www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-corporations-20100826,0,1475245.story
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Rein in the corporations
Big business dominates politics and government, but the people have an opportunity to regain control
By Charlie Cooper
4:50 PM EDT, August 26, 2010
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself." — FDR
The corporate stranglehold on media, elections and congressional bill-drafting has locked our economy into obsolete and unproductive channels. Corporate influence has even led the Supreme Court to rule this year that corporations are "persons" with "rights." The court's bizarre logic shows just how precarious our democracy and our economy have become.
Since President Barack Obama's jobs summit last December, the national employment picture has worsened slightly: Although the official unemployment rate has dropped from 10 percent to 9.5 percent, the number of discouraged workers has risen so that a slightly smaller fraction of the adult population is working. Job growth is not keeping up with population, and corporate influence is the reason.
Emerging from the economic doldrums will require major investment in schools, water systems, transportation, communications and energy infrastructure to rebuild the foundations of prosperity. In addition, we need to make the banking system safer, stop the bleeding in the housing market, reduce massive waste in the health care sector, and cut unproductive defense spending and other types of corporate welfare. Finally, we must remedy structural imbalances in international trade and the federal budget that are creating unsustainable debt.
Corporate power thwarts nearly every aspect of these reforms and is a more important factor in our woes than those discussed ad nauseam by media pundits and Republican or Democratic partisans.
We live in an era of almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and income. The richest 1 percent controlled 23.5 percent of income in 2007, and corporations are the means by which this elite protects its wealth. When corporations go bankrupt or harm people, wealthy owners are not personally liable.
Historically, government created corporations for the public good — to allow more efficient flows of capital and to serve public purposes. In practice, corporations have used campaign spending, lobbying, media and think tanks to extend their grip on our society to the point where progress is stymied on nearly all fronts:
•Corporate propaganda promulgated in the media hides the enormous debt created by futile wars, contracting fraud, corporate welfare and bank bailouts, instead banging the drum to cut Social Security.
•Unrelenting corporate pressure for "free trade" leads to job exports and the trade imbalance. With wages falling for three decades, corporate flacks twist logic until it's "socialists" who are inciting class warfare.
•Thousands of corporate lobbyists swarmed
•Corporate influence watered down the financial reform bill and left the "too big to fail" banks even bigger. In 2009, bankers spent $450 million on federal election campaigns.
•Energy corporations contributed nearly $80 million during the 2008 federal election cycle and spent more than $400 million lobbying in 2009. No surprise, then, that clean energy legislation is dead.
Citizens can take back our democracy. Popular movements arose when Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts and when FDR enacted the New Deal. The "Fight
Corporations Are Not People: Amend the Constitution to protect
Fair Elections Now Act: Provide public financing to candidates who areØ supported by small donors so they can compete with corporate-backed and self-funded candidates.
Lobbyist Reform Act: End the overwhelming influence of corporate lobbyistsØ by prohibiting switching between corporate lobbying and government service or vice-versa within a five-year period; stopping lobbyists from giving government officials gifts and free travel; and banning secret meetings with lobbyists.
A SurveyUSA poll shows that 67 percent of likely voters would be "more likely to support a candidate for Congress ... who backs a constitutional amendment that would overturn [the] Supreme Court ruling" on corporate election spending. Half a million people have signed on to this pledge to fight Washington corruption, along with 20 current members of Congress — including Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland — and dozens of congressional candidates. Citizens should demand that their congressional representatives sign this pledge and follow through until it is implemented.
It will be very tough to break the grip of corporate political power, but life will be even tougher if we don't.
Charlie Cooper is a member of the
Copyright © 2010, The Baltimore Sun
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Too much money, too much government
As political system decays, power of money explodes
Ron Smith
4:47 PM EDT, August 26, 2010
I was going to write about the primary election results this week, but they're probably not all that important in the big picture. Some establishment candidates won, some insurgent candidates won, and money played a huge role in the results.
As in late
That this isn't a sign of a healthy polity is an understatement.
The greed for political power must be a strong, narcotic-like thing. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg persuaded the City Council to end the two-term limit on holding that office, coughed up more than $100 million of his own fortune, and narrowly beat a little-known Democrat with a tiny war chest. Admittedly, this is a drop in the bucket for the diminutive billionaire, but again, it's not a good sign.
As the system decays, the power of money explodes. Todd Purdum writes in the current Vanity Fair about how broken Washington is and how this has made President Barack Obama's job one vastly different from even his recent predecessors — and much more difficult.
The theme is to exonerate the current president from blame for the bad things that are happening, but to read the results of Mr. Purdum's reporting is to understand a little bit more about how things have gotten pretty grim in the game of governance.
In essence, the government has grown too big to be effectively managed by anybody. Neither this president nor any other can cope with the job.
Take lobbying, for instance. The tens of thousands of lobbyists in
The result is grotesque: Bills are passed that are so large, so dense, so laden with special favors that they can't be read by normal human beings, or even by elected representatives of the people. Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and a leader of the effort to pass health care reform, admits he's never read the bill passed into law this year. He says they have "experts" to do that.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi memorably said, "We have to pass the bill so you can understand what's in it." It passed, but it also passeth all understanding. No one, for example, knows how many new federal agencies will be created by it. It could be 159, but that's just an estimate.
Meantime, the economy remains in a ditch. Stock market investors don't know what to do, and the small fry are exiting that game. There are concerns that the bond market, into which investors have poured trillions, may be the next bubble to burst. Consumers are in a vise.
Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times wrote this week about how consumers are tapped out three years after the borrowing bubble burst. Citing a new Federal Reserve Bank of
There is no economic recovery. There will not be a return to the halcyon days of yesteryear in which American consumers drove the world economy by buying things they couldn't afford with money they didn't yet have.
That game is over, but government hasn't yet come to grips with it.
Ron Smith can be heard weekdays, 9 a.m. to noon, on 1090 WBAL-AM and WBAL.com. His column appears Fridays in The
Copyright © 2010, The Baltimore Sun
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