From the West Hartford News:
Another view: Corporate destruction of free markets rules us
The ruling dogma of our political economy is corporatism. Corporatism claims to draw legitimacy from the free market theory that all vendors who do not meet market demands will go under. Corporatism uses this illusion to exert power over all aspects of our political economy.The writer believes that left/right divisions are used by elites to entrench their power. Here he is talking to the hyperpartisans at Salon:
Free markets, corporatists believe, are the best mechanism to allocate resources for the exchange of goods and services. They believe markets free of regulation, taxation or competition from government enterprises produce the best results. Their favorite metaphor is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people by the exertions of many willing sellers and many willing buyers (Adam Smith, they neglected to add, favored public works, public education and social safety nets like decent wages and public welfare as needed.)
Many things intrude on free market theories including military expenditures, wars, taxation, public infrastructure, health and safety regulation and governments’ emergency duties. What financier George Soros has called “market fundamentalism,” is opposed to any interference with free markets. Yet, corporatism makes massive exceptions that rig markets and tilt the seller-buyer balance heavily in favor of the former who become bigger and bigger global corporations.
Market critics call this hypocrisy. Corporations push for larger military budgets, which have concentrated power in ever fewer military contractors. What are less recognized and more part of the culture of acceptance are the other interferences with free markets, which corporate power has entrenched so deeply that they are rarely part of any political or election-time debate.
Let this point be made in the form of questions rarely asked and therefore rarely answered.
Can there be a free market without freedom of contract? Corporatism has stripped consumers of freedom of contract with fine-print standard-form contracts that become more dictatorial every decade. They now often take away consumers rights to go to court for their grievances via compulsory arbitration clauses. They stipulate that the vendors can change the contract anyway they want – called unilateral modification – which takes away the last vestiges of consumer bargaining power. An example is the unilateral changes in what you have to pay in penalties, late fees or any hundreds of fees hidden in the fine print. And you can’t shop around because companies don’t compete over the fine print. (See faircontracts.org.)
Can there be a free market if workers cannot join together to bargain with large employers whose investors have expanding freedom to form companies, holding companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures and partnerships to advance their bargaining power? Moreover, in comparison with the freedom of investors, workers are besieged with union-busting intimidations, lockouts and a system of corporate-driven labor laws that present far more obstacles to go through than is the case with the labor laws of other Western nations.
Can there be a free market without strong and comprehensive anti-monopoly, anti-cartel and other laws against the myriad of anti-competitive practices that Adam Smith alluded to back in 1776 when he warned of the motives when businessmen gather together?...MORE
Salon exclusive: Talking Rand Paul, Hillary, Fox News and the dream of left-right alliances with an iconic activist
Say what you will about Ralph Nader — and most of you probably have — the man is tireless and persistent.
Now 80, Nader has a new book with the triumphant title of “Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.” And even if you’re not convinced that alliance is emerging, let alone unstoppable, Nader beats on, a relentless, articulate and sometimes very lonely critic of big business, media mediocrity and politicians who put corporate interests ahead of the public interest. Which means most of them.
You can thank Nader for most every consumer or environmental regulation from the 1960s onward — name it, and it was probably proposed or designed by one of his grass-roots organizations, or pushed into reality by an activist he trained or inspired. And at a time when his legacy was safe, he put it all on the line with four third-party campaigns for president, trying to create a grass-roots alternative and to thrust important issues into the debate. He was usually just as critical of the Democratic candidate as he was the Republican, forever alienating himself from some allies who still blame him (unfairly, I’d argue, but you might disagree) for helping elect George W. Bush in 2000.
When we sat down with Nader last week, in New York, we kept the conversation forward-looking. His book argues that progressives and libertarians, that liberals and conservatives, can make common cause on close to two dozen issues, ranging from corporate welfare, civil liberties and the drug war, to ending American militarism overseas and more closely examining the defense budget.
