To Shore Up The 1% They Were Willing To Destroy Democracy

They hate the government for taxing them and regulating them, so they decided to destroy it, which means they decided to destroy our democracy because that’s the kind of government we have here.

It began in the 70s with a memo Lewis Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce. Workers had rights, polluters were being regulated, corporations didn’t like being taxed and regulated by a public sector that inhibited them from predatory practices.

You can read up on Lewis Powell at Bill Moyers' website, and learn more about Powell's influential memo that stole the economy back for the plutocrats. Powell went on to sit on the Supreme Court and help convert it into a law firm for the wealthy.

In the 70s the super-rich decided enough was enough and decided to fight back.

Slowly, over the past 3 or 4 decades, workers’ incomes have flatlined and infrastructure, schools, and trusted institutions have been deliberately degraded.

The Right knew that the only way to destroy democratic government was to defund it, degrade it, discredit it, make it not work, make people distrust and dislike it.

Now the Congress is owned by the people who own for a living. The Court works for the people who own for a living. And the president is one of the people who own for a living.

The Citizens United court ruling turned democracy into a proxy operation by which ordinary people voted for their government but wealthy corporate clubs owned and operated one major party and dominated the Supreme Court through the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and a whole zoo of upliftingly and patriotically and vaguely named non-profits devoted to free market absolutism.

Bill Moyers has some very good analysis of the powerful octopus of tax-free lobbying operations led by Heritage.

They had a single goal: the total levitation of the owning classes above the bothersome social responsibilities that constitute citizenship, the stuff contained in the social contract by which you contribute of yourself and expect decency and fair play in return. The corporate absolutists who drove this Big Idea felt no obligations beyond themselves and felt the average citizen and his or her government owed them absolute freedom of action and total obedience. When you’re very very big and powerful your dreams are big too. The 1% now own the world.

Did The Lewis Powell Memo Create This Mess?

History unfolds from hinge moments. I have been wondering lately about the Lewis Powell memo and what larger things have unfolded from it. If a private memo is a small thing consider its effects if it galvanizes far greater powers and undoes important precedents.

Did the Powell memo (and the doctrine that it made) make corporate and wealthy America immune to their obligations to society, enabling them to levitate away from tax obligations and the necessary support and protection of institutions and infrastructure and the environment? Did it enable them to hoist (permanently, it appears) the justice system and the financial apparatus out of the reach of the vast majority of Americans? Did it then enable the justice system and financial system to be reorganized to prey on the wider population rather than serving it? (Granted, the law has a recurring habit of acting to protect property from people, to become an instrument of property without a primary obligation to people.)

Did the Powell memo make corporations and the belief system of wealthy Americans immune to inconvenient science? Did it make science subservient to the profit imperative? Did the Powell memo obligate all businesspeople to ignore and defy any science that might diminish their profits? Not just reverse their profits but cut into them. Did the Powell memo lead to the mindset that made the profit imperative the single obligation, the only sacred idea?

I got on this train of thought after seeing the story this morning where NASA scientists are now convinced climate change will unfold more suddenly and devastatingly than previously thought. That is moreso than we were previously led to think by the corporate deniers. I began to think how colossally stupid we’ve become in the space of a few decades. What was the off button on the American genius? I think it was the Powell memo’s assertion of money, overruling intelligent discourse. (The assertion of what I’ve called Moneythink on my blog. A dangerously corrupt and corrupting philosophy, if you can call it a philosophy.)

Business and Money and Markets and Corporations and the whole apparatus of our financial side used to obey basic norms to correct folly and regulate the “animal spirits” that cause problems. Those regulators were turned off subsequent to the assertion of corporate power and veto that followed the Powell memo.

One chief example of a useful regulator that was turned off is the insurance industry, which was bought and harnessed by large financial companies and told to make its functions serve the profit of the larger company rather than do its job, which was to place a cost on risks. The insurance business didn’t raise the costs of insuring harbor facilities or coastal properties or the longer term risks climate change represented to our agricultural infrastructure (civilizations are based upon reliable climate, and our civilization is therefore at high risk.) The insurance industry was told to keep its mouth shut and to tailor its charges for risk to suit the profit demands of the shareholders and the corporate parent, which probably was investing decades of premiums in very profitable fossil fuel investments.

If nothing else, the Powell memo gave Money a veto over Reason. It allowed the shareholder class to veto the warnings of scientists in the matter of climate change and to veto the legitimate demands and grievances of people who work for a living because they might limit the return on investment to people who own for a living. The only loyalty was to return on investment, no other obligation mattered. That was the central justification for Lewis Powell’s memo which evolved into a fiat: that concentrated money ought to assert the deciding vote on all of our public decisions, because money had a better brain than people did. This breathed legitimacy into the ludicrous Citizens United ruling that stated Money = Speech. And the similarly ludicrous Bush v Gore decision that stated that equal protection required the Court to intervene to protect the interests of George W Bush from irreparable harm by the voters who had voted against him. Money and patronage (the values the Powell memo places uppermost) were again the pollutant in that decision: how many of the justices who stepped in for Bush Jr. were appointed by Bush Sr.?

