How To Sell “Hard Choices”

The Origin of Bipartisanship and The Decline Of Democracy

By ALAN NASSER
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

In his State of the Union address president Obama told us that “We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.” We have learned to beware when elites talk of “hard” and “tough” choices. These terms are synonymous with ‘unpopular’, and those for whom life will be made hard and tough are never the ones selling the choices. Historically, in times of crisis the working population has been made into shock absorbers for the oligarchs, and the austere policies required -by the plutocrats-  to undo the effects of the crisis on elites have been put forward as bipartisan. The policies are alleged to be the product of no particular interest but represent a consensus shared by all participants in the political process. What is pressed upon the people is thus held to be beyond politics, determined by experts to be pragmatically necessary.

This general strategy was born in the period 1899 – 1907. There had been a series of failed attempts to address the problem of serial recessions and depressions that had plagued the formative years of nineteenth-century industrializing capitalism. Between 1867 and 1900 the economy experienced eight business cycles over 396 months. During this period the economy expanded during 199 months and contracted during 197. This stretch included three severe depressions, from 1873-1879 (the longest contraction in US history), 1883-1885 and 1893-1897. The captains of business understood that this period of serial bankruptcies and chronic instability was the inevitable result of cutthroat competition, which drove prices into a downward spiral to the level at which capitalists were unable to cover their huge fixed costs. Many of the most prominent businessmen of the time, including JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, came to understand that combination, consolidation and merger were essential to protecting their interests by muting competition and administering markets and prices. Coordination trumped competition when the interests of the ruling class were at stake. It was common to hear and read corporate heads and attorneys trashing the going ideology of unmitigated competition as a fool’s fairy tale. A way was sought  -in vain, as we shall see-  for private business to get its house in order on its own.

The business barons attempted a series of combinations, from “gentlemen’s agreements” to the pool and the trust. None of these efforts bore fruit: the individualism endogenous to capitalism led parties to these consolidations repeatedly to break their agreements. Finally, from 1898 to 1902, businessmen resorted to an unprecedent wave of corporate mergers, in which the absorbed companies lost their independent legal and business identities. The opportunity for parties to intercorporate agreements to break their agreement was eliminated. But now competition took new forms, the most effective of which was the entry into key industries of smaller newcomers with smaller fixed-cost debt obligations and the ability to compete… by price cutting! Fratricidal competition was once again, in spite of all the efforts available to business to eliminate it, threatening to undo the ascendancy of the biggest giants.

The situation was grave. The market share of the leading behemoths  -US Steel, Standard Oil, International Harvester, Anaconda Copper and the American Can Company- actually fell during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Only about half of the large enterprises formed by combination between the late 1880s and 1906 survived. Iron Age, the steel industry magazine, wrote in 1909 that “So large a part of the current business has been going to those who were either willing or compelled to make lower prices that the situation finally became unendurable.”

All the private methods of eliminating competition had failed to effect the stable market environment sought by the consolidators. A hitherto untried strategy needed to be found that would successfully address the problem of destructive competition that private capital by itself was powerless to fix.

The forty to fifty year persistence, in spite of every strategy available tothe private sector, of recessions, depressions, bankruptcies and cutthroat competition constituted the first major crisis threatening US capitalism as a system. When attainable strategies failed to produce stability, businessmen concluded that not only did capitalism preclude automaticmarket self-regulation, it also resisted any private efforts to render the system sufficiently dependable to enable investors to expect profits with the desired confidence. Big capital came to recognize that the only effective alternative was political intervention in the form of government regulation.

The rhetoric of the business community since the New Deal has been replete with ritual denunciations of government regulation of the private economy. These tirades are always aimed at government intervention intended to protect working people from the vicissitudes of the market. When the interests of capital are jeopardized, business does not hesitate to seek government succor. In the period of industrialization, prominent businessmen evidenced no reservations in their desire for government intervention to regulate and stabilize an economy otherwise insufficiently responsive to the needs of capital. In effect, these captains of industry recognized chronic recessions and depressions, with their retarding effects on the growth of output, productivity and profits, as at bottom apolitical problem demanding a political solution. Thus was born what the historian Gabriel Kolko has called “political capitalism”, namely business elite support for the “utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security  -to attain rationalizatiuon-  in the economy.”

