Excessive Corporate Power and Class Warfare in the United States Today [View All]

[Time for change]

Since the onset of the Reagan presidency in 1981 our country has been on a downward slide. Reagan’s constant branding of government as the problem rather than a potential solution to our problems ushered in an era of anarchy, greed and irresponsibility, in which few have had the political courage to seriously challenge the paradigm that private pursuit of profit is sacrosanct and must be unhindered by government. From this the Military-Industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against has grown so powerful that we now spend almost as much on our military as all the other nations of the world combined. This attitude has led to the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80s, the current home mortgage crisis, control of much of our political process by private corporate interests, the worst economy since the depression of the 1930s, and much more.

William Kleinknecht describes how the Reagan presidency set us on this course in his book, “The Man Who Sold the World – Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America”, in which he summed up Reagan’s philosophy of government with respect to the President Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s:

Reagan stood against everything that had been achieved in this remarkable age of reform. His constant attacks on the inefficiency of government, a rallying cry taken up by legions of conservative politicians across the country, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more money that was taken away from government programs, the more ineffective they became, and the more ineffective they became, the more ridiculous government bureaucrats came to be seen in the public eye. Gradually government, and the broader realm of public service, has come to seem disreputable… Politicians, imbued with the same exaltation of self-interest that is the essence of Reaganism, increasingly treat public office as a vehicle for their own enrichment.

In this post I assert and discuss six basic principles for the operation of our government which I believe should be self-evident from a consideration of basic human values, as well as from our own Declaration of Independence, but which too many Americans have forgotten since the onset of the age of Reagan:


Private corporations should not own our country or our planet

As income inequality has risen to unprecedented levels in our country, private corporate power has become so great that it threatens our livelihood, our lives, and the lives of future generations, and has become virtually beyond control. Yet so great is the belief in the virtues of unhindered private (corporate) license that in the midst of perhaps the worst single man-made eco-disaster in world history, the minority leader of the U.S. House had the nerve to call for a moratorium on federal regulations (of unhindered private corporate license).

Well I’ll tell you what, John Boehner and all the rest of you Republicans and corporate Democrats who agree with him on this: Neither corporations nor any private individuals have a God-given or any other kind of inalienable right to pursue private profit at the expense of the rest of humanity. No private corporation or person owns our country or our planet, and no private corporation or person has the right to destroy it or risk destroying it. Protecting a nation’s people against those who threaten to destroy them or their livelihood is perhaps the most important purpose of government. If you want to call for a moratorium on government’s ability to do that you may as well call for a moratorium on government punishment for murder or any other crime.


Freedom from corporate monopoly

The great disparity in wealth and political power that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as our more recent Meltdown of 2008, was largely the result of failure of government to regulate powerful private interests which threatened the well-being of our nation. Barry C. Lynn discusses the dangers of private monopolies in his new book, “Cornered – The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction”:

Monopoly is, after all, merely a form of government that one group of human beings imposes on another group of human beings. Its purpose is simple – to enable the first group to transfer wealth and power to themselves. Monopolists use such private governments to organize and disorganize, to grab and smash, to rule and ruin, in ways that serve their interests only…

Lynn notes that this battle has been fought since the first days of our republic, when Jefferson and Madison battled against the soon-to-be defunct Federalist Party on this issue. Lynn continues:

Ever since, the central battle in our political economy has been between those who would use our federal and state governments to establish and protect private monopolies to empower and enrich the few and those who would use our governments to break or harness private monopolies in order to protect the liberties and properties of the many.

The Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th Century worked to combat this problem, which they did with such achievements as the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Anti-trust Act of 1914. But that wasn’t enough to stave off the Great Depression, which spurred the New Deal and additional federal anti-monopoly controls. That worked out quite well for several decades, characterized by the greatest sustained economic boom of our history. But then came Reagan Revolution. Lynn summarizes the political dynamics of this:

A generation ago a highly sophisticated political movement appeared in the United States. This movement was dedicated to taking apart the entire institutional structure that we had put into place, beginning in the mid-1930s, to govern our political economy by distributing power and responsibility among all the people. The goal of this movement was to enable the few, once again, to consolidate power entirely in their own hands.

And indeed they have thus far been quite successful in accomplishing that goal.


