of a person!’ She laughs.

  ‘And a good thing too,’ says Bill, ‘otherwise there are certain people who would like to take away the rights of certain sections of the community pretty damn quick . . .’

  ‘And I somewhat favoured not trying to make a new law anyway,’ says Doug. ‘I didn’t think people were ready for that yet. I rather favoured something symbolic. And that was kind of what we ended up with.’

  ‘Although it’s not entirely symbolic,’ chides Bill. ‘Even though it wasn’t made into a law, it is the official position of the city – the city agrees that corporations should not have personhood rights.’

  What the three of them are talking about is the Resolution of the City of Point Arena on Corporate Personhood, which was passed by the city, thanks to Bill, Jan, Doug and a handful of others, in April 2000. Following the now-familiar pattern of introducing a local proposal, kicking off a heated debate and then, just, making it official, they persuaded the council of the nearby town of Point Arena to pass a resolution stating that, in the city’s view, corporations were not, after all, ‘persons’ under the law. They quoted the opinion of a Supreme Court judge who had said the same thing in 1938. The resolution, like Arcata’s Measure F, also resolved that the city council would ‘encourage public discussion on the role of corporations in public life and urge other cities to foster similar public discussion’.