Referring of the destructive effects of persistent cutthroat competition Andrew Carnegie wrote: “it always comes back to me that Government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem.” Business leaders were clear that it was federal government regulation they were after. State and local laws were disparate; production for a national market required the uniformity that only federal authority could produce. Between 1899 and 1907 a consensus was formed among large-corporate capitalists, trade unionists and small producers advocating legislation establishing federal regulation of reasonable restraints of trade.

In 1899 the Chicago Civic Federation sponsored the Chicago Conference on Trusts, which promoted the acceptance of corporate bigness as a fait accompli, with the proviso that the power of these companies be curbed by government regulation. How exactly this was to be accomplished was a matter of intense dispute, as the conferees represented perspectives as heterogenous as laissez-fair capitalism, Marxian socialism and single-tax populism.Concord was in effect ruled out from the start.Dissatisfied with the results, a group of delegates called a splinter conference four months later, the National Anti-Trust Conference, but the diversity of the delegates generated the same kind of schism that had doomed the earlier assemblage.

Unanimity was essential to the agenda of elites, who understood that the appearance of bipartisanship was most likely to encourage the mobilization of popular support for congressional action. Marshalling public opinion was especially challenging, since elites aimed to persuade a public largely hostile to the corpoprate giants to acquiesce in the incorporated firm as the dominant form of business enterprise and large-corporate administration of markets. The elite hope was that the advocacy of a strong government regulatory role would dampen widespread suspicion of the giants.

With this in mind, the National Civic Federation organized the National Conference on Combinations and Trusts in October 1907. This time, agenda setting and delegate selection were deliberately controlled. The 492 delegates included representatives of commercial, manufacturing, labor, agricultural and civic associations, presidents of prestigous universities, corporate officers and presidents of state bar associations, among others perceived as private elites. Deliberately excluded from the proceedings were the political elements though to have contributed disproportionately to the discord that had foiled the earlier meetings. Nationally prominent political leaders and U.S. senators and representatives were not invited.

The idea was to de-politicize the trust question. Oligarchic power would be taken out of politics, thereby rendering democracy irrelevant to corporate priorities and national policy making. The recommendations of the Conference would be presented to the public and to Congress as nonpartisan, nonpolitical, representing the best thinking of the most expert and disinterested parties in the country.

The Conference was ultimately successful. Shortly after the Conference concluded, Andrew Carnegie averred that “it always comes back to me that Government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem [of economic instability wrought by destructive competition].” As a leading authority on the origins of railroad regulation wrote:

“When these efforts [of private business to cooperate in rate setting] failed, as they inevitably did, the railroad men turned to political solutions to [stabilize] their increasingly chaotic industry. They advocated measures designed to bring under control those railroads within their own ranks that refused to conform to voluntary compacts. … [F]rom the beginning of the 20th century until at least the initiation of World War I, the railroad industry resorted primarily to political alternatives and gave up the abortive efforts to put its own house in order by relying on voluntary cooperation. … Insofar as the railroad men did think about the larger theoretical implications of centralized federal regulation, they rejected … the entire notion of laissez-faire [and] most railroad leaders increasingly relied on a Hamiltonian conception of the national government.” (Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, Princeton, 1965, pp. 3-5)

The history and the basic rationale of the business movement for federal regulation assured that government would remain subordinate to business domination. The fact of “regulatory capture”, the domination of the regulatory agencies by executives of the firms supposed to be regulated, was built into the regulatory regime from the start. Regulation in the first decade of the twentieth century was openly welcomed by the regulated interests in nearly every case.Upton Sinclair, perhaps the leading public intellectual of the time,  wrote of the meat industry, “the federal inspection of meat was historically established at the packers’ request. … It is maintained and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers.” Representing the large Chicago packers, Thomas E. Wilson  publicly announced: “We are now and have always been in favor of the extension of the inspection.”