He suggests that it’s a powerful corporate state — politicians of both parties in the pocket of big business, and a media that’s both in the service of the corporate agenda and otherwise confused by triviality — which unnecessarily divides would-be allies and perpetuates its own power. About most of that, he’s probably right. On some of the details — the nature of today’s right, the importance of social issues — we had an open-minded debate.
I admire the optimism of a book called “Unstoppable,” designed to argue for a coming left-right alliance to overthrow the corporate state. And I’m not one of the naysayers or the obstructionists or sissies, as you call them, standing in the way.
But as I look at the state of American politics, I see a decade-long plan on behalf of big business and the wealthy GOP elites to take over statehouses nationwide, leading to a 2010 census and the gerrymandering of the House so severe it’s in Republican lockdown until 2020. I see the installation of right-wing judges who have demolished campaign finance laws. And then groups like ALEC that introduce right-wing legislation designed to gut laws and regulations you and I feel passionate about, with the judges in line to rubber-stamp the horrible bills. You look at what the Supreme Court has done in the last month on campaign finance. Or a Republican Party enthralled by its know-nothing, anti-science wing.
So to me it almost feels the other way around: That the victory of the corporate state over democracy is nearly complete. Where does your optimism come from? How does that square with my more pessimistic vision?
Well, you’ve introduced multilayer documentation of the corporatist wedge to control, distract and otherwise split the left and the right on the corporate issues. The corporate issues obviously are the forms of corporate non-taxation, the right forms of government expenditure, the military-industrial complex and all the things that the corporations want to control the political state, and turn it into a corporate state.
On the other hand, even the Republicans who are the beneficiaries of all the money, once you put them on the record on certain issues, they diverge from the corporatist agenda. For example, they can’t stand bailouts. Their leaders are corporatist; John Boehner, for example, is a corporatist. Mitch McConnell is a corporatist. So you don’t see the true voting patterns there would be if there was an organized effort, as you see in the book, one example after another — the NSA vote in the House is one. Over 22 state legislatures have in effect overturned the Kellogg decision on eminent domain in New London with Pfizer. That was impossible without a left-right coalition, and you see how fast it moved. The near overturn of the FCC expansion of media concentration — overwhelmingly left-right in the House, and the Senate was ready to do it, but the corporatists derailed it and delayed it, and the fever of convergence dissipated.
That’s why I was very specific in the book. I had 25 areas where we could have agreement and convergence, and those aren’t all the areas, either. What you see is an interesting eruption against the corporate state, and the power of the corporate lobbyists, from time to time, without almost any organization.
You know, the example of the Clinch River breeder nuclear reactor; that was considered an impossible project to stop. It had everything going for it, including General Electric, Westinghouse, the powerful Sen. Howard Baker — and it lost resoundingly in the Senate. We beat it with a left-right coalition in 1983.
So, your multilayer analysis is very, very there — of corporatism. That’s the main obstacle to a major political realignment in our country. Because as you know, once the left-right tastes victory in one area, they get to know each other. Then they strategize, they meet, and then they’ll go into another area. There are plenty of areas now that are ripe for something like this, because the corporate state has become so extreme. It has blown out of the water any pretense of conservatism; it’s just destroyed any pretense of conservatism as an ally....MORE*Previously on the firebrand channel:
...We've been circling this kind of stuff for years. In 2008's "Hank Paulson, George Washington and Benito Mussolini Walk Into a Bar: Part I" we looked at Machiavelli's Discourses on the First 10 Books of Titus LivyCopyright Infringement Now Seen As Terrorism
As Political Capitalism becomes indistinguishable from Mussolini's Corporatism it's getting close to the time where the West has to decide just what it wants to be when it grows up."Blaming Capitalism for Corporatism"
"The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes, many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress."
Andrew Jackson (1830) Cited by Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 62
"The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. [Big] Corporations"
Blueprint For America: "Fascist Italy's Experiment With Economic Corporatism"
"Yes Virginia, Obama and the Democrats Are Mussolini-Style Corporatists, Just Like the Republicans"
Democracy is dead ... lobbyists rule America
A handy cheat sheet last seen in Socialism, Capitalism and Bitcoin:
