Common Sense vs. Political Realities: An Anatomy of Dysfunctionality

                                                              An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

                                                                                                                         January 11, 2011

An incisive political cartoon appeared in national newspapers on January 22, 2010.  The political cartoon, created by Matt Davies, shows a billboard with little neon lights on it which reads BOB IS A JERK.  A blimp floats overhead with a sign on it that says GET A LIFE BOB.  A bus going past this scene has one of those international traffic signs on the back that says BOB with a slash across the name, and a political ad on the side of the bus says BOB IS WRONG.  Off to one side, a perplexed-looking Bob stands next to a woman, and he is saying to her:

    “ALL I SAID WAS GIVING FREE SPEECH TO A CORPORATION

       IS DIFFERENT THAN GIVING FREE SPEECH TO AN INDIVIDUAL.”

This astute political commentary was created in response to the landmark ruling a day earlier by the Supreme Court which overturned long-standing legal precedents that had been designed to limit the powerful and highly unfair influence of Big Money in our elections.  This decision in the case Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission declared that it is more-or-less unconstitutional for representatives of the American people to put restrictions on the rights of cash-rich corporations to influence elections.  Wow, what a world!

This ruling overturned campaign finance laws that sensibly restricted corporate spending in elections.  Eighty-nine-year-old Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the four Justices who disagreed with the decision, read his dissent aloud to give additional emphasis to his words.  He noted that the decision “rejected the common sense of the American people, who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”

The purpose of this essay is to develop a big picture perspective on current events and the lessons of history and experience, and to make a call to action for Americans to stand up and demand that our representatives actually work to improve our societies and make them more healthy and more just.  This can only be accomplished if we find ways to prevent established interests from getting special short-term-oriented advantages for themselves at the public expense.  At the same time, we must ensure that these interests do not undermine the financial health of our nation or unduly harm the environment or damage our hopes for a fairer and more peaceful world.

Capitalism, Corporatism, and Inegalitarianism

     “We have the best government that money can buy.”

                                                                           --- Mark Twain

Mark Twain was being distinctly cynical when he wrote these words.  This trenchant observation was definitely not an endorsement of the goodness of our government, or of the wisdom of allowing Big Money to have a domineering influence on our politics and public decision-making.

Many indicators show that too much corporate money is already negatively affecting our society.  The greater good is diminished when we allow our public decision-making to be dominated by the amount of money spent by vested interests to influence our national policies.  We need to find ways to ensure that all people and competing interests have fair representation.  One of the reasons that our economic and political systems are so unfair and dysfunctional is that rich people and giant corporations have such powerful influence to enact their own self-interested priorities. 

The bottom-line confirmation of this contention is embodied in one simple fact:  The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more of the total wealth in the United States than the bottom 90% combined.  One percent of Americans, in other words, own more than the combined amount of everyone in the lower classes, plus everyone in the middle class, plus about half of the people in the upper class.  Furthermore, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans today earn as much as the bottom 120 million, and the marginal tax rate on high income individuals is the lowest it has been in more than 80 years.

It is downright stupid for the United States to run the biggest budget deficits in world history while at the same time requiring the super-rich to pay the lowest tax rates since the Roaring Twenties.  This state of affairs is an outrageous affront to common sense and the common good.  The marginal tax rate should be increased to prevent the extreme unfairness of letting rich people exploit our system to get vastly richer. 

Also, since our capitalist system is set up to primarily benefit wealthy people, it is entirely reasonable to require a once-every-lifetime reckoning in which wealthy people, after they die, give back a good portion of their wealth for the greater good.  Taxes on rich people’s estates, which were reduced to zero in 2010, should be re-instituted at a higher level than they were in the December 2010 Obama/McConnell compromise.  The revenues generated should be applied to reduce the national debt, which has been artificially inflated, in part, to ensure that rich people are able to accumulate their assets.

The dominating influence of Big Money in our society drowns out the voices of the vast majority of people.  It thus has the effect of reducing the power associated with the freedom of speech for individuals, so it significantly erodes their interests.  This is not what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights.  We are living in a new Gilded Age of disparities of wealth that is so unjust a form of inegalitarianism that it could only have come about, and could only be perpetuated, by completely UNFAIR representation and by the subversion of democratic ideals.

“Government must give priority to the needs of ordinary citizens, workers, consumers, students, children, the elderly, and the ill, the vulnerable and the underdog, and not to the needs of those already sufficiently powerful and affluent to afford their own lobbyists.”

                                                                                     --- Theodore Sorensen (1928 – 2010)

Justice Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court Justice from 1916 to 1939, made this compelling observation: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”  Yikes!  Which shall it be?

A Bottom Line Assessment

Money is power.  Power is control.  The net effect of the power of money is to perpetuate an establishment that controls our political system and prevents common sense reforms that would otherwise make our societies healthier, fairer, more just and more likely to be sustainable in the coming decades and centuries. 

I strongly believe that we would achieve greater general prosperity if we were to implement policies that would make it easier for small businesses and innovative entrepreneurs and the middle class to succeed rather than pandering so exclusively to established interests.

Since George W. Bush appointed conservative justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, it has become narrowly biased in favor of employers over workers, and of wasteful exploiters and polluters over the environment.  At a time that the need for ecological sanity is growing more urgent every year, it is bizarre that power-abusing corporatism and ideological intransigence and eco-stupidity are gaining such power.  We must do more to protect the environment instead of finding rationalizations for irresponsibly facilitating its degradation.

Just a little more than 9 months after the misguided ruling in the Citizens United case, the bastard progeny of this ill-advised decision has been delivered.  About $4 billion was spent on the midterm elections of November 2, 2010.  This represents an increase of more than 40% over the last midterm elections of 2006.  Additionally, the amount of this spending that has come from undisclosed donors has increased substantially. 

Secrecy in the financing of elections is anathema in a democracy, for it conceals the source of opinion and spin, and it facilitates the dissemination of misinformation and distorted narratives which undermine larger perspectives of the greater good.  The preponderance of this secret money was given to Republican and Tea Party candidates.  This allowed the public to be shrewdly manipulated by narrowly-focused interests in ways that are contrary to good decision-making and fair-mindedness.

Wealthy people tend to be jealously protective of their privileges and prerogatives.  They seem to feel completely entitled to their financial security and their high social status, as if the status quo of circumstances denotes deservedness.  They believe in a sort of self-approving Social Darwinist self-righteousness.  In effect, they consequently damn others who they regard as less accomplished and less deserving.  In contrast, the overwhelming majority of people who are less financially fortunate are deeply envious of the rich.  They want to be equally lucky and secure, but they are relatively powerless, and many of them feel undeserving of a fairer shake in our system.  They may vaguely understand how unfairly jerry-rigged the system actually is, but they can do little about it.  Their ability to succeed in endeavors is surely severely limited by the unfair nature of the rules and the structure of this system.

A small number of super-rich people are essentially making fools of the rest of the American people.  We should all wake up and shout, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"  This is not merely an issue of ‘free speech’ for corporations;  it is an issue of decency, democracy, justice, healthy communities, sound finances, and the sanity of ecological wisdom. 

The brilliant John Stuart Mill wrote in the early nineteenth century about the principles of “political economy”.  He made the insightful observation, which was startling at the time, that there is no “correct” distribution of wealth in a society.  Every nation chooses its own tax structure and incentive rules and fairness doctrines and moral values, and thus chooses how extreme to allow the concentration of wealth to become, and how severe poverty will be, and whether or not to support the emergence and sustenance of a healthy middle class.

Fairer elections and representation are needed now.  We must not allow the perpetuation of a system that gives dominating and highly unfair influence to ‘fat cats’!  Congress should correct this overriding challenge to the common good by enacting a proposed ‘Fair Elections Now Act’.  This legislation would have a highly salubrious effect on our elections and the health of our democratic republic by making election campaigns about the best ideas for improving our nation, rather than merely stimulating competition to see which interests are most successful in raising funds for their own narrow goals.  This Act would use public financing of campaigns to create a fairer forum for the American people.  It would limit the amounts of private contributions and corporate money in our elections. 

Congress should also enact legislation that requires the disclosure of funding for candidates and initiatives in elections.  Our representatives should follow up on these initiatives by passing a new Constitutional Amendment that simply expresses the vital importance of freedom of speech for individuals.  This Amendment should make it clear that our democracy is designed to give a fair voice to all of the people, not just to corporations whose coffers are vastly larger than those of individuals.  This Amendment would help assure all Americans that there is a more level playing field of representation. 

We should also put into effect serious reforms of ethics standards in Congress, and real limitations on the ability of lobbyists for powerful established interests to determine legislation at both the federal and state levels of government. 

Our American Founders’ Point of View

One need not be a Constitutional scholar or an astute historian to know that our Founders despised tyranny and abuses of power.  They had risked their lives to gain independence from British despotism and taxation without representation, so they established a form of government with broad checks and balances and other mechanisms built into it to prevent abuses of power.  Any contention that it was our Founding Fathers’ intention to guarantee free speech to powerful organizations and rich people at the expense of free speech rights and fair representation for the majority of people is preposterous. 

While Americans proudly think we live in a democratic republic, we arguably delude ourselves in this belief.  Our political system is much more accurately understood as a plutocracy, and as a corporatocracy, i.e. a system of rule by wealthy people and giant corporations.  As a result, our national goals are narrowed down to be nearly synonymous with the self-serving priorities of rich people and CEOs and corporations, and NOT with the greater good.

A New Yorker named David DeGraw has written essays collectively titled The Economic Elite vs. The People of the United States of America in which he makes compelling observations about the terrible physical and psychological toll that is caused by mass unemployment and the high costs of healthcare, and the increasing numbers of people who are bankrupt or homeless or locked up in prisons.  He asserts that a small economic elite of wealthy people in the U.S. is managing “to normalize the unthinkable” by concealing the true nature of our economic and political systems and by deceiving people into thinking that the status quo is acceptable.  But for the vast majority of Americans, our society is unraveling, and the unfair status quo is becoming increasingly unacceptable!

