Dustin Olson - The Corporate Coup D’état: Corporate Tyranny, Pt. 2
Photo Credit: (Washington Post/Google Images)
Written by: Dustin Olson
Unless democracy can give people full stomachs, clothes to wear, decent houses to live in, educational opportunities, security in old age, health services for themselves and their families when they need it– unless democracy can do all that, democracy has failed. It is your job and mine to make democracy work.
Tommy Douglas, ‘Making Democracy Work’
By Tommy Douglas’ reasonable standards, western democracy is failing. The illusion of democracy is perpetuated by the belief that we have political options. After all, do we not vote on the party of our choice? Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, Labour or Conservative-Unionist. These so-called parties differ only nominally on those matters of fundamental importance Douglass highlights.
The sad reality is that the entire notion of party in 21st Century ‘democracy’ is simply a cover for special interests. In a time when word meaning still mattered, these interests were called business elites.
Liberal democracies are suffering a hostile takeover by authoritarian-minded corporatists. Some democracies haven’t survived, including the United States, what many once took as the gold standard. There are revealing signs of this empire’s implosion: the elevation of corrupt demagogues; increasing numbers of pointless, costly wars despite nearly universal public opposition; a culture ever more hedonic, greedy, and distracted by the superficial; isolation from international allies; an elite class siphoning a civilization’s wealth and resources while remaining isolated from those they exploit; and a populace complicit in the breakdown of traditional liberal democratizing structures, such as unions, free speech, a free press, a common curriculum, and the non-arbitrary application of law.
How did it come to this?
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US history is, of course, blemished from the start. Their entire economic system is built on racism and generational wealth, from genocide against indigenous populations to massive wealth accumulation on the backs of slaves. The resulting inequality produced a de facto feudal system observed throughout the Industrial Revolution into the Great Depression, both inequalities that persist today.
As Noam Chomsky highlights in the documentary Requiem for the American Dream, the US has always had a power struggle between rich elites and the remaining populace. Even early 20th Century liberals like Walter Lippman were anti-democratic, judging that educated elites should make state decisions, not the uneducated rabble. This type of paternalist aristocracy masked an abusive oligarchy that revealed itself with the Great Depression. While many families were boiling bones for food, rich capitalists hoarded the country’s wealth.
Despite these historical blemishes there were glimmers of hope as the 20th Century advanced. Motivated political leaders sympathetic to democracy, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, recognized the unrest that would surely result in violence and ultimately the republic’s undoing, were these power dynamics to persist. A fair tax code, substantial financial regulations, and legal support for unions and the labour movement were established, ensuring that working people’s needs were met and there would be no more recessions or depressions.
FDR’s foresight, aided by a massive social stimulus resulting from WW2, equalized and thereby further democratized society. In these historical moments, there was hope that democracy would win the day. The labour, feminist, and civil rights movements sought to give a political voice to the exploited and marginalized. Steps towards universal suffrage were taken and a flourishing middle class was established. These are democratizing events.
While certainly not perfect, the US in many ways seemed headed in the right direction, providing an example of democracy’s potential.
While citizens enjoyed the fruits of a robust economy throughout the 50s and 60s, business elites and power-hungry technocrats acknowledged that power was slipping from their grasp. Their ambitions were not modest, and their retaliation reflected as much. What were these ambitions? A wholesale overhaul of the US political, economic, and political system, aptly described by historian and philosopher John Ralston Saul as a “corporate coup d’etats.”
The beginning of this coup can be traced back to 1971 with the release of the Powel Memorandum. With the heading “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell offers a comprehensive playbook for how to bring about this coup. Targeting education, the media, the courts, politics, business, and finance, this document provides a veritable textbook for manipulating public opinion to facilitate oligarchical overthrow and establishing corporatism as the dominant ideology. With the instructions laid, business elites set to work.
Richard Nixon was the last New Deal president. After his resignation, deregulations increased. Not coincidentally, after more than 30 years of stable markets, so did recessions. Along with these deregulations, additional anti-democratic reforms were being pushed through by Carter appointed elites establishing the Trilateral Commission. This group of unelected elites, hell bent on globalising the economy, set the stage for free trade and the eventual dismantling of hard-fought labour rights for workers at home.
It was in 1980, however, that corporatism achieved the most substantial victory. Paradigm liberal democracies in the UK and US took a dramatic shift right with Margret Thatcher and Ronald Regan each winning their federal elections. While they were instituting free market financial reforms in the West, China was establishing itself as a major economic player globally. It was finally time to truly take the axe to root to financial regulations, establishing once and for all neoliberalism as the dominant global financial ideology. Coupled with the Cold War, which was still in full force, neo-conservatism established itself as the dominant ideology in corporatist foreign affairs.
A socio-economic paradigm shift had occurred. With the symbiosis of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, democracy was now considered an exportable good, especially if it meant military intervention. Traditional terms took on new meanings, however. Democracy implied freedom, but freedom now meant free markets and free markets now meant the economy at home and democracy abroad.
