Marty's Blog

I share a virtual neighborhood with a legion of Times reporters, editors and columnists who know more than I will ever know about business and economics. (Look! Right over there: a Nobel-prize-winning economist!) In this humbling company, on this intimidating matter, who am I to tell anyone what to think? And so my plan was, frankly, to avoid the subject.

But while there are things a columnist can ignore (if Kim Kardashian ever features in this column, just shoot me), our failing economic ecosystem is not one of them. So for the past several weeks my airplane and bedside reading has consisted of sexy documents like “A Roadmap for America’s Future” and “The Way Forward” and “The Moment of Truth” and “Restoring America’s Future” and “Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future.” I’ve also reached out to a few economists respected for the integrity of their science and their patience with economic illiterates.

The first thing I gleaned from this little tutorial will probably not surprise you: There really is a textbook way to fix our current mess. Short-term stimulus works to help an economy recover from a recession. Some kinds of stimulus pay off more quickly than others. Once the economic heart is pumping again, we need to get our deficits under control. The way to do that is a balance of spending cuts, increased tax revenues and entitlement reforms. There is room to argue about the proportions and the timing, and small differences can produce large consequences, but the basic formula is not only common sense, it is mainstream economic science, tested many times in the real world.

So what’s the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear. Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.

But also, I’ve come to think something is rotten in the state of economics. The dismal science, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has been ravaged by the same virus that has corrupted the rest of our national discourse.

Back in the very pre-digital days, the writer A. J. Liebling famously remarked that freedom of the press was guaranteed only to the man who owned one. Nowadays, of course, freedom of the press belongs to anyone with Internet access, from the information guerrillas of WikiLeaks to the blogger next door. The democratization of media has diminished the authority once held — and sometimes abused — by a few big newspapers and broadcasters. In many ways this has enriched society, creating a great global buffet of information and opinion, pooling the knowledge of the masses and providing an almost instantaneous reality check on the conventional wisdom.

The consequences have not all been happy, though. The easiest way to stand out in such a vast crowd of microbroadcasters is to be the loudest, the angriest, the most outrageous. If you want that precious traffic, you stake out a position somewhere in oh-my-God territory and proclaim it with a vengeance. Global warming is a hoax! Vaccines make you sick! Obama is a Muslim! In vanquishing the conventional wisdom, sometimes it seems we have vanquished wisdom itself.

Economists don’t live in caves, so there is no reason they should be immune to the centrifugal politics of this noisy world. Thus serious scholars are tempted to sign onto ideas that stretch their own credulity, and lesser economists are thrust forward for their moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims. Economists cluster in ideological think tanks that promote political conformity rather than intellectual rigor. Politicians, with no generally accepted consensus to challenge them, can get away with plucking data out of context to bolster assertions that are based more on faith than on reality. Tax cuts pay for themselves! Protectionism saves jobs! It’s all the Fed’s fault! Deficits don’t matter! Obama is a socialist! Say it often enough and before long it’s a serious discussion on cable TV, in which the proven and the preposterous get the same respectful chin-wagging.

“Nobody who is taken seriously as an economist is going to say ‘cancel the Fed,’ ” said Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, and now Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser. “I find it very disturbing that the media is giving equal time to some ideas that are just crazy.”

The Web site PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-winning fact-checking service, recently did a thorough debunking of Republican claims that Obama’s 2009 stimulus program created, quote, “zero jobs.” In fact, the checkers established, using still-trustworthy sources like the Congressional Budget Office, that the stimulus created or saved a couple of million jobs. Case closed? No, the Republicans just went on repeating the claim.

“The talking points drive the discourse,” said Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact. “They repeat the talking points so often I think they start actually believing them.”

In the Internet age, anyone can be an expert, and anyone who says otherwise is an elitist.

The other day House Speaker John Boehner put out a list of 132 economists who signed a statement endorsing a Republican menu of spending cuts, tax cuts and deregulation. All of these are legitimate things to propose, but the statement claimed the Republican list “will do more to boost private-sector job growth in America in both the near-term and long-term than the ‘stimulus’ spending approach favored by President Obama.” Reputable number-crunchers like Moody’s Analytics and some top-tier economists of both parties said Boehner’s statement would have little or no impact on the short-term employment problem. So who were these 132 economists? With a few exceptions they were academics from off-the-beaten-path colleges (no offense to Dakota State University), bloggers (the Calafia Beach Pundit?) and economists from devoutly libertarian think tanks. But the news had the right-wing tom-toms beating with excitement.

“I’ve never in my professional life seen the disjunction between the political debate about economics and the consensus of economists be as large as it is today,” said Justin Wolfers, a Wharton School economist who favors Democrats, and who tweeted withering commentary on the list of 132.

Surely this dilution of authority contributes to our national paralysis. At the very least it befogs the discussion and fosters a pervasive cynicism.

Columbia’s Hubbard says the way to weed out the quackery is for serious economists to speak up when silly ideas get a political foothold. He’s right, but once a mainstream economist has settled comfortably into a party-line think tank or joined a candidate’s brain trust, or even enjoyed the adulation at partisan cocktail parties, a degree of self-censorship takes hold.

Of course, there have always been economists who leaned right or left — and some outright snake-oil salesmen — but until recently the public debate about economics pretty much stayed within the boundaries of accepted science. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have become conservative icons, John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson are stalwarts of the liberals, but in their lifetimes they all had a reverence for evidence (even if their acolytes did not).

Rereading some of the alternating, left-right weekly columns Samuelson and Friedman wrote for Newsweek in the 70s, I’ve been struck by their shared assumptions, and by the fact that the tone was so civil. It’s not hard to imagine both men signing on to the kind of grand bargain that keeps eluding Congress now. But if they were getting started in today’s media market, they would probably be obliged to amp up the vitriol, to sound like the old “Saturday Night Live” “Point-Counterpoint” parody:

“Paul, you pompous ass!”

“Milt, you ignorant slut!”

By Chris Hedges

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a
reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was
released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other
participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested
outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us
Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman
Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby
windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members.
They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords
of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security
personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret
police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the
ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh
them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street
demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the
onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman
Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were
the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had
seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo
and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above
bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages
of starvation and disease.

I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and
cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War brings with
it a host of horrors, including famine, but the worst is always the human
detritus that war and famine leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled
limbs and vacant eyes condemn us all. The wealthy and the powerful, the ones
behind the glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we
were a brief and odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from hoarding
and profit, from this collective sickness of money worship, as if we were
creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.