Reactionary conservatives and the simplistic Tea Party, on the other hand, believe that we need to turn back the clock on socially progressive initiatives and reduce the size of government, as if this would somehow be a panacea to make our nation more prosperous and people more free.  I worked for a medium-sized corporation that was forced to lay off 10% of its workforce several times over the years, so I have no doubt that most government agencies could be shrunken by 10% without reducing the effectiveness of their most important purposes.  But accomplishing this will be difficult, and it will involve significant hardships.  It is also likely to make overall joblessness worse.

The epic success of conservative politicians in the November 2, 2010 midterm elections seems likely to make partisan conflict more pronounced than it has been even in the past two years, which have been plenty contentious!  Nonetheless, the need is growing for all interests to embrace solutions that are truly comprehensive and to make fair compromises to achieve the greater good for society as a whole from a long-term perspective. 

Further proof of the fact that it is wrong-headed folly to allow unlimited amounts of money to dominate our politics is found in the fact that the degree of inequality in the United States has increased dramatically in the past 30 years.  This has been facilitated by two primary initiatives:  First, trillions of dollars in tax cuts have been given to rich people.  Ronald Reagan rashly reduced the marginal tax rate on high income earners from 70% to 35% in 1980.  This created an enormous windfall for rich people.  George W. Bush augmented these benefits by giving further trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy. 

Partially as a result of giving the preponderance of benefits to the rich, the number of people living below the poverty level has reached the highest rate since the government began tracking this statistic in 1959.  Tellingly, the bottom 90% of American workers saw a negligible increase in their average income during the 30 years from 1980 to 2010, in radical contrast to the 75% increase they had earned during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980.

The second corporate initiative that has contributed to the dramatic increase in inequality is the abuse of corporate power to get the government to reduce their share of America’s tax burden.  Corporations are paying 60% less than the share of federal revenues they paid in 1960, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  Sixty percent less!  Large businesses have managed to achieve this goal by contributing enormous amounts of money to politicians in return for their favors. 

Corporations have also financed phalanxes of lobbyists who help ensure that they are able to grab numerous special privileges for their management and shareholders.  These perks include direct subsidies, tax loopholes, tax cuts, and accelerated depreciation write-offs.  Corporations also exploit offshore tax shelters that shelter income from taxes.  Additional provisions are granted to corporations by means of the evisceration of sensible common good regulations and the relaxation of requirements for all production costs to be included in the prices of goods and services.   

These provisions allow businesses to externalize a wide range of costs onto society, including pollution mitigation and toxic waste clean up costs, and resource depletion and worker healthcare costs and the ill health of citizens impacted by externalized costs, and natural disasters caused by global warming trends and related extreme weather events and climate disruptions.

Corporations are narrowly focused because they exist for only two specific legal purposes:  to limit the liability of owners and to maximize profits for investors and shareholders.  To argue that free speech for individuals should be effectively subordinated to paid speech for giant corporations is not merely naïve or disingenuous, it is dishonest and ideologically driven and practically traitorous to democratic fairness.  Our political system in effect subordinates all public policy priorities and decision-making to the narrow goals of irresponsible capitalists and investors, so it is not adequately accountable, and it is thus dysfunctional.  This is why it simply must be reformed. 

Our collective shortsighted reluctance to invest in and repair the important infrastructure of our nation will lead to “a steady erosion of the social and economic foundations for American prosperity in the long run”, according to a bipartisan panel of experts who met at the University of Virginia in September 2010.  For one thing, our support of public education has been reduced in recent years, despite the fact that education is the underpinning of economic prosperity.  Also, our public road and transportation system is “rapidly decaying and woefully underfunded”, and yet the federal gas tax has remained unchanged at 18 cents per gallon since 1993, despite inflation.  This tax should be increased to finance the maintenance of our infrastructure for the future, and to staunch the resource misallocations created by artificially cheap fossil fuels.

The Republicans Get “A Second Chance”

Voters chose to give Republicans “a second chance” after their terrible record during the Administration of George W. Bush.  Recall that the Republicans controlled Congress most of the time from 2001 to 2009, and they significantly increased government spending while slashing taxes on the rich.  This created the biggest deficits and increases in the national debt in history until that time.  They also figuratively drove the economy into a ditch by fervently deregulating banks and encouraging speculative leveraging and acting to inflate the real estate bubble.  They also ramped up spending on the military and involved us in endless occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  They even created a costly new entitlement program for prescription drugs, and they irresponsibly reduced protections of the environment to allow big corporations to make bigger profits at the public expense.

Voters in 2008 had been fed up with this performance by Republicans, so they demanded change and elected Barack Obama and gave control of Congress to the Democrats.  But the hopes of Americans have been disappointed because the Great Recession, spawned under Republican policies, resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, and the government was forced to bail out big banks and auto companies and to desperately stimulate the economy with corporate tax breaks and other extensive and costly and risky measures. 

Republicans have acted as “the party of no” for the past two years.  Media spin, financed by wealthy individuals, has nonetheless convinced the majority of voters in the South and Midwest that Republicans offer the best hope of actually addressing the daunting problems facing our nation and the world, and Republican fear-mongering about “socialism” has temporarily shifted the balance of power.

One of the great challenges is that Americans of all stripes basically “want to eat their cake and have it too.”  We want a large basket of “social goods”, but we do not want to pay for them.  We want police, firefighters, a strong military, protective Homeland Security, a fair system of justice, adequate prisons, and good public schools and libraries and roads and water systems and sewage treatment plants.  We want some sort of socially affordable safety net for old people and the homeless and the mentally ill and the disabled and the extremely poor.  We also want clean air and good water quality and protected open spaces, public beaches, state parks, national parks and wilderness areas. 

It makes sense to have these social goods financed by the populace in general.  But no one seems to be willing to pay the taxes required to provide all of these things, particularly not rich people who are best able to afford to pay higher rates on their higher levels of earnings.  As a result, our representatives do the expedient thing, even though it is highly unfair and shortsighted: they foist the costs onto taxpayers in the future by indulging in deficit spending.

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will shift the goal of new legislation to rejecting healthcare reforms and undermining the power of President Obama and labor unions.  The results of this negative strategy, and the probability that they will not be effective in addressing federal deficit spending because of their overriding goal of cutting taxes, will make the next two years quite interesting.  And we will likely figuratively fiddle while Rome burns.

The Role of Unions in Our Society

The status quo of the economic and political establishment in the United States is contrary to democratic fairness.  This state of affairs is made worse by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case.  This narrow decision not only allows large corporations to spend freely on elections, but also unions and non-profit organizations.  This is a potentially positive thing for democratic fairness and saner decision-making.  But let’s do the math.  Corporations make several trillions of dollars of profit annually in the $55 trillion international economy.  Unions and non-profit organizations have a much more difficult time raising money.  Which entities are most likely to have the most money to influence elections?  Duh!

Union representation of American workers peaked more than 50 years ago with almost 36% of all workers belonging to unions.  This was a significant reason that the number of people in the middle class grew so robustly in the decades following World War II.  Today only about 12% of workers belong to unions, or about 8% in the private sector and a much higher rate in the public sector.  Partially as a consequence, after the effects of inflation are taken into account, workers in the United States are now working longer hours on average for lower wages and benefits.

Not only do Americans work the longest hours of any nation in the developed world, they have “the most family-hostile public policy” due to the lack of subsidized child care or paid family leaves or mandatory sick leave or vacations.  There are also no limits on mandatory overtime, or rights to request flexibility on the job.  So much for “family values”!

How has it come to pass that workers have been afflicted with this adverse turn of events?  Why has the decline in representation been so pronounced in the private sector?  The growth in the power of corporations is the principal explanation.  This is another reason that we must find more effective ways to rein in the overweening power of big corporations in our economy and in our politics. 

The rising power of unions in the public sector, on the other hand, is creating high costs for public employees and dauntingly large unfunded liabilities for most local and state and federal government employees.  Taxpayers and future generations are thereby being committed to paying for rapidly growing costs and liabilities.  We really must find more intelligent ways of controlling the size and cost and effectiveness of government entities.  Pension reform, in particular, should be done in the near future.  Too many of the outcomes in the battle for special advantages are contrary to the greater good, so a sensible redesign of our entire system must be achieved!

The Perspective of Thomas Paine, Plus Even Larger Ways of Understanding

Not long after the terrible terrorist attacks of 9/11, the honorable and honest journalist Bill Moyers observed the manipulative forces at play in the aftermath of the tragedy, and then he succinctly noted:  “The soul of democracy -- the essence of the word itself -- is government of, by, and for the people.  At the core of politics, the soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of big money contributed by a narrow and unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the faith of citizens in self-government.”

Right on, Bill Moyers!  The early patriotic pamphleteer Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1776.  This small book had a revolutionary effect on our nation’s future.  Paine saw society and civilization clearly.  He used the understandings gained from experience and reason as his guide in advocating a fair and representative system of government.  He noted that, in earlier times, simple democracies consisted of people who governed themselves directly without the need for intermediaries.  As the population grew, it was necessary to design a system of representation that modified simple democracy into governance capable of “embracing and confederating all the various interests” that compete for advantages and privileges and ascendancy.

Today, the need to respect and integrate all interests is greater than ever before.  In fact, it is time that we see an even bigger picture.  We must begin to give the interests of young people and those in future generations much greater consideration in all public policy decision-making.  Our current economic and political systems give our children and grandchildren very short shrift.  We practically ignore their best interests in the intense competition of actively-involved people and entities trying to gain short-term advantages. 

This is why we should create a Bill of Rights for Future Generations.  The only responsible way to create fairer and more farsighted public policies is by providing an overarching context for our national priorities and the decisions we collectively make concerning such things as resource exploitation, habitat and environmental protections, waste disposal, social justice, job creation, deficit spending, the national debt, and peaceful coexistence.

The health of natural ecosystems and the vitality of the services they provide are public goods that the state should safeguard by preventing private entities from damaging them and depleting them at irresponsible rates.  Nothing could be more sensible than the “polluter pays principle”, and yet polluters successfully circumvent such policies.  They do this in order to avoid paying the costs of the pollution prevention and clean-up, and to maximize shareholder profits. 

All competitors should feel free to make as big a profit as they can, but only in the larger context that they are required to compete fairly and include all production costs in the prices of their products and services.  We should collectively ensure that businesses make their profits in honest ways rather than by externalizing costs upon society.  When we allow some production costs to be externalized onto society, the true costs of goods and services are distorted.  This results in wrong-headed and irrational allocations of resources.  The net effect is to influence consumer choices in ways that are socially undesirable.

