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The Danger of Invisible Corporate Power
It may take several election cycles to scrub corporate influence and control from our political system.
Let's face it: Large corporations have our country, and us, in a death grip. Some of their bad behavior makes big headlines: the BP oil disaster, Goldman Sachs' financial shenanigans, Enron's book-cooking. However, equally dangerous corporate activity happens every day, far from public view.
Corporations have seeped almost invisibly into nearly every government agency and too many congressional offices. And they're as poisonous as carbon monoxide. In the last 20 years, protective legislation and regulation, carefully constructed from the days of President Coolidge and vastly strengthened due to the Depression, have seriously deteriorated.
There's nothing inherently evil, or even bad, about corporations. Indeed, the combination of capital and management under one roof is efficient and essential in a global, competitive world. So much of our standard of living and our worldwide leadership are directly traceable to our corporate and entrepreneurial culture. But even good things, when they get out of control, turn destructive. Cancer, after all, is just growth gone wild.
There has always been tension between good government and free enterprise. It hurts the bottom line to scrub emissions from coal-burning power generators, ensure meat is sanitary, clean up toxic waste, and disclose the full risks of financial products. But once corporations realized that instead of fighting government they could actually buy it through lobbying and political contributions, the base of our democracy eroded. Their "invisible power" got a grip. The stealthy hunt for corporate profits metastasized from the marketplace and entered the halls of Congress and the executive branch.
The fight over reforming Wall Street is just the latest example. The need for regulation is hardly theoretical here. We're still reeling from a crisis caused by the absence of it. Congress doesn't even need to reinvent the wheel, a favorite task. There were laws and regulations that had worked for so long, such as those to keep banks and investment brokers separate; require diligent lending; prohibit betting against your own borrowers; require full disclosure to borrowers; and, above all, keep the risk with the lenders to insure they make prudent loans.
So why has the debate on reform dragged on for nearly a year? The public wants Wall Street reined in. So why would any legislator, much less an entire political party, get in the way of financial reform? It can't just be a coincidence that the financial sector happens to be the biggest contributor to 2010 congressional campaigns, with more than $129 million doled out already. Financial firms have also spent well over a half a billion dollars on lobbying since early 2009.
To reverse this situation we must change who gets elected to Congress. And that is the one thing we can do, and perhaps the only thing, to neutralize corporate control of our government. Only real people have the vote; corporations don't.
To regain our democracy, we must:
- Identify and make public those elected representatives who owe their jobs to corporate largesse and cast their votes accordingly.
- Insulate the election process from corporate funding. Bills in both the Senate and House that would forbid campaign spending by contractors who receive more than $50,000 in taxpayer funds would be a good start.
- Prohibit lawmakers and lobbyists from interacting with each other, except to exchange ideas on legislation, and require them to publish a record of their contacts.
It may take several election cycles to scrub corporate influence and control from our political system, but once it starts it will gain momentum. And once we've accomplished this feat, appropriate regulation and control will follow. The horse will be before the cart, and the driver will be a human person.
- Posted in
45 Comments so far
Show AllInstead of being published in "OtherWords" this article should have been published in "OtherWorlds". If this guy thinks we can regain our democracy using our current Congress/SCOTUS, he has to be from Mars.
Don't you just love his three suggestions?
1. Identify the venal politicians, then vote them out.
Who'd a thunk it? It couldn't be that the media controls the dialog and the corporate party, the republicrats, the choices; Palin, 'nuf said.
2. Get the venal politicians to vote themselves off the gravy train.
Who'd a thunk it? We would do better by relying on the supreme court to uphold the constitution. Oh, right, never mind.
3. Get the venal politicians to only talk policy with the bag men and then publish the conversation.
Who'd a thunk it? "Hey, Mr. Capone, you wouldn't mind carrying this tape recorder around and sending a copy of the transcript to the Tribune?
This is class war exacerbated by the Impirical level of capitalism. There will be no fixing it through its corrupt channels. Fight or starve.
98% of US voters will tell you that if you vote for any candidate who doesn't have millions of corporate dollars backing them, then you are wasting your vote.
Until the US has 100% public-funded political campaigns, corporations will keep getting wealthier and buying more electeds.
No kidding! This well-meaning gentleman has much more faith and hope than anyone I know who follows such things. Most voters have just shoulder-shrugged away this country's political system. Like the legal system it only works for the wealthy. Just as the medical system does. Same as the school system for the well-off. If I wasn't so cynical I'd begin to think you need lots of money to take advantage of almost any right that is guaranteed in this Corporatocratic Cleptocratic Corruptocratic nation. Thankfully, I'm not cynical like the rest of the you commentors(Snarkiness involved here).
