Peace Versus Paychecks

by Claire Cocco '96

How seriously did you take the Honor Code when you were at Haverford? Was it a factor in your choice to attend in the first place? Does it impact the decisions you make now, after college? Do the ideas behind the Honor Code have a place in our society today?

Haverford's social Honor Code and Quaker-influenced values were a major factor in my choice of the school. In order to attend, all students must commit to thinking about the impact of their individual actions upon the community at large. What a radical idea in a society so focused on individual accomplishment and gain! The idea that students have decision-making power and a voice in the areas that affect their lives -- through Honor Council and faculty search committees, for example -- was enormously appealing to me. I later grew to understand that this was an outgrowth of the Quaker idea of consensus, in which every person, no matter their age, gender, race, or social standing, has an equal voice.

Does the commitment to community end after we're out of sight of the Duck Pond? To the contrary; our actions, particularly our career choices, should be viewed through the lens of how they affect others. As seniors, it often seemed that the only career options open to us were further academic study, some sort of corporate job, or maybe an ill-paying "good-works" internship. However, as a recent article in this magazine suggests, it seems that increasingly Haverford is trying to market itself as a liberal arts school that can also produce good business people.

I am afraid that many of my peers do not believe it is possible to work for peace and justice in the "real world," or to make a living doing it. For me, an internship at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a national peace and justice organization, led to my full employment one year later. More important, it opened my eyes to an entire world of peace and justice organizations and movements previously hidden from me. True, my salary is nowhere close to entry-level salaries in consulting, public relations, advertising, or investing.

But I'd like to challenge Haverford graduates to consider the system in which they are partaking when they work for a corporation and receive that big paycheck. Whether or not you work at one, corporations affect your life and the survival of democracy in this country and around the world. Let's look at the facts of how wide-ranging the tentacles of corporations reach.

The United States' major media outlets -- the TV channels and newspapers where the majority of Americans get their understanding of daily events -- are owned by just six large corporations. Three out of the six -- General Electric, Viacom, and Westinghouse -- have subsidiaries that are weapons manufacturers. Disney, another of the six, owns ABC and is notorious for paying 70 cents per day to Haitian workers while CEO Michael Eisner receives an eight-figure salary. Five of the six media conglomerates also have holdings in oil and banking companies. Is Eisner looking over the shoulder of Peter Jennings when he gives his nightly report? Of course not. But how Americans get their information is greatly consolidated into the hands of the very few whose interests are not necessarily with the truth, but with the bottom line.

So what is Disney doing in Haiti, anyway? Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), passed early in President Clinton's administration, corporations find it more beneficial to move their industrial operations out of the U.S. (which has pesky environmental protection and minimum-wage laws, as well as labor unions) to less industrialized countries. In countries like Haiti and Indonesia exploitation such as child labor and sexual assault of workers is not a problem for the corporations or the governments that sponsor them.

Another benefit of "free trade" agreements like NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is that if a corporation thinks local or national laws -- say, an environmental law in Philadelphia that forbids the use of lead in paint -- interferes with a trade benefit, the corporation can challenge this law in a trade tribunal created by the treaty. The risk of corporate practices to citizens, in these situations, does not constitute an acceptable reason to overturn whatever is decided in this court.

Wondering why you haven't heard about these effects of GATT, NAFTA, the Multilateral Agreement on Trade, or the upcoming Africa Free Trade Bill? Look at who owns the mainstream media. We hardly hear when these bills come up in Congress. Our elected representatives, both Republican and Democrat, may not mind that so much, since more than three-quarters of the PAC money that supports their campaigns comes from business or corporate interests.

Corporations, which by their very nature are concerned primarily with profits, have found a new market and constituency to exploit: children in public schools. Channel One, a pseudo-educational television channel, is one way corporations advertise to children while they attend publicly funded schools. Teachers are mandated to show one hour of the channel each day. Schools are also finding that corporate monies are helping where the state or federal governments are skimping. In February, The New York Times reported that one Rhode Island school district was accepting vending machines for Coca-Cola in their high schools. If they sell a certain quota of soda per month to the students, the district will receive a corporate gift for their needy school system. In short, even public schools are becoming a marketplace and training ground for new generations of consumers.

We are faced with a growing gap between rich and poor in this country (10% of the population currently owns 72% of the wealth), corporations quietly overtaking citizens' rights, continuing international human rights abuses, and increasing corporate management of global economies and individual lives. I believe that Haverford stands for something else, a world wherein decisions are made by those whose lives are affected by those decisions the most -- not by those who have the most wealth -- and where people act in the interests of the community as a whole.

Grassroots and social change organizations such as the FOR are actively working to turn back the tide of corporate campaigns for economic justice. They are struggling to be heard and need everyone's participation in order to achieve a just and peaceful world.

Claire Cocco, 1996 Haverford graduate in history, is Membership Outreach Coordinator for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Information about FOR and many other social change organizations campaigns can be found at <www.nonviolence.org>.