A Digression on Being Right

The political divide on the Supreme Court reflects deep ideological differences in beliefs between the worldviews of conservatives and liberals.  The narrow conservative majority on the high court advocates a ‘strict constructionist’ view of our great American Constitution that unfortunately interprets this brilliant founding document in ways that value corporations over people.  Seeing how clearly our Founders strived to prevent the federal government from being able to abuse power, it is preposterous to suppose they would be in favor of conservatives’ view that corporations deserve to be treated as persons. 

The book titled The Corporation - The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, cogently portrays the concept that, if giant corporations really were persons, the type of person they would be most likely to resemble would be a sociopath.  Corporations are basically manipulative and socially irresponsible and unempathetic and practically incapable of guilt or remorse or moral rectitude or genuine responsibility to the greater good.

Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation, wrote that big corporations are designed to foist costs onto the public, noting that corporations are “deliberately programmed, indeed legally compelled, to externalize costs without regard for the harm it may cause to people and communities and the natural environment.  Every cost it can unload onto someone else is a benefit to itself, a direct route to profit.”  (A fascinating film of the same name, available on Netflix, was made of this book.)

We surely should not give greater power to such entities.  They are, after all, organized to satisfy just two principal purposes, both of which are too narrow to be consistent with the greater good:  (1) to maximize profits, and (2) to minimize the liabilities of management and shareholders for damages or harm that may be caused by corporate activities.  This narrow focus harms the commons and undermines our democracy.

Another shortcoming of our democratic process is that politicians try to convince voters that they will do the right thing for the people, if elected, and yet they may not actually know what the right thing is.  Self-professed experts are wrong more than 50% of the time, says Philip Tetlock, a psychologist who analyzed predictions made over a span of 25 years by economists and journalists and foreign policy specialists and intelligence analysts.  The main reasons for the inaccurate predictions were overconfidence and the phenomenon known as “confirmation bias”.  Experts tend to ignore contrary evidence, and they are deluded by hubris and ideological dogmatism into believing that they know what the outcome of trends and policy actions will be.  They are thus “prisoners of their own preconceptions”. 

What Philip Tetlock concluded was: “Our political discourse is driven in large part by people whose opinions are less accurate than a coin toss.”  Yikes!

Sex! And Money!!

Federal and state governments are like ladies of easy virtue, gullible and easy to exploit and rather ditzy and oddly loose with their purse strings.  Corporations are like unscrupulous and highly-sexed men who are eager and ever-ready to take advantage of such sexy and desirable ladies.  Money is like Viagra to these old goats, these clever proxies for wealthy people, and the lure of money and the compulsion to control others seems to stimulate corporations to fervently court the government for special favors and privileges.

Since the overarching goal of corporations is to make profits without having to be responsible or liable, it would be most sensible to require all businesses to compete fairly by developing superior products or by providing higher quality services than their competitors.  It is, however, often much easier for big businesses to take advantage of the government’s generosity and profligacy and its inability to control its finances.  Thus, it is no surprise that plying the representatives of the people with money and intoxicating favors is a rapid growth industry.  These favors include inducements like political support, bribes, extravagant wining and dining, inclusion in good-old-boy clubs, self-affirming rationalizations, and general pandering to the peccadilloes and predilections of politicians and their hunger for power.  Most of these things are a serious betrayal of the public trust.

The vast majority of people, meanwhile, are forced to figuratively keep their noses to the grindstone.  They are practically powerless to prevent the tax man from taking a hefty cut of their hard-earned dollars to facilitate this game.  People are diverted from understanding the true nature of this scam, and of the tax evasion schemes of rich people who would have the least difficulty in being able to afford to pay a greater share of the tax burden than the system currently requires. 

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once stated that “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.”  Rich people should contribute their fair share of taxes to ensure the health of our civilization.  Specifically, the top 10% of Americans should pay a proportional percent of taxes to the amount of the income they make. 

A detailed and eminently fair proposal on how to restructure our tax system can be found in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto.  See Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues.

All the participants in this chess-like game of complex strategies seem to be willing to let the powers-that-be grease the economic wheels by hyper-stimulating consumerism and by borrowing enormous sums of money from people in future generations to gin up this unsustainable Ponzi-like scheme to a fever pitch of irresponsible profiteering.  No one seems to be honest enough to proclaim that “the emperor has no clothes” by revealing the obvious fact that the real outcome of this laissez-faire debt-financed system is socially unacceptable.  This outcome is an increasing concentration of wealth and of poverty, together with more powerful impulses toward national insolvency.  This gives a more pronounced diminishment to the prospects of our descendents.  Checkmate!

The Undesirable Influence of Big Money in our Politics

Corporate spending on elections is a form of institutional bribery which is particularly contrary to the common good when it facilitates the externalizing of costs onto society.  Big corporations and rich people are also primarily responsible for obstructing sensible pay-as-you-go rules, and they prevent rules from being enacted and enforced which require polluters to pay for the prevention or mitigation of the pollution they cause.  Vested interests generally oppose such greater good goals because they are so intensely focused on getting ever-more subsidies and perks and lower taxes for themselves, plus bigger profits at the expense of the public good.

Vested interests are largely responsible for the extreme fiscal irresponsibility of the first decade of the twenty-first century.  It is stunning that our nation started with a national budget surplus in fiscal year 2000, and then managed to turn it into the largest deficits in world history.  This was accomplished by spending money like a drunken sailor, while at the same time giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to rich people and large corporations.  Simultaneously, the government was rashly subjecting the financial system to less regulation and less oversight and less accountability, and big businesses were given many new tax breaks and subsidies.  More government spending, coupled with less revenues, is an obvious recipe for financial disaster.

Corporate money effectively buys politicians and helps businesses dictate the terms of most legislation that affects them.  The influence of Big Money in our political system can be seen in almost every law passed by Congress.  Wall Street and Big Oil and defense industries and large drug companies and health insurance companies and industrial agribusinesses and almost every other arena of corporate activity can be seen to dominate our decision-making. 

The provisions of the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003, for instance, were clearly devised to be of biggest benefit to the drug industry, and not to people.  This complicated and costly new Medicare entitlement plan even denied the federal government the power to negotiate lower drug prices, thereby ensuring that drug company profits would be big, and would grow bigger, at the direct expense of taxpayers.

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 is another piece of legislation that was a gift to corporations.  In this instance, it was a form of welfare given to credit card companies and student loan companies.  The law created a hardship for people who cannot afford usurious interest rates for credit card debt and high over-limit fees and late fees.  The majority of people who are affected by this bankruptcy law are people who have fallen on hard times because of costs related to catastrophic illness, or unemployment, or divorce. 

To allow the government to side with such changes in laws in favor of corporations is essentially unconscionable when such changes exploit people who are in such existentially difficult circumstances.  Prisons for debtors were eliminated long ago, but today we allow banks to exploit the unfortunate in too many ways.

The best way to change this state of affairs would be to limit corporate money in political campaigns and lobbyist organizations.  We simply must begin to directly and responsibly address the far-reaching problems we face. Our representatives must be made more responsive to the American people, not just to the special interests with the most money.  We must seek more sensible accountability and demand more transparency of campaign contributors and lobbyist financiers and Wall Street bankers and CEOs.  We must manage better.  To cede power to economic fundamentalists and energized Tea Party enthusiasts would let them move us backwards once more, at a time we arguably need to move smartly forward.  Power to the people!

Illusions and Delusions in our Two-Party Political System

Some say that the American political system was curiously designed to prevent effective action by the government rather than to facilitate it.  They may have been thinking about the unfair representation and dysfunctionality of the U.S. Senate, in particular.  This appears to be a prime reason that it is so difficult to get sensible things done in our nation today.  In this respect, some say that our form of corporate governance is most accurately characterized as an “idiocracy”!  Ha!  Check out the 2006 comedic film Idiocracy for some pathetically funny entertainment!

P.J. O’Rourke once observed: ”The Republicans are the party that says that government doesn’t work – and then gets elected and proves it.”  The Democratic Party does not do much better, because it is also largely controlled by powerful special interests.  The divisive conflict between the two parties in the struggle for power masks the reality that both parties pander to the influence of money in our politics, rather than honestly striving to facilitate the greater good.

Our political system is, in a sense, a kind of one-party system.  The dominant ideology of those who control this system holds that the prerogatives given to those with power and privilege are appropriate and properly placed.  This ideology effectively embraces the privatization of profits and the socialization of costs and risks.  It implicitly rejects the great principle in a democracy that asserts government should be ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. 

Our government is not meaningfully addressing the problems that people face.  The primary reason that our political system is dysfunctional is because it is controlled by wealthy people and giant banks and Big Oil companies and Big Pharma and large insurance companies and the military-industrial complex.  This is why the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program was principally focused in 2008 to 2010 on helping Wall Street, not Main Street. 

The illusion of a two-party system is fostered by the sound and fury of rancorous conflict between Democrats and Republicans over hot-button social issues and a “blame game” regarding more substantive issues.  Since politicians are forced to pander to various vested interests to get money to stay in power, all legislative decisions tend to be oriented around benefitting CEO’s and investors and rich people, but not average Americans or future generations.  This is why we need serious campaign finance reform and real Congressional ethics reform and stronger restrictions against the influence of corporate lobbyists. 

The revolving door between corporate management and government regulatory agencies and the lobbying industry must be restricted.  And we must elect leaders who are more socially and environmentally responsible.

“The path to the future should be small-donor democracy, not corporate democracy,” says Bob Edgar, the president of the organization Common Cause.  Instead of moving in this reasonable direction, the recent ruling by the narrow conservative majority on the Supreme Court is essentially rejects common sense and institutionalizes unfair representation of the people.  It blatantly favors the corrupting influence of corporations in our elections. 

It is the nature of our contemporary capitalist system to allow big businesses to nearly completely dominate decision-making.  We should enact smart laws and regulations to prevent these entities from evading their obligations to their employees and to society.  To do this, we must reduce the influence of Big Money in our politics rather than allowing it to increase.  If this is not done, then workers and citizens will be forced to bear even more externalized costs, and people will become more dependent on the vagaries of the market and more vulnerable to corporate shenanigans.