The silliness of the conceit that these rescue efforts were beyond politics is underscored by their depending entirely on government regulation to enforce agreements that capital left to its own devices was unable to implement. This was an epochal consciousness raising for big capital. Government involvement in the accumulation process was inescapable, and was to be secured only by deliberate class-concerted mobilization aimed at securing the state for the interests of big business. Capital learned this lesson well. When the New Deal was perceived by the most influential businessmen to place workers’ interests at the center of the state’s agenda, they attempted to organize a coup to replace FDR with a business-military coalition. When the New Deal-Great Society period 1949 – 1973 evidenced an influential labor movement, several large-scale labor actions and the first and only 40-year downward distribution of income from the top 1 percent to the rest in the nation’s history, elites perceived this as a major crisis and mobilized in the mid-1970s to sieze control of the state in order to undo the social programs and business regulations of the Golden Age, paving the way for the neoliberal macroeconomic reconfiguration superintended by Reagan, Clinton, Bushpere, Bush fils and Obama.

Both the 2008 bailout of finance capital and the ongoing project of doing away with government functions designed to promote the interests of workers and regulate business were put forward as above partisan politics and as requiring for their implementation governmental action. In both cases elite command of the state was demanded lest the economy collapse and government be shut down. Since the establishment early in the twentieth century of corporate oligopoly capitalism as the nation’s settled economic formation, corporate elites have identified two key elements of class power: mobilization and control of the State. Individual efforts are never sufficient to secure interests that are essentially class-bound. Private collective efforts are indeed necessary, but never sufficient to safeguard class interests. That goal is a political one, and as such requires underwriting by the State, and that won’t happen absent control of the State.

John Kenneth Galbraith argued, in American Capitalism (1956), that as the economy grows, its crises become increasingly severe and government remedial action greater in scope. We may draw the appropriate conclusion: increasingly harsh crises will prompt the owning class to demand increasing control of the State. Let’s not mince words. We are talking about the creeping  -now galloping-  privatization of the State. In fact, domestic policy is now entirely shaped by Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke.

The masters of capital have taught the working class a priceless lesson. You will not get what you want unless you mobilize in order to capture State power, i.e. power to turn the State into one whose dominant objective is to further the interests of the working population. It’s not impossible; it only looks that way.

CODA

That the two major constituent classes of a capitalist economy must establish an alliance with the State in order to secure their interests goes farther back than is indicated in this article and is as inherent a feature of capitalism as the compulsion to increase profits and the wage labor relationship. In a footnote in Capital (volume III, p. 270, International Publishers) Marx comments on the 1863 testimony of Josiah Wedgewood, of uptown pottery fame, urging Parliament’s Children’s Employment Commission to effect “some legislative enactment” to limit the working hours of children. In an uncommon philanthropic gesture, Wedgewood sought to gain consensus among competing potters to treat child labor less severely. He implored the Commission: “Much as we deplore the evils before mentioned, it would not be possible to prevent them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers… Taking all these points into consideration, we have come to the conviction that some legislative enactment is wanted.”

The Corporate "Heist" Of The US Government

The following is an excerpt of Jeffrey Clement's Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It.) Click here to order a copy.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce. He outlined a critique and a plan that changed America. 

Powell titled his 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” He explained, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” In response, corporations must organize and fund a drive to achieve political power through “united action.” Powell emphasized the need for a sustained, multiyear corporate campaign to use an “activist-minded Supreme Court” to shape “social, economic and political change” to the advantage of corporations.

Powell continued:

But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

The roots of Citizens United lie in Powell’s 1971 strategy to use “activist” Supreme Court judges to create corporate rights. “Under our constitutional system,” Powell told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

Powell’s call for a corporate rights campaign should not be misunderstood as a “conservative” or “moderate” reaction to the excesses of “liberals” or “big government.” Rather, to understand the perspective of Powell and his allies is to understand the difference between a conservative and a corporatist.

 Powell and The Tobacco Corporations Show The Way

By the time of his 1971 memorandum, Lewis Powell was a director of more than a dozen international corporations, including Philip Morris Inc., a global manufacturer and seller of cigarettes. Powell joined Philip Morris as a director in 1964, when the United States surgeon general released the most devastating and comprehensive report to date about the grave dangers of smoking. He remained a director of the cigarette company until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1971. Powell also advised the Tobacco Institute, the cigarette lobby that finally was exposed and stripped of its corporate charter in the 1990s after decades of using phony science and false statements to create a fraudulent “debate” about smoking and health.

The story of the cigarette corporations and their response to public efforts to address addiction, smoking, and health is a big piece of the larger story of how corporate rights took such significant pieces of the Constitution and American democracy. The ideas expressed by Powell in his 1971 memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce came out of his personal involvement in the aggressive resistance of the cigarette corporations to efforts to address the devastating social and public costs of its lethal products. As a director and an executive committee member of Philip Morris, Powell shared responsibility for the fraudulent attack on the conclusions of scientists and the surgeon general by the cigarette industry and for its false insistence for years that “no proof” showed cigarettes to be unhealthy.

Hints of this work can be seen in the Philip Morris annual reports issued during Powell’s tenure as a director, which reflected the broader campaign of the company and the cigarette industry to discredit the science about smoking and health and to misrepresent the facts to keep people smoking and get young people to start. We now know, thanks to the 2007 findings of a federal judge, that many of the assertions in these annual reports were knowingly false. According to the reports themselves, these statements and others were made “on behalf of the Board of Directors,” including Powell:

• 1964: “The industry continues to support major research efforts directed towards resolving the many unanswered questions on smoking and health.”

• 1967: “The year 1967 was marked by an intensification of exaggerated claims made relative to the possible adverse health effects of smoking on health. ... We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy. ... Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking.”

• 1967: “We would again like to state that there is no biological proof that smoking is causally related to the diseases and conditions claimed to be statistically associated with smoking ... no proof that the tar and nicotine levels in smoke are significant in relation to health.”

• 1969:  “No biological or clinical proof that smoking is causally related to human disease ... serious doubt that smoking is a causative factor in heart disease.”

• 1970:  “Often the scientific information which is relied on to indict cigarette smoking is of dubious validity.”

Absent convincing evidence, it might be reckless to say that Philip Morris and the other tobacco corporations engaged in a willful, aggressive, wide-ranging conspiracy and racketeering enterprise so that the corporations could sell more products that kill people. But now that the evidence is in, we know that that is exactly what happened. We know this thanks to scientists, victims of the conspiracy, state attorneys general (both Democrats and Republicans), the United States Department of Justice (under both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush), and Judge Gladys Kessler and a panel of U.S. Court of Appeals judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice took the cigarette corporations to trial, alleging that they had engaged in a racketeering conspiracy. Eighty-four witnesses testified in the nine-month trial, and hundreds of internal corporate secrets were finally exposed. When the verdict came in, Judge Kessler concluded that “overwhelming evidence” proved that the cigarette corporations “conspired together” to fraudulently deny that cigarettes caused cancer, emphysema, and a long list of other fatal diseases; to manipulate levels of highly addictive nicotine to keep people smoking; to market addictive cigarettes to children so that the corporations would have “replacement smokers” for those who quit or died; and that they “concealed evidence, destroyed documents, and abused the attorney-client privilege to prevent the public from knowing about the dangers of smoking and to protect the industry” from justice.

As counsel to the cigarette industry and as a Philip Morris director, Powell already had begun testing the use of activist-minded courts to create corporate rights. In one case in the late 1960s, Powell argued that any suggestion that cigarettes caused cancer and death was “not proved” and was “controversial.” Therefore, according to Powell, the Federal Communications Commission wrongly violated the First Amendment rights of cigarette corporations by refusing to require “equal time” for the corporations to respond to any announcement that discouraged cigarette smoking as a health hazard.

Even the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in the tobacco-friendly South, rejected this claim. Although Powell lost that time, he went on to win far more than he could have imagined after he got on the Supreme Court and helped change the Constitution.

Powell’s 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce laid out a corporate rights and a corporate power campaign. The Chamber and the largest corporations then implemented these recommendations with zeal, piles of money, patience, and an activist Supreme Court. In equating corporations with “We, the People” in our Constitution, no justice would be more of an activist than Lewis Powell after he joined the Supreme Court in 1972.

1972: Powell Gets His Chance

In January 1972, President Nixon filled two Supreme Court vacancies, appointing Powell to one seat and William Rehnquist, a conservative Republican lawyer from Phoenix, Arizona, to the other. Rehnquist never hid his conservative views, which were well known and, to some, controversial. At the same time, neither Congress nor most Americans knew of Powell’s radical corporatist views. In his Senate confirmation hearing, no one asked about his recent proposal to the Chamber of Commerce recommending the use of an “activist-minded Supreme Court” to impose those views on the nation. No one asked because neither Powell nor the Chamber of Commerce disclosed the memo during his confirmation proceedings.

Once on the Court, these two Nixon appointees followed very different paths. Justice Powell would go on to write the Court’s unprecedented decisions creating a new concept of “corporate speech” in the First Amendment. Using this new theory, the Court struck down law after law in which the states and Congress sought to balance corporate power with the public interest. With increasing assertiveness by the Supreme Court even after Powell retired in 1987, the new corporate rights theory has invalidated laws addressing the environment, tobacco and public health, food and drugs, financial regulation, and more.

Powell helped shape a new majority to serve the interest of corporations, but for years, several vigorous dissents resisted the concept of corporate rights. The most vigorous came from the conservative Justice William Rehnquist. He grounded his dissents in the fundamental proposition that our Bill of Rights sets out the rights of human beings, and corporations are not people. For years, Rehnquist maintained this principled conservative argument, warning over and over again that corporate rights have no place in our republican form of government.

Here Come The Foundations

Despite the Rehnquist dissents, Powell’s vision of an unregulated corporate political “marketplace,” where corporations are freed by activist courts from the policy judgment of the majority of people, won out. Powell, of course, could not have acted alone. He could not have moved a majority of the Court to create corporate rights if no one had listened to his advice to organize corporate political power to demand corporate rights. Listen they did — with the help of just the sort of massive corporate funding that Powell proposed.

Corporations and corporate executives funded a wave of new “legal foundations” in the 1970s. These legal foundations were intended to drive into every court and public body in the land the same radical message, repeated over and over again, until the bizarre began to sound normal: corporations are persons with constitutional rights against which the laws of the people must fall.

Huge corporations, including Powell’s Philip Morris, invested millions of dollars in the Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center and other legal foundations to bring litigation demanding new corporate rights. In rapid succession, corporations and supporters funded the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Legal Foundation, the Mid-America Legal Foundation, the Great Plains Legal Foundation (Landmark Legal Foundation), the Washington Legal Foundation, the Northeastern Legal Foundation, the New England Legal Foundation, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Center, the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, and many others.

These foundations began filing brief after brief challenging state and federal laws across the country, pounding away at the themes of corporations as “persons,” “speakers” and holders of constitutional rights. Reading their briefs, one might think that the most powerful, richest corporations in the history of the world were some beleaguered minority fighting to overcome oppression. The foundations and the corporate lawyers argued that “corporations are persons” with the “liberty secured to all persons.” They used new phrases like “corporate speech,” the “rights of corporate speakers,” and “the corporate character of the speaker.” They demanded, as if to end an unjust silence, “the right of corporations to be heard” and “the rights of corporations to speak out.”

This corporate campaign sought to redefine the very role of corporations in American society. The message was insistent: We should no longer think of corporations as useful but potentially insidious industrial economic tools. We should no longer be concerned that corporations might leverage massive economic power into massive political power or trample the public interest for the profit of the few. Instead, we should think of corporations as pillars of liberty, institutions that Americans can trust. They would protect our freedom for us. They would stand up to “bad” government for us.

A 1977 brief of the Chamber of Commerce, for example, argued that the Court should strike down a state law that limited corporate political spending in citizens’ referendum elections because corporations help maintain our freedoms: “Business’s social role is to provide the people a valuable service which helps maintain their freedoms. ... The statute at issue prevents the modern corporation from fulfilling a major social obligation. ... ”

By 1978, the millions of dollars invested in the radical corporate rights campaign began to pay off. The first major victory for the corporate rights advocates came in 1978, with a corporate attack on a Massachusetts law in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. Several international corporations — including Gillette, the Bank of Boston, and Digital Equipment Corporation — filed a lawsuit after the people of Massachusetts banned corporate political spending intended to influence a citizen referendum. Justice Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote and wrote the 5–4 decision wiping off the books the people’s law intended to keep corporate money out of citizen ballot questions. For the first time in American history, corporations had successfully claimed “speech” rights to attack laws regulating corporate money in our elections.