A glass tower filled with people carefully selected for the polish and
self-assurance that come with having been formed in institutions of privilege,
whose primary attributes are a lack of consciousness, a penchant for deception
and an incapacity for empathy or remorse. The curious onlookers behind the
windows and we, arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak
the same language. Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the
words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil.
Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Those
who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding commodities futures, doubled and
tripled the costs of wheat, rice and corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across
the globe are going hungry to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon,
learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively masks the reality
of what is happening—murder. These are words designed to make systems operate,
even systems of death, with a cold neutrality. Peace, love and all sane
affirmative speech in temples like Goldman Sachs are, as W.H. Auden understood, “soiled,
profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech.”

We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street
movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal
judgment. Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its
appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of
ruling principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of
natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive
acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions
of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit. The
corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms,
our newsrooms, our entertainment systems and our consciousness. This corporate
culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the
narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us
into compliant consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice. These corporate
machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in company
rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a childish optimism
and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate rituals, bolstered by retreats
and training seminars, by grueling days that sometimes end with initiates curled
up under their desks to sleep, ensure that only the most morally supine remain.
The strong and independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning
advance upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt writes, “the
rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel
form of rulership.”

Our political class, and its courtiers on the airwaves, insists that if we
refuse to comply, if we step outside of the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we
will make things worse. This game of accepting the lesser evil enables the
steady erosion of justice and corporate plundering. It enables corporations to
harvest the nation and finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into
neofeudalism, one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly
any action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime. It goes on until
corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the planet were not
worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth. It goes on until moral acts,
such as calling for those inside the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs to
be tried, see you jailed, and the crimes of financial fraud and perjury are
upheld as lawful and rewarded by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress.
And all this is done so a handful of rapacious, immoral plutocrats like Lloyd
Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who sucks down about $250,000 a day and who
lied to the U.S. Congress as well as his investors and the public, can use their
dirty money to retreat into their own Forbidden City or Versailles while their
underlings, basking in the arrogance of power, snap amusing photos of the rabble
outside their gates being hauled away by the police and company goons.

It is vital that the occupation movements direct attention away from their
encampments and tent cities, beset with the usual problems of hastily formed
open societies where no one is turned away. Attention must be directed through
street protests, civil disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that
are carrying out the assaults against the 99 percent. Banks, insurance
companies, courts where families are being foreclosed from their homes, city
offices that put these homes up for auction, schools, libraries and firehouses
that are being closed, and corporations such as General Electric that funnel
taxpayer dollars into useless weapons systems and do not pay taxes, as well as
propaganda outlets such as the New York Post and its evil twin, Fox News, which
have unleashed a vicious propaganda war against us, all need to be targeted,
shut down and occupied. Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is wrong
with global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose degradation and
destruction of human life are no less egregious.

It is always the respectable classes, the polished Ivy League graduates, the
prep school boys and girls who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., or Short Hills,
N.J., who are the most susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are at
least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable
citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,”
including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in
the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to
systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable
to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on
others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms mutate and change, as
the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal
of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one
set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system
work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.

Those who resist—the doubters, outcasts, renegades, skeptics and
rebels—rarely come from the elite. They ask different questions. They seek
something else—a life of meaning. They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If
justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search
they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong
than to do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally
defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It
refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life,
indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only
morally reliable people when the chips are down are not those who say “this is
wrong,” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.”

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never
given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them
back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving
in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing ourselves, so as
not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple
temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it
has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep
over the whole world.”

There are streaks in my lungs, traces of the tuberculosis that I picked up
around hundreds of dying Sudanese during the famine I covered as a foreign
correspondent. I was strong and privileged and fought off the disease. They were
not and did not. The bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug
mass graves. The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They
are the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women, to
fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to the doors
of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living. Those whose last breaths had marked
my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call
for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps
across the planet, could not make this journey. I see their faces. They haunt me
in the day and come to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me
choose sides. As the metal handcuffs were fastened around my wrists I thought of
them, as I often think of them, and I said to myself: “Free at last. Free at
last. Thank God almighty, I am free at last.”

I began my public journalism the same year you began your public advocacy, in
1971. Our paths often paralleled and sometimes crossed. Over these 40 years
journalism for me has been a continuing course in adult education, and I came
early on to consider the work you do as part of the curriculum – an open seminar
on how government works – and for whom. Your muckraking investigations – into
money and politics, corporate behavior, lobbying, regulatory oversight, public
health and safety, openness in government, and consumer protection, among others
– are models of accuracy and integrity. They drive home to journalists that
while it is important to cover the news, it is more important to uncover the
news. As one of my mentors said, “News is what people want to keep hidden;
everything else is publicity.” And when a student asked the journalist and
historian Richard Reeves for his definition of “real news”, he answered: “The
news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” You keep reminding us how crucial
that news is to democracy. And when the watchdogs of the press have fallen
silent, your vigilant growls have told us something’s up.

So I’m here as both citizen and journalist to thank you for all you have
done, to salute you for keeping the faith, and to implore you to fight on during
the crisis of hope that now grips our country. The great American experience in
creating a different future together – this “voluntary union for the common
good” – has been flummoxed by a growing sense of political impotence – what the
historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who
believe “the dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but who no longer
believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think
they have a political right to aspire to – a decline of individual self-respect
on the part of millions of Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to
produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write,
we advocate – and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest
aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray – yet the earth that is our
commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations,
continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests
to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political
equality – yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. . . .

. . . And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of
the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now
openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges,
is a common deference to cash.

So if belief in the “the dogma of democracy” seems only skin deep, there are
reasons for it. During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains a century
after the Constitution was ratified, the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease
exclaimed: “Wall Street owns the country…Our laws are the output of a system
which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie
to us and the political speakers mislead us…Money rules.”

That was 1890. Those agrarian populists boiled over with anger that
corporations, banks, and government were ganging up to deprive every day people
of their livelihood.

She should see us now.

John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total
obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. GOP once again means
Guardians of Privilege.

Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats”, then invites them to dine at a
pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The President has raised more
money from banks, hedge funds, and private equity managers than any Republican
candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them
while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.

Let’s name this for what it is: Democratic deviancy defined further downward.
Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of
power and policy – fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and
tactics of Tony Soprano.

Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters
keep scratching their heads and asking: “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they
are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And
that’s why in public places across the country workaday Americans are standing
up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march
in Iowa the other day? It read: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought
this sign.”

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that
when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions
in campaign contributions, they get what they want. They know that if you don’t
contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying,

…you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher
prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay
taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re
compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must
pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on
your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the
cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules,
while the government creates another set for your competitors… In contrast the
fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right
lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business
deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below
market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time
to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want
immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore
rules their competition must comply with, the government gives it approval. If
they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets
killed.

