The Iowa primary is history, 350,000 votes were cast nearly $25 million spent. We know the results. We know the message to victory was change.
This change however is not revolutionary it’s a revamp of the pap that has been sold to the American people for twenty years. The messages include health care, an end to the special interest stranglehold, building consensus and an end to partisan wrangling. This is tired, hackneyed, and despite the nattering by Huckabee, Obama, Clinton and Edwards still supports the corporate state.
Edwards is the only candidate to call a spade a spade. Corporate greed is part of his stump speech; but what Edwards is actually addressing is an increase in more of the same—corporate social responsibility. This is a cosmetic fix.
Does Edwards think the New Deal regulatory agencies should either be reestablished or strengthened? Should we look at corporate expansion through the vertical and horizontal paradigm that the corporate sector has successfully eviscerated?(Should, for example, Apple and ATT be permitted to sign an exclusivity agreement as they have with regard to the sale of the I-Phone?) Should we institute a corporate financial control board which regulates profits and assures a certain level of spending be set for research and development? Should corporate taxes be increased and salaries of the corporate upper-echelon also be regulated? Should the federal government foster a policy that encourages employee ownership of business, worker participation on corporate boards and concomitant participation in decision-making? Should we abolish or means test all government subsidies’ to the corporate sector? (For example, should Americans pay twice as much for sugar than the rest of the world because of a price support program?)
The sugar price support program may be considered a minute example. It is but it is the tip of the Wealthfare iceberg. We could wipe out the federal deficit if these subsidies were abolished or subject to a means test.
We allow military waste and fraud. There are inequities in the social security tax. We allow corporations to take accelerated depreciation thus we the taxpayers are subsidizing corporate expansion with no strings attached. The capital gains tax is a joke. We allow global multi-nationals to avoid US taxes. There are export subsidies, timber giveaways and agricultural subsidies that do not protect small farmers but agribusinesses such as Archer Daniel.
Obama’s special interest message attempts to sell the change message but under the surface he continues to support the status quo. Candidate Clinton is clearly the corporatist candidate on the Democratic side. John Edwards has come to the water’s edge but has failed to enunciate any real government action.
Obama’s idea of change is to allow health industry lobbyists to write Illinois’s attempt at health care reform. Wasn’t this technique criticized and litigated by the GAO over Vice President Cheney’s Environmental Task Force?
Change is defined as to become or make something different. Until one of the presidential candidates announces a serious substantive agenda will their platitudes become a series of public policy reforms.
Will Edwards take the leap or is his rhetoric just another political strategy which resonates in opinion polls or just another one hand clapping? More of the same old same old yada, yada, yada...