*
The US Constitution assigns to Congress the authority to regulate commerce. The idea that the Commerce Clause is widely understood to mean that the federal government should encourage or promote the development of commerce doesn't seem outlandish to most of us. However, the idea that the government should be a "partner" of industry is fairly new, at least in America. What that means, practically speaking since the Reagan Revolution, is that Industry (with a capital I) considers it the duty of the federal government to remove barriers to corporate profit-making irrespective of the justice of social usefulness of doing so. That expectation has come to include the even more dicey concept that government operations should be conveyed into the hands of Business (capital B) for purposes of "efficiency," which is a euphemism for wealth transfer from the US taxpayer into corporate bank accounts.This idea was expressed most elegantly by Robert Kennedy Jr. in a speech I heard broadcast on my local pubic radio station a coupla months ago. Asked by an audience member to explain his understanding of the controlling legal ideology of the Roberts Supreme Court (the current one), Kennedy quoted his law partner: "corporations always win."
When it's person versus the corporation, the corporation wins.
When it's government versus the corporation, the corporation wins.
And when it's the person versus government, government wins. This happens because government is the "partner" of industry, whose job it is to look after the legal interests of the corporation. In general terms, their interests have largely merged over the past few decades. Industry is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of America; the federal government is the Executive Vice President for Human Capital.
Republicans are at least candid about this; Democrats are not. That, in my opinion, makes the Democratic Party the more detestable of the two.
I offer the above as a spirochete's-eye view of some mental synthesis I've been working through in order to reboot my thinking process. I think all of us could benefit by trying to refresh our perspectives on who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Today, for reasons of news topicality, I'm thinking that the typical Democrat plays Joe Paterno to the Republican Jerry Sandusky. The Democrat goes through the motions of doing the right thing in the eyes of his "base." But everything he does is for the aggrandizement of The Corporation. Any way you look at it, humanity is considered only an incidental feature of the environment, and one that The Corporation won't miss when it's gone.
how is this relationship different now than 150 years ago when the govt ran interference for big business-- stealing land for railroads and mining companies, etc? It was probably easier to be a profiteer back then, in fact.
ReplyDeleteActually, it's the same relationship the church had with monarchies hundreds of years earlier. The rulers just wear suits now instead of robes.
So we're stuck with the choice between Paterno and Sandusky (great analogy) and no alternative beyond moving to Norway or Sweden, or for libertarians, Haiti.
Without concerted and prolonged collective action the corporate golden rule (the often morally tarnished sense of gold owners making the rules) seems to win. After all, progressive history says: the weaker in the family group need at least a portion of the kill to survive, serfs and vassels (and organized religions) need protection from homicidal mauraudeers and thieves,nations protect territory and resource based productive capacity, etc. A necessary collective good? At least in a basic sense I'd say yes. Civil order is sharply discernable and lamented upon it's loss. But with that as a "given" considerably more should be possible. Until we see a nation of autonomous and self replicating robots it's always going to be a two-way street. No "government" can exist without an at least implicit collective tolerance by a governed people. To use a non-PC phrase it's mainly a matter of who wears the pants. Mr. Nicolo, Aristotle, and others talk of "the one, the few, the many" and variations, but I don't expect a philosopher king worth his weight even in compost any time soon. As a cautiously prudent experiment let's elect Watson as dog catcher and see what the pooches think.
ReplyDeleteMr. What Is (a.k.a. In the Form of a Question)
Oil Can: I'm only giving a short answer. It's a matter of degree, but it's a very large degree, and it matters. In the early days large corporations didn't dominate the economy, and through most of US history there has been a discernible and active opposition to absolute rule by the ultra-wealthy. There also were widely understood lines of legality and decency that big business couldn't transgress out in the open. And there was a clear difference between government and business. Now there is at least one government agency that is literally a fusion of the public and private sector. And that doesn't count privately owned prisons.
ReplyDeleteWhat Is?: I don't see why anybody other than a corporate executive or right-wing ideologue would have a problem unequivocally recognizing that there is a collective good. It's not a difficult concept except for a sociopath like Margaret Thatcher who reputedly said "There is no such thing as 'society.'"