Feature
Literary 2003: ESSAY
Raking the Muck: Revealing Corporate America
by Pauline Uchmanowicz

Rife with gumshoes tracing greenback and paper trails from the nation’s heartland to McDonald’s, cyberspace to Florida voting booths,
Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, and flag stops in between, 2002 proved a vintage year for muckrakers. Fast Food Nation, award-winning journalist Eric Schlosser’s exhaustively researched indictment of agribusiness, appeared in paperback (with a new afterward), and 54-straight weeks later remains on the New York Times bestseller list. Parked on that paper’s hardcover bestseller roster for more than 40 weeks and still holding, provocateur Michael Moore’s smearing political satire Stupid White Men, slated for an October 2001 release but delayed until the following March, is now in its 40th printing. A wider reading public likewise encountered investigative reporter Greg Palast, whose book debut The Best Democracy Money Can Buy presents an unfettered look at recent political and corporate fraud in the us and uk. Rounding out these exposés, in late November, business-writer wunderkind James Surowiecki offered up Best Business Crime Writing of the Year, an edited collection of stories culled from among our nation’s most respected newspapers and magazines. Each book paves inroads into current environmental, economic, and governmental crises, fingering those who drove us to the brink and explaining how to apply the breaks before we all fall over the edge together. Summed up another way, as Schlosser writes in the epilogue of Fast Food Nation, “The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”

Perhaps the most recognizable personality in the pile, documentary filmmaker and television host Michael Moore narrates Stupid White Men as if he were one. Irreverent and frequently scatological—literally discoursing on bathroom habits—in a print version of the folksy, big-screen bumbler, he shakes down big shots to find the right leads, whether riffing on global warming, Dixiecrats, the prison system, Pharmacia, Bill Clinton, or international politics. Aiming controversy directly at “Thief-in-Chief” George W. Bush (a tactic which post-9/11 stalled and nearly nixed the author’s deal with publisher HarperCollins), Moore claims Dubya and clan fixed the presidential election via Florida.

Elsewhere stirring up political incorrectness, Moore tackles white-skin privilege in the chapter “Kill Whitey,” paralleling the theme of white violence contained in his latest documentary Bowling for Columbine. Serving up smarmy “survival tips” to both whites and blacks (in that order), he at times borders on racism. This misstep aside, Stupid White Men likely will ignite today’s younger generation the way Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book did baby boomers. While Hoffman’s anarchist anthem offered strategies for circumventing government and consumerism, Moore explains how to fight the forces head-on—the only option we have in these troubling times. To that end, Moore’s practical handbook provides e-mail addresses for contacting representatives in Washington, along with “clip’n’carry” boxes “suitable for laminating and carrying in your wallet,” such as an excerpt from the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In subject matter, tone, and format, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy comes closest to Stupid White Men. In fact, the deep throat for most of Moore’s dirt on the “stolen” Florida election is Greg Palast, who broke the story in a series of revelations that appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, Salon.com, and elsewhere. Spliced together in his book’s most shocking section, “Jim Crow in Cyberspace,” the reportage leaves little doubt that Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris engaged in electronic “ethnic cleansing,” purging 57,000 people, mostly African Americans, off the voter rolls. To lend a helping hand, the duo terminated a $5,700 bid-contract with a small database-industry operator and hired the Atlanta firm dbt Online (since merged into ChoicePoint) “for a fee of $2,317,800—no bidding.” Their chore was to generate a list of felons, ineligible to vote in Florida. But due to egregious errors, at least 90.2 percent of the names were “wrongly tagged for removal.”

The story went unreported in our fast-forward, profit-driven media, Palast charges, because investigative journalism, which often requires fine-combing mountains of evidence, is risky, time consuming, and expensive. In contrast to what he says “is laughably called America’s ‘journalistic culture,’” The Best Democracy Money Can Buy exemplifies the challenges of recording hard news. A bricolage of Palast’s award-winning coverage, including the Exxon Valdez cover-up, illicit dealings of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, unsavory policies of both Bushes and Clinton, Tony Blair’s scandalous “Lobbygate,” strong-arm tactics of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and the Monsanto caper that tainted America’s milk supply with BST growth hormone, the book flushes out the excesses of corporate power and accompanying threats to democracy. Quoting former Texas agriculture commissioner and muckraker-in-his-own-right Jim Hightower, who used to complain about Monsanto lobbying the secretary of agriculture, Palast writes, “The corporations don’t have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.” Echoing Moore and Schlosser, he adds the caveat, “Today, Monsanto executive Ann Venamin is the secretary of agriculture,” who along with Bush pushed to stop testing the National School Lunch Program’s ground beef for salmonella, a decision later overturned by outraged consumer groups.