Hopes for a post-partisan world have shattered upon the political reality that, for all the bluster about morality and ideological propriety, the intense competition between opposing politicians is not a competition for the best ideas, or the fairest outcomes, or the most sensible plans.  No, not in the least!  Instead, it is a ruthless fight for money and power and control and dominance and perks and privileges.  Republicans are proving that they are far less willing than Democrats to compromise, and their failure to work together with Democrats for the common good has helped prevent us from truly and fairly solving the most important of our national problems.

A democracy relies on citizens being well-informed and independent in their thinking -- and skeptical of the propaganda of vested interests.  Democracies also rely on people being able to have their voices heard by political representatives.  The best government would be one in which a fair and optimum balance is established between the goals of strong individual liberties and adequate social responsibilities and a reasonable modicum of equality and justice.  We must ensure that we re-commit our society to Golden Rule ethics by overriding partisan biases and reducing stubborn support for inegalitarian initiatives and special privileges for elites.

Specific Rich People who are Instrumental in Obstructing Common Good Reforms

David and Charles Koch (pronounced ‘Coke’) are amongst the most egregious examples of a selfishly greedy and unempathetic attitude that some extremely wealthy people have in their staunch opposition to sensible reforms.  These two billionaire brothers are amongst the top ten richest people in America.  They own most of the stock of Koch Industries, the second largest privately-held company in the United States.  Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kansas, is a giant conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, chemicals, timber, fertilizers, and commodities-trading interests. 

The Koch brothers are best known for their wealth and influence, and even for their generous contributions to some good causes.  David Koch, for instance, donated enough money to have a new exhibition hall named for him at the science-oriented Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.  The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins opened on March 17, 2010 with an exhibit and research and education programs dedicated to the discovery and understanding of human origins.  This is part of an initiative called Human Origins: What Does It Mean to Be Human?  These programs focus on the epic story of human evolution and how our species’ defining characteristics have evolved over the last 6 million years as our primate ancestors adapted to a changing world. 

The premiere of this new hall helped commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the original opening of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.  This venture is far more laudable than the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which promotes fallacy over fact by pretending that a literal reading of the Bible is a plausible explanation for the prehistory of human existence.  The Creation Museum is an ignorance-embracing undertaking that denies scientific knowledge and evolutionary understandings.  It actually pretends that dinosaurs and human beings once co-existed, even though dinosaurs had been extinct for 65 million years before our human species came into being.

Most important to this narrative, however, is the role of David and Charles Koch in what are anti-social and mean-spirited campaigns to obstruct and kill reforms to our economic and political systems.  The Koch brothers loom large behind almost every major domestic policy dispute in the United States.  Over the years, millions of dollars of Koch brothers’ money has been given to various right-wing think tanks and front groups and biased publications. 

Koch groups, for instance, maneuvered to try to stop Barack Obama’s efforts, early in his presidency, to stimulate the economy in the wake of the financial crisis that afflicted nations worldwide at the time of the Obama inauguration.  A Koch-funded group launched television and radio ads that derided the recovery package as containing wasteful pork barrel spending and bad ideas.  It referred to the plan as “the Devil in Disguise”.  The famous economist John Maynard Keynes would have turned over in his grave.  Efforts to keep the international economy from entering another Great Depression were evil?

The conservative Cato Institute, founded by Charles Koch, and other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a series of reports that distorted the details of the stimulus plan and called instead for Bush-style tax cuts targeted to benefit big businesses and wealthy people.  The Koch brothers cynically stick to the deceptive story that tax cuts for rich people will trickle down to the vast majority of people who have suffered the brunt of hardships associated with economic hard times.  No matter how much such strategies can be shown to principally lift rich people’s yachts rather than everyone’s boats, this dogma is a favorite rationalization for increasing the already glaring disparities and inequities in our societies.

In addition to battling the economic stimulus plan, an organization founded in 1984 by David Koch named Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency helping to organize the first Tea Party protests.  It has subsequently spent much of the past year mobilizing Tea Party opposition to clean energy legislation and health insurance reform and systemically-sensible regulations on banks and the financial industry.

David Koch pretends to be a champion of science, yet he has arguably done more to undermine the public's understanding of climate-change science than any other person in America.  The AFP provided financing for a so-called “Hot Air” tour, a nationwide road show that used a balloon to depict climate change science as "hot air."  Koch's AFP organization has run ‘populist’ ads that mocked environmentalists as spoiled brats who are more concerned about their “three homes and five cars” than they are about economic conditions.  How ironic!  It is, after all, the extremely wealthy Koch brothers who seem to be the spoiled brats that lack empathy for Americans who suffer adversities because of policies enabled by the Koch brothers’ self-serving politics. 

The Koch brothers have spent more than $10 million dollars so far on misinformation campaigns and direct lobbying.  One of their basic goals is to weaken legislation designed to mitigate the impacts of climate change.  A team of Koch-funded operatives attempted to crash the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, and the brothers are partially responsible for scuttling prospects for Congress to pass climate change laws.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow refutes the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. 

The Koch brothers have a strong financial stake in blocking smart reforms because oil refineries owned by Koch Industries are major carbon dioxide polluters.  Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S., and for leaking three million gallons of crude oil into drinking water sources and fishery habitats, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  Also, Georgia Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is a large contributor to causing the “carbon-sink capacity” to be reduced by chopping down trees.  Koch Industries has rational profit-oriented reasons to want to block things like regulatory enforcement and clean energy and labor reforms and carbon taxes, but American citizens and our representatives simply must stop allowing such shortsighted and socially irresponsible schemes for externalizing costs onto society.

A Glaring Example of Corporate Social Misbehavior

Greater-good goals must of necessity be broader and more long-term oriented than the short-term-oriented goals of giant corporations.  The private sector is highly interested in making profits, and an easy way to do this in our current system is by using up natural resources at an unsustainable rate while at the same time foisting upon the public the costs of depletion and health-impairing pollution and ecosystem harm that is associated with their activities.  Taxpayers and future generations are thus forced to pay for benefits that corporate shareholders and CEOs and investors gain at the expense of the general public.

Most scientists agree that if humanity continues to spew billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in increasing quantities every year, the inevitable result will be enormous costs related to health adversities and increasing numbers of natural disasters caused by the disruptive effect of these emissions on the global climate.  These disruptions will be manifested in more intense storms and weather extremes that will have high costs due to flooding, hurricane damages, heat waves as well as cold snaps, crop losses, more intense wildfires, ecosystem disruptions, coral bleaching due to warmer seas and ocean acidification, coastal inundations caused by sea level rise, and assaults on biodiversity caused by the degradation of habitats.

The Supreme Court decided in April 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  Since Congress and the White House have been completely dominated in recent decades by the influence of Big Oil and Big Coal and other vested corporate interests, no sensible national plans have been made to address this growing, risky, unjust, and irresponsible problem of climate disruption.  So the state of California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, commonly known as AB32, to address the problem at a state level by limiting emissions. 

This California law is one of the first steps toward a necessary transition to an environmentally safer energy regime which uses cleaner fuels and more sustainable alternatives to power our civilizations.  Two of the biggest polluters in California aggressively fought to have this bill derailed.  Ironically, they are both Texas-based oil conglomerates, Tesoro and Valero.  BP might have joined them, but I reckon that it would just have been too negative a public relations move after their environmentally-calamitous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  These companies, together with the Koch brothers, spent lavishly to try to convince voters to postpone this law in the November 2010 elections by voting “YES on Proposition 23”. 

“This is a corruption of the democratic process,” stated Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the time.  “Today, Valero and Tesoro are in a conspiracy.  Not in a criminal conspiracy, but a cynical one about self-serving greed.  Does anyone think in their black oil company hearts that they want to create jobs?”

Californians wisely rejected this corporate initiative.  One journalist likened the Proposition 23 effort to the conspiracy hatched among oil companies in the 1920’s to get rid of light rail systems.  Remember that story?  After buying up easements for light rail systems in 45 cities, corporation systematically dismantled them.  The negative effects of this corporate ‘conspiracy’ on urban transportation today are starkly clear.  Roger Rabbit! 

Another Aspect of Koch Brothers’ Gambits

Much of the fierce opposition to health insurance reform is also attributable to organizations funded in part by the Koch brothers.  When the health care debate began, AFP created a front group known as Patients United to attack Democratic proposals for health care reform.  This organization barraged the country with ads that distorted various provisions of health reform legislation, like the proposed public option.  In their quest to block health care reform, Koch-funded groups have stooped to trying to foster political extremism, as when a speaker with the Patients United Hot Air bus tour repeatedly compared healthcare reform to the Holocaust.  A large banner at an AFP health care rally read, “National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany – 1945”, and it depicted a pile of corpses at a concentration camp.  Give me a break!  The rally featured, among others, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), one of the most radically inane members of Congress.  Honest debate has thus been hijacked by freak-show tactics.

Many people were surprised at the level of anger that AFP managed to channel into the town hall meetings concerning healthcare in August 2009.  It was not, however, the first time that Koch groups have helped to derail reforms of our costly and dysfunctional health insurance and healthcare system.  Back in 1994, Americans for Prosperity, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked closely with the House Speaker at the time, Newt Gingrich, to bring mobs of angry men to health reform rallies that were being held by the First Lady in 1994, Hillary Clinton. 

Part of the Koch brothers’ opposition to reform stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right.  Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David, helped found the radical John Birch Society in the late 1950s.  This ultra-right-wing organization strived to harness Cold War fears to channel them into fear and hate toward black people and liberals.  The John Birch Society used tactics like warning that President Kennedy and Civil Rights activists and organized labor were in league with communists.  The Society actually characterized sensible reforms as a capitulation to the Soviet Union. 

By using such propaganda and strategies, Fred Koch and others who helped fund the John Birch Society were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting their real agenda of cutting corporate taxes and undermining regulations.  Racism and fear and manipulative divisiveness were used to energize this movement, but the bottom line was clear:  selfish greed and narrow self-interest were values that superseded all other principles.

How “Conservatism” Resembles Radicalism

Wealthy conservatives like the Koch brothers and another Republican billionaire, Richard Mellon Sciafe, have used their economic power to establish an interlocking network of foundations to push their agenda to move the Republican Party to the right.  They fund conservative media outlets and conservative law firms, in addition to right-wing advocacy groups and think tanks.  This is the network that Hillary Clinton described as being a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in 1998 when President Clinton was being mercilessly smeared because of his sexual improprieties and evasions during the Monica Lewinski affair.  Richard Mellon Sciafe played a major role in funding efforts to investigate President Clinton and to undermine the president in order to give conservative causes greater power.

