There's an excellent documentary called "The Corporation" which was produced in 2003 in Canada by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan. Being the plugged in Kossacks I know you all to be, you probably have the film on a constant loop in your living rooms except when President Obama is speaking on CSPAN. In fact, I'm guessing that some of you have the homepage for the film on "speed dial" in your favorites section of Firefox.
In case you missed it, you can download the film from the homepage, or you can just watch it via the YouTube playlist embedded in this diary...
Here's the entire doc as presented by the makers of the film via YouTube:
The subject of this diary is really a quick, hard look at the underlying mentality that has put us in the position we find ourselves in today. The film demonstrates the power that the corporations of the world hold over the institutions and individuals that traditionally have constituted the parties of the social contract, as a result of legal wrangling that defines a corporation as a person under the law. This is truly one of the most pressing and confounding problems facing our way of life, yet it promises to be far too difficult to disentangle from the system it's helped to mold.
The second issue that is inseparable from this current state of affairs is the philosophy that drives the corporatist ideological base that runs from the Far Right through the centrist Democrats like Evan Bayh that threaten to stall any true progressive economic agenda. Money talks, and these types fall in line to walk the Wall Street walk. The ideology of this political caste is explained in the film transcript of The Corporation, via arch-economic-villain Milton Friedman. See for yourself (bold is mine):
An appropriately privatized society would look like a society in which the total income of society about 10 to 12% is going through government. And it’s going through government to pay for certain really basic functions. To finance the judicial system, to provide for the defense of the country for armed forces. To provide for law and order, police, fire, not necessarily fire protection that can be done privately as it has been done. And to provide for truly hard cases – indigent - those would be the main functions.
We are far from achieving the kind of society in which government is engaging only in what I regard as a proper functions of government. In our present society government is spending not 10 or 15% of the national income but in the United States, 40% of the national income. In addition it is indirectly through regulation, rules, mandates directing the spending of about another 10% of national income.
So that the United States which everybody regards as a freest society in the world is half, is 50% socialized. The reason we don’t realize that is because government spends its money so much more inefficiently than private enterprise does. That the 50% of our resources which are being spent by government or directed by government produces a lot less than 50% of our utility.
What's evident here is that the free marketeers, the disciples of Hayek and Friedman, resist the hand of government in anything, including the fire department if they had their way. They believe that private interests always handle things more efficiently and effectively because they have incentives to do so, the bottom line. This is what Bobby Jindal was trying to argue about the government's failure during Katrina.
The argument that flies in its face is the financial meltdown that was entirely caused by putting faith in markets to do what's best for business. To keep the government's hands out of business affairs to avoid messing it all up. Looks like we know how that worked out, don't we. Also see: "The Take" and the financial crisis in Argentina of similar making.
Also worth noting is that Friedman claims the United States is already 50% socialized, which would make us socialists in some respect, no? Even the Bush administration would have fallen under this umbrella in 2003 despite their best efforts to reverse things via deregulation. Now, we hear Obama being smeared as a socialist by ignoramuses who don't know what the word means, and who have zero historical perspective on the makeup of our national system. More Friedman:
There are many great things about the world as it is now. We have a great deal of freedom, a great deal of prosperity. But there are enormous problems and the most important of those problems are produced by government, not by the private market. In the United States one of our, certainly one of our major social problems are the slum ghetto areas of our country. The inner cities. And those are a result of government policies. (snip)
Again, the most important of our society's problems are created by government, not by the private market. It's fiction. Certainly, bad government creates enormous problems that rival anything the private sector can muster, but let's get real for a second. The government can be wasteful. It can start unjust and expensive wars. It can squander away surpluses on the expansion of the military-industrial complex. It can impotently sit on its hands during the greatest of human tragedies as a result of poor oversight and bad planning. It can engage in torture and domestic spying and all manner of illegal and immoral acts against humanity. Yes, that much is true. That's BAD government.
It can, however, dig the nation out of a depression, even a Great Depression, by stepping in where the private sector is impotent and reeling and put people back to work. It can provide for their long term health and well being and build and maintain an infrastructure that allows commerce to flow and innovation and entrepreneurship to flourish. Yes, it can divert tax money to do big things that will rescue private interests in the face of a disaster and even assure their long term viability, if government is GOOD. A bit more Friedman:
The legitimate role for government is in so far as it can to, to control and check negative externalities. But in doing so just as there’s nothing that’s all black and all white there are never clean cases. Because government involvement is itself an externality. Government cannot involve in checking something without imposing costs on somebody. It has to raise money for taxes. It has to interfere with their freedom. And so each case has to be considered more or less as in terms of a balance sheet. Here are the problems, advantage costs, here are the benefits. You need a cost benefit analysis.