With that success, an emboldened corporate rights campaign next attacked energy and environmental laws. In the 1982 case of Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation v. Public Service Corporation of New York, utility corporations and the array of corporate legal foundations all argued that a New York law prohibiting utility corporations from promoting energy consumption violated the corporations’ rights of free speech. The corporations won again, and again Justice Powell wrote the decision for the activist Supreme Court that he had imagined in his 1971 Chamber of Commerce memo. The corporate interest in promoting energy consumption for corporate profit trumped the people’s interest in energy conservation. Over a period of six years, Justice Powell wrote four key corporate rights decisions for the Supreme Court. These unprecedented cases transformed the people’s First Amendment speech freedom into a corporate right to challenge public oversight and corporate regulation.

Powell led a majority of the Court to accept the repeated mantra that “corporations are persons” and corporate “voices” must be free, and the sustained attacks on the people’s laws continued for the next two decades. Oil, coal, and utility corporations, tobacco corporations, chemical and pharmaceutical corporations, alcohol corporations, banking and other Wall Street corporations, and many others all successfully claimed corporate speech rights to invalidate federal, state, and local laws. As you will see in Chapter Two, corporations even succeeded in attacking the right of parents to know whether the milk they fed their children came from cows treated with Monsanto’s genetically engineered recombinant DNA bovine drug.

In 2007, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center celebrated thirty years of using judicial activism on behalf of corporations and admitted that it was “the brainchild of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.” The brainchild, with its motto of “Business Is Our ONLY Client,” bragged about such “victories” as convincing the Supreme Court to throw out a decision by a jury of people to impose punitive damages for the unlawful conduct of Philip Morris, Inc.

The Consequences

The success of the Powell–Chamber of Commerce plan transformed American law, government, and society, with two devastating consequences for the country. First, corporations gained new political power at the expense of average citizens and voters. Corporations poured out money to lobbying and election campaigns and to help friendly politicians and hurt unfriendly politicians. With even modest reform crushed by corporate rights decisions such as Bellotti v. First National Bank of Boston — and now much more so, Citizens United — corporations could threaten “independent expenditure” campaigns against politicians who did not bend their way. Corporate money to influence legislative votes and politician behavior lost its scandalous, shameful nature. Bags of corporate cash were no longer bags of cash; they were “speech.” How could “speech” be corrupt or scandalous?

Washington and many state capitals became playgrounds for corporate lobbyists, and our elected representatives became increasingly disconnected from the will of the people. With the new, organized corporate radicalism, staggering amounts of corporate money flooded Washington and our political system. Between 1998 and 2010, for example, the Chamber of Commerce spent $739 million on lobbying. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations spent more than $2 billion on lobbying in the past twelve years. Three corporations seeking military contracts, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Lockheed, and Boeing, spent more than $400 million on lobbying. GE Corporation ($237 million), AT&T ($162 million), the pharmaceutical corporate lobby PHRMA ($195 million), ExxonMobil ($151 million), Verizon ($149 million), and many more corporations all joined the lobby- fest.25 Financial, labor, energy, environmental, health, trade, and other legislation and policy tilted in favor of corporate interests; the hurdles for advancing the public interest became much higher.

Second, the successful corporate rights campaign created a corporate trump card over public interest laws. If laws that were inconvenient to corporate business models somehow made it through the corporate lobbyist machine, corporations now had constitutional “rights” to attack the laws in the courts. It no longer mattered if the majority of people and our representatives chose laws to curb pollution, require disclosure, protect the public health, or nurture small businesses and local economies. The democratic process was no longer enough to decide the issue. After the creation of “corporate speech” rights, it was now up to federal judges to decide whether the law served an “important” state interest and was not too “burdensome.”