I didn’t crib that litany from Public Citizen’s muckraking investigations
over the years, although I could have. Nor did I lift it from Das Kapital by
Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. No, I was literally quoting Time
Magazine, long a tribune of America’s establishment media. From the bosom of
mainstream media comes the bald, spare, and damning conclusion: We now have
“government for the few at the expense of the many.”

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist-
friendly press. In the middle of the last decade – four years before the Great
Collapse of 2008 – the editors of The Economist warned:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble
in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first)
Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same
pace….Everywhere you look in modern America – in the Hollywood Hills or the
canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard
houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts – you see elites mastering the art of
perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain,
with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of
social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make
decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working
stiffs.

Hear the editors of The Economist: “The United States is on its way to
becoming a European-style class-based society.”

Can you imagine what would happen if I had said that on PBS? Mitch
McConnell and John Boehner would put Elmo and Big Bird under house arrest. Come
to think of it, I did say it on PBS back when Karl Rove was president, and there
was indeed hell to pay. You would have thought Che Guevara had run his motocryle
across the White House lawn. But I wasn’t quoting from a radical or even liberal
manifesto. I was quoting – to repeat – one of the business world’s most
respected journals. It is the editors of the The Economist who are warning us
that “ The United States is on its way to becoming a European-style class-based
society.”

And that was well before our financiers, drunk with greed and high on the
illusions and conceits of laissez faire (“leave us alone”) fundamentalism, and
humored by rented politicians who do their bidding, brought America to the edge
of the abyss and our middle class to its knees.

How could it be? How could this happen in the country whose framers spoke of
“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the same breath as political
equality? Democracy wasn’t meant to produce a class-ridden society. When that
son of French aristocracy Alexander de Tocqueville traveled through the bustling
young America of the 1830s, nothing struck him with greater force than “the
equality of conditions.” Tocqueville knew first-hand the vast divisions between
the wealth and poverty of Europe, where kings and feudal lords took what they
wanted and left peasants the crumbs. But Americans, he wrote, “seemed to be
remarkably equal economically.” “Some were richer, some were poorer, but within
a comparative narrow band. Moreover, individuals had opportunities to better
their economic circumstances over the course of a lifetime, and just about
everyone [except of course slaves and Indians] seemed to be striving for that
goal.” Tocqueville looked closely, and said: “I easily perceive the enormous
influence that this primary fact exercises on the workings of the society.”

And so it does. Evidence abounds that large inequalities undermine community
life, reduces trust among citizens, and increases violence. In one major study
from data collected over 30 years [by the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and
Kate Pickett in their book: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes
Societies Stronger] the most consistent predictor of mental illness, infant
mortality, educational achievements, teenage births, homicides, and
incarceration, is economic inequality. And as Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow has
written, “Vast inequalities of income weakens a society’s sense of mutual
concern…The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the
meaning of civilization.”

The historian Gordon Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on The
Radicalism of the American Revolution: If you haven’t read it, now’s the time.
Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous
free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their
pecuniary pursuits of happiness.” This democracy, he said, changed the lives “of
hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”

Those words moved me when I read them. They moved me because Henry and Ruby
Moyers were “common laboring people.” My father dropped out of the fourth grade
and never returned to school because his family needed him to pick cotton to
help make ends meet. Mother managed to finish the eighth grade before she
followed him into the fields. They were tenant farmers when the Great Depression
knocked them down and almost out. The year I was born my father was making $2 a
day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a
week in his working life, and made that only when he joined the union in the
last job he held. I was one of the poorest white kids in town, but in many
respects I was the equal of my friend who was the daughter of the richest man in
town. I went to good public schools, had use of a good public library, played
sand-lot baseball in a good public park, and traveled far on good public roads
with good public facilities to a good public university. Because these public
goods were there for us, I never thought of myself as poor. When I began to
piece the story together years later, I came to realize that people like the
Moyers had been included in the American deal: “We, the People” included us.

It’s heartbreaking to see what has become of that bargain. These days it’s
every man for himself; may be the richest and most ruthless predators win!

How did this happen?

You know the story, because it begins the very same year that you began your
public advocacy and I began my public journalism. 1971 was a seminal year.

On March 29 of that year, Ralph Nader bought ads in 13 publications and sent
out letters asking people if they would invest their talents, skills, and yes,
their lives, in working for the public interest. The seed sprouted swiftly that
spring: By the end of May over 60,000 Americans responded, and Public Citizen
was born.

But something else was also happening. Five months later, on August 23, 1971,
a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell – a board member of the death-dealing
tobacco giant Philip Morris and a future Justice of the United States Supreme
Court – sent a confidential memorandum to his friends at the U. S. Chamber of
Commerce. We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the
top down.

Let’s recall the context: Big Business was being forced to clean up its act.
It was bad enough to corporate interests that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had
sustained its momentum through Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy,
and Lyndon Johnson. Suddenly this young lawyer named Ralph Nader arrived on the
scene, arousing consumers with articles, speeches, and above all, an expose of
the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed. Young activists flocked to work
with him on health, environmental, and economic concerns. Congress was moved to
act. Even Republicans signed on. In l970 President Richard Nixon put his
signature on the National Environmental Policy Act and named a White House
Council to promote environmental quality. A few months later millions of
Americans turned out for Earth Day. Nixon then agreed to the creation of the
Environmental Protection Agency. Congress acted swiftly to pass tough new
amendments to the Clean Air Act and the EPA announced the first air pollution
standards. There were new regulations directed at lead paint and pesticides.
Corporations were no longer getting away with murder.

And Lewis Powell was shocked – shocked! – at what he called “an attack on the
American free enterprise system.” Not just from a few “extremists of the left,”
he said, but also from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including
the media, politicians, and leading intellectuals. Fight back, and fight back
hard, he urged his compatriots. Build a movement. Set speakers loose across the
country. Take on prominent institutions of public opinion – especially the
universities, the media, and the courts. Keep television programs under
“constant surveillance.” And above all, recognize that political power must be
“assiduously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used
aggressively and with determination” and “without embarrassment.”

Powell imagined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a council of war. Since
business executives had “little stomach for hard-nose contest with their
critics” and “little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate,”
they should create new think tanks, legal foundations, and front groups of every
stripe. It would take years, but these groups could, he said, be aligned into a
united front (that) would only come about through “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 united
organizations.”

