THE DISEMPOWERING FOG CREATED BY 14 IDEOLOGICAL MYTHS
Prepared for Occupy the Quad at the University of Illinois, Urbana 1/19/12
by Belden Fields
1. The myth that the corporation is a person with the rights of individuals.
This myth existed well before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, but that decision put the icing on the cake.
In so ruling, the conservative majority violated two of its fundamental principles, that of judicial restraint (it did not have to approach that issue to resolve the case), and that of respecting the precedent decisions (stare decisis) by overturning two previous Supreme Court decisions. Moreover, conservatives have almost always denied group rights in favor of purely individual rights, (e.g., rights of minorities as a group). But when it comes to the interest of corporations in politics, it supports the fiction that the corporation is a person. While money has played a huge role in American politics in the past, (e.g., the Senate has long been the political club of millionaires, and families such as the Kennedys and the Rockefellers have had inordinate influence in American politics), the Superpacs that can now spend unlimited amounts for candidates have elevated the power of money to an unprecedented level.
2. The myth that Supreme Court represents a higher interpretation of law that transcends partisan politics.
As I learned in my constitutional law course in the late 1950s, judges always have had their own ideological bents that have influenced their decisions as they interpreted laws. But judges were not always predictable, e.g., why Republicans rail against former Republican governor Earl Warren who was appointed by President Eisenhower and turned out to be quite liberal. In our present climate, the two parties try very hard, and succeed, to make sure that the justices nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate have long ideological track records so that they will not turn out to be a surprise like Warren. The right-wing Federalist Society of lawyers has become a very potent pressure group in this regard, and its influence in law schools, particularly among law faculty in the Law and Economics (not by chance) field has grown significantly over the past decade. We now see more consistently than ever the 5 to 4 Republican/Democratic split in so many Supreme Court decisions. Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas has broken precedent by speaking at Republican and right-wing political events while sitting on the court.
3. The myth that money is speech; therefore, money spent freely in elections is protected by the First Amendment right to speech.
Money is not speech. Money is a tangible scarce resource with an enormous power potential. Speech is not a scarce resource. Unless someone is afflicted by a physical malady that renders one mute, anyone can speak. The opportunities for speech in both oral and written form have been magnified by electronic technology.
As money is accorded greater freedom to play a powerful role, speech is being curtailed in the United States by restrictions, and sometimes outright prohibitions, on the right to demonstrate and protest, especially at meetings of the economic and political elite structures (e.g., meetings of the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade of the Americas, the G8, Davos, and the political party conventions).
But the power of money to speak is very well protected indeed.
4. The myth that the interests of large corporations is in the interest of workers because they create jobs and raise standards of living.
This is what Mitt Romney is arguing in defense of Bain Capital that has thrown so many workers out of their jobs. In fact, the large corporations are attempting to create an economy with the lowest possible wage and benefits for workers.
What has stood in their way more than anything, is the power of organized labor.
As the economic historian Gar Alperovitz has pointed out, after the Great Depression and the common sacrifices of the Second World War, a system emerged whereby a reasonably developed labor movement could check the most draconian instincts of corporations. There were social supports from the New Deal, and the Truman Administration was relatively supportive as well. The rate of unionization was about 35% of all workers.
Now the rate of total unionization is less than half that, 16 or 17%. In the private sector it is only between 6 and 7%. Corporate America, with the help of Republican national and state administrations, has been pushing an agenda of low wages and benefits, moving plants first from the unionized North to the South and then overseas, weakening the Labor Relations Board, firing union organizers, breaking strikes with replacement workers (since Reagan’s replacement of the air controllers), and Right to Work Laws such as that now being proposed in Indiana. At the same time, Republican governors in Wisconsin and Indiana have been attempting to break the unions in the public sector, the most highly unionized of any American sector. The Citizens United decision will be useful to those trying to elected more such anti-worker governors and legislators.
5. The myth that “right to work” laws really protect workers’ rights.
What so-called “right to work” laws really attempt to do is finish off what remains of the power of unions to contest the power of the corporation. To defend worker rights, unions need to have the economic means by which to represent workers’ interests vis-à-vis employers, the public, and political institutions. The intent of right to work laws is to deprive unions of that possibility by stipulating that no worker who benefits from union representation need pay dues into the union. This attempts to break the bonds of solidarity between workers and encourages “free-riding,” (i.e., enjoying a benefit for which one does not have to pay, thus increasing the burden on those who do pay.) It is the moral equivalent of telling someone in a community that he or she does not have to pay taxes to support the schools or fire department if they do not wish to, knowing full well that that will increase the tax burden on the rest.
6. The myth that government is the only source of bureaucracy that disempowers people.
It is true that bureaucratic governmental bodies at all levels can be rigid, intractable, and difficult to deal with. But the same is true of the private sector. Whether one deals with banks on foreclosure attempts, power companies on billing disputes, insurance companies on health-care claims, or any number of issues involving the consumer versus a large institution, people are often abused and disempowered. Disempowerment results form a combination of size of the enterprise, resources at the disposal of each interacting party, physical distance between them, and the medium and contact point of communication. That is true of both public institutions and private corporations. But it is in the interest of the corporate world to make people believe that only governments are bureaucratic because the corporations are trying to ward off government regulation that might favor the consumer, or that might prevent the corporations from degrading the environment.
7. The myth that economics is above moral concerns and the market will always, by definition, result in the greatest good for society.
This is a myth that was not even believed in by Adam Smith, the18th century Scottish philosopher and economist who is looked to by many as the premier historical capitalist thinker. It was given its greatest elaboration by the 20th century Austrian economist Frederick von Hayak, whose second volume of his three volume trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, is entitled The Myth of Social Justice. He and the rigorously individualistic novelist, Ayn Rand, have had perhaps the greatest influence on our contemporary free-market libertarian thinkers.
For Hayak, the only legitimate function of government, aside from the protection of a person from physical aggression, is to protect the free market rules and the enforcement of contracts. Aside from that, government should not be in the business of making determinations of what is or is not in the public interest.
Apart from the interests of the entrepreneurial group, there appears to be no such thing as a public interest in his thinking. Differential impacts to economic decisions and practices are of no public concern, unless they impose a negative impact on free economic activity. Solidarity, empathy, and material assistance to the needy should be purely a private matter handled at the level of family, church, fraternal organizations, or charities. They should be voluntary, purely at the discretion of the potential donor. The situation of the needy is a determination of the market, or the unwillingness of the needy to enter into market processes.
Except perhaps the physically impaired, the needy bear responsibility for their plight. The only hint he gives that there might be structural determinants of people’s plights, relationships of dominance and subordination that have significant moral implications, is a footnote admitting that it is disadvantageous to be born black in America. But even then, he might have agreed with his admirer, Ron Paul, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a bad thing because commercial property owners should be able to exclude people from their property on whatever criteria they choose. According to this conception, in the 1960s the southern lunch counter owners had every right to refuse service to blacks without governmental interference.
8. The myth that the United States is a democracy.
Actually, many on the right have argued that this is a myth, that the United States is not a democracy but something they call a “Republic.” Indeed, the founding fathers created barriers to democracy, such as property qualifications for voting, exclusion of women and Native and African Americans, indirect election of the Senate, and the Electoral College for the selection of the president. They were heavily influenced by the Roman Republic, which