What We Believe and Why

Equality

So what did Jefferson mean when he said that “all men are created equal” is a self-evident truth; or Lincoln when he said at Gettysburg that the nation was dedicated to that very proposition. They meant that all humans beings have equal rights, that all are entitled to equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and equal opportunity to choose and influence their government representatives; equal protection of personal safety and property; equal protection from discrimination or abuse; equal freedom to work, live, and travel where we choose; equal pay for equal work; equal freedom of speech, assembly, religion, choice of partner, of action (as long as we do not break laws or harm others); equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Of, By, and For the People (OBFP)

When Lincoln went on to say “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What he meant of course was that the government is elected by the people, the people staff the government, and the work of that staff is to serve the people. Today there are large numbers of civil servants and even a few politicians who do try to serve the people, but they are in the large majority of cases kept from doing so by governments protecting corporate interests.

What the Rich Believe

“Our evidence indicates that the wealthy are much more concerned than other Americans about budget deficits. The wealthy are much more favorable toward cutting social welfare programs, especially Social Security and health care. They are considerably less supportive of several jobs and income programs, including an above-poverty-level minimum wage, a ‘decent’ standard of living for the unemployed, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, and having the federal government ‘see to’ —or actually provide—jobs for those who cannot find them in the private sector.

“Judging by our evidence, wealthy Americans are much less willing than others to provide broad educational opportunities, by “spend[ing] whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to” or “mak[ing] sure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so.” They are less willing to pay more taxes in order to provide health coverage for everyone, and they are much less supportive of tax-financed national health insurance. The wealthy tend to favor lower estate tax rates and to be less eager to increase income taxes on high-income people. They express concern about economic inequality and favor somewhat more egalitarian wages than they perceive as presently existing, but—to a much greater extent than the general public—the wealthy oppose government action to redistribute income or wealth.”

1. “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans”

By Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels and Jason Seawright
American Political Science Association, Perspective on Politics, March 2013

2. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8864478

This research too finds that, as a general rule, the rich do not believe in equality or a safety net; nor do they support what the large majority of Americans consider human rights.

Ninety Percent of Elections are Won by the Candidate Who Spends the Most

How strong is the association between campaign spending and political success? For House seats, more than 90 percent of candidates who spend the most win. From 2000 through 2016, there was only one election cycle where that wasn’t true: 2010. “In that election, 86 percent of the top spenders won,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign fundraising and spending.

“How Money Affects Elections” by Maggie Koerth

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/

Who Determines Policy Decisions?

“In a blockbuster study published in 2013, two political scientists, Martin Gilens and…Benjamin Page, examined a familiar question: How many of the policies that the public supports become law? But they gave it a novel twist: They separated out the opinions of the bottom, the middle, and the top of the income distribution…. They also calculated where major interest groups such as the Chamber of Commerce stood on each of the issues covered by their survey data.

The result? When all these groupings were considered, neither the middle class nor the poor seemed to have any influence. Instead, whether policy changed related most strongly to whether those at the top of the economic ladder supported the change. And among major interest groups, it was business groups that were the most influential.” p. 195

“As big as the increase in business political activity was, the accompanying changes in power structures, political strategies, and policy aims were even bigger. Responding to the shifting contours of American capitalism and American politics, organizational innovators built new sorts of business associations better matched to a more financialized economy, more narrowly focused corporate elite, and more partisan and money-driven political world. In this chapter, we focus on the three most important such efforts: the Roundtable, the revamped US Chamber of Commerce, and—later on the scene—the network centered around Charles and David Koch. In American political history, few groups have assembled more resources or amassed more power than these three, and few have done more to shape the world we occupy today.” Pp. 201-202

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016

How Corporations Have Captured Government

Corporations have been promoting the idea that unregulated capitalism is the only viable way to structure a society (although it is in fact a reliable way to destroy a society); and that governments only get in the way. However, governments make the rules under which markets operate, they intervene when markets fail (the Depression, 2008, etc.), manage things like infrastructure, and fund most of the primary research that makes the major discoveries which private companies later exploit. The arguments don’t have to be true to be useful though—they are just useful props.