I agree, does he really think these people will just sit back and let us wash them out of the system as he says? If anyone is being washed out with increasing frequency it's the rest of us. Our so called Democracy is now really a Corporeality / Corpocracy and the $$ interests intends to widen and deepen the moat between us and them and they're pals in gov't not allow us to somehow stop them. This guy is in some kind of dream land. $$ just doesn't talk in DC and every State capital it rules with an Iron fucking fist and anyone who tries to get in it's way finds out real fast whose the boss in America.
Corporations such as Exxon, for example, are chartered to run a business.
They are not chartered to run a Congressman.
Until citizens believe there should be a separation of commerce and state, as there is between church and state, and forbid corporate funding of elections, we will ever languish under this Corporatism (which Mussolini, called fascism).
Post-Constitutional America
Remove the money, and the stench will eventually blow away. Ban media from charging for candidate ads. Put the debates back into public control. The electoral process needs serious work as well - radical ideas such as proportional representation, instant runoffs, election day on Sunday, and a limited - say 60 day - campaign season. Ooops - way to much to ask. The electorate wouldn't go for it. The media would freak. I guess we're screwed.
Unfortunately if we have to wait 'several election cycles' to rid ourselves of the power that large corporations have ingested into our current political system, then this country that our forefathers worked so hard to create, will no longer be around.
Those that provide the labor in this country will become slaves to the corporations - which is already happening.
We cannot wait several election cycles - the change must happen now if we are to save our working class and, as a result, our country.
Where not the majority of the founding fathers slave masters or in silent approval of such practices?
As far as the electoral cycles is concerned, the much abused notion of "as the pendulum swings" is constantly used in reference to the inertia of all things political moving in relation to a "center." Translation: progress being more of a straight line is an aberration which the political system eventually "corrects" by reaffirming the status quo. Big corporations with enormous political clout are now the plantations of modernity. Or as history shows, what goes around comes around...
Sioux Rose
AD: Someone pointed out to me that beyond "what goes around comes around," or my favored saying, "Everything comes full circle," is a certain spiral effect that informs the mix. With that being said, I like to think of history in terms of wave motion. A certain set of progressive initiatives take root and grow, only to be set back by a recurrent wave of recidivistic trends. Then the cycle recurs. Perhaps each time, the hard-won liberties remain more firmly planted that the next wave will progress directly from where these initiatives left off. This is my hope.
Because corporate power has been heavily assisted by powerful technology (from weapons to the surveillance of citizens), the repressive side of the wave will be more punitive than ever before experienced; however, the reciprocal collective surge will be strong enough to break the chains that are being set to render us all slaves unto the new corporate pharaohs, and/or serfs laboring for the elites (as Chris Hedges sees it). Nothing stands still! Change is inevitable, the very law of life itself. This, too, shall (eventually) pass.
I understand your enlightened view but alas you're in a minority here. As long as the predominant world view is fundamentally self-referential in its underpinnings the gross and dark elements of personal identity and egocentric pride will continue to reassert themselves at the expense of real evolutionary growth towards greater collective well being. We must be ever vigilant in abstaining from entreating the falsehood and selfishness of pride from reasserting its ugly head. It is not enough to have faith in noble ideas. Truth immortal is older than time itself yet imperishable and permanent as it never is not. One must responsibly remain sincere with what is true and unchanging as only then it is effortlessly shared. Good luck to you in these difficult times.
Sioux Rose
ADNO: Your post/response reads like a Kua from the I ching. Wise words, and thank you for the "good luck."
KANE JEEVES: Interesting how a similar "vision" came to both of us. Yours being so much more "mathematical," and yet I do find in the circle, a reflection of the Eternal Verities.
VISITING Prof: Great post! (The one that sees media as the 4th estate).
WOW! I had that exact picture in mind a few years back when I drew something I called "World Line". It's a big wave that slowly heads to the left (in the political, social, liberal sense) (with Time being the vertical axis, future pointing up). Then within the big wave is millions of smaller sine waves that waver back and forth between left and right but always leaning more to the left/liberal. If you look at history, that's really how things are. Unfortunately for us liberals, it's a generational shift that overcomes all the limited little skirmishes the righties engage in.
There is no need to identify those elected officials who are in the pocket of corporations. All our government is in the pocket of the corporations.
Hoa binh
The problem stems from the Constitution and the philosophy underlying it, derived from Montesquieu, regarding the three branches of government. Actually government has four branches: executive, legislative, judicial, and bureaucratic. The fourth branch typically oversees record keeping for citizens: births, deaths, marriages, wills, etc., a function taken over by the church in the decay of the Roman Empire. Our constitution makes no provision for public input into the bureaucracy, leaving it as a dummy hand to be played by the executive. When the corporations obtain power over the executive, they have the ability to regulate the bureaucracy that is supposed to enforce law in the market. By managing the hidden primary where candidates are screened before throwing their hats into the ring, the corporate directorship class is able sustain political power actively through the executive, passively through the legislative, and indirectly through the judicial. This gives the corporate elite totalitarian control over society, and the financial sector in particular which exerts totalitarian control over the production sector.