The Lost Promise Of Earth Day

On that far-off Earth Day in 1970, Americans reclaimed the water, air, land, and forests that belong to all of us and to our descendants. We reclaimed the promise of government of the people, where people and our representatives would weigh, debate, and decide the balance of private and public, corporate and human. Since that spring day in 1970, we have pushed resources and the ecological systems on which life depends to the breaking point. Even as the oil, gas, and coal corporations mimic the strategy of the cigarette corporations to create a fraudulent “controversy” and “open question” about the global warming “hoax,” we have ripped past the point of no return on climate pollution.

While the evidence of national and global environmental destruction at a level that will challenge our civilization and way of life is more compelling now than in 1970, our leaders in government are not even debating, let alone enacting, possible solutions. Incredibly, the current debate in Congress is not what we can do to save our world but whether Congress should strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate pollution that causes the global climate crisis.

Corporate media might tell you that the reason for inaction is that Americans oppose environmental regulation and oppose drastic changes to address the energy and environmental crisis. Yet there is little reason to believe that this is true. In fact, try an experiment. Find a moment to talk seriously in a nonpolitical, non-confrontational way with your friends, neighbors, or family members, regardless of what political party or philosophy they may favor. I bet that you will find that they too think that we cannot continue to rely on corporations to protect freedom for us and that corporate business as usual will condemn us to disastrous energy, economic, and environmental policies and ensure that we pass to our children a very bleak and weak nation and world.

This basic understanding of the connection between our state of decline and crisis on one hand and our corporate-driven energy, environmental, economic, foreign and military policy on the other, is one of the many points of consensus among the American people that the corporatist political elite ignores. According to an independent, nonpartisan 2010 Pew Research poll, for example, huge majorities of Americans favor better fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks (79 percent), more funding for alternative energy (74 percent), more spending on mass transit (63 percent), and tax incentives for hybrid or electric vehicles (60 percent).

Similarly, for years, most Americans have supported, and still support, stronger, not weaker, environmental and energy policies. This is true even in times of recession, terrorism, and deep concern about budgets.26 From 1995 to 2008, when the independent multiyear Gallup poll was last done, through every variety of political environment, from good economies to bad, from terrorist attacks to war, the American people have been consistent in the response. More than twice as many Americans say we need “additional, immediate, and drastic action” to prevent major environmental disruption, compared to those who say “we should just take the same actions we have been taking on the environment.” The percentage of those identifying a need for “drastic, immediate action” was 35 percent in 1995, 38 percent in 2007, and 34 percent in 2008. When you add in those who say “we should take some additional action,” the range of Americans who want better, stronger, tougher environmental protection has stayed between 80 and 90 percent over the past ten years. The percentage of those who chose the status quo answer (“we should just take the same actions we have been taking on the environment”) has ranged from 13 to 20 percent.

For years, most of us have known that the gathering and urgent environmental and energy crisis cannot be ignored, but what has our government done? Maintain the status quo, more or less, and usually much less as the global environmental crisis has worsened and the demand for fossil fuel exploitation soars.

Polls are not infallible, but I suspect that these results would be duplicated in most family discussions around the dinner table. And I believe that we would see a similar disconnect between what people know about the state of our nation and the world and what the corporate-dominated government does. Whether the issue is the environment, the economy, the decades-long wars in the Middle East and bloated military budgets, agri-corporate subsidies and industrial food systems, or corporate welfare, what most people think or want out of our government does not matter much anymore.

We have become accustomed to thinking that we cannot change, that our problems are too big, that our government can- not be effective. This was not always so, and it does not have to be so now. The choice we face in America now about whether to succeed or fail begins with our choice about whether we agree with Lewis Powell, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the corporate rights movement that massive, global corporate entities are the same as people.

Via: "AlterNet"

United States Has Worst Election Process On Planet

JIMMY CARTER SAYS ELECTIONS CORRUPTED

By Pete Papaherakles,

Injecting billions of dollars into U.S. politics is a recipe for corruption, says former President Jimmy Carter. Placing the blame squarely on the Supreme Court for endorsing a corporate spending free-for-all in American politics, he said the justices gave unlimited freedom to special interest groups representing corporations and lobbyists to provide campaign funding through third parties that don’t have to disclose their donors.