You have to admit it was a brilliant strategy. Although Powell may not have
seen it at the time, he was pointing America toward plutocracy, where political
power is derived from the wealthy and controlled by the wealthy to protect their
wealth. As the only countervailing power to private greed and power, democracy
could no longer be tolerated.

While Nader’s recruitment of citizens to champion democracy was open for all
to see – depended, in fact, on public participation – Powell’s memo was for
certain eyes only, those with the means and will to answer his call to arms. The
public wouldn’t learn of the memo until after Nixon appointed Powell to the
Supreme Court and the enterprising reporter Jack Anderson obtained a copy,
writing that it may have been the reason for Powell’s appointment.

By then his document had circulated widely in corporate suites. Within two
years the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce formed a task force of 40
business executives – from U.S. Steel, GE, GM, Phillips Petroleum, 3M, Amway,
and ABC and CBS (two media companies, we should note). Their assignment was to
coordinate the crusade, put Powell’s recommendations into effect, and push the
corporate agenda. Powell had set in motion a revolt of the rich. As the
historian Kim Phillips-Fein subsequently wrote, “Many who read the memo cited it
afterward as inspiration for their political choices.”

Those choices came soon. The National Association of Manufacturers announced
it was moving its main offices from New York to Washington. In 1971, only 175
firms had registered lobbyists in the capital; by 1982, nearly twenty-five
hundred did. Corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over twelve
hundred by the middle of the l980s. From Powell’s impetus came the Business
Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage
Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound
Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity) and other
organizations united in pushing back against political equality and shared
prosperity.* They triggered an economic transformation that would in time touch
every aspect of our lives.

Powell’s memo was delivered to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its
headquarters across from the White House on land that was formerly the home of
Daniel Webster. That couldn’t have been more appropriate. History was coming
full circle at 1615 H Street. Webster is remembered largely as the most eloquent
orator in America during his years as Senator from Massachusetts and Secretary
of State under three presidents in the years leading up to the Civil War. He was
also the leading spokesman for banking and industry nabobs who funded his
extravagant tastes in wine, boats, and mistresses. Some of them came to his
relief when he couldn’t cover his debts wholly from bribes or the sale of
diplomatic posts for personal gain. Webster apparently regarded the merchants
and bankers of Boston’s State Street Corporation – one of the country’s first
financial holding companies – very much as George W. Bush regarded the high
rollers he called “my base.” The great orator even sent a famous letter to
financiers requesting retainers from them that he might better serve them. The
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wondered how the American people could follow
Webster “through hell or high water when he would not lead unless someone made
up a purse for him.”

No wonder the U.S. Chamber of Commerce feels right as home with the landmark
designation of its headquarters. 1615 H Street now masterminds the laundering of
multi-millions of dollars raised from captains of industry and private wealth to
finance – secretly – the political mercenaries who fight the class war in their
behalf.

Even as the Chamber was doubling its membership and tripling its budget in
response to Lewis Powell’s manifesto, the coalition got another powerful jolt of
adrenalin from the wealthy right-winger who had served as Nixon’s secretary of
the treasury, William Simon. His polemic entitled A Time for Truth argued that
“funds generated by business” must “rush by multimillions” into conservative
causes to uproot the institutions and “the heretical strategy” [his term] of the
New Deal. He called on “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount “a
veritable crusade” against progressive America. Business Week magazine somberly
explained that “…it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea
of doing with less so that big business can have move.”

I’m not making this up.

And so it came to pass; came to pass despite your heroic efforts and those of
other kindred citizens; came to pass because those “men of action in the
capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes,
more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They
were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else. And they succeeded
beyond their own expectations. After their 40-year “veritable crusade” against
our institutions, laws and regulations – against the ideas, norms and beliefs
that helped to create America’s iconic middle class – the Gilded Age is back
with a vengeance.

You know these things, of course, because you’ve been up against that
“veritable crusade” all these years. But if you want to see the story pulled
together in one compelling narrative, read this – perhaps the best book on
politics of the last two years: Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made
the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Two accomplished
political scientists wrote it: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson – the Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science, who wanted to know how America had
turned into a society starkly divided into winners and losers.

Mystified by what happened to the notion of “shared prosperity” that marked
the years after World War II;

puzzled that over the last generation more and more wealth has gone to the
rich and superrich, while middle-class and working people are left barely
hanging on;

vexed that hedge-fund managers pulling down billions can pay a lower tax rate
than their pedicurists, manicurists, cleaning ladies and chauffeurs;

curious as to why politicians keep slashing taxes on the very rich even as
they grow richer, and how corporations keep being handed huge tax breaks and
subsidies even as they fire hundreds of thousands of workers;

troubled that the heart of the American Dream – upward mobility – seems to
have stopped beating;

astounded that the United States now leads in the competition for the gold
medal for inequality;

and dumbfounded that all this could happen in a democracy whose politicians
are supposed to serve the greatest good for the greatest number, and must
regularly face the judgment of citizens at the polls if they haven’t done
so;

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wanted to find out “how our economy stopped
working to provide prosperity and security for the broad middle class.” They
wanted to know: “Who dunnit?”

They found the culprit: “It’s the politics, stupid!” Tracing the clues back
to that “unseen revolution” of the 1970s – the revolt triggered by Lewis Powell,
fired up by William Simon, and fueled by rich corporations and wealthy
individuals – they found that ‘Step by step and debate by debate America’s
public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American
economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many.”

There you have it: they bought off the gatekeepers, got inside, and gamed the
system. And when the fix was in, they let loose the animal spirits. turning our
economy into a feast for predators. And they won – as the rich and powerful got
richer and more powerful – they not only bought the government, they “saddled
Americans with greater debt, tore new holes in the safety net, and imposed broad
financial risks on workers, investors, and taxpayers.” Until – write Hacker and
Pierson – “The United States is looking more and more like the capitalist
oligarchies of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia where most of the wealth is
concentrated at the top while the bottom grows later and larger with everyone in
between just barely getting by.”

The revolt of the plutocrats has now been ratified by the Supreme Court in
its notorious Citizens United decision last year. Rarely have so few imposed
such damage on so many. When five pro-corporate conservative justices gave
“artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing
human beings, they told our corporate sovereigns “the sky’s the limit” when it
comes to their pouring money into political campaigns. The Roberts Court
embodies the legacy of pro-corporate bias in justices determined to prevent
democracy from acting as a brake on excessive greed and power in the private
sector. Wealth acquired under capitalism is in and of itself no enemy of
democracy, but wealth armed with political power – power to shake off
opportunities for others to rise – is a proven danger. Thomas Jefferson had
hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of
strength and [to] bid defiance to the laws of our country.” James Madison feared
that the “spirit of speculation” would lead to “a government operating by
corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of
public duty.”