“Where ‘politics as spectacle’ concentrates on voters and politics [primarily on elections], ‘politics as organized combat’ focuses on groups and policies. Voters are hardly powerless. But their attention to what government actually does I limited and typically brief. And given the complexity of our political institutions, they can have a devilishly hard time determining whom they should hold accountable when they are discontented. In our fragmented political system, victories without enduring organization are almost always fleeting. To influence the exercise of government authority in a modern democracy generally requires a range of formidable capabilities: the capacity to mobilize resources, coordinate actions with others, develop extensive expertise, focus sustained attention, and operate flexibly across multiple domains of activity. These are the attributes of organizations, not discrete, atomized voters….

“What had become very apparent to the business community was that it was getting its clock cleaned. Used to having broad sway, employers faced a series of surprising defeats in the 1960s and early 1970s…. Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection….

“The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping—a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in
Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982 nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980….

“What the numbers alone cannot show is something of potentially even greater significance: Employers learned how to work together to achieve shared political goals. As members of coalitions, firms could mobilize more proactively and on a much broader front. Corporate leaders became advocates not just for the narrow interest of their firms but also for the shared interests of business as a whole.”

New organizations, like the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Business Political Action Committees, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and a variety of Koch brothers associations were formed, while the National Association of Manufacturers (formed in the 1920s) moved to DC from New York, and the Chamber of Commerce doubled its membership and tripled its budget between 1974 and 1980, and became much more active and much less willing to compromise. With only a weakening labor movement, the Nader organizations, and a collection of other advocacy groups in opposition, the newly active business community, with five times the funding of their combined adversaries, won nearly every battle—starting with the unexpected defeat of a further series of planned regulatory protections, including an Office of Consumer Representation, despite a Democratic President with a supermajority in both houses of Congress. Since then their dominance has only grown with each administration.

Corporations have captured government by building coalitions, organizing, funding elections, and keeping their wishes continuously before all the most powerful government officials, at first in Washington and since then at the state and local level as well.

1. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016. (quotes above from this book)

2. Oreskes, N, Conway, EM, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

3. Ferguson, CH, Predator Nation, Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America New York: Crown Business, 2012.

4. Kleinknect, W, The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America. Philadelphia: Nation Books, 2009.

Corporate Business as Usual

Large companies operate like governments of large countries; they look at the big picture and do what is best for them (or at least their executive suite) and, secondarily, for their stockholders, though not necessarily for customers or standard employees or local society or America at large—in fact, though they rarely say so, they generally these days see themselves not as American but as global concerns. They spend some of their money on perks (homes and cars and first-class travel and five-star hotels and spending accounts, etc.) and salaries and stock options for managers and administrators with full reimbursement packages averaging more than 100 times what a minimum wage worker earns ($1.5 million a year or more). They spend some on stock buybacks and some on dividends since these expenditures tend to raise stock prices—foremost in their minds because the higher the stock prices the more their options are worth. They may buy art for their executive suites or build sumptuous new buildings for their comfort and enjoyment and to advertise their brand. They often focus more on packaging and advertising than on improving products or creating new ones (R&D expenditures are often less than expenditures on dividends and buyback; and developing packaging, for example is considered to be R&D). Giving the impression of quality is often more lucrative, because much cheaper, than providing quality. They invest in media coverage or buy media companies to help with these initiatives. They will sometimes move an entire department from one place to another to consolidate and then, unhappy with the result, move the department back again. They of course spend large amounts of money on lawyers and accountants to find loopholes in laws to decrease their tax payments. They spend freely on donations to politicians, their favorite charities, PACs, gifts to their families, promise them lucrative positions when they leave government; and pay lawyers and lobbyists and others to create constant pressure on them to approve desired legislation, providing verbiage for bills, critiquing them, keeping up a constant interaction with politicians and their staffs that no other entities have the time or resources to afford.

They build teams to address “concerns,” people whose research or articles or presentations question their products or behavior or advertising, competitors, politicians or pundits with troublesome views, enlist the help of detectives and corporate spies, and harass or undermine or sue or discredit “undesirables.” They hide any worrisome findings that testing or studies have found regarding their products or services and do their best to silence any whistleblowers or naysayers, all the while having these products touted in friendly media and by respected (and well-paid) pundits, academics and institutions. They push the edges of legality in developing products and services and lobby for laws that have allowed banks, for example, to charge usurious interest rates (as much as 30% per year when late fees and interest are taken into account) to the poorest members of society with poor credit ratings—which banks have recognized as one of their most lucrative niches. Some have decreased expenditures on safety measures (railroads), hidden risks and suppressed exposés (smoking, asbestos, opioids), marketed life-threatening toxic substances (DDT, Round Up, and hundreds of other dangerous pesticides), and even broken laws when they thought they could get away with it (Volkswagen & pollution controls) in ways that make it clear that even killing a few citizens is not off the table where profit is concerned (more on this later). And they do their best to develop monopolies by buying competitors or driving them out of business. When that fails, they often reach agreements to coexist with a minimum of competition. And they also hire lawyers to defend them, sometimes at enormous expense, from prosecution when their questionable behaviors are challenged by government agencies or law enforcement.