Born in Los Angeles but largely shut out from reporting for big us media firms due to his leftist political leanings, Palast works primarily for the English press. An investigator by training, who has worked with labor unions and consumer groups throughout the us, South Africa, and Europe, he turned to journalism five years ago because of the dearth of reporters willing to risk their livelihoods on red-hot topics. Consequently, despite accolades applauding his ambition and purpose, Palast has not as yet fine-tuned his writing skills. One could argue that translating the minutia of policy reports or top-secret memorandums that mysteriously fall into his possession (sources undisclosed) into readable prose precludes attention to style. But in Fast Food Nation, “an avalanche of facts and observations” according to the New York Times, Eric Schlosser’s eloquence suggests otherwise.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle revisited for our times, Schlosser’s four-year study began as a two-part article for Rolling Stone. Arranged as a series of interrelated narratives, the meticulously documented yet beautifully written Fast Food Nation is a veritable page-turner, as hard to put down as a hardboiled mystery novel. Schlosser backs up his polemic with mounds of information, ranging from scientific studies and industry reports to firsthand interviews and eyewitness accounts. Though chiefly excoriating the fast food industry for its exploitative labor practices, polluting of the environment, decimation of the natural landscape, and contributions to dietary epidemics in America, Schlosser likewise implicates consumers, writing in the book’s introduction, “Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases.” Also recognizing the power of human interest in posting memorable images and ideas to the political imagination, Schlosser lauds teenage and immigrant workers, small farmers and independent ranchers.

In the course of exposing corporate monoliths such as the Iowa Beef Packers (ibp) and ConAgra for engaging in bribery, fraud, price fixing, and other illegalities, Schlosser’s most compelling chapters address why “meatpacking is now the most dangerous job in the United States” and “what’s in the meat.” (Bluntly stated: “shit”.) Taking readers on a tour of a slaughterhouse, staffed by mostly ill-paid, uneducated, itinerant employees who don’t speak English, he describes donning knee-high rubber boots and wading “through blood that’s ankle deep” to where a worker called a “sticker” slits the neck of a stunned steer every ten seconds, up to 400 an hour. (As a vegan friend of mine observed, refraining from eating meat is one way of easing this butcher’s karmic burden.) With the potential for accident and injury running high, the meatpacking industry connives to skirt Occupational Health and Safety Administration (osha) requirements and workers’ compensation litigation. For example, as Schlosser reports, “under Colorado law, the payment for losing an arm is $36,000,” with an amputated finger fetching between $2,200 and $4,500.

Schlosser’s new afterward proposes policy, imploring the fda and other regulatory branches of the us government to revise agribusiness industry standards, rules, and regulations. Despite his apocalyptic scenarios, including the looming threat of mad cow disease and lethal food-borne pathogens, such as E. coli, transmitted in contaminated meat, he writes, “Things don’t have to be the way they are.” Echoing the final sentence of The Diary of Anne Frank, Schlosser closes with the line: “Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.”

Likewise written with style and grace, Best Business Crime Writing of the Year reads like a primer on biggest corporate scandals of last year. Taken as a whole, the 27 articles provide a top-down analysis of how politicians, lobbyists, ceos, and finance-industry regulators colluded to bilk investors of some $2 trillion. Brief “updates” follow original stories when deemed necessary by editor James Surowiecki, who in addition to writing a quirky one-page business column in The New Yorker also contributes to Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Surowiecki provides vocabulary lessons for novices in his general and section introductions. Explaining “self-dealing” (when those running companies put their own gain ahead of owners’ and shareholders’), “independent regulators” (supposedly trustworthy investment houses such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch), and the like, he makes the complexities of high finance accessible to working stiffs who cash paychecks rather than exercise stock options (when corporate executives, without investing their own money, borrow against company earnings to buy company stock, which they may cash in at any time). In what follows, readers glimpse arcane mechanisms of corporate systems chiefly through the lens of Big Telecom, which promised cheaper, faster, and more efficient telephone and internet communications through the likes of Enron, Global Crossing, Qwest, WorldCom, and other now notorious companies.

Among the most engaging selections are personality profiles of the rich and famous coming home to roost, though a small group of bigwig financiers managed to walk away with billions. David Staples’ “A Telecom Prophet’s Fall from Grace,” from the Edmonton Journal, presents an entertaining portrait of Bernie Ebbers, the milkman-turned-captain of industry who founded WorldCom, at the center of the largest bankruptcy and biggest corporate fraud in history. And who could resist the comeuppance of Martha Stewart, roasted by a group of Newsweek writers in an exposé called “The Insiders?” Tracking down how biotech giant ImClone, brainchild of Stewart’s pal Sam Waksal, “sprouted a very big weed” in the domestic diva’s “well-manicured life,” it compels through wit as much as cold-hard facts.

Readers also learn how regulators such as accounting firm Arthur Anderson, who collected from Enron more in consulting than auditing fees, jumped the “Chinese walls,” which reporters from BusinessWeek translate as industry jargon for “the separation of different lines of business conducted under the same roof.” But others, such as Arthur Levitt, Jr., chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec) under Bill Clinton, as well as current New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, have kept to their sides of the boundaries, presented as having pushed for Wall Street reforms. Additionally, the book’s final section aims to diagnose what went wrong with the system and how to fix it. Not surprisingly, several journalists recommend a reassessment of stock-option employment packages.

Historically, investigative journalism has instigated cultural reforms. Food legislation was enacted in 1906 due to The Jungle, and the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers led to the downfall of Richard Nixon. But the key to social change begins with an informed citizenry. The books by Moore, Palast, Schlosser, and Surowiecki can aid in this pedagogical process.