Toughts on the Roots and Future of Corporatism in the United States

Time for change

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Mon Jan-22-07 11:25 PM
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Toughts on the Roots and Future of Corporatism in the United States

Edited on Mon Jan-22-07 11:41 PM by Time for change

The freedom and rights we treasure were not sent from heaven and do not grow on trees� Our moral, political and religious duty is to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is in good hands on our watch � Bill Moyers

In a time when the chief executives of our country have tried for six years, with much success, to trash our Constitution, and when it is still uncertain as to whether they will be allowed to complete the job, or whether instead they will be held accountable for their many crimes, we would do well to consider how we got to this point and how we might think about our future.

Some thoughts on legalized bribery in the United States

When powerful private corporations give big money to public legislators (or other public officials) in return for legislative favors, a reasonable person would call that bribery � notwithstanding the fact that it is usually legal in our country today. The only differences between such acts that are deemed legal and those that are deemed illegal involve the explicitness with which the deal is made. When public officials become so careless that the deal is spelled out in black and white, as was the case with Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Tom DeLay, they can be prosecuted for bribery. But when, as in most cases, it is not so obvious that the acceptance by public officials of tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions was done in return for helping to enact corporate favorable legislation, it is legal. Why is that?

Defenders of this type of bribery claim that lobbying involves �educating� legislators and exercising our First Amendment rights to petition Congress. I have nothing against education or our First Amendment. But does our First Amendment include the right to pay (i.e., bribe) legislators to be educated? What if it was made illegal to give large amounts of money to public officials? In other words, what if corporations were allowed to continue to �educate� our public officials but not allowed to bribe them? Would they then continue to devote time, effort and money to �educating� them?

Current Congressional efforts towards �ethics reform� address this problem by applying mere window dressing. As Robert Reich recently said, calling this �ethics reform� is like �saying you�ve cleaned the house when all you�ve done is taken out the garbage.� How much good can come from banning or reducing the giving of gifts, meals, free travel, or entertainment by lobbyists to our legislators, when those same lobbyists can legally implicitly promise campaign contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars to their campaigns? And how much good can come from banning contacts between legislators and lobbyists in certain specific settings, when they are free to have all the contact they want in other settings?

The unholy alliance between government and corporate power

There are now about 35,000 lobbyists in the United States. Corporations pay those lobbyists about $2 billion in salaries and spend another $8 billion to �influence� legislators to help to enact favorable legislation. In many if not most cases, the legislation in question, while benefiting the corporation, will do so at the expense of most everyone else.

It should be perfectly obvious why our elected representatives engage in that type of activity. The money they receive for their campaigns from corporate interests translate into votes � sometimes far more votes from a single corporation than a legislator could obtain from hundreds or thousands of his/her other constituents. What does that do to the presumed �one person, one vote� principle upon which our country was founded? How can democracy thrive when one powerful CEO controls more votes than thousands of other citizens? And why should that be legal in a democracy?

Thus there has developed in the United States an unholy and symbiotic alliance between government and corporate power, whereby our government acts in behalf of corporate interests rather than in behalf of our interests, in return for the bribes which keep them in power.

That explains why ordinary citizens can be thrown into prison for smoking marijuana, whereas Congressional action to control global warming is demonized as interfering with the �liberty� of corporations to do what they want. It explains why our Congress hasn�t yet been able to enact national legislation that would counteract the �right� of voting machine corporations to use �proprietary� and secret machines to count our votes. And it explains why Congress has been so reticent to put an end to our war in Iraq, despite an obvious public mandate to do so. In short, it explains why our government in recent years has initiated so many policies that have widened the wealth gap in our country to the extent that today the wealthiest 1% of our population have almost 200 times the wealth as most other Americans and more than the bottom 90% combined.

The poisonous effects of �free market� ideology

How do they get away with this? How are our elected representatives able to convert their ill gotten corporate money into the votes that maintain their office and their power? One of the main strategies for doing this is to tout �free market� ideology as if was written into our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. This is done through such mechanisms as right wing �think tanks�, our corporate news media, and paid political advertisements.

I wrote several months ago about how �free market� ideology is ruining our country, discussing why the shrinking of government and the corresponding privatization of so many previous government functions is inappropriate and dangerous in so many circumstances: Privatization of intrinsic government functions (such as the military, public education, elections) results in fatal impairment of government services because private corporations will cut corners to increase profits; deregulation of corporations allows them to do great harm to our country through such means as degrading our air, water, and soil, and depleting our natural resources; deregulation also leads to the development of powerful monopolies which destroy competition price gouge ordinary citizens; deregulation of the news industry has allowed disproportionate corporate control (with consequent misinformation) of much of the news that we receive; free market principles do not operate effectively when people are confronted with complex issues (such as those involved in health care) that they are not capable of fully evaluating effectively by themselves; some services (Social Security, education, health care) are so important to the public welfare that government control (i.e., control by �we the people�) is needed to ensure that our citizens have a reasonable opportunity to a decent life.

Bill Moyers on the need to free ourselves from the �Reagan revolution�

Bill Moyers, in a recent article appearing in The Nation, �A New Story for America�, discusses the need for Democrats, now that they have control of Congress, to get our country back on track. He notes how Ronald Reagan put our country on the road to fascism (though he doesn�t use that word) by convincing many or most Americans that �big government� destroys our freedom and that we must therefore shrink government and give business unlimited �freedom� to do as they please.

But the shrinking of government and the corresponding deregulation and giving of unlimited �freedom� to corporations does not equate with freedom for ordinary Americans. On the contrary, the merging of corporate and governmental power is the central trait of fascist dictatorships.

Moyers notes, in response to Reagan�s plea for more corporate �freedom�, that �we too (meaning Democrats) have a story of freedom to tell� � if they can muster the courage to tell it. With regard to Reagan�s idea of �freedom�, Moyers says:

But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right our from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole� {It} has taken us down a terribly mistaken road toward a political order where government ends up servicing the powerful and taking from everyone else�

Nor does it assure the availability of economic opportunity� Yet it has been used to shield private power from democratic accountability, in no small part because conservative rhetoric has succeeded in denigrating government even as conservative politicians plunder it� But government is � often the only way we preserve our freedom from private power and its incursions.

Moyers then takes us back in history to explain how our country�s greatest leaders, from Jefferson to Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to FDR, have used the powers of government to provide opportunity for Americans to create a decent and better life for themselves. Thus Moyers concludes about our present state:

So it is that contrary to what we have heard rhetorically for a generation now, the individualist, greed-driven, free-market ideology is at odds with our history and with what most Americans really care about � Indeed, the American public is committed to a set of values that almost perfectly contradicts the conservative agenda that has dominated politics for a generation now.

A reminder that we are doomed to repeat the past if we don�t learn from it

Reminding us that our freedom and rights don�t come from heaven or grow on trees, Moyers quotes from John Powers, in an unmistakable allusion to our current march towards fascism, noting that the freedom and rights that we now try to hang on to were:

born of centuries of struggle by untold millions who fought and bled and died to assure that the government can�t just walk into our bedrooms and read our mail, to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety net against the often-cruel workings of the market, to guarantee that businessmen couldn�t compel workers to work more than forty hours a week without extra compensation, to make us free to criticize our government without having our patriotism impugned, and to make sure that our leaders are answerable to the people when they choose to send our soldiers into war.

Referring to Lincoln�s Gettysburg Address, Moyers concludes that �We have a story of equal power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out.� And then he pleads with us to spread that story:

Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can � to every candidate for office, to every talk show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it � for America�s sake.