“We have one of the worst election processes in the world right here in the United States of America,” he said, “and it’s almost entirely because of the excessive influx of money.

“You know how much I raised to run against Gerald Ford?” asked Carter in his latestConversation at the Carter Center. “Zero. You know how much I raised to run against Ronald Reagan? Zero. You know how much will be raised this year by all presidential, Senate and House campaigns? Six billion dollars. That’s 6,000 million.”

Carter did get public funding from the Democratic National Committee but received no money from private donors—corporate or individuals.

In contrast, Romney and Obama are both on their way to possibly raising an astonishing billion dollars each in campaign funds this year. By August 31 Romney had raised $669M while Obama had raised $766M. In the month of August Romney raised $112M and Obama brought in $114M, and the stakes keep getting higher until Election Day. These funds are a combination of public and private funds, with public funds comprising only about a quarter of the total money raised.

The Supreme Court justified its 5-4 Citizens United ruling on the basis that the First Amendment prohibits government from restricting independent political donations by corporations and unions. As a result, special interest groups have taken control of the election process making it “shot through with financial corruption that threatens [America],” according to Carter. He expressed his hope that “the Supreme Court will reverse that stupid ruling.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is, of course, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Along with other pro-Zionist lobbies, individuals and corporations, they dominate campaign funding, thus influencing the political platform, including foreign policy, for both candidates.

Carter prefers publicly financed elections, currently used by other countries.

Via: "American Free Press"

Money Is Speech

A Musical History Of Campaign Finance

Act I: Brown Paper Bags

“I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited [from public service]. I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)

“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“I don’t like all the influence of money in politics.” (Mitt Romney)

When people think of Watergate they think of a break-in
But they don’t mention the money that Nixon was taking
From wealthy donors to help him get reelected
Nixon paid them back in favors just like they expected

To battle corruption Congress passed a new law
Capping contributions to a candidate’s haul
The source of the donations had to be disclosed too
And the FEC was formed to enforce the new rules

Some who felt the law went against the Constitution sued
Saying limits on money limited free speech too
So the courts kept the cap on how much you can donate
But said spending was unlimited by an outside group or candidate

That meant no more spending limits to promote a cause
Or to point out a rival campaign’s flaws
So while candidates once snuck around with brown paper bags 
From then on they raised money publicly or left it to PACs

“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“I don’t like all the influence of money in politics.” (Mitt Romney)

Act II: Soft Money

“We should also curb the role of big money in elections by capping the cost of campaigns…” (Bill Clinton)

In the 80s and 90s, there was a new gimmick:
“Soft money” that’s disclosed but had no limits
It’s supposed to cover each party’s expenses
But guys like Clinton used it to help their election chances

There was just one problem, Clinton’s party was broke
So he asked for more money every time he spoke
And in return for the 100 million dollar cash-in
He let donors use the Lincoln Bedroom to crash in

Then the “scandal and reform” cycle happened again
And legislation was proposed by Feingold and McCain
It capped donations to parties, ending soft funds
And banned corporate/union issue ads right before elections

But with each new reform comes new loopholes
Tax exempt “527s” arose
Because they weren’t explicit about whom they supported
Many still raised money without limits to thwart them

“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“The rules are what they are…” (Jay Carney)

Act III: Super PACs and Non-Profits

“I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.” (Barack Obama)

But the most outside money was yet to be spent
Some argued spending limits broke the first amendment
“Corporations and unions are entitled to free speech”
They took it to court, the Supreme Court agreed.

Super PACs can raise as much money as they want
They can also use union and corporate funds
The only rule is they cannot coordinate
With a specific party or a specific candidate

But reform opponents weren’t quite done yet
They found new uses for 501(c)(4) non-profits
Which are a lot like Super PACs with more mystery
They haven’t had to disclose donors ever in history

Whether Republican or Democrat you might believe
That spending limits jeopardize our freedom of speech
But with each new cycle of deregulation
More money is being injected into our elections

Lyrics via: ProPublica