Don Blankenship, the bullying CEO of Massey Energy, is another wealthy right-wing activist who has contributed heavily to Republican candidates to grease the wheels of profit-making operations at the expense of employees.  Massey Energy operated the coal mine where 29 people died in April 2010 in the worst coal mining disaster in the U.S. since 1970.  Massey Energy had been cited numerous times for unsafe working conditions at this mine.  Don Blankenship sits on the boards of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association, and is a highly active GOP fundraiser and bankroller known for his outspoken opposition to labor unions.

Some say that Don Blankenship displays an arrogant ruthlessness that has its deep roots in the priorities of profit over people.  This is, of course, one of the less pleasant, though most salient, aspects of our capitalistic economic system.  This is as American as apple pie.  Human nature has not changed much over the millennia, but human institutions can, and do, and should evolve much faster to enable us to cope with gathering threats to our collective well-being. 

Our systems and leaders are failing us, but sometime soon someone must find a way to unite people (even those in “the party of no”!), in cooperative and constructive efforts to actually solve problems.  Thomas Paine called for a more sensible confederation of all the various interests that compete for advantages and privileges and ascendancy.  Surely our system of laws and lawmakers must become more flexible to prevent Tragedy-of-the-Commons outcomes and fiscal calamities and catastrophic impacts on Earth’s ecosystems.

A coal-sludge levee break in Marin County, Kentucky, in the year 2000 resulted in the spill of 300 million gallons of toxic wastes into rivers.  This was one of the worst environmental disasters ever in the Southeastern United States.  The then-U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao stopped an investigation into the spill by placing a staffer to her husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), in charge.  In Sept. 2002, a Political Action Committee of Massey Energy gave $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which McConnell had previously chaired.  Overall, McConnell has been one of the top recipients of Massey-related contributions.  Blankenship's closeness to prominent Republicans helped him land allies at the highest levels of the federal mine safety system during the George W. Bush presidency.  Using this position, they acted to weaken mine safety regulations.  This is the best government that money can buy!?

The Federalist Society is another prominent highly influential conservative organization.  This right-leaning organization frames issues in favor of minimally-regulated capitalism and economic fundamentalism and dogmatic propaganda.  The Federalist Society aggressively provides its highly partisan points of view to judges and lawyers and professors and law students and legislators and lobbyists and journalists and the media.  In the process, they skew democracy toward undemocratic and elitist and socially harmful dogmas. 

The larger context of these conflicts is the centuries-long struggle between capital and labor.  Corporations want lower costs and bigger profits, and workers want higher wages and safer working conditions and better benefits.  This strife sparked many reforms long ago during the Progressive Era and in subsequent decades, and it helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt to enact his New Deal.  Such conflicts have also given impetus to a wide variety of legislative attempts to give workers a fairer shake in this sometimes internecine battle. 

I recommend that readers check out How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.  This illuminating 2009 book by journalist John Cassidy contains valuable insights into the ways that laissez-faire free market capitalism fails people and society.  This book makes it increasingly clear that we must restructure our system to manage it more effectively, and to create more sensible incentives and disincentives.  Also, see the insights in Earth Manifesto essays like The Common Good, Properly Understood, and Existence, Economics, and Ecological Intelligence for more comprehensive understandings.

The Politics of the Supreme Court

This decision in the Citizens United case was made by a narrow 5-to-4 vote.  The slim majority was led by Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the two conservative Supreme Court Justices appointed by George W. Bush.  These lawyers were essentially expressing their dogmatic convictions that giant corporations and other vested interests should have unlimited rights to dominate our politics.  Gosh, even conservative Senator John McCain once told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices show about the role of special-interest money in elections and Congressional lawmaking.

The freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment for individuals is assured to all citizens.  It should be recognized that an individual’s free speech is completely different than the amplified megaphones of paid speech that wealthy people and large organizations are able to finance using their deep pockets.

Samuel Alito, during his Senate confirmation hearings, indicated that he would approach every question “with an open mind and to go through the whole judicial process, which is designed, and I believe strongly in it, to achieve good results, to achieve good decision-making.”  Really?  This ruling is serving to reduce the impact of free speech rights of individuals as an even greater cascade of corporate money pours into election ads on television and in other media outlets.  A record amount of money was already being spent in political ads in the last presidential election, and this ruling opened the floodgates to even more corporate and union money in our elections. 

This will arguably contribute to downright bad results, not good ones.  It will be distinctively contrary to good decision-making.  Justice Alito mouthed the words “Not true” during President Obama’s first State of the Union speech in denial of the risk that the Supreme Court encouraged by opening the floodgates to special interests to spend without limits on elections.  But the November 2010 elections have confirmed this concern, and the lack of disclosure about who gives financing to politicians and initiatives has harmed our democracy.

 “As scarce as the truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.”

                                                                                                                      --- Josh Billings

Chief Justice John Roberts, during his own confirmation hearings, stressed his respect for legal precedents.  Were he and Samuel Alito simply lying to Congress and thus to the American people to get their lifetime appointments?  Now that they have stepped over the line and revealed their true pro-corporate ideological biases and their disdain for the laws of Congress, and for the court’s own prior decisions, we would be better off impeaching them than honoring them! 

Ha!  I’m just kidding!  Impeachment is the mechanism established by our Constitution to allow the American people to hold their government accountable.  It was designed to be used whenever ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ are committed by officials.  Lying to the American people was one of the principal grounds upon which Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were impeached, but we must pick our battles, and this one probably could not be won, given the current political status quo.

I do believe that appointing Supreme Court Justices for life-long terms is becoming increasingly foolish in light of the need for our society to be more flexible and adaptable to changing times.  The Supreme Court is currently narrowly dominated by conservative Justices who will be affecting our societies for generations to come with their closed-minded interpretations.

The guarantee of free speech to the American people which is contained in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights requires a vibrant independent media and rigorous laws to prevent censorship and false arrest and numerous forms of tyranny by the powerful.  Free speech is an extremely important aspect of a democratic republic.  When free speech is suppressed or denied, a variety of undesirable consequences results. 

Regimes like the one in Iran are ruled by religious ayatollahs who routinely arrest citizens and imprison them when they dare to speak out or demonstrate against heavy-handed and repressive rule.  They even apparently torture or kill people who oppose them, and they deport honest journalists.  To prevent such negative outcomes, guarantees of individual free speech are vital.  Corporate power, like authoritarian power in a theocratic government, is often distinctly subversive of the power of individuals.

Hey, shouldn’t we have truth in advertising, and require the organization Citizens United to change its name to <Citizens Divided in Order to Promote Right-Wing Dominance>?

Tea Party Perspectives and Broader Considerations

Our Founders went to great lengths to try to ensure fair representation to the people.  They recognized the anger of the colonists expressed in the Boston Tea Party incident, which was directed against the tyranny of taxation without representation.  Today it is imperative for us to find a fairer way to confederate all of the competing interests in our nation.  To do this we must make sure that no entity is allowed to employ large megaphones that drown out free expression with hyper-partisan and dishonest messages like “BOB IS WRONG!”  

We already have too much negative campaigning and character assassination and incivility and political machine politicking in our elections, even before sensible limits on campaign finance contributions were declared to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Modern day Tea Party activists have been duped into getting all fired up about taxes and deficit spending AND at the same time to staunchly oppose spending cuts on their own sacred cows, like the military.  Tea Partiers are thus passionately defending the prerogatives and propaganda of billionaires.  They are incoherently clamoring against government debt without having any realistic idea about how to achieve a balanced budget in a civilized democratic republic.  Cut government employees and public education and environmental protections?  Give tax cuts to rich people and giant corporations, and allow them even more power and influence, and this will make things better for the disenfranchised majority? 

Shall we continue to ignore the best interests of future generations and stimulate profligate consumerism and encourage the depletion of resources and facilitate the exploitation and pollution of the commons?  How likely is this course of action to make the little guy better off?  When we oppose progressive initiatives and social justice and immigrants and religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence, this is highly unlikely to make the world a better place.  When we act to crush organizations of workers, the none-too-subtle invisible hand of the powerful does not make America freer or fairer or more prosperous.  Give us a break!

What irony!  It is not progressives who should be vilified, but the domineering wealthy.  Actually, I don’t believe in vilifying anyone;  let’s not just get mad, “let’s get even”!  A wise Buddhist philosopher would agree with honest spiritual people that love is much healthier than hate, and forgiveness is a much more salubrious attitude for all concerned than animosity.  Whatever!  The most important thing is that we identify the true nature of problems and then find the best approaches to solving them.   

Conservative propaganda has been used to exploit the fear and anger and paranoia and ignorance of the Tea Party crowd.  This strategy is similar to the right wing gambit that ideologues used to successfully hijack social conservatives in order to advance the narrow agenda of the ruling elite.  False populists have made the Tea Party crowd think that high taxes are the biggest problem, when in fact the most serious problems stem from low taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on giant corporations, coupled with related high levels of deficit spending year after year after year.  This state of affairs is made worse by large sums of economic stimulus spending that have been required to get the economy moving after the rashly inflated real estate bubble collapsed. 

Another factor in the current calamitous situation is the inadequate regulation of the banking industry and consequent costly government bailouts that have been required for big banks and the insurance giant AIG and auto companies and the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  It should also be quite clear that uncontrolled spending on military weapons systems and military occupations of foreign countries and a vast network of military bases abroad are things that seriously exacerbate these financial problems. 

What we need today is not lower taxes and more debt, but more steeply graduated taxes that are the same or lower for 98% of Americans and higher for the richest 2%.  We also need lower taxes for small businesses and higher taxes for profitable big businesses.  We need the federal government to manage its affairs better, and to stop wasting money on extravagant earmarks and lavish benefits for vested interests.  Simultaneously, we need to invest intelligently in good public education and vital infrastructure and smart initiatives that address the social ills associated with urban problems and industrialization and globalization and deteriorating transportation systems and predatory banking and our dependence on fossil fuels and wars. 