And yes by the way, corporations are inherently evil because in order to obtain profits, they require victims, as necessitated by the second law of thermodynamics. Totalitarian control over society allows them to name the victims and to control the terms of victimization.
Sioux
CLASS ACT: I admire a unique perspective, and you surely deliver. Interesting post that elucidates factors I'd never taken into account. Thank you for posting.
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."
— Frederick Douglass
Interesting. No mention in the article of how voters are going to reform government using our corrupted voting systems.
q
Perhaps a good fix is written in fixcongressfirst.org
Bills are passed to reform campaign finance, but the ultimate goal is a constitutional amendment. From the website:
"Passing the Fair Elections Now Act is an essential first step toward restoring trust in our democracy. But if we want to guarantee that nothing will stand in the way of fundamental reform, then we have to write this reform into our founding document, the Constitution itself."
I would also like some distance placed between regulators and lobbyists, i.e. close the revolving door. We need to be sure 'our' representatives aren't just padding their resume for a lucrative employment after their 'public' service, aka Robert Rubin.
Spot on!
An honest discussion would violate the Sedition Act.
Sioux Rose
PROFESSOR: Solid analysis. I would just wish to point out that principal (think pal) is the guy who generally runs the school. What he may or may not believe in are principles. So one would be principled in his beliefs, not principalled. (In your 11th paragraph.) You're probably not an English professor.
Invisible corporate power has taken over our government. We need a solution. A plan to take our country back. The Supreme Court is stacked with right wingers and we are not going to change the Supreme Court. The Senate is 75% corrupt, (all the R and half the D), we are not going to change the Senate enough either. Presidential elections have become no more than high stakes lie-fests. Once in office Obama has become Bush in black face. Obama is an even better Republican president than Clinton ever was.
The solution lies in the House and it's doable. All seats are up every two years. Elect only Progressive candidates. Vote Green if there is no Progressive choice. Be resigned to electing Republicans in place of DLC/corporate Dems. That's the key. Electing a Republican for two years may be the only way to drive your DLC Dem out of office. Show DLC Dems no quarter.
Progressive House members need to vote in a block. The Progressive Caucus should become obstructionist. Newt did it. How come all we hear about is Blanch and her Blue Dogs? The House controls the purse string of the government. The House is an equal branch of government, yet it plays second fiddle to all other branches. Cut funding or just vote no. If you don't have the votes to cut funding on the war then just vote no on the funding bill itself and just keep voting no. The Progressive Caucus should have voted no on Obama Care and told Obama it's single payer or nothing. Obama just wanted a win, any win, so he could take his victory lap. Progressive need to play hard ball with rocks.
Progressives voting in a block is an oxymoron. Some will say the legislation is too weak, some too strong. Autocratic or authoritarian leaders are only compatible with conservatives.
I beg to differ with John Steel. There is a real structure to corporate capitalism that is intrinsically evil.
It is the evil that emanates from publically traded corporations. These corporations are under tremendous pressure by Wall Street financial speculators and hedge funds. These corporations are forced to produce ever increasing shareholder value. In layman terms, this is about making wealthy stockholders ever wealthier. But wealth is not the real problem. The problem is that the system becomes dehumanizing. Stockholder value becomes the sole ruthless driving force of corporations to relentlessly reduce the cost of labor and externalize as many costs as possible on to society. Human values, healthy foods, the sacredness of the earth, and the vitality of local communities become meaningless in such a harsh competitive capitalistic society.
If we can have "Dancing With the Stars" on TV we could easily have bandwidth donated to "Campaigning With the Candidates". Just open up a public station to candidates and prohibit them from buying time on the major networks. They can already campaign on the Internet for virtually nothing.
Taking the media bucks out of the equation is a start.
Still, this is hopeless because any reform goes down in flames. It's Catch-22 -- can't reform the process without permission of those who currently own the process.
Sioux Rose
DM: Cool idea!
Sigh...
Let me see if I have this right:
1. Corporations have corrupted our political system.
2. We can use our corrupt political system to change the evil corporations into good guys.
There is something very wrong with this basic proposition. A person has to be very desperate about saving the status quo to promote such illogical banality. A person has to be very fearful of the consequences of change to avoid thinking about more logical statements to fill the second slot. Perhaps other readers have more logical number 2's to offer. Here's mine:
2. Get a new political system and get rid of the corporations
The horse will be before the cart, and t
__________________________________
This pleasant, well-meaning paean to reform by incremental change sits on this site like a crocheted antimacassar sits on granny's upholstered wing chair.
The Democrats can't even unseat reprehensible reactionary dinosaurs like Blanche Lincoln and Jane Harman.