Once you make Money immune to intelligent discussion you give it control over the public conversation. Which is why we have a billionaire of low cunning dominating one of our political parties right now. Who are we non-billionaires to question his right to rule us? We have learned not to embarrass Money with difficult questions. The galvanizing moment in Ronald Reagan's presidential run came early, when he faced down the annoying challenge of some journalist, saying: "I paid for this microphone!" Except he hadn't. General Electric and a few decades of other corporate sponsors had. Reagan had been employed as their spokesmodel. He was the political incarnation of Lewis Powell's memo.

Are we all to blame? We voted for Reagan, and all his works and all his ways. We liked him. Half of us still worship him even though he presided over the theft of our prosperity via Reaganomics. He organized the redirection of wealth from the many to the few. Money isn't speech, but it can buy a lot of it. And it can buy the likable voice of an aging actor. Money isn't speech any more than Money equals thought or intelligence. By delegating more of our decisions to our money, which the Lewis Powell memo urged, we stopped thinking. And that is why we are surprised to learn the oceans will rise and there is no longer anything we can do about it. Maybe that is also why a handful of billionaires are using their tax-immune billions to build personal rocket ships.

The Nullification of Science

Exxon did this for decades. They'd discovered that continued use of fossil fuel would warm the climate, raise the oceans and make large growing areas into deserts. What did they do? They hid the information. Why? So the owners of oil shares could continue to reap high profits from peak oil and their top executives could pull down decades of multimillion dollar paychecks.

Recently we've learned that pesticides manufactured by powerful multinational corporations have begun killing off bees and butterflies necessary for the pollination of a large percentage of our food crops. But powerful multinational corporations know how to reach deep into academic research institutions and shut the science down. Because they sponsor those institutions. (Nobody else has enough money and they do. They hold the purse and the veto power.) These multinationals also can dictate government policy. A story on public radio yesterday told of how a USDA bee scientist was upsetting the pesticide companies with his findings. They shut him down.

Republicans Believe Our Government Should Be Used To Attack Their Political Opponents

The Republicans have very different ideas about what democracy is supposed to do. Sometimes they even admit it openly. A few examples:

The purpose of Congressional committees is to destroy Democratic candidates’ poll numbers.

(EJ Dionne wrote an excellent column about the vendetta of the Benghazi panel)

The purpose of the U.S. Senate is to make sure Democratic presidents fail.

The purpose of Republican-led state legislatures is to make it harder for people to vote so Republicans are elected president.

This is not a new thing. Nixon used the IRS and FBI and tried to use the CIA to attack his political enemies. It appears more evident each year that Dick Cheney used our military and our sons and daughters enlisted in it to carry out a personal agenda involving acquisition of oil reserves in Iraq and large contracts for his former company, Halliburton. It was a war that multiplied the value of his Halliburton stock portfolio.

Each example points to the likelihood that abuse of power has remained a part of the Republican DNA since the day 41 years ago when Nixon's abuse of power brought his resignation and disgrace. It doesn't seem to embarrass or disgrace Republicans anymore because they believe they were elected to government to abuse its power. Democracy isn't for the people, it's for the Right People.

In 1980, the founder of the Heritage Foundation stated the Republican/conservative strategy very clearly.

Paul Weyrich didn’t believe in Good Government. He called it the “goo goo syndrome.” He didn’t want people to vote. The group he was addressing represented conservative Christianity. They apparently believe the reason there is a God is to enhance the personal power and wealth of “the right people." Every kind of bigotry and economic unfairness flows from this. Democracy is supposed to protect us from this kind of abuse, but it doesn't when those we elect use their new power for personal vendettas.

Ronald Reagan addressed this same gathering and was elected later that year by the same conservative movement that still is trying to break our democratic system.

Books have been written about how successful the vandals have been, but very little of this gets into the nightly news. To criticize one party requires our “fair and balanced” news anchors to find something equally bad to say about the other party.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican congressional leaders met and agreed on a plan to oppose everything he did and to refuse any manner of compromise on any issue even if the president's proposal were something they had supported in the past, like healthcare reform based on private insurers and an insurance mandate.

A book was written about this conspiracy, titled Do Not Ask What Good We Do.

Another, co-authored by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of Brookings, placed most of the blame on the Republicans.

The Republican goal is to make government stop working.

Why?

Because each public institution they can destroy will offer an opportunity for their corporate clients to exploit.

Government looks at public needs as a moral duty. Corporations look at them as an opportunity to leverage necessity into large profits. The greater and more desperate the need, the greater the profit.

Ultimately Republicans would like our government run like a corporation, from the top down, with a command structure, where people do as their told, where the boss’s motives are never questioned. Americans who want a corporate tough guy as our next president do not seem to realize that corporations are not run democratically. In their blind admiration of "business" Americans forget what happens when business and government are in cahoots. There is a name for this. It’s called fascism. It’s been tried in many places. In Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and in many smaller tin-pot dictatorships that have operated under the aegis of American corporations and their military allies. But fascism ruled most notoriously in Hitler’s Germany. It was not a successful experiment and it took millions of lives to remove it.