Restoration of basic political rights

Our most basic political right is the right to vote in free and fair elections. Today in our country there are two related processes that have greatly impinged on that right: Excessive money in politics (i.e. legalized bribery) and election fraud.

Excessive money in politics
Money influences politics in our country today to such an extreme that it can accurately be referred to as legalized bribery. Bill Moyers has succinctly explained the idea in his book, “Moyers on Democracy”:

We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”. Let’s call it what it is: a bribe.

Corporate interests could not elect their candidates to office in the face of an accurate assessment of their performance and agenda by the American people. Their agenda is anti-people, and very few Americans would vote for it if they understood what it is. But corporate politicians use the corporate “campaign contributions” that they receive to conceal that agenda.

Americans want a political system that serves their interests, not the interests of the wealthy and powerful. They want national health insurance. They want a minimum wage law that helps working Americans out of poverty. But as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter has said, our current system “functions for the benefit of donors whose object is to place candidates under obligation …”

This of course creates a vicious positive feedback cycle in which the powerful use the wealth and power they gain through their bribery of politicians to continue to bribe them in order to gain ever more wealth and power. There is no good reason why this kind of thing should be legal in a presumably free country.

Election fraud
Related to corporate control of our political system is corporate control of our election system. Fair elections are an inalienable right of human beings. As such, they should be run by government personnel who are accountable to them, not by private interests. Yet private interests taking on government functions disenfranchised tens of thousands of Florida voters in the presidential election of 2000 and hundreds of thousands of Ohio (and other) voters in 2004, to hand those elections to perhaps the most corporate friendly president in U.S. history.

Just as serious is the use of private corporate voting machines that count votes in a way that is invisible to public scrutiny and cannot be reproduced. That process has often been referred to as “black box voting”. It has no place in a democracy because as long as vote counting is invisible and non-reproducible there is no good way to ensure a fair election.


Right to a decent life

The right to a decent life is enshrined in the Declaration that created our nation, specifically the part that says that all human beings are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some would counter that the right to a decent life should be earned through the exercise of individual responsibility. I don’t disagree with that in principle. However, certainly we should expect our government to at least work towards creating a level playing field. When more than 10% of Americans are unemployed and there are five applicants for every vacant job, and when so many jobs fail to pay a living wage, the failure to have a job or to become financially self-sufficient does not indicate a lack of individual responsibility.

Economic rights
President Roosevelt (FDR) first began speaking about our country’s need for economic and social rights to compliment the political rights granted to us in our original Bill of Rights during his first campaign for President, in 1932. Though his whole twelve year Presidency and four presidential campaigns centered largely on advocating for and implementing those rights, it wasn’t until his January 11th, 1944, State of the Union address to Congress that he fully enumerated his conception of those rights in what he referred to as a “Second Bill of Rights”. Here is a partial introduction to and list of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, as enumerated in his 1944 State of the Union address:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are:

 The right to a useful and remunerative job…
 The right to a good education
 The right of every businessman… to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies…
 The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment
 The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
 The right of every family to a decent home.
 The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

Following FDR’s death in 1945, his wife, Eleanor, led the effort towards international acceptance of numerous elements of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, incorporated into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. These rights were then expanded further by The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which was ratified by 142 nations as of 2003.

The commitment to economic and social rights throughout the world is manifested by their inclusion in the constitutions of numerous countries. And the European Social Charter], signed by 24 European countries, establishes such rights as the right to work for fair remuneration, health care and social security.

But unfortunately – and paradoxically – the United States, where the Second Bill of Rights originated, has not yet signed that Covenant.

The right to be free of discrimination
In addition to assistance with the basic economic issues discussed above, the other thing that government can and should do to level the playing field of opportunity is to ban discrimination based on race, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic that would unfairly strip people of the opportunity to lead a decent life.

This was what the Civil Rights Movement was all about. A lot has been accomplished, but we still have a long way to go.


Freedom from arbitrary and discriminatory incarceration by government

2008 statistics show that more than 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated at the end of 2007. That translates to more than 1% of American adults – by far the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It has been estimated that this figure includes approximately 750 thousand individuals incarcerated for victimless crimes, as well as 3 million on parole or probation. Approximately 4 million are arrested each year for victimless crimes.

Victimless crimes provide a situation rife with opportunities for violation of our Constitutional rights. For example, consider our anti-drug laws. These laws can only be enforced against a small portion of those who violate them because we don’t have anywhere near enough police and prosecutors investigate them all. This situation is tailor-made for racial discrimination because police and prosecutors must prioritize whom to target. Because court decisions have repeatedly allowed them virtually unlimited discretion in choosing where and whom to investigate, racial discrimination has been given virtually free reign.

And indeed, statistics bear this out. Though illegal drug possession and sale is no more common among blacks than whites, blacks constitute 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison in seven states, and in 15 states black men are admitted to prison on drug charges at 20-57 times the rate of white men. These statistics strongly point towards racial discrimination in our justice system, which is a violation of the due process clause of our 5th Amendment, as well as the due process and equal protection clauses of our 14th Amendment.

Furthermore, draconian penalties for drug crimes, such as harsh mandatory minimum sentences and (later) three strike laws (which may carry life imprisonment penalties for a third felony conviction) surely violate our 8th Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Michelle Alexander comments on this in her book, “The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”.

In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established extremely long mandatory minimum prison terms for low-level drug dealing and possession of crack cocaine. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years. By contrast, in other developed countries around the world, a first-time drug offense would merit no more than six months in jail, if jail time is imposed at all.

A U.S. Supreme Court case, Lawrence v. Texas, illustrates some of the problems with victimless crimes. The case involved a Texas law that made consensual sex between homosexuals a crime, even within the privacy of their own homes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the state, striking down that law. The plaintiff pursued the case based in large part on arguments against victimless crimes:

Liberty cannot survive if the legislature demands that people behave in certain ways in their private lives based on majority opinions about what is good or moral…And of course, the Founders believed wholeheartedly that majorities had no right to impose their beliefs on minorities. In Federalist 10, Madison articulated his concern…

Give up our imperialistic designs

Militarism and nationalism are strongly embedded on our culture. They are strongly related to each other and to excessive corporate power, which has throughout our history sought military adventures to expand their wealth and power, with tragic consequences to so many millions of people. Carl Boggs discusses this long-standing and seemingly intractable problem in depth in his book, “The Crimes of Empire – Rogue Superpower and World Domination”. In the introduction to his book he states the basic problem:

A central problem has been the ceaseless American pursuit of global hegemony on a foundation of expanding military power. While U.S. leaders dutifully uphold the rhetoric of democracy, human rights, and rule of law, their actual conduct has been more congruent with imperial agendas that run counter to the requirements of a peaceful international order… Not only has Washington been the leading violator of international legality, its nearly trillion dollar war machine deploys bases in some 130 nations, has ambitious plans for space weaponization, possesses a most lucrative arms sales program, and continues a pattern of military ventures that makes it the most fearsome agency of violence in the world today… No other state devotes even a significant fraction of what the U.S. spends on its armed forces, no other state deploys large-scale military units across dozens of countries, and no other state claims to be defending its own “national security” and “global interests” hundreds and thousands of miles from its home shores…

These efforts, while producing enormous profits for some politically well-connected elites, have proven to be an economic disaster for our country and for most Americans. Worse, our myriad unjustified, aggressive, and violent interventions into the affairs of numerous sovereign countries throughout our history has produced untold tragic consequences and is morally repugnant. It is extremely hypocritical too. Boggs notes:

At odds with its well-crafted political image, the U.S. has long stood opposed to a system of global norms that would limit arbitrary and unrestrained use of military force. Such outlawry not only contravenes all pretense of democratic values… Few in government, the media, or academia have chosen to endorse the perfectly rational notion that the U.S., like every sovereign nation, should be willing to accept legal and moral constraints on its international behavior.

Some concluding words on class excessive corporate power and class warfare

All of these issues are of course highly related. Excessive corporate power, fueled by government condoned monopolistic arrangements, has contributed greatly to the rampant militarism that Eisenhower warned us against, led to the incarceration of more of our nation’s citizens than any other country in the world, eroded our political rights, and enabled the perpetrators to act as if they own our planet. All of this has greatly impinged on the ability of Americans to carve out a good life for themselves and their children.

What all of this has in common is class warfare. The corporatists are quick to scream out the charge “class warfare” against anyone who complains of their power or tries to do something about it. FDR discussed this concept in his 1936 Democratic Convention speech, as part of his rationale for his New Deal. The following excerpt is representative of the spirit and content of the whole speech:

The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

And now, some 80 years later they’re still at it.