And in general it’s only where there are serious externalities where you can really make a case for government involved. And in general also wherever possible government should be involved by setting a fee on the activity concerned. And that is something else that has increasingly developed. You have a markets now in pollution abatement. So that for example in the case of the stream where somebody is putting something in. Your best procedure is to try to impose a charge on the disposition of the garbage rather than to try to regulate the details of how the garbage is disposed of.
The idea of free markets is rooted in liberalism, the protection of freedom. In the case of the private sector that freedom extends to the corporation, which defined as a person under the law, demands to be treated equally under the law as little old you and me. The example of pollution, a classic negative externality or unintended negative byproduct of an otherwise productive and upstanding entity, is illustrative here. If you throw a bag of trash in the river and the police catch you, you get fined. It puts a dent in your wallet. If the police catch you. The thing is the police hold you accountable under the law for your garbage shenanigans, and rightly so. You just can't have people tossing trash into the waterways willy-nilly.
Friedman would simply allow you to throw your trash into the river as long as you pay to do it. For most of us, it would be silly to spend money to throw our trash in the river so we would do things appropriately. It's his cost-benefit analysis on a small scale. The problem with this thinking is that you and I don't throw our trash in the river because we are ethical beings with families and schools and churches to teach us right and wrong. If we see our neighbors throwing trash in the river, our moral compass demands that we put a stop to it by calling the authorities. Corporations aren't actually people. They are certainly made of people, but the entity itself isn't a person. It isn't subject to the same moral and ethical existential dilemma when confronted with making decisions on things like pollution or fraud or even the sponsorship of human rights violations.
Many corporations are guided by sound, ethical businesspeople and many corporations play by the rules of moral and ethical behavior. However, just as we have laws to govern those individuals who would otherwise act selfishly, destructively, and against the best interest of society we must have laws and REGULATIONS to deal with those corporations who act selfishly, destructively, and against the best interest of society. That's the point, really. You and I don't throw trash in the river because we know it's wrong. For those people who lack the moral center to avoid throwing trash in the river, there are laws that threaten fines and jail for violations of the legislated rules. The rules that we tacitly give our support by electing representatives to GOVERNMENT to develop and implement on our behalf.
As Friedman would have it, the unethical among us who would throw trash in the river would be controlled by pricing him or her out of that behavior. Donald Trump might decide to say, "Fuck you," to all of us and pay to throw his empty hair gel containers into the Hudson but he would be in the minority. The cost of polluting would control the behavior. The problem is, if regulations don't scare corporations then why would a fee? Corporations hide their behavior from regulators and pay a fee when they get caught because it's worth the risk to do so. They'd surely do the same with a cost attached to the negative behavior. Pollute in secret and hope they don't get caught. In fact, with the de-emphasis on regulation by the government they'd be MORE likely to try to get away with things than less, no? In a nutshell, isn't that what this whole financial meltdown is all about?
Didn't financial corporations engage in unethical and perhaps illegal behavior when Phil Gramm and company did away with the regulators? When the rules and the impediments to confidence gaming the public were done away with, the corporations saw it as their opportunity to ratchet up the bad behavior. Where the once would have risked heavy legal and financial penalties for their scheming, they only risked pissing off their customers and shareholders the way Milton Friedman and company would have it. The problem is, they pissed off their customers and shareholders by collapsing the entire stinking global financial structure. Whoops, I guess Uncle Milty's little plan didn't see that coming.
Guess who's stepping in to help? The GOVERNMENT. Guess what we're doing now? Re-regulating the private sector and restoring GOOD GOVERNMENT to do what it does better than private industry, protect and serve the citizens of the United States and uphold the values of the social contract - OUR CONSTITUTION. If we want to call that socialism, so be it. We'd be wrong, but at least we'd be right...if that makes sense. The entire Wall Street establishment, including the corporate media, are fueling this Obama as socialist meme because they're all Friedman free-marketeers. They know their little shell game is coming to an end as they knew it and they'll be damned if they're going to let it disappear without a smear war.
For our part, we need to understand the underlying mentality and educate the intelligent, but uninformed among us to combat the trap that's being laid by the corporate interests that are losing their grip on us. The populism of the 21st century is fueled by our communication of these ideas. Send this diary or a link to The Corporation to your friends and family and have them in turn do the same. Have a conversation. Start a dialogue. Control the debate.