And am I the only one who noticed that the article is actually cut off? Unless there's something wrong with my browser, which I doubt, the text cuts off exactly as pasted above-- in the middle of a sentence.
To employ the Comedy Club cliché: what's up with THAT?
It's almost as if the author decided, "Oh, never mind!" ;)
Maybe he just wanted us to finish the sentence with our own idiom.
My favorite: "the tail won't be wagging the dog".
but "Oh, never mind!" is even better.
I guess I always knew that someday I'd be on the business end of a "friendly flagging"-- still, you could have just flagged your OWN post for the stated purpose. ;)
Sioux Rose
John Steel says: "It may take several election cycles to scrub corporate influence and control from our political system, but once it starts it will gain momentum."
The problem with this relaxed view of several election cycles is that:
1. Nature is dying in major ways difficult to deny today
2. So many people are dying (Afghanistan, Palestine, Congo, etc.) And the MIC keeps pushing its deadly products off the conveyor belts to make room for new inventory.
3. Jobs are being lost/homes foreclosed
4. Social Security is headed towards the auction block
5. Health care a debacle, and the public is being exposed to more and more toxins in our water, food, and air... most courtesy of deregulation, too.
It's no longer a given that there will BE several more election cycles. Our nation is breaking down as well as apart. When the pie gets cut so tight that fewer and fewer crumbs fall to the working classes, those who feel persectued have been taught (and now expensive PR campaigns work the puppet strings) to turn on one another:
Note the precedents being set by the state of Arizona and the violence around the U.S. border. Things are deteriorating VERY quickly.
Sioux Rose: "It's no longer a given that there will BE several more election cycles."
That is a lesson from the history of Rome. BC means before Christ to some people. BC means before the common era to others. To me BC means before Caesar. After Caesar, when all the smoke cleared, the Roman Republic became Imperial Rome. We may be approaching that point in American history.
Caesar was a popularist. Caesar wanted to distribute land to the people. Caesar was similar to our mythical JFK. When he crossed the Rubicon with his army he also crossed many generations of inherited wealth. Caesar marched on Rome. Caesar took power and became the first Emperor of Rome. The sons of the Plutocracy, the wealthy, rose up and killed him. "E tu, Brute?" Rome became Imperial Rome. The Republic came to an end and Rome became a dictatorship. Cheneys' dream!
The two tenths of one percentile of the people who have the vast majority of the wealth and power in world today have no intention of giving it up. Marx saw a bloody revolution as the only means of real change. The Bolsheviks acted on his theories. Today we the people have another option. World Wide Selective Default!
Sioux Rose
SJRYAN: Thank you for the informed history lesson. Were there not a permutation of major prophetic proportions in formative stages, I'd agree with you. How far humanity will first sink into the dystopia you describe before amassing the force of a great global insurrection (operating like a human tsunami), I cannot say with certainty.
VISITING PROF: I make occasional typos, too. We all do. But some in this forum cannot spell AT ALL.
"there's not a thing that's wrong with any man here/
that can't be cured by puttin' him near/
a girly, womanly, female, feminine, dame!!"
Rogers and Hammerstein (South Pacific)
Come on, CommonDreams readers. This is the only article that matters on CommonDreams today, or even this week. To paraphrase South Pacific, there's not a thing thats wrong with any economic, military, environmental, or social justice issue in America today that can't be cured by campaign finance reform. Shouldn't we cut Steel some slack for at least getting to the root of the problem? Instead, he's being dismissed, like this isn't the issue behind all the other issues. We need a constitutional convention, aka fixcongressfirst.org. Steel's other suggestions are worth pursuing as well. The democracy is broken, and the money interests have wheezled into the halls of political power through the break. We either fix our democracy or everything that's wrong with America today will go horribly wrong tomorrow, because at base they all have the same characteristic: money bribing power for short-term profit, even when it promotes long-term pain.
My only beef with Steel's article is the title. There's nothing 'invisible' about corporate power in this grossly compromised democracy.
"money bribing power for short-term profit, even when it promotes long-term pain"
Well stated ubrew12......
Here is the fundamental error:
"There's nothing inherently evil, or even bad, about corporations. Indeed, the combination of capital and management under one roof is efficient and essential in a global, competitive world."
May I assume that no one here who is aware needs to have this explained?
He's just offering up the same old "one bad apple" argument, when it's really the whole barrel that's the problem. The sorts of accidents that the author decries are not just symptoms of a lack of regulation or of abnormal greed, but are instead indicators of the very essence of corporate monopoly capitalism.
Let's face it: the values, purpose, and organization of corporate monopoly capitalism are inherently in contradiction with democracy, environmental protection, human righs, and freedom. When you profit from poverty, misery, and enviromnental degredation, when your success is dependent upon subverting the democratic process, then no meaningful reform is possible.