Corporate Earmarks: Free Market, Indeed!

In all the partisan jockeying around whether or
not to ban some or all Congressional earmarks, a small detail has been
overlooked--the fact that Congress gives away some $1.7 billion
per year in completely unaccountable, uncompetitive, sweetheart deals
to private industry. Here we are still bickering about the $100
billion-over-10-years price tag to give health care to over 30 million
uninsured Americans and fix our ailing system, but pols on both sides
of the aisle have nary blinked an eye in handing out a tenth of that,
without public debate, to defense contractors and developers.

With families across the country suffering from the downturn and
tightening their belts--and pleading for even the most meager of
unemployment benefits and other aid programs to be extended--Congress
handed bags of cash to for-profit businesses in contracts based not on,
say, comparative estimates about how many jobs would be created versus
other potential projects but, blatantly, based on personal friendships,
payback for campaign contributions and promises to base some work in
the Congressperson's home state or district.

When you really look at how the legislative sausage gets made in our
United States Congress, it's enough to turn you into an anarcho-vegan...

Is it really any wonder that the supposedly superiorly efficient and
cost-effective for-profit health insurance companies are whining like
babies about the prospect of actually having to compete with a
publicly-funded health insurance option? Of course they prefer
non-competitive handouts and monopolies. What smart businessperson
wouldn't?

In February, the Justice Department launched an investigation into
five members (Dems and Reps) of the House Appropriations defense
subcommittee for allegedly accepting $840,000 in campaign contributions
in exchange for funneling $2.4 million in federal monies
to just one defense contractor, 21st Century Systems. The charges were
dropped, but the specter (and evidence) lingers. It's too bad that all
those poor folks without health insurance can't scrape together a few
hundred grand to line the pockets of those Members of Congress who are
holding back health care reform.

In the mid-20th century, as New Deal economic investments in public
spending and, well, the public in general were making Americans
happier, healthier, better-educated and generally better off, and as
surging social movements were starting to question even more deeply the
pro-corporate economic policies of the past that had ruined regular
people and ruptured the common good, Milton Friedman and his band of
pro-corporate economists quickly stopped using the phrase laissez faire capitalism and switched to free market capitalism. Genius! Free market,
after all, sounds like we're taking the cuffs off the lean and mean
market machine to let it fairly compete in the economic ring. Laissez faire,
on the other hand, sounds... um... lazy. Lazy capitalists. And Freedman
would be damned if that image of greedy robber barons who sit and get
fat off the hard work of others would be permanently sealed in the
public imagination. As long as you call it the free market, the illusion of fair effort masks the reality of backroom deals and biased handouts.

The reality is the free in free markets stands for free money. From our pockets.

Americans got angry about the bank bailouts, but not angry enough.
There's a deeper problem afoot in our nation, a problem cemented in our
economic policies, defended by our politicians, exacerbated by the
Supreme Court's recent ruling to even further open the floodgates of
corporate money into politics. We are a nation by, of and for
corporations.

In 1816, Thomas Jefferson prayed, "I hope we shall crush in its
birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to
challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to
the laws of our country." Almost 200 years later, our work is still cut
out for us.