Corporate Power and Government

When I began blogging about the mythology of government interfering with business, my son sent me this perspective. "Government in its present form is dependent on big business dollars for it's existence. I think international corporations that exist beyond political boundaries and the dollars that they spend are in tighter control of the government then we the people who elect those very officials. This can be seen in Oil, and Tobacco, and the lack of any infrastructure to support electric vehicles. Where are the subsidies in support of wind farms? Solar power? Why are we so invested in using corn as a source for alternative fuel? etc. etc."

I believe the problem is like the elephant in the living room. Everyone sees it. Everyone walks around it. Everyone pretends it's not there. That elephant is corruption. We all know about the shadow government of lobbyists. They raise huge amounts of corporate money for election campaigns. The money they raise buys them access to elected officials. They control the economy because of the revolving door between Wall Street bankers, particularly Goldman Sachs  I had a professor who graduated from the college where he taught, He called it intellectual incest. We have economic incest in this country. We all know that incest raises the incidence of abnormalities. We have seen many abnormalities in the economy since deregulation. Yet the Wall Street bankers still call the shots. It's hard to ignore the money they represent. Recall how easy it was for bankers to receive TARP money while the auto makers had to beg for for help. The auto makers represent real jobs where people make real things. Wshouldn't feel sorry for them. They are also part of the shadow government.

I could give a laundry list of Washington lobbyists and the special breaks they receive. I'm sure you could fill in a lot of the gaps, too. The way they work is hardly a secret. Just look at the battle over health care since it was proposed by that great Progressive Republican, President Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago. But it's not just the shadow government lobbys, it's also the recent Supreme Court ruling on election spending. The conservative, original doctrine Constitutionalists on the court created an entirely new class of "corporate" citizen. There is no artificial person mentioned in the Constitution. Since 85% of the population agree the Supremes got it wrong, I wonder just how much corporate money interests influenced this decision.

Corruption. We really need to talk about this elephant named Corruption. The government set up by the Constitution is balanced among three branches. It does not also balance today's large corporations and the way they spin the news to push their own agenda. Unfair, unbalanced news destabilizes government. Most people can cite their own examples so I need not get into them now. While corporate news outlets are a major problem, we can't overlook the system itself.

I like to believe most people go into politics to help their fellow citizens. Others, like the current crop of "retired", wealthy CEOs' may be open to question. Regardless, it takes a lot of money to run a campaign. Fielding rich candidates doesn't resolve the problem. Campaign finance reforms haven't worked as intended for a variety of reasons. Mostly, however, when one door to the big corporate donors closes, another one is found. Barak Obama's appeal to small donors made a huge difference in his campaign. I wonder if it will be a reliable model for future campaigns. Even when people make small donations, there is still the problem of media and ballot access. Agenda driven media limits access by definition.

As for ballot access, the two main partys raise the bar for third party candidates while keeping it low for themselves. It takes more signatures for a third party candidate to get on the ballot than it does for main party candidates. Once on the ballot, it is not a gimme they will even be part of a debate. Ross Perot bought his way. Ralph Nader, even with significant name recognition, couldn't get into the debates. This is unfortunate as most third party candidates bring substance and new perspectives to voters' attention. I recently decided that voting the two major party candidates is like the definition of insanity where you do the same thing over and expect a different result. We seesaw between the two major partys and gridlock just gets worse every election cycle. The only way to break gridlock is to vote in new people who really are independent of the major party leadership and not dependent on corporate money to stay in office. It may be our only choice to end political corruption.