Just The Owner, Not The Boss

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Mike's wife often said, "Mike likes to spend his Sunday mornings railing at the Archer Daniels Midland Company." For years Mike religiously watched This Week with David Brinkley. Whenever an ADM commercial came on, Mike would glower and recite the latest figure on how much campaign money ADM had given politicians who supported ethanol subsidies. Whenever the announcer said, "ADM--supermarket to the world," Mike muttered, "ADM--superbriber of the pols." What particularly galled Mike was that through his pension plan, he was an ADM stockholder. "I'm paying for this," he often said.

Mike was not alarmed by large campaign contributions. He understood that a satellite company needing a White House waiver to transfer technology to China might be generous to the Democratic National Committee and that a financial-services concern that wanted to squash a consumer-protection clause would feel inspired to support the campaign of Alfonse D'Amato, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He wasn't opposed to the system; he was opposed to ethanol. He believed that using corn for anything but feeding people or livestock was against the laws of nature.

"Why don't you switch the channel?" Mike's wife used to ask him when he got particularly agitated. But Mike thought that switching channels would simply confirm his growing suspicion that all public-affairs programming was sponsored by Archer Daniels Midland, using his money.

Then, a few weeks ago, Sam Donaldson said on This Week that if unions were forced to get permission from individual members to use their dues for political contributions, why shouldn't corporations be made to do the same with stockholders' money? The difference, George Will explained wearily, was that a disgruntled union member had no choice about belonging to the union, but a stockholder who didn't like what a corporation was doing could simply sell his stock. Mike's wife said, "Why don't you sell your ADM stock?"

Mike felt emancipated. The next morning he phoned the 800 number of the pension plan. A voice asked him if he wanted to shift some of his holdings from a retirement money-market portfolio to an OTC portfolio. The more buttons he pushed, the more such talk continued. Nobody said anything about Archer Daniels Midland.

After 10 or 15 minutes of this, Mike heard himself shout, "But George Will said I could sell it!" to a computer-generated voice that had put him on hold while it checked how to shift money to an equity fund. Occasionally a voice he'd been paying no attention to would come on the line, telling him to be patient. But had the voice, the last time it came on, talked not about patience but about how much of the world's food supply was produced in the U.S.? The voice had a familiar echo. Brinkley? Had Mike just heard David Brinkley describe how the federal ethanol program creates jobs and reduces our trade balance? Maybe not. Mike didn't want to find out. He hung up the phone. The next Sunday he was back in front of his TV set, glowering.