How Corporate Efforts Have Changed the Texts That Students Read:

An Example

“In the 1950s, Stigler took on the task of producing an edited version of Adam Smith’s foundation work, The Wealth of Nations…. Conspicuous among the topics elided (or omitted entirely) are Smith’s arguments for the necessity of regulation when self-interest fails, and the necessity of raising funds for public goods that markets by themselves either do not provide or cannot sustain. To be sure, Smith advocated open trade and competition, but he also acknowledged the need for restraints on the marketplace to protect public safety. He also identified the problem of wages that were sometimes inadequate, and the necessity of taxation to pay for public goods such as education and infrastructure. That Adam Smith is nowhere to be found in Stigler’s Chicago version….

Adam Smith, the hero of capitalism …insists on the necessity of regulating banks. … His explanation is clear and simple: Restraints on liberty are justified when the actions of a few individuals endanger the rest.

Smith spends many pages explaining his argument for bank regulation; chapter 2 is entirely dedicated to the issue. The discussion is not merely theoretical; it is based on problems that had already arisen in the banking system…. Smith stressed that he was not against banks: overall ‘the judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country.” The problem, he made clear, was that many bankers did not act judiciously, which leads to this conclusion: some things just need to be regulated….

Smith anticipated the objections that Mises, NAM, Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Chicago school, and diverse latter-day conservatives would all make: that regulations are an infringement of liberty. And so they are. Smith—the hero of the libertarians, the father of free-market economics, the patron saint of self-interest—spent a significant section of his most famous work discussing banks and banking precisely because it illustrated an essential and nonnegligible point: that regulations do infringe liberty, but they are necessary when the ‘natural liberty of a few individuals…endanger[s] the security of the whole society.’”…

Smith’s discussion of the problems of late eighteenth century banking and the need for banking regulation is entirely omitted from Stigler’s version of the volume.”

Oreskes, N, Conway, EM, The Big Myth, 244-255.

Inequality

In the world today, “how much inequality?” is determined almost entirely by politicians and the people who influence them—at present, the leaders and representatives of corporations and the rich. Of course they tell us (corporations, politicians, and the rich) that it is the market, not they, that determines the degree of inequality, that the Invisible Hand of the market insures that each individual gets just what s/he deserves. Successfully making that argument is how they have become so powerful. However, the market operates according to the ground rules governments set with their laws, conventions, interpretations and enforcement. At the moment these have made corporations and the rich so powerful that they influence every aspect and hour of our lives.

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

Medicare for All

One reason we spend more than any other country on health care and yet have poor outcomes on measures like morbidity and mortality is that our healthcare system is disorganized, in large part private, and has always left at least 20 million people uncovered. The system is built around assuring pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, hedge funds, etc. reliable outsized incomes. Perhaps an extra 5 or 10% has been covered by the ACA, but the quality and availability of the care provided by that insurance has deteriorated. It is hard to find a primary care doctor nearly everywhere, the waits for care are unreasonable, the time doctors have to take care of patients is defined by hedge fund managers and keeps getting shorter, data entry takes up much of providers’ time. Nor do we want Medicare Advantage (MA) for all. MA gets 22% more for each patient–the is just another way to privatize health care. We do not need corporations that require profit and 5% growth a year to manage health care. We’ve been doing this for decades and it doesn’t work. And no it doesn’t cost more to have a national health service, it costs less. You can do entirely without insurance companies and markedly decrease bureaucracies, and the lobbying and donations the companies spend to corrupt politicians. There’s too much to say here, but I understand this issue in depth, if there is interest.

Free Public College Education

In England, not only college but medical school education was free (with a stipend for room and board) when one of us did medical school rotations there in 1975-76. Pay was accordingly lower after leaving school but no one left with $300,000 in debt or chose sub-specialties with procedures to help pay off their loans. College graduates are paid on average two or three times what those without college degrees get. Our national productivity depends upon adequate training. By pricing college out of reach of a large part of the population and placing many more in crushing debt, we are limiting our collective productivity, increasing inequality, and damaging lives. Public college and vital graduate training should be free and accessible to all qualified students.

Subsidizing GMO farmers

We should also require all GMOs to be labelled (no loopholes) and break up the large corporations from farms to manufacturers to grocery chains (Wal-Mart, Kroger, Target, Costco, Pepsi, Tyson, Cargill, JBS, Smithfield, Purdue, Kraft, etc) to reestablish meaningful competition. Farm bills, rewritten every five years or so are an opportunity for promoting the ideas we favor and when they are being addressed is the time to overwhelm our representatives with citizen lobbying.

We need regional wholesalers, local organic food grocery stores to compete with chains like Safeway.

Yes we should favor local and organic farmers, but it makes sense to get off season produce (apples, pears, and such from the tree from Argentina and Chile in the spring; and regional agreements to provide produce as it moves north from Southern California to northern Canada so that local farmers have large customer bases and don’t have big price drops for raspberries when they are in season locally.) It does not make sense to grow oranges or mangoes locally, which would require greenhouses. There is a benefit to the low cost of transportation and its carbon footprint is relatively small in the overall context of food production.

Federal Job Guarantee

Rather than propose a minimum basic income, why not promise those who are unemployed a well-paying government job with benefits? It is not like there is a shortage of tasks that need doing. When Amazon or Wal-Mart or Pfizer or Intel or Citigroup lays off a thousand workers, instead of putting those workers on unemployment, why not put them to work, ideally near their homes, using skills they already have—to improve our infrastructure, build or refurbish and upgrade housing, solar and wind farms, libraries, schools; improve the electric grid, teach, provide support in areas of their training for federal, state, and city functions etc. If the federal job pays $20 an hour with generous benefits, a new minimum wage would be established, and no one fit and wanting to work would be denied a job. At present, our Federal Reserve makes sure that at least 4% of those actively looking for work will not find it, not to mention those who have given up. (The Fed operates on the theory that when the unemployment rate drops below approximately 4%, inflation begins to rise, though historical evidence shows that even at times of full employment, as during the two 20th century World Wars, inflation did not occur. As long as the work is productive it will not cause inflation–see The Deficit Myth [Stephanie Kelton]). This is predistribution rather than redistribution. The point of taxes is the latter, and if we are going to cut taxes further (and so decrease redistribution) we need to provide living wages to those at the bottom, who already don’t pay any tax, to begin to address inequality.

Corporate Impact on the Average Citizen

1. Payne, K, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die. New York: Viking, 2017.

2. Alexander, B, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

3. Stockman, F, American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears. New York: Random House, 2021.

Corporate Welfare

1. Johnston, DC, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You with the Bill. New York: Portfolio (Penguin Books), 2007.

2. Nader, R, Cutting Corporate Welfare. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000.

Corporate Crime

1. Buell, S.W. Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2016.

2. Coffee, JC, Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2020.

3. Mokhiber, Russell, Corporate Crime and Violence: Big Business Power and the Abuse of the Public Trust. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.

Corporate Impact on Democracy

1. Kuttner, R, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

2. Rusch, E. You Call This a Democracy? New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2020.

3. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016

On the Environment

Vallianatos, EG, Jenkins, M, Poison Spring: the Secret History of Pollution and the EPA. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

On Finance

1. Warren, E, A Fighting Chance. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2016.

2. Mazzucato, M, The Value of Everything: Making & Taking in the Global Economy. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.

3. Morgenson, G, Rosner, J., These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023, 38-152.

On Corruption

Kucinich, DJ, The Division of Light and Power. Cleveland: Finney Avenue Books, 2021

On Economics

Kelton, S, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy. New York: Public Affairs, 2020

On Media

1. Pickard, VW, Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1-255.

2. Alterman, E, What Liberal Media? New York: Basic Books, 1-267.

3. Attkisson, S, Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

On Work and Community

Stockman, F, American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears. New York: Random House, 2021,

On Consulting

Bogdanich, W, Forsythe, M, When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm. New York: Doubleday, 2022.

On Law

Enrich, E., Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice. New York: Mariner Books (HarpersCollins), 2022