Political leaders and activists are realizing how much leverage they have over companies whose services cannot be conducted over the internet, outsourced to cheap overseas labor, or that depend on extracting natural resources.
In these cases, they cannot evade taxes or regulations requiring safe products and fair treatment of their workers.
This is the chink in their armor that must be exploited for one person one vote to prevail over one dollar one vote.
Hugo Chavez understands this which is why corporations hate him, and the Iraqis understand it, which is why they are resisting the oil company drafted Hydrocarbon Law--because you can't suck most of Iraq's oil out of the ground any place but Iraq.
You can outsource a factory to Bangladesh, but you can't outsource in-person service or retail. If people wrapped their brains around this, they could turn Walmart into a model corporate citizen--because they need to SELL here.
And every place corporations take from public lands, we should get a chunk of fair market value, not some token payment set by a corrupt legislator 150 years ago.
Americans must demand that our politicians play hardball with these assholes in situations where we have the advantage before they drag us back to feudalism.
If your elected representative won't do this, he should be removed, not in the next election, but immediately with a shoe leather colonic.
Captive-Industry Populismby David Sirota
Take a look at Livingston, Montana. Its stretch of the Yellowstone River might be known as the setting for the film "A River Runs Through It," but the town also has the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad running through it, as well as an underground plume of industrial toxins dumped by the company over many decades. In 2006, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) declared that if BNSF refused to clean up its mess, the state would do the job itself and — here's the kicker — bill the company for the cost.
Such a threat might have made an Internet firm flee. But a national railroad is a captive industry. It cannot easily move its infrastructure (tracks, bridges, etc.). That is why when Schweitzer toured Livingston last week, he saw firsthand how his captive-industry populism resulted not in BNSF leaving, but in BNSF spending $10 million to begin cleaning up.
A few clicks north of Livingston, Alaska Gov.
Sarah Palin (R) is proposing to reform her state's laws so that they prevent oil companies from avoiding $800 million in taxes this year. Palin knows the oil business is both lucrative and a captive industry, and therefore that "oil-rich states such as Alaska can bump up taxes without much worry about loss of production or oil industry investment," as the Anchorage Daily News reported. Put another way, she knows that no modest tax measure will make the ConocoPhillipses of the world walk away from massive petroleum reserves.
Of course, captive-industry populism goes beyond environmental and energy policy and beyond rural areas. In Emeryville, Calif., grassroots organizers recently passed a voter referendum establishing a $9/hour minimum wage in the town's hotels. The hotels could not convincingly undermine the minimum wage campaign with threats to move because tourism is a captive industry and the hotels' business comes from Emeryville's proximity to Oakland Airport, San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/david-sirota/captive-industry-populism.html">FULL TEXT 
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