The economy was purportedly capitalist, but capitalism now meant corporate socialism—government insurance for the financial sector, rugged individualistic capitalism for everyone else. Multinational companies no longer had owners with a vested interest in providing consumers with a quality product or service; they now had CEOs and shareholders whose only interests were quarterly profits. And as the economy became increasingly financialized and the financial sector became increasingly deregulated, the markets became increasingly unstable, and market crashes and tax-payer bailouts simply increased.
By the end of the 90s, the corporatist overthrow of the economy was complete. Under the Clinton Administration, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial from investment banking, was repealed. This act was introduced during the Great Depression to prevent fraudulent financial mismanagement that would lead to future depressions. Once Glass-Steagall was repealed, it was a corporate feeding frenzy ripe for manipulation. As we learned in 2007-08, it was also ripe for catastrophe. With the financial system now entirely under corporatist control, the coup d’état was nearly complete.
If the Powell Memorandum was the beginning of the corporate coup, Citizens United, established during the Obama Era, is its end. By granting corporations the right to free speech, and equating money with speech, this legislation is the final nail in America’s democracy’s coffin. It has long been understood that if money is allowed into politics, those with the most win. We shouldn’t be surprised. The same unelected officials who worked for Regan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Obama set policy, such as Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. When the business elites are the regulated, and the regulated are also the regulators, who do you think is going to win?
* * *
We are now witnessing the logical outcome of this coup. In 2019, 38 million US citizens utilized the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. According to a study conducted by Human Rights lawyer Phillip Alston, 15% of US citizens live in poverty, roughly 40 million people, with five million living in “Third World conditions.” Of the 36 OECD countries, America ranks 33, surpassing only Turkey, Chile, and Mexico—countries whose combined GDPs are $19 trillion less than America’s. Moreover, life expectancy rates are dropping. Out of 71 nations, America ranked sixth for its levels of healthcare and education in 1990. As of 2018, it was 27th.
The above figures are only going to get worse. Consider the current pillaging of US public coffers at the behest of corporate lobby interests. The same unregulated financial system that produced the 2008 recession and led to roughly five-million families displaced from their homes and trillions of dollars extracted from society, is once again pilfering an unprecedented volume of wealth from the American taxpayer. Rather than fulfilling their mandates as public servants, political leaders from both sides of the aisle are ensuring that their financial backers are satisfied at the taxpayer’s expense.
Unemployment resulting from the COVID-19 shut down is projected to reach 30%, and has already left 33 million people jobless, with inevitably more forthcoming. By definition, this is a depression. On the cusp of this economic tragedy, rather than taking preventative measures, political leaders have seized opportunity in disaster, exploiting a rigged system at the public’s expense. The ironically labeled CARES Act ensures the further consolidation of wealth into fewer hands, exacerbating a wealth disparity of already feudal proportions.
Now, in addition to the CARES Act’s corporate bailouts and the Fed’s $4 trillion in security backed loans for the big-five banks, Republicans are proposing the elimination of payroll tax and capital gains taxes. In 2008 the corporatists came for your homes. Now they’re coming for your businesses and social security.
This, the most egregious and sustained theft in history, has received acclamation from the House, the Senate, and the Executive, including so-called political revolutionary Bernie Sanders, finance watchdog Elizabeth Warren, and the woke Justice Democrat Squad. They might give a good speech, but so what? Words without deeds are worse than saying nothing at all. One only need observe the result of disenfranchising a populace who waited eight years for hope and change, only to be betrayed by Obama. Many want to blame Trump for current woes. That simply confuses the cart for the horse.
Channeling their inner Marie Antoinette, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, reveal the absurdity of thinking Democrats are meaningful alternatives to Republicans. While tens of millions are jobless and plague is ravaging the nation, people are desperate for medical assistance. Instead of pushing for universal healthcare, they champion the Affordable Care Act.
“What’s all the fuss about?”
The people have lost their jobs and are in dire need of medical care due to forces beyond their control.
“Well, let them buy health insurance!”
Those already with insurance can expect a rise in premiums over the next few years. Stock prices in the health insurance industry have already gone up in anticipation. American healthcare is doing great. Never mind the 100000 deaths.
* * *
It is harrowing to observe in real time the American Dream reveal itself as the American Nightmare. A once promising model for liberal democracy’s potential, history’s most powerful empire is now run by a cabal of authoritarian elites who have successfully infiltrated Congress, the Senate, the Federal Reserve, the Pentagon, the courts, the schools, the media, the churches, the arts, and the White House. They are guided by one principle: More. More wealth, more power, and more control.
They recognize no institutions, acquiesce to no authority, and acknowledge no democratic correctives. Public opinion is meaningless. Elections are meaningless. Citizen lives are meaningless. The United States is not a democracy. It has rid all pretense of being anything but a kleptocratic plutocracy run by rapacious oligarchs.
Despite this focus on the US system, we must observe that neoliberalism has gone global. Corporatists are not bound by borders. They have already redesigned the international financial system allowing them to hoard profits, consolidate wealth and power, engineer elections, and manufacture consent. It would be naïve to judge any democracy immune to these forces. And the logical outcome of this system is exemplified in what's currently happening in America.
Democracy is at all times insecure. When citizens cease participating, democracy ceases to function. Corporatists are working to undermine our participation by establishing an ideology against our own democratic interests. But it is your job and mine to make democracy work.
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