"Corporations rule. No other institution comes close to matching the power that the 500 biggest corporations have amassed over us. The clout of all 535 members of Congress is nothing compared to the individual and collective power of these predatory behemoths that now roam the globe, working their will over all competing interests.
The aloof and pampered executives who run today’s autocratic and secretive corporate states have effectively become our sovereigns. From who gets health care to who pays taxes, from what’s on the news to what’s in our food, they have usurped the people’s democratic authority and now make these broad social decisions in private, based solely on the interests of their corporations. Their attitude was forged back in 1882, when the villainous old robber baron
(sic)
William Henry Vanderbilt spat out:
'The public be damned! I’m working for my stockholders.' ...
Wal-Mart is now the world’s biggest corporation, having passed ExxonMobil for the top slot. ...
Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons -- the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire
(2002)."
The Forbes Magazine listing of the 400 richest Americans --
The top 25
According to United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies, that’s the average ratio of CEO pay to non-professional worker pay in 2004 in these United States. This represents a new trend in the wrong direction after a slight remission in this ratio since a peak at 531 to 1 in 2000."
"If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour."
"In what amounts to a silent coup, an unholy alliance of corporate power brokers and conservative Republicans have spent the last five years attempting to hijack democracy and move the seat of governance from Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street. ...
At the center of this takeover is the K Street Project -- an attempt to purge industry’s lobbyists of any and all Democrats, and to make sure that '...even the secretaries...' are
'conservative Republican activists.'
They’ve just about succeeded.
... Now, an assortment of K street Corporate shills write legislation, develop tax proposals, and formulate foreign policy, sometimes in their industry’s self-interest, sometimes at the behest of a few right wing ideologues in Congress or the Administration. ...
The grease that lubricates this new model of government is greed;
the fuel that feeds it is money. Lots of it. And overwhelmingly, the hard-line, right-wing conservative branch of the Republican Party are both its architect, and its beneficiary. ...
Republicans accuse Democrats of being "tax and spend liberals." The reality is, Democrats do tax a little more, but they spend less,
and Americans get more for their money.
Republicans tax less but spend much more and the borrowed largesse goes to corporations and the likes of Ken Lay and Paris Hilton,
while the debt gets passed on to future generations."
Well, the overall schema here sounds painfully plausible to me,
but looking at a few devilish details ...
- Who originated this name The K Street Project?
- Author Atcheson puts
"...even the secretaries... are conservative Republican activists"
in quotes, but he doesn't say who he's quoting.
Welcome to the Machine:
How the GOP disciplined K Street and made Bush supreme.
by Nicholas Confessore
"... lobbying jobs have become the foundation of a powerful new force in Washington politics: a Republican political machine. Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule. But unlike legendary Chicago mayor
Richard J. Daley, who rewarded party functionaries with jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, the GOP is building its machine outside government, among Washington's thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal.
... K Street is becoming solidly Republican. The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer, are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the GOP. Through them, Republican leaders can now marshal armies of lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations experts -- not to mention enormous amounts of money -- to meet the party's goals. Ten years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the political donations of 19 key industry sectors -- including accounting, pharmaceuticals, defense, and commercial banks -- were split about evenly between the parties. Today, the GOP holds a two-to-one advantage in corporate cash. ...
The emerging Republican machine is the mirror image of that built by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors. The edifice of federal bureaucracy that emerged between the 1930s and the 1960s shifted power and resources from the private sphere to the public, while centralizing economic regulation in federal agencies and commissions. Democratic government taxed progressively, then redistributed that money through a vast and growing network of public institutions. Those constituencies that Democratic governance serviced best -- the working class, the poor, veterans, the elderly, and, eventually, ethnic and racial minorities -- made the Democrats the majority party."
"The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled corporations have a “right” to spend unlimited corporate funds to influence ballot questions. As citizens in dozens of communities have learned, that power enables giant corporations to turn ballot measures -- theoretically the purest form of democracy -- into yet another sphere of corporate dominance. ...
When American colonists declared independence from England, they also freed themselves from control by corporations like the East India Company that extracted colonists' wealth and dominated trade. The colonial experience bred fear of concentrated power in the hands of corporations as well as despots, leading states to limit corporations' size, lifespan, and range of activity. In most states, corporations were forbidden to spend any money to influence elections or law-making.
Corporations escaped many of those barriers during the 1800s, aided by the distraction and growth opportunities of the Civil War. By the end of the century, the Supreme Court's judicial activism had invented a concept that would have shocked American revolutionaries.
Ignoring the fact that corporations' are unmentioned in our Constitution, the Court interpreted the 14th Amendment's guarantee of “due process of law” -- written to protect the rights of freed slaves -- to make corporations legal “persons.”
It took almost another century, however, before another episode of Supreme Court activism effectively created a corporate "right" to dominate ballot initiatives and referenda (initiatives are questions placed on the ballot via signature gathering among the general public, referenda are questions on which the government chooses to allow a popular vote). ... (when) in 1978 ... the (5-4) majority opinion in
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti ... created a new class of corporate political "speech"
So when the citizens of Sandy
(Utah, USA) go the voting booth this fall, they'll battle against a company that spent less than sixty seconds worth of corporate revenue to defeat a skilled and well-organized citizen effort in Flagstaff
(Arizona, USA). Whether or not we're concerned by the proliferation of big box stores, we all should be alarmed by this perversion of democracy."