We need both fiscal responsibility AND more fairness.  We should boldly act to mitigate inegalitarian trends and the deception and authoritarianism that are required to enforce such unfairness.  The best way to ensure greater fairness in our societies is to make sure that money and power are more fairly distributed to all Americans by reducing the power that money can buy, NOT by increasing it.  Take note, radical Supreme Court “conservatives”!

Thunderous silence pervades our politics on this one particular topic of fairer taxation.  It is quite apparent that there is a proverbial elephant in the room:  the only entities in a good position to help finance a healthier society and to pressure politicians to honestly balance the federal government’s budget are highly profitable corporations and wealthy people.  Yet corporations and rich people are too busy milking the system to really help make our societies fairer and more fiscally sound, and more likely sustainable.  This is a major reason that short-term-oriented selfishness dominates our decision-making at the expense of the greater good.

No matter what ideological brew one personally adheres to, it must be admitted that a free society is better than one dominated by powerful and ruthless corporations or governments that are controlled by them.  The long-standing strife between capital and labor will become an even more pitiful contest as corporate money asserts the power of its vastly greater financial resources.  Good citizen goals will continue to be swamped by narrower corporate goals and investor goals and consumer goals.

Shall we disresemble the place, Bob?  Roger!  Positive change must be made!

An Aside on the American Prison System

Since rich people tend to jealously guard their prerogatives and privileges, and everyone else tends to enviously desire to become rich, our economic and political systems are essentially designed to preserve the status quo.  In the course of defending the way things are, many people without good opportunities are forced to join the military or to commit crimes like robbing banks or stealing things. 

Consider the astonishing fact that there are 2.3 million people in prison in the United States.  We now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world.  The per capita statistics are astonishing: for every 100,000 citizens, the U.S. has 700 people in prison compared to 110 in China, 80 in France, and 45 in Saudi Arabia.  Opening new prisons and outsourcing prison functions to private companies is a rapid growth business.  There were, after all, just 500,000 people in prison when Ronald Reagan became president.  

Why is the U.S. prison industry thriving and experiencing such a rapid expansion?  One reason for this trend is the glaring unfairness of our society and the stresses associated with it.  Punitively ruthless efforts are being made to enforce this state of affairs.  To reduce the growing costs of this trend, we need corrections and sentencing reforms.  And to reduce the motives for crime, we need greater social justice, not more inegalitarian social policies and harsher punishments.  Greater fairness is vital to increasing the health of a nation’s people, as measured by their average longevity.  The U.S. ranks a pathetic thirty-eighth in the world in the average life span of its citizens.

A Call for Fairer Taxation

Numerous rationalizations are formulated and propagated to get policies enacted that make the rich richer at the expense of all other Americans and people in future generations.  This is economically wrong-headed and socially disastrous and anti-democratic and ecologically harmful.  For these reasons, it is ethically wrong. 

Billionaire businessman and investor Warren Buffet has repeatedly pointed out the folly of having a tax system in which people who make millions of dollars pay lower effective tax rates than their secretaries.  Rich people pay lower overall rates largely due to low taxes on capital gains.  Stubborn ideological arguments are endorsed by representatives of rich people to make taxes low on income earned from owning capital assets.  But doesn’t it seem outrageous to require people who work hard for their money to pay higher rates on their incomes than people who earn money from inheritances or savings or highly-leveraged speculative investments?  Those who have inherited money or accumulated it due to the inegalitarian nature of our capitalist system should be required to pay rates on their incomes that are at least as high as working people!

Warren Buffet points out that large disparities of wealth hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.  He testified before the Senate Finance Committee in November 2007 in defense of the federal estate tax, the nation's only tax on inherited wealth.  He invoked the historical roots of the estate tax, which was established in 1916 to put a brake on anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power. 

"Dynastic wealth, the enemy of meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the panel.  "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline.  A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."  He continued:  "Tax-law changes have benefited this super-rich group, including me, in a huge way."  It is time to revise these changes with a more steeply graduated tax system!

Further Observations, Including a Wide-Eyed Disclaimer

The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United case came about in the following way.  Senator John Kerry had lost his bid for the Presidency in 2004, in part because of a scurrilous personal attack ad by a right-wing group that called itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”.  Upon seeing the effectiveness of the Swift Boat people’s smear campaign, and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 criticisms of the Bush Administration’s war policies, the ‘conservative’ group Citizens United recognized the powerful influence of film media.  So it set out to produce a ninety-minute attack video against Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary campaign for the presidency.  The video was called Hillary: The Movie.  Its influence just before the primary elections was deemed by the Federal Election Commission to be a violation of campaign finance laws.  A lawsuit ensued. 

It took until January 2010 before the case made its way to the Supreme Court and a ruling was made.  The five conservative Justices on the Court took this opportunity to make a sweeping decision that overturned a number of sensible campaign finance laws, and it opened the flood gates to an unlimited amount of hyper-negative and truth misconstruing political speech.  In the wake of this ruling, NOW is the time for us to collectively find ways to limit the influence of corporations and rich people on our public policies and in our politics.  Fair Elections Now!

Soon after the Supreme Court decision, President Obama harshly criticized the narrow ruling, telling the American people, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest.  The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of the elections."

Look.  I’ve watched Hillary, The Movie, and it portrays some valid perspectives.  To climb to the top in American politics, politicians must be ambitious and somewhat ruthless and adroit and at least a bit dishonest.  This is why so many politicians of every party have seedy sides to their characters.  Many recruit Machiavellian, manipulative, shrewd, Karl Rove-like political operatives and associates who engage in sometimes dastardly and underhanded activities.  The qualities that allow success in politics almost automatically exclude forthright honesty and principled dedication to the common good. 

But our elections should be about choosing representatives who work to benefit the greater good.  The global challenges we collectively face are more daunting now than ever before in history, so we need honest debate about vitally important issues.  We need to focus on these things, and choose good leaders, and avoid getting derailed by negative campaigning and smears of opponent’s characters and political machine politicking. 

Hillary, The Movie is essentially one long propaganda campaign that says:  HILLARY IS A JERK.  HILLARY IS A LIAR.  HILLARY IS WRONG.  A similar hit piece could be made about almost every politician, with more or less damning material for each and every one.  Let’s find a way to stick to the issues that are most important to the future!

Broader Considerations of the Role of Corporations and Government

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United case is far more complex than it is construed herein.  So are broader issues of fairness and social responsibility.  Some corporations do considerable good.  Corporations are forms of organization that have created millions of jobs and facilitated an amazing proliferation of products and services.  They have helped to employ and feed and clothe and shelter hundreds of millions of people.  They have created an extraordinary distribution system, and they have helped revolutionize things like transportation systems and communications and technology. 

Corporations are a part of a free market system that rewards hard work and well-made, affordable goods, and theoretically discourages shoddy and unreasonably priced goods.  It also stimulates specialization and productivity and investment and innovation.  It does these things when the system is functioning properly.  However, the laissez-faire ideology that says markets always provide optimum outcomes turns a blind eye to the extensive failings of market capitalism. 

These failings have become rudely apparent in the last decade.  A dogma of deregulation helped create the inflation and collapse of speculative bubbles and accompanying economic turbulence which had terrible outcomes for billions of people.  Our system has been jerry-rigged through the use of distorted incentives and the stimulation of extreme inequities, and it has facilitated things like Ponzi frauds and large-scale environmental degradation.

Apologists for the status quo stick to their old story that a beneficent invisible hand guides all economic activity for the greater good, even though it is quite obvious that in fact hidden hands frequently game the system and manipulate people in order to maximize their own narrow best interests.  Much more often than not, these vested interests strive to gain advantages at the expense of the majority of people.  There is proof of this contention:  the deep inequities in our societies become significantly more pronounced whenever regulations and controls over corporate accountability are eliminated, and whenever less transparency is required. 

Gigantic amounts of government spending have been required to deal with the “spillover effects” of some methods of profit-making by banks and other special interests.  This is a perverse aspect of the status quo.  And yet a refrain swells in the background, amped up by agitation that is fomented by wealthy conservatives:  Socialism, socialism, evil, evil, horror, hate, fear, embrace ignorance, drown the government in a bathtub!  Cut taxes!!

Concerning Corruption and Intelligent Policy

Millions of Americans are angry at paying taxes and the hardships associated with high unemployment, home foreclosures, home equity declines, difficulties in getting loans, absurdly escalating costs of medical insurance and health care, retirement insecurity, homelessness, endless military occupations, and the rapacious and polluting impacts of giant corporations on the environment.  Conservatives and the Tea Party and secret donors have managed to misdirect this anger toward government and public employees and incumbent politicians and progressives, but it should more appropriately be directed at wealthy people and large corporations that are the most responsible for the current state of affairs.

There is a considerable range of varieties of capitalist societies.  In the United States, many aspects of the economy are “socialized”.  Taxes and borrowing are used to finance a powerful military presence around the world, and to pay for police and other law enforcement officers in cities and rural areas, and for firefighters and prisons and courts and public schools and libraries and government agencies and post office deficits and investments in roads and bridges and water systems and federal disaster relief programs and unemployment benefits and social security programs and poverty alleviation programs and other entitlements.

In contrast, the socially successful economies of Scandinavia and Europe provide fairer health care and retirement security than the United States.  Those economies are not markedly less successful than the United States in economic terms, but they are considerably less socially disastrous than our form of capitalism. 

As Robert Heilbroner points out in The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, executive compensation in the biggest corporations in the U.S. is twice that of France and Germany, but the upward mobility of the American poor is half that of those countries and only a third that of Sweden.  “The first comparison points to a culture of greed”, he opines;  “the second to one of social indifference.  The combination hardly suggests the institutional adaptability that will be needed by any nation seeking to minimize the strains of the decades ahead, much less serve as a model for world leadership.”

Reflections on Political Corruption

A global civil society organization named Transparency International publishes an annual “Corruption Perceptions Index” in its fight against the damaging effects of corruption in public sectors worldwide.  Somalia, Myanmar (Burma), Afghanistan and Iraq are rated the most corrupt governments in the world in the 2010 Index.  Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland and Sweden are rated the least corrupt governments in the world.  The United States is rated worse than 21 other nations.  Our rating has fallen slightly from 2009, possibly due to the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded decision to allow more institutional bribery in our elections.  Anyone in America who watches television is aware of the ugly and confusing barrage of political ads that pervaded the airwaves in the drumbeat that led to the national midterm elections of 2010.