Jefferson and Madison didn’t live to see reactionary justices fulfill their
worst fears. In 1886 a conservative court conferred the divine gift of life on
the Southern Pacific Railroad. Never mind that the Fourteenth Amendment
declaring that no person should be deprived of “life, liberty or property
without due process of law” was enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves.
The Court decided to give the same rights of “personhood” to corporations that
possessed neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned. For over half a
century the Court acted to protect the privileged. It gutted the Sherman
Antitrust Act by finding a loophole for a sugar trust. It killed a New York
state law limiting working hours. Likewise a ban against child labor. It wiped
out a law that set minimum wages for women. And so on: one decision after
another aimed at laws promoting the general welfare.” The Roberts Court has
picked up the mantle: Moneyed interests first, the public interest second, if at
all.

The ink was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce organized a covertly funded front and rained drones packed with cash
into the 2010 campaigns. According to the Sunlight Foundation, corporate front
groups spent $126 million in the fall of 2010 while hiding the identities of the
donors. Another corporate cover group – the American Action Network – spent over
$26 million of undisclosed corporate money in just six Senate races and 26 House
elections. And Karl Rove’s groups – American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS – seized
on Citizens United to raise and spend at least $38 million that NBC News said
came from “a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and
private equity moguls”– all determined to water down financial reforms designed
to prevent another collapse of the financial system. Jim Hightower has said it
well: Today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy “have simply elevated money
itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash as the real coin of political
power.”

No wonder so many Americans have felt that sense of political impotence of
the historian Lawrence Goodwyn described as “the mass resignation” of people who
believe in the “dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but whose
hearts no longer burn with the conviction that they are part of the deal.
Against such odds, discouragement comes easily.

But if the generations before us had given up, slaves would still be waiting
on these tables, on Election Day women would still be turned away from the
voting booths, and workers would still be committing a crime if they
organized.

So once again: Take heart from the past and don’t ever count the people out.
During the last quarter of the 19th century, the industrial revolution created
extraordinary wealth at the top and excruciating misery at the bottom. Embattled
citizens rose up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist
William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting,
that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new
relation should be established between the haves and have-nots.” Not content to
wring their hands and cry “Woe is us” everyday citizens researched the issues,
organized to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned
and canvassed, marched and marched again. They ploughed the fields and planted
the seeds – sometimes in bloody soil – that twentieth century leaders used to
restore “the general welfare” as a pillar of American democracy. They laid down
the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum
wages, child labor laws, workmen’s safety and compensation laws, pure foods and
safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare, and rules that promote competitive
markets over monopolies and cartels. Remember: Democracy doesn’t begin at the
top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to
rekindle the patriot’s dream.

The Pariot’s Dream? Arlo Guthrie, remember? He wrote could be the unofficial
anthem of Zucotti Park. Listen up:

Living now here but for fortune
Placed by fate’s mysterious
schemes
Who’d believe that we’re the ones asked
To try to rekindle the
patriot’s dreams

Arise sweet destiny, time runs short
All of your patience has heard their
retort
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle the
patriot’s dreams
Can you hear the words being whispered

All along the American stream
Tyrants freed the just are imprisoned
Try
to rekindle the patriot’s dreams

Ah but perhaps too much is being asked of too few
You and your children
with nothing to do
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle
the patriot’s dreams

Who, in these cynical times, when democracy is on the ropes and the blows
of great wealth pound and pound and pound again against America’s body politic –
who would dream such a radical thing?

The Bonus Army veterans stage a mass vigil on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol in 1932. (Photo: MPI/Getty Images)

During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over�alone, in groups, with families�until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army�for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre�New Deal entitlement�especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist �Radio Priest� who became a phenomenon for railing against �greedy bankers and financiers,� framed Washington’s double standard this way: �If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?�

The echoes of our own Great Recession do not end there. Both parties were alarmed by this motley assemblage and its political rallies; the Secret Service infiltrated its ranks to root out radicals. But a good Communist was hard to find. The men were mostly middle-class, patriotic Americans. They kept their improvised hovels clean and maintained small gardens. Even so, good behavior by the Bonus Army did not prevent the U.S. Army’s hotheaded chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, from summoning an overwhelming force to evict it from Pennsylvania Avenue late that July. After assaulting the veterans and thousands of onlookers with tear gas, �MacArthur’s troops crossed the bridge and burned down the encampment. The general had acted against Hoover’s wishes, but the president expressed satisfaction afterward that the government had dispatched �a mob��albeit at the cost of killing two of the demonstrators. The public had another take. When graphic newsreels of the riotous mêlée fanned out to the nation’s movie theaters, audiences booed MacArthur and his troops, not the men down on their luck. Even the mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond and wife of the proprietor of the Washington Post, professed solidarity with the �mob� that had occupied the nation’s capital.

The Great Depression was then nearly three years old, with FDR still in the wings and some of the worst deprivation and unrest yet to come. Three years after our own crash, we do not have the benefit of historical omniscience to know where 2011 is on the time line of America’s deepest bout of economic distress since that era. (The White House, you may recall, rolled out �recovery summer� sixteen months ago.) We don’t know if our current president will end up being viewed more like Hoover or FDR. We don’t know whether Occupy Wall Street and its proliferating satellites will spiral into larger and more violent confrontations, disperse in cold weather, prove a footnote to our narrative, or be the seeds of something big.

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-�American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause�and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them �an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.� Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.

Despite such dismissals, the movement, abetted by made-for-YouTube confrontations with police, started to connect with the mass public much as the Bonus Army did with a newsreel audience. The week after a Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that �no one seems to care very much� about the �collection of ne’er-do-wells� congregating in Zuccotti Park, the paper released its own poll, in collaboration with NBC News, finding that 37 percent of Americans supported the protesters, 25 percent had no opinion, and just 18 percent opposed them. The approval numbers for Occupy Wall Street published in Time and Reuters were even higher—hitting 54 percent in Time. Apparently some of those dopey kids, staggering under student loans and bereft of job prospects, have lots of parents and friends of all ages who understand exactly what they’re talking about.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators asleep in Zuccotti Park. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Coverage increased and politicians ran for cover. Mayor Bloomberg, who had initially (and preposterously) portrayed the occupiers as a threat to the financial industry’s lower-income service workers, gingerly observed that some unspecified �people� are �very frustrated.� Though the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, replied with a flat �no� when asked if he had any sympathy for Occupy Wall Street, Barack Obama publicly acknowledged the demonstrators’ �broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.� (If Bloomberg and Obama are both using �frustration,� you can be certain it is a focus-group-tested trope chosen not to frighten the presumed sensibilities of independents.) Mitt Romney, who had first called the protests �dangerous,” executed another of his patented flip-flops to assert that he, too, identifies with America’s 99 percent, not the top one percent where he’s always dwelled. �Boy, I understand how these people feel,� he said. (Boy, do �these people� not believe him.) Even Eric Cantor, who’d described the protesters as �mobs,� started talking about�what else?��frustration.�

 

These efforts to domesticate and contain the protests are unlikely to succeed. It is not frustration that’s roiling America but anger, the anger of a full-fledged class war. Try as polite company keeps trying to ignore it, that war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008. But the crisp agenda demanded of Occupy Wall Street will not be forthcoming. The inchoateness of our particular class war is central to its meaning. America is not Tahrir Square or the riot-scarred precincts of North London, where everyone knows at birth who is in which class and why. We pride ourselves on being a �classless” democracy. We abhor ideology. When Americans left and right, young and old, express anger at an overclass, they don’t necessarily agree about who’s on which side of that class divide. The often confusing fluidity of class definitions, especially in an America as polarized as ours is now, may make our home�grown class war more volatile, not less.

 

The tea-party right finds the hippie-scented movement in lower Manhattan repellent, but it and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin. �Take Back America,� the initial tea-party battle cry, would work for those in Zuccotti Park as well. The disagreement is about which America needs to be taken back, and from whom.

 

 

Provoked by Obama’s ascent, the right was ahead of the class-war curve, with Sarah Palin sounding the charge when she stuck up for �the real America� against the elites during the 2008 campaign. The real America, as she defined it, was in small towns��those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food.� In other words: It is the middle class (or at least its white precincts) that fell behind while the rich got richer. The Über-class she and her angry followers would take to the guillotine, however, is not defined by its super-wealth. It is first and foremost exemplified by potentates in the federal government, especially the Ivy League cohort of Obama�closely followed by the usual right-wing populist bogeymen, the pointy-headed experts in fancy universities and the mainstream-�media royalty with their �gotcha� questions.

 

Palin may now have abdicated her position on the barricades, not least because she succumbed to the financial blandishments of the unreal America, but the zeal of her constituency has not faded a bit. The right’s angry class warriors constitute the vast majority of the GOP�that roughly three-�quarters of the party that seems determined to resist Romney no matter what. A Harvard-educated former Massachusetts governor, especially one who embraced the social engineering of health-care reform, inspires class anger from his own party to the same degree that his private-sector record as a leveraged-buyout tycoon provokes class anger from Democrats.

 

But while Romney is a class enemy liberals and conservatives can unite against, perhaps nothing has revealed how much the class warriors of the right and left of our time have in common than the national outpouring after Steve Jobs’s death. Indeed, the near-universal over-the-top emotional response�more commensurate with a saintly religious or civic leader, not a sometimes bullying captain of industry�brought Americans of all stripes together as few events have in recent memory.

 

Some on the right were baffled that the ostensible Marxists demonstrating in lower Manhattan would observe a moment of silence and assemble makeshift shrines for a top one-percenter like Jobs, whose expensive products were engineered for near-�instant obsolescence and produced by Chinese laborers in factories with substandard health-and-safety records. For heaven’s sake, the guy didn’t even join Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in their Giving Pledge. �There is perhaps no greater image of irony,� wrote the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, �than that of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-materialist extremists of the Occupy Wall Street movement paying tribute to Steve Jobs.�

There’s no handier way to track just how much American capitalism has changed since Apple’s divine, mid-�seventies birth in a garage than by following the corporate afterlife of the American icon most frequently invoked as Jobs’s antecedent in his obituaries, Thomas Alva Edison. Like Jobs, Edison wasn’t just a brilliant fount of technological breakthroughs but a businessman as well (albeit a less savvy one). He was the official founder of General Electric�known as Edison General Electric at its inception in 1890, before Edison was strong-armed into an early merger. G.E. was created to maximize the profits of his many inventions and businesses, Apple style. And like Apple, the company flourished as an exemplar of American capitalism at its most creative and productive, even in a downtime. During the Great Depression, it produced an astonishing array of Jobs-worthy �innovations�the first commercial fluorescent lamp, the first waste �Disposall,� the first night baseball game, and the first television network. This was the job-�creating, profit-making, America-�empowering corporate behemoth, spewing out refrigerators and jet engines, that would ultimately recruit Ronald Reagan as its television pitchman in the fifties.

But the G.E. born out of Edison’s genius and synergistic with Reagan’s brand of postwar jingoism is far from the G.E. of our time. Its once minor financial-services subsidiary, G.E. Capital, metastasized over the past 30 years in sync with the growth of the new Wall Street. In 1990, G.E. Capital accounted for just a quarter of G.E.’s overall profits, but by 2007, on the eve of the crash, it had gobbled up 55 percent of the bottom line. Its sophisticated gambling strategies, like those of the big banks it emulated, amounted to an ingenious get-rich-quick scheme for high-rollers until the bottom fell out, taking shareholders and employees, not to mention the country, down with it. G.E. Capital’s dependence on short-term credit was so grave that it forced G.E. to cut back its dividend for the first time since the thirties and to turn to Buffett for a $3 billion emergency cash infusion in the dark days of October 2008.

The cheerleader for ratcheting up that risk at G.E. was the CEO, Jeffrey Immelt. These days he heads the president’s ineffectual Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, despite his own corporation’s record of job-shedding in America and the revelation that G.E. paid no American taxes in 2010 (on more than $14 billion in profits, including $5.1 billion in the U.S.). Immelt is a Republican, but that didn’t prevent Palin this fall from calling G.E. �the poster child of corporate welfare and crony capitalism.� (Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich joined this class-warfare chorus.) On this point, once again, there is no air between the right and Occupy Wall Street. And as both camps condemn Immelt, so they are also united in the conviction that the godfather of Obama’s economic team, Robert Rubin, is likewise a poster child for corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Rubin, whose useful cronies included his former protégés Geithner and Lawrence Summers, encouraged reckless greed and risk at Citigroup during the bubble much as Immelt did at G.E. Capital, ultimately requiring the taxpayers’ rescue of TARP.

By Chris Hedges

There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and
plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by
the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose
abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class,
have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union
leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they
bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do
Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of
“liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to
funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked
those who called for profound structural reform.

Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a
couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning
forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down
from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises. These
protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional “liberal”
establishment has steadily refused to do—fight back. And it was deeply moving to
watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street. It lent a
whole new meaning to the phrase “too big to fail.”

Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged
into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from
corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the
corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is
desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It
collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions
of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that
liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups
such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency
unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters’ arrival
Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new
radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement
by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no
choice.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated
the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make
concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral
imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of
responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not
seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It
can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of
dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices,
often at personal risk, to fight back. It has no other way of defying the
corporate state. This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or
virtual one. It affirms our dignity. It permits us to become free and
independent human beings.

Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially
when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that
liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices.
King too was a radical. He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or
justice. He understood that movements—such as the Liberty Party, which fought
slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women’s rights, the labor movement and
the civil rights movement—have always been the true correctives in American
democracy. None of those movements achieved formal political power. But by
holding fast to moral imperatives they made the powerful fear them. King knew
that racial equality was impossible without economic justice and an end to
militarism. And he had no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal
establishment that called on him to be calm and patient.

“For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in
the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King said shortly
before he was assassinated. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to
have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.”

King was killed in 1968 when he was in Memphis to support a strike by
sanitation workers. By then he had begun to say that his dream, the one that the
corporate state has frozen into a few safe clichés from his 1963 speech in
Washington, had turned into a nightmare. King called at the end of his life for
massive federal funds to rebuild inner cities, what he called “a radical
redistribution of economic and political power,” a complete restructuring of
“the architecture of American society.” He grasped that the inequities of
capitalism had become the instrument by which the poor would always remain
poor.

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” King said, “but there
must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s
children.”

On the eve of King’s murder he was preparing to organize a poor people’s
march on Washington, D.C., designed to cause “major, massive dislocations,” a
nonviolent demand by the poor, including the white underclass, for a system of
economic equality. It would be 43 years before his vision was realized by an
eclectic group of protesters who gathered before the gates of Wall Street.

The truth of America is understood only when you listen to voices in our
impoverished rural enclaves, prisons and the urban slums, when you hear the
words of our unemployed, those who have lost their homes or cannot pay their
medical bills, our elderly and our children, especially the quarter of the
nation’s children who depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are
marginalized. There is more reality expressed about the American experience by
the debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all the
chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the airwaves.

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and
Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below
the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold
sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to
save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its
mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons
its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind
of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own
citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the
ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s
children?

“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”

“The black vote mean [nothing],” the rapper Nas intones. “Who
you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan?/ In the hood nothing is changing/ We ain’t got
no choices.”

Or listen to hip-hop artist Talib Kweli: “Back in the ’60s, there was a big
push for black … politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but
our communities are so much worse. A lot of people died for us to vote, I’m
aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at
all. Politics is not the truth to me, it’s an illusion.”

The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a
safety valve. It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact. It makes
piecemeal and incremental reform possible. This is what happened during the
Great Depression and the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest
achievement was that he saved capitalism. Liberals in a functioning capitalist
democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is
King, especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or
Ralph Nader.

The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense
with the liberal class. It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order
to loot and pillage with no impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal
class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction
of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty
rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets.
Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they
acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless
political theater. But that game is over.

Human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power
become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power,
they are brutally discarded. The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its
positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional
role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised appendage of
corporate power. And as the engines of corporate power pollute and poison the
ecosystem and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs,
the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being
abandoned and discarded by both the corporate state and radical dissidents. The
best it can do is attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising
up to replace it.

An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope of a correction or a
reversal through the formal mechanisms of power. It ensures that the frustration
and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression now in
these protests that lie outside the confines of democratic institutions and the
civilities of a liberal democracy. By emasculating the liberal class, which once
ensured that restive citizens could institute moderate reforms, the corporate
state has created a closed system defined by polarization, gridlock and
political charades. It has removed the veneer of virtue and goodness that the
liberal class offered to the power elite.

Liberal institutions, including the church, the press, the university, the
Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions, set the parameters for limited
self-criticism in a functioning democracy as well as small, incremental reforms.
The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion
basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a
morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the
conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues
and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

But the liberal class, by having refused to question the utopian promises of
unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed
itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could
have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite.
The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role
left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance. All hope lies now
with those in the street.

Liberals lack the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market
ideologies. They have no ideological alternatives even as the Democratic Party
openly betrays every principle the liberal class claims to espouse, from
universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy to a demand for
quality and affordable public education to a return of civil liberties to a
demand for jobs and welfare of the working class. The corporate state forced the
liberal class to join in the nation’s death march that began with the presidency
of Ronald Reagan. Liberals such as Bill Clinton, for corporate money,
accelerated the dismantling of our manufacturing base, the gutting of our
regulatory agencies, the destruction of our social service programs and the
empowerment of speculators who have trashed our economy. The liberal class,
stripped of power, could only retreat into its atrophied institutions, where it
busied itself with the boutique activism of political correctness and embraced
positions it had previously condemned.

Russell Jacoby
writes: “The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the
market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as
exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored
independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The
left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We
are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps
inversion.”

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism comes with the return of the language
of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon
of the liberal class, language that defines this new movement. This does not
mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship
of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the
working class, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx
employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are
not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress,
kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the
uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the
ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the
global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that
seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power. And, as
Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater
and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The dead zone in
the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is part
of the same nightmare experienced in postindustrial mill towns of New England
and the abandoned steel mills of Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis
and Afghans, living in terror and mourning their dead, endure daily.

What took place early Friday morning in Zuccotti Park was the first salvo in
a long struggle for justice. It signaled a step backward by the corporate state
in the face of popular pressure. And it was carried out by ordinary men and
women who sleep at night on concrete, get soaked in rainstorms, eat donated food
and have nothing as weapons but their dignity, resilience and courage. It is
they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation. And if we join
them we might have a chance.

By

Published: February 11, 2011

In a recent article in Truthdig, Christopher Ketcham reports on Vermont State Senator Virginia Lyons’ introduction of a resolution for passage in the Vermont Legislature. The resolution would amend the United States Constitution to provide that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States. This in response to the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision that gave corporations as “persons,” accorded the right to free speech under the first amendment, the right spend unlimited money to influence elections.

According to Ketcham, “the language in the Lyons resolution is unabashed.” It states that: “The profits and institutional survival of large corporations are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings.”

He quotes from the resolution, which, according to his sources, has a good chance of passing the Vermont legislature:

“Democratically elected governments” are rendered “ineffective in protecting their citizens against corporate harm to the environment, health, workers, independent business, and local and regional economies.” The resolution goes on to note that “large corporations own most of America’s mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities.”

Denouncing this situation as an “intolerable societal reality,” the document concludes that the “only way” toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution “to define persons as human beings.”

