I agree with @Harp above, the average American is so ignorant about economics (among other things) that he or she cannot even tell how they are being screwed by various policies being enacted, much less organize in ways that effectively defend them.
The following is my response to this week’s Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns:
This decision removes the final impediment to corporations competing directly against natural citizens in the democratic process. Up until now, corporations have not been able to contribute to political campaigns directly. They have had to channel their contributions through industry trade associations, Chamber of Commerce-type interest groups, and Political Action Committees. Forcing corporations to aggregate their money in this way is supposed to blunt the influence of specific corporations, so that no one corporation can use its wealth to buy political influence that gives it a permanent advantage over its competitors.
Now the gloves are off and the race for dominance has begun. One can expect the most rapacious and self-serving corporations to end up on top. So, forget global warming; forget health care; forget debt relief; forget peace; forget government by the people. And say hello to the Corporate State—a nation run by its corporations for the benefit of its corporations and not its people. Say hello to policies driven by the military-industrial-complex and for-profit prisons. Say goodbye to democracy and hello to fascism.
The reason that corporations were not granted full political rights in the first place is because they do not die like natural persons. And because they do not die, there is no natural limit to how rich they can become. Over time the laws of compound interest alone will ensure that corporations own everything. The reason they don’t already is because of the countervailing power of government to break up trusts, monopolies, police unfair, corrupt, and dangerous practices, and generally redistribute wealth through things like the minimum wage, protecting the right to unionized, direct forms of social investment, and stimulus spending.
As corporate power has grown, the power of natural citizens has decreased. Corporations have gotten the usury laws repealed, and they can now legally charge you upward of 30% interest. Despite recent cosmetic “reforms” corporations can still engage in stealth pricing—that is, they can trick and trap you into complicated contracts that slam you with penalties on top of penalties, if you run into hard times and fall behind. The steady erosion of the social safety net, lack of enforcement of labor laws, the manipulation of the economy through pumping up and then bursting speculative bubbles, allows corporations to fleece ordinary citizens on a wholesale basis—and to do so legally—or if not legally, to do so with impunity.
As you may have noticed, just one senator—Joe Lieberman, the Senator from Aetna—was able to veto health care for millions of Americans, at a cost of 47,000 uninsured American lives per year. The Iraq war was instigated by oil corporations who had expected to profit handsomely by forcing the Iraqi’s to sell them their oil fields cheap. When that didn’t work out, they profited from artificially high oil priced due to the war-induced uncertainty over oil supplies. Eventually, they were able to gouge the American consumer to the tune of $4 a gallon, knocking over the first recessionary domino that sent the whole world economy to the brink of collapse. To save the day, the Bush Administration gave the banks $350 billion with no strings attached, and now nobody knows where that money went and the bankers are paying themselves billions of dollars in bonuses again.
Once the corporate state begins to rewrite the nations laws to suit itself, you can expect to see a permanent corporate aristocracy emerge, lording themselves over an increasingly debt-ridden and impoverished citizenry. Freedoms will evaporate as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, because free markets only benefit people who have money. The corporate aristocracy will literally be able to get away with murder, while everyone else will sink into a kind of second-class citizenship subject to the close scrutiny of all the surveillance that money can buy. The technical infrastructure is already in place, and now has a political constituency of its own (everyone who makes a living, directly and indirectly, through the Homeland Security apparatus).
It may already be too late. However, the justices who voted for this are mostly the same ones who voted to steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush. There are ample grounds for impeachment here, but there is no political will.
If you thought my reference to fascism was simply rhetorical hyperbole, think again. An anti-democratic, militarized, corporate state is the very essence of fascism. The tea bag rallies are astroturfed, which is to say, they are corporate funded mass spectacles orchestrated to drum up popular resentment and discontent—in this case, they are tapping into white people’s resentment over having a black president, and the prospect of having to share the nation’s wealth with people they don’t consider real Americans. It is not an accident that the rhetoric is becoming increasingly irrational and violent.
Fascism does not begin with goose-stepping stormtroopers. They come later. First, the legitimacy of democratic government has to be systematically discredited. The whole conservative notion that government is theft and can’t do anything right is part of this propaganda attack. And, then there are the actual attacks when the Republicans rule and bring government into disrepute by staffing it with third-rate people, ideological hacks, and people hostile to the mission of the agencies they work for. During the Bush Administration one watchdog agency phoned in complaints that children were working in meat packing plants during school hours, and none of them were even investigated.
Even science is undermined in order to thwart the development of expertise and competence that might legitimate a technocratic approach to governing. The Republican’s refusal to engage in any sort of bipartisanship is a deliberate attempt to destroy the American people’s confidence in their democratic institutions, by bringing the nation’s business to a screeching halt. In addition, they have engendered cynicism by exposing to the extent to which the Democrats are complicit in all this by being recipients of corporate money and deferential to corporate interests, while pretending to be “for the people.”
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Under Obama, we have returned to the ways of soft power abroad, but we have done nothing to dismantle the imperial presidency at home. All the laws that enabled President Bush to declare someone without habeas corpus remain on the books. Unless and until we hold people to account for instituting torture and dismantling the constitutional checks and balances, we are only one or two elections away from a virtual monarchy. We are still very much an imperial power, out for ourselves and our corporations.
This came out just hours after Obama challenged the power of banking corporations and Wall Street. He may have no choice now but to side with the American people to rein this monster in. If he does not, he may not win reelection.
Barny Frank on the Rachel Maddow show was saying that it may be possible to use Corporate Law to impose limits on corporate political contributions. But, as you have seen with health care, corporations already have the means to undo any statutes they find inconvenient. If this does not become a major issue this election year, and if nothing is done about it, I may be moving to Canada.
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