We should strive to make governments and corporations alike more socially responsible by requiring greater transparency and accountability in their activities.  Transparency International notes:  “The message is clear: across the globe, transparency and accountability are critical to restoring trust and turning back the tide of corruption.”  The organization advocates stricter implementation of the United Nations Convention against Corruption, which is “the only global initiative that provides a framework for putting an end to corruption.”

We must restore honesty and integrity and greater fairness to our economic and political systems.  What would our economy and society look like if we effectively outlawed the institutional bribery that results from allowing Big Money in our elections?

The Issue of Regulatory Capture

Another aspect of the corporate control of our politics is the phenomenon known as ‘regulatory capture’.  This is a form of systemic corruption in which powerful vested interests subvert the will of the people and the purposes of government regulatory agencies.  Federal agencies were established to represent the people’s interests, and yet many of these agencies have been ‘captured’ by the organizations they were created to regulate.  For instance, big pharmaceutical companies routinely run circles around the Food and Drug Administration, sometimes getting unsafe drugs approved and allowing the use of dangerous food additives and food processing techniques and agricultural chemicals.  Similarly, the purposes of the Environmental Protection Agency are undermined by corporate interests in order to allow corporate profits to be unaffected by inconvenient ‘polluter-pay’ principles and regulations which would prevent costs from being externalized onto society.  Banks and Wall Street corporations evade regulation and supervision of the financial industry.  And remember that the wily Bernie Madoff managed to perpetrate the biggest rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul Ponzi scheme fraud in history right under the noses of Securities and Exchange Commission regulators. 

Regulatory capture is facilitated by the ‘revolving door’ whereby regulatory officials come from corporations that they are meant to regulate.  Our representatives in Congress and regulatory officials often move on to become lobbyists who work on influencing legislation to achieve narrow corporate goals rather than the greater good. 

There is also a broader problem than regulatory capture.  Big multinational corporations sprawl beyond the control of any one government, and they have powerful influence over the entire global economy.  These companies often make profits in ways that are unfair and irresponsible at the expense of the American people and of people in other countries and of all humanity and of almost every form of life on Earth.

Let Us Not Forget the Military-Industrial Complex

An overriding aspect of the domination of our politics by Big Money is found in the arena of war and peace.  We must never forget Dwight Eisenhower insightful words, which he spoke at the end of his presidency in 1961: 

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.  We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.  We should take nothing for granted.  Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

National security is good.  Liberty is good.  Unfairness and national bankruptcy are not good.  We are spending far too much money on our military, and on sending our troops abroad.  We would not do this if we had to actually pay for it today through a mechanism like higher taxes on oil.  When we allow these costs to be foisted onto people in the future, it is highly irresponsible.  We should begin to more tightly control military aggression and spending now!

Earlier Instances of Supreme Court Folly

The Supreme Court has gone through prior periods where its biases were so contrary to common sense that what was ruled “Constitutional” was actually extremely unfair and even contrary to many of the ideals and principles upon which our nation was founded.  The dreadful Dred Scott Decision is the most famous of such rulings.  This 1857 decision held that people of African descent brought into the United States and held as slaves were NOT protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States! 

The ruling even stated that their descendants, whether or not they were slaves, had no more rights than they did.  It held that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.  The Court also ruled that because slaves were not citizens, they could not sue in court, and that slaves were ‘chattel’ or private property, so they could not be taken away from their owners or freed without due process.  Wrong, Bob!

A terrible Civil War was fought over this and related issues.  According to the Supreme Court in 1857, the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” 

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1868 to finally rectify this egregious and racist wrong.  The bias against black people has a sad echo today in the way lesbians and gay men are regarded by the religious right and their minions in politics and the military and the judiciary.  Social conservatives in Congress and state and federal courts must yield to understandings that are fairer, no matter what their personal prejudices.  They must act to prevent discrimination against people because of their sexual persuasion, in addition to prohibitions of discrimination on account of race, color, creed, gender or national origin.

Ironically, despite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted just after the Civil War to secure rights for former slaves, its important clauses relating to Due Process and Equal Protection have been subsequently interpreted by the Supreme Court as providing a guarantee to corporations of rights that are equal to those of individuals.  This odd and perverse skewing of law has expanded the power and immunity of corporations, and it has enabled them to increase their potential to abuse their power over people and the environment.  As mentioned earlier, this point is powerfully portrayed in the startlingly insightful book The Corporation - The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and also in the fascinating Canadian film, The Corporation, which is based on the book.  Check them out for entertaining and valuable understandings!

Any contention that corporations can and should regulate themselves seems to me to have been resoundingly refuted by the deregulatory experiment of the past decade in which banking speculation was encouraged and no steps were taken to prevent foolish mortgage lending or the risky packaging of mortgage-backed securities or the unsound ratings of these securities by ratings agencies.  The resultant credit market freeze caused economies worldwide to falter.  These things have cost people around the world trillions of dollars.  This is another form of ‘disaster capitalism’ shock doctrines which have wrought severe hardship to millions of people.  We must now manage our societies more sensibly and create more intelligent controls of banks and other financial institutions.

Another Landmark Supreme Court Decision, and the Beginning of Environmental Law

Another way to more comprehensively understand Thomas Paine’s visionary common sense about “embracing and confederating” all competing interests is to give close consideration to one of the first great legal decisions that halted environmental despoliation in the United States. 

Hark back, for a moment, to the Gold Rush that Mark Twain wrote about in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other stories.  Gold had been discovered in the South Fork of the American River in California’s Central Valley in January of 1848.  Before the ensuing Gold Rush, there were less than 20,000 non-Indian people in California.  An estimated 90,000 people arrived in 1849, and perhaps 300,000 had come by 1855.  It is estimated that miners extracted $12 billion dollars of gold in the first five years of the Gold Rush, at today’s equivalent prices.  That is a lot of money for a bunch of wild frontier ‘pan handlers’!

After much of the gold in rivers had been extracted by panning and other placer mining techniques, miners discovered that they could also find gold in hillsides that contained gravels deposited by ancient rivers.  Miners developed hydraulic mining techniques in which river water was channeled into miles-long flumes and then into high-pressure hoses, and then it was blasted against hillsides from iron nozzles called ‘monitors’.  This process resulted in enormous quantities of gravel and silt being washed down into large sluices where the gold could be captured. 

There were severe unintended consequences of this mining method that had extremely negative impacts on the environment.  Enormous volumes of sediments that were washed into rivers were carried down into California’s Central Valley, resulting in significant harm to towns and farms.  Rivers flooded, damaging farmland and crops and homes, and they became so choked with silt that ships could no longer navigate upstream to Sacramento from the San Francisco Bay.  The scars of these activities are still starkly visible in such places as Malakoff Diggins, California’s largest hydraulic mine. 

This harmful kind of mining had its heyday in California from 1853 to 1884.  The conflict of interests between hydraulic mining and those who lived downstream resulted in an intense legal battle.  The conflict was finally resolved in an epic environmental ruling by Judge Lorenzo Sawyer in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco in 1884, when a sweeping injunction was made to stop all hydraulic mining activities. 

Today, mountaintop coal mining and large industrial pig and cattle farms are creating similarly vast quantities of harmful wastes.  The corporations involved in these activities are required to make efforts to prevent the wastes they generate from getting into rivers and the water table, but they often fail.  Sometimes the Environmental Protection Agency levies fines for infractions, but this doesn’t usually happen.  Why not?  Corporate lawyers are shrewdly able to get their employers off the hook, allowing them to continue to evade their responsibilities as good citizens.

A long view reveals that there are harmful impacts of many industrial activities, and that these negative effects take place not only literally and figuratively downstream in location, but also downstream in time.  This is another reason that, when we are formulating priorities and public policies, we must think about the well-being of our descendents in future generations.

Corporate Intransigence

As noted repeatedly in the Earth Manifesto, giant corporations love to externalize costs upon society.  Pollution costs, resource depletion costs, waste disposal costs, greenhouse gas emission costs, climate change costs, worker healthcare costs, bailout costs, a fair share of corporate taxes, anything they can get away with.  By using the power of their deep pockets to manipulate our economic and political system, corporations generally get what they want.  They have even been able to get a set of ideologically extreme Justices appointed to the Supreme Court!

Vested interests have always tended to oppose footholds for innovative competitors.  Big oil companies often work against things like renewable resource initiatives and energy efficiency measures and the conservation of resources.  Established interests in general oppose protections of local communities and the environment, as well as sensible regulations, balanced budgets, international justice, the alleviation of poverty, and peaceable coexistence with other countries. 

The Supreme Court has injected a virulent new impetus into our national politics that will serve to further obstruct adaptive change and progress toward the well-being of individuals and all of humanity.  Politicians are finding that it can be political suicide to honorably support common good plans like Wall Street regulation, healthcare reform, cost controls, moves toward renewable energy regimes, increases in taxes on the rich, and limits to the power of the military-industrial complex in our politics.

At a time when the urgency and importance is greater than ever for us to collectively and boldly address daunting economic, social, military and environmental challenges, the Supreme Court has made our representatives even more beholden to maintaining the status quo.  The opposition to fundamental reforms has thus been strengthened, especially any reforms that are opposed by rich people and powerful corporations.  We must find sensible and effective ways to change this!

Let’s Tame the Size and Power of Corporations!

Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said, “I want to be very, very clear:  too big to fail is one of the biggest problems we face in this country, and we must take action to eliminate too big too fail.”  We are now seeing that it is not just ‘too big to fail’ that causes costly problems, it is too big to be limited by Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court.  NOW is the time to address these challenges!

The Great Recession, curiously, has resulted in an even more distinct concentration in the banking business.  So we have not moved away form “too big to fail”, but instead the reins of banking power have been tightened up like a noose around the necks of American citizens.  How long will it be before these reins are jerked abruptly, once again?

Early in the career of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the legal battles he was involved in had convinced him that concentrated economic power could have negative effects on a free society.  The concentration of economic power has been increasing ever since the federal government more-or-less gave up on anti-trust prosecutions. 

A new deregulatory crusade was started under Ronald Reagan’s direction, and it has advanced in favor of vested interests ever since.  This has caused the concentration of power to increase dramatically.  Exxon-Mobil, for instance, has been making bigger profits than any business in history, and yet there is no ‘break-up-Standard-Oil’ enthusiasm anymore, like there was a century ago when Standard Oil was broken into a number of different companies.  The trend toward conglomeration and globalization is creating ever bigger potentialities for economic and ecological catastrophes.  We ignore this at our own peril, and at the ever-greater peril of our descendents.

Another Perspective on Money in Politics

One of the lynchpins of our democratic system at the state level is the use of ballot initiatives.  The initiative process began just about 100 years ago;  California became the tenth state to adopt this form of direct democracy in October 1911.  It began as a means to offset the power of wealthy interests.  The use of initiatives in the state of California was approved to reduce corruption in politics and the powerful influence of Southern Pacific Railroad at the time. 

The integrity of the initiative process has been undermined by moneyed interests, which today use their money to try to get the people to pass some distinctly unfair new laws.  Thus, the very entities that the process had been enacted to counter have co-opted the process.  Quelle surprise!

Money profoundly perverts this initiative system.  Signature gatherers who are paid by petition advocates can be pushy and less than forthright, especially when they are paid by the signature rather than by the hour.  In addition, wealthy individuals or institutions often bankroll ballot initiatives that are contrary to the common good or are hot-button-social-issue end-runs around legislative deliberations, like the financing by the Mormon Church of Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative in California.  The legislative process at least has a better probability than the initiative process of vetting potential impacts and balancing interests and identifying and addressing constitutional concerns.

Initiatives curiously face a “Catch-22 of reform”.  If an initiative is not aimed at helping a narrow interest group, it is hard to raise enough money to get it on the ballot.  If it IS aimed at helping advance the interests of a narrowly focused group, then it has an easier time of getting on the ballot but voters are likely to see through the self-interested motives and reject the proposal.

On Differing Opinions

There are not only distinctly different interests in every society, but also a wide spectrum of varying opinions about important matters.  It is vital that we have accurate understandings of human nature and economics and the world in order to formulate the best public policies.  Let us honestly examine the nature of differing theories and worldviews.

Points of view tend to evolve that are founded on certain premises and assumptions and biases.  Preconceived notions construe all evidence in ways that artificially fit these assumptions.  This is particularly true of religious convictions, in which religious establishments channel deep-seated hopes and fears into beliefs in a curiously anthropocentric Supreme Being of one stripe or another.  Good God!

Religious fundamentalists thus often deny the most far-reaching understandings ever realized about geology and physics and biology in order to cling to antediluvian explanations which completely fail to take into account more accurate modern scientific ways of understanding the world in which we live.

In the political arena, trade associations and think tanks develop highly specific theories that center around their own particular self-interested perspectives and agendas.  They make great efforts to spin all evidence into a coherent explanation that supports these biases.  Wealthy businessmen fund a growing number of far-right think tanks, as discussed above, in order to establish a theoretical basis for their causes.  These think tanks lack the checks and balances that keep academic research honest.  As a result, they produce highly flawed and biased studies whose principal purpose is to promote policies that favor the business classes that fund them.

Status quo defenders abound in powerful trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute.  These organizations try to prove that activities which spew billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are not having any adverse effects on the environment which we should collectively be trying to prevent or mitigate. 

Financing for such propaganda is provided by large corporations like ExxonMobil, the biggest and most profitable corporate conglomerate in the world.  Such organizations and entities keep people from responsibly addressing the potentially damaging impacts of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  Big oil companies, in order to make bigger profits, strongly oppose efforts to change the ‘sweet system’ that allows them to pollute habitats and externalize costs onto society and damage the environment.

These are not good things for the well-being of individuals, or for the prospects of future generations.  We must find ways to limit the power of such organizations.  We must also find ways to ensure that our market system functions more effectively to embrace the common good and prevent people from being subjected to enormous systemic risks such as costly destabilizing economic booms and busts and ecological calamities.

Boom and bust cycles of business are an integral aspect of the process of “creative destruction” in capitalism that facilitates big profits and wage increases in good times, and then provides a socially disastrous but expedient shock that suddenly resets over-leveraging and “irrational exuberance” in speculative risk-taking, resulting in a downward push on wages and a spike in joblessness.  This moderation of wage costs allows a recovery which then sets the stage for a new burst of economic growth and profit-making.  This tendency toward economic instability is a salient characteristic of unfettered capitalism, and it is amongst the most harmful of its traits. 

  I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’, because I’m free …

 --- Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, a song written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach

Status Summary and Recommendations

The social contract between workers and corporations that underpinned the post-World War II economic boom and the growth of the middle class has frayed badly under the onslaught of regressive tax changes and deregulation and union-busting that began with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and were amplified by George W. Bush and fellow Republicans. 

The Republican Party was severely chastised in the 2008 national elections because of the colossal failure of the Bush Administration to manage the economy either fairly or well.  One of the most egregious aspects of this failure was the enthusiastic embrace of tax cuts for rich people and giant corporations, while at the same time government spending was being recklessly increased.  The resulting budget deficits, the largest in history until that time, have contributed to rapid and fiscally irresponsible increases in the national debt. 

By the time George W. Bush’s eight years in power came to an end, the economy was in a disastrous state.  A severe crisis was unfolding that required unprecedented interventions by the federal government in financial markets to prevent an even more severe credit crisis and the possibility of another Great Depression.  Trillions of dollars were advanced by the government and the Federal Reserve to keep banks and insurance companies and mortgage companies and automobile companies from going out of business. 

‘Disaster capitalism’ has once again worked its black magic and forced our nation to bail out the bad risks taken by banks and other entities like AIG and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  American taxpayers and workers and future generations are being fleeced even more than before, and short-term expediencies rule the day.

The consequence of these measures was a federal budget deficit for 2009 and 2010 that was three times bigger than the worst shortfall of the Bush years.  The budget deficit for 2011 and future years now seems to be at risk of continuing indefinitely at dangerously high levels.  The United States has effectively painted itself into a corner with deficit spending and a ballooning national debt.  The combination of these shortsighted gambits with bubble economic policies and speculative leveraging and inadequate regulation of the financial system and a political system that is practically incapable of sensibly dealing with these challenges makes our system dangerously vulnerable.

Republicans want to regain controlling power in order to reap more of the big benefits that majority power provides.  As the year 2011 begins, unemployment is high and our society is more unfair than at almost any time since the “Gilded Age” that Mark Twain wrote about.  Recognizing the frustrations of the American people at this state of affairs, Republicans rail about taxes and oppose all Democratic initiatives to reform the status quo.  They are like sharks circling the American people, smelling blood in the water, and becoming ever more frenzied in preparation for attack.  They are committed to getting power by using dirty political strategies like the ones Karl Rove employed.  They continue to use divisive tactics in order to conquer.  It would be far better if we found ways to unite people to fairly solve problems, rather than irresponsibly dividing them and causing downright harmful results.

It seems to me that it is foolish to put the people back in power who were most responsible for creating the current economic calamity, and to thus effectively embrace their fiscally unsound tax and de-regulation policies and their slavish obeisance to vested interests and CEO’s and fat cats and Big Oil and giant drug companies and health insurance companies and the gun lobby and the military-industrial complex.  Our system must be fixed instead of just having the people perversely rush from one hoped-for savior to another in the expectation that one of them, one of these days, will actually succeed in making positive changes for the people.

Republicans seem to me to be the ones most staunchly opposed to actually fairly solving any of our society’s problems.  They oppose a re-structuring our system of taxation that would make it fairer to small businesses and the bottom 90% of Americans, and they have been striving to obstruct all efforts to make government and corporations work in ways that are more consistent with the common good. 

The Republican Party has spent the past two years filling the role of being “the party of no”.  They oppose every initiative that the Democrats propose, even those things that they previously advocated.  They work actively to make President Obama’s efforts to improve our nation fail.  This cynical strategy has allowed them to gain majority rule in the House of Representatives once again, and they have set their top priority on winning the White House in 2012.  This is politics, but it is so tinged with insanity that something must be done to honestly reform our economic and political systems.

Republicans have used the filibuster in the Senate in the past two years more than twice as much as any other Congress ever in history.  More than 200 bills that have been passed by the House of Representatives were bottled up in the Senate by this obstructionist tactic.  The abuse of this procedural tool has made the Senate more dysfunctional than ever.  Senate rules should be modified to make the filibuster less obstructionist for normal business.

The American political system also allows corrupt tactics like that used by Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, who placed ‘blanket holds’ on more than 70 nominations of qualified people to positions that would help make the government work more effectively.  Shelby adopted this strategy as a kind of blackmail to get more earmarks spending for his district.  Pork!

Republicans pretend to be “populists”, but their agenda seems to be: ‘Damn the American people!’  They want power back so that they can reap enormous benefits for themselves and their big money supporters.  While populism is claimed by politicians on the left as well as the right, these claims are generally a charade that is performed to gain political support, and then this is used in our crony capitalist system to benefit elite segments of society, not the ordinary people. 

This is insane!  Populism is actually about the best interests of the people, not the best interests of elites.  Congress is ineffective in actually solving the daunting challenges that collectively face us largely because of the stubborn refusal by Republicans and Democrats alike to work together for the greater good.  The Supreme Court has now thrown great gobs of bait to the sharks with its narrow campaign finance ruling that gives corporations and unions even greater power in skewing our public policies for narrow advantages.  We must change this!

An Interim Conclusion

The insightful Paul Hawken wrote in his provocative book, The Ecology of Commerce:

“We have the capacity and ability to create a remarkably different economy, one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment, while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security.”

It is high time that we begin to come together to do this -- citizens, politicians, CEOs, unions, judges, religious leaders and all -- to make sure that we manage our societies more fairly and more sustainably.

History will likely confirm my conviction that, to make America safer and stronger and fairer and more prosperous, we must restructure our economic policies so that smart incentives are established, and inflation and rapidly increasing debt are not used as short-term expediencies that make it more probable that we will face fiscal insolvency and potential national bankruptcy.  Join in to support the ideas of the Earth Manifesto to help effect such positive change.  See Part Four for a summary of positive recommendations.

Thanks for your consideration of these thoughts!

    Truly,

       Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

           Hannibal, Missouri     

              c/o SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com