Then
Too Far Already
June 9, 2010
Government and big business have always been involved in each other’s “business.” As soon as taxes were collected by government from businesses these entities became interconnected. After all, governments need money to operate, and businesses had to push back to keep as much control as possible. Businesses also wanted to keep as much money as possible. I am not sure we can keep business completely out of government. Politicians are human. Humans like money. Therefore, politicians are vulnerable to those who offer them money. We have ethics rules, but the temptations are still very great, loopholes are found, ethics rules are broken. So, we have individuals dipping into the pot for personal gain, as well as exercising their more altruistic goals for keeping our government solvent.
How can we keep big business from exerting undue control over our government and our politicians? The issue is not yet quite as blatant as in Rollerball. We haven’t started turning our trees into fireballs just for entertainment value. However, countries need finances, and they need the businesses which generate them. With all the businesses we have lost we can see this loss is making our government less prosperous. Yet we cannot let big business take over our government regardless of how needy we get. Have things gone so far in America that the corporations are ipso facto in charge of our politicians and therefore our government? Can we afford to make an issue of this right now? Can we afford not to? Some people believe that big business is already so entwined with our government that our government just jumps when business shouts. Perhaps we are at a crisis point in our relationship and perhaps it is good that we are looking at the issue right now when it might be possible to back up a bit and achieve more balance. We don’t want big business to keep pulling up stakes the way they have been. We don’t want them to “take their toys and go home.” We also don’t want to let them run amok and take whatever they want.
The environmental impact of big business is probably one of the biggest issues between the American people and our businesses. If other countries do not put too fine a point on clean air, water, and land, then businesses will go there because we are making all kinds of environmental rules that are expensive to comply with. Add to this high wages and corporate taxes and we get the exodus we have been experiencing. Corporations can be culturally aware, and they can police themselves on these and other issues (like product quality and worker salaries and benefits). But it seems that they have not exercised their humanity in these areas and have instead been concentrating on huge profits. Trying to force big business to consider the planet and their country is like trying to wrestle with an octopus. We can keep trying to appeal to their “better” instincts, but it is unlikely that we will get a positive response when it is so easy to pull up stakes and move on. It will continue to be a complicated process until the whole world is a level playing field and by then there may be no “fields” left to play one, and we may each belong to a corporate team.
Obviously, there are more complicated issues here than just getting rid of “special interests.” The skills of some really smart people are required to guarantee that our needs for a strong economy, a “clean” government, and for the survival of our planet are all being met.
Since Then
Sometimes it takes time and perspective to give events perceived as general trends some specificity. In 2010 America was just coming out of the Great Recession that came on the heels of the Great Factory Migration. There were empty factories all over American, huge echoing spaces that once rang with people and industry. Our factories relocated to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, at first leaving their mother ships anchored in America. Capitalism went global. Labor abroad was cheap and there was forced labor in some of these countries. Profits rolled in despite tough financial times in America.
Although the exposure of the bad financial packages that bundled good and bad mortgages together and the banks that sold them above their value tanked the Stock Market in the US the wealthy did not suffer. Factories that left America took their money with them and tucked it away in offshore accounts. Loopholes in the tax structure allowed then to legally escape paying taxes on any assets that did not count as income. Mortgage scams left empty houses all over America to go with the empty factories.
The interconnections between business and government became more transparent as the corporations gained the upper hand, with government trying to find ways to get our factories back. Blame fell on unions and union busting was the punishment. Our millionaires in Congress blamed the factory migration on greedy unions that demanded better pay and more benefits. The truth was actually quite different. The USSR failed and the Iron Curtain parted and Russia, upon seeing the growth nations were experiencing, decided to throw some capitalism into the mix. Then China also opened its cities to capitalists so it could enter this era of economic growth. China with its enormous population could pay workers little and it would still be more than most Chinese people had. Mexico also offered cheap labor and low overhead and was close to America for supply chain advantages. Any industry that wasn’t tied to doing business in America either moved out of the country or opened factories in places where it was cheaper to operate and where there were plenty of new consumers. Hard times for the middle class in America.
Republicans had always formed many political organizations and think tanks. These groups, all seeking to enact laws that suited their ideology, lobbying for conservative policies, formed a web of organizations all receiving funding from the Koch Brothers, the inheritors of Koch Industries.
The Koch brothers were in the fossil fuel business, especially coal and coke. Clearly, with climate change and alternative energies becoming a topic of serious consideration and action, profits were threatened, and the Koch brothers needed climate deniers to hold the line on fossil fuels. So, they bought them.
Republicans were also defenders of American morality, although they were as flawed as any other humans, so many in the Koch web were also affiliated with religious groups, especially Evangelicals. It was in this Koch web that government and religion formed a bond which belied the founders firm intentions to keep church and state separate.
Now
Claiming to believe in the original meanings that the founders set forth in the Constitution, while interpreting open-ended sections of our documents to suit their intentions, we have witnessed the machinations of the right-wing in their states rights movement to make federal government smaller and give states back the rights that the federal government ostensibly stole from them. States’ rights was and still is an idea that carries racist baggage with it as it was the cry of slave owners in the era before the Civil War, by plantation owners who did not want the federal government to deprive them of their slaves. It continued to be the hue and cry after the Civil War as Southerners insisted that federal troops be withdrawn from the south and then as they proceeded to terrorize Black folks who wanted to exercise their new rights to vote and own land (think KKK). Therefore, States’ Rights is coded language to many, for racism or other federal crimes practiced without federal oversight.
Republicans won the battle to allow corporations to contribute money to political campaigns when the Supremes ruled that Money is speech, and that Corporations are people in decisions like Citizens United v the FEC. Now it costs millions to run even a local campaign to act as a representative in Congress in either the House or the Senate. The Republicans in the federal government rewarded corporations for their generous donations by passing The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 with lots of tax cuts and very few jobs.
Now that our corporation have been off seeing the world and globe-trotting, it’s possible that they have decided that capitalism works just as well in a dictatorship as in a democracy, in fact perhaps it works better because of forced labor, however gently the force is applied. That may be why the forces against the movement of the Republican Party towards authoritarianism has no corporate pushback. If we lose our free and fair elections, as looks likely if current voting changes stand, then we lose our democracy. That may not seem like much of a loss to some, but they will learn, after the fact, to mourn the loss of their relative freedom under our two and half century old democracy/republic. It could well be all forced labor and low wages, right here in America.