Justice Stevens, in his dissent to the Citizen’s United decision, had this to say:

The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind. (37)

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.  It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics. (90)

The science fiction qualities of the corporate super-person

To help underscore the dangerous consequences of the Citizen’s United decision, Ketcham describes the “weird metaphysics” of corporate personhood, which is at the heart of the decision. His characterization has the tone of a science fiction novel:

This astonishing fictional “person,” accorded all the rights of a human, can split off pieces of itself to form new fictional persons, can marry many other similar persons in a process called a merger, is immortal, can change its name and identity overnight, and can aggregate gigantic streams of capital with which it somehow has the right to speak. Strangely enough, the corporate person, who has neither soul nor body, is at the same time owned by many other persons called shareholders who buy and sell its parts every day—it is owned, in fact, much the way a slave is owned.

He goes on to define the reality in which we now live—one in which corporations enjoy the protections accorded individuals in the Bill of Rights but immunity from the often times destructive consequences of their actions. According to Ketcham, this fictional corporate person is one who can:

shut down whole communities by driving out business, can spread cancers in the air and water, can destroy fisheries or lay waste to forests, and do all of this with a degree of impunity provided under the vaunted protections of the Bill of Rights. The best-known and most insidious of these rights is that which allows the corporation under the First Amendment to speak freely using money—yet another twist of metaphysics masquerading as law, and one that has not gone unnoticed by the highest jurists in the land. . .

Mere humans are arrayed against a dangerous automaton army, the army of the fictional corporate super-persons that deploy power with real-world consequences. If corporate hegemony is rightly understood as the overarching threat to world democracy today—the threat from which all other threats derive when governments stand captured by corporatocracies—then it is the absurdist legality of corporate personhood that serves as the functional lever of that hegemony.

Vermont will be the first state to introduce at the legislative level a statement of principles that corporations are not persons and do not have constitutional rights. Ketcham quotes constitutional lawyer David Cobb who helped draft the resolution, “This is how a movement gets started. It’s the beginning of a revolutionary action completely and totally within the legal framework.”

According to a February, 2010 ABC News poll, 8 in 10 respondents oppose the Citizens United decision. Overturning Citizen’s United by way of a constitutional amendment may be the one single act that can restore democracy to the United States.

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

So let’s see: The solution to large-scale abuses of the financial system, a
breakdown of the private sector, extreme economic inequality and the failure of
companies and individuals to invest and create jobs is—well, to give even more
money and power to very wealthy people, to disable government and to trust those
who got us into the mess to get us out of it.

That’s a brief summary of the news from the Republican Party this week. It’s
what Republican candidates said during the Washington Post-Bloomberg debate, and
it’s the signal Senate Republicans sent in voting as a bloc against President
Obama’s jobs bill. Don’t just do something, stand there.

Those who have plenty of capital to invest are holding back because consumers
don’t have enough cash. But let’s not give potential middle-class buyers jobs
and money to spend. No, let’s heap yet more resources onto investors. And if
sharp guys made fortunes writing abusive mortgages, let’s repeal all the rules
we just passed to prevent them from doing the same thing again.

Better yet, don’t blame the people who got the windfalls. Blame poor people.
Thus did Rep. Michele Bachmann place responsibility for the mortgage mess on the
Community Reinvestment Act, a law aimed at preventing discrimination against
people in neighborhoods, many of them predominantly African-American, where
banks wouldn’t make loans. The CRA had nothing to do with the proliferation of
subprime mortgages; old-fashioned greed did the trick there. But it’s so much
easier to pass the buck to the powerless. They don’t make many campaign
contributions.

Then there is Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, the only policy proposal to get
really serious attention at Tuesday’s encounter. The biggest flaw in Cain’s
scheme barely got discussed. It is designed to shift the tax burden away
from the wealthy and toward the middle class and the poor by cutting income,
corporate, capital gains and estate taxes. It would then collect a lot of new
money from a 9 percent federal sales tax, layered on top of existing sales
taxes. Plutocracy, thy name is 9-9-9.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who dominated the debate, is much
smoother than his adversaries. He even had some good words for the struggling
middle class and spoke with concern about getting health insurance to children.
(Romney’s desire to provide poor kids with a chance to see a doctor will surely
bring down upon the architect of Obamneycare charges of socialism.)

For the most part, though, Romney was selling the same wares as everyone
else. “The answer is to cut federal spending,” he said. “The answer is to cap
how much the federal government can spend as a percentage of our economy and
have a balanced budget amendment.” But wait: This was the answer to every
question that was posed in New Hampshire. There’s no problem that can’t be
solved if the federal government just does absolutely nothing about it.

And thus spoke Republicans in the Senate on the same day as the debate. In
any other democracy, we would say that Obama’s jobs bill passed its first test
in the Senate because 51 out of 100 senators were for moving it along. But not
in America, where we now require 60 votes to get a bill out of the
Senate—despite the fact that our Constitution, supposedly so revered by
conservative “strict constructionists,” says absolutely nothing about a Senate
supermajority.

The jobs bill is a pretty simple mix of tax cuts and spending on popular
items such as schools and roads. Its core idea accords with what the vast
majority of economists (and a lot of business people) think needs to be done
now: In the absence of private-sector investment and job creation, the federal
government should be the investor of last resort to get the economy moving. This
should be an urgent priority with unemployment stuck at more than 9 percent.

But no, “don’t do something, stand there” is the order of the day. Every
Republican senator present voted to block the jobs bill. Government is to be
powerless because the country’s most energetic ideological minority has declared
that it must be powerless.

Years ago, Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat much maligned during
the Post/Bloomberg debate, introduced me to the concept of the “Reverse
Houdinis.” They are people who tie themselves up in knots and then declare, “I
can’t do anything because I’m all tied up in knots.” We seem on the verge of
putting Reverse Houdinis in charge of our government.

By Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall
Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you
stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left
to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall
Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human
species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste,
feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of
despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing,
where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and
women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation
and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even
habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a
commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be
complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am
innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help
the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in
times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim
DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to
crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will
spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of
white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with
pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on
every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the
mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to
gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside
those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century
was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial
markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even
better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed
the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin
oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists
who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown
out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people
a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die
from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20
percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt
peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a
world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling
every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to
Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let
the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed
rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live
in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects
of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to
swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police,
firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the
unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines,
subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising
temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the
droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned
water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or
Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they
chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks.
If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will
kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are
too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So
either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state,
for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea
that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are
frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope.
They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it
requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete
every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut
butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone
to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung,
talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the
office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they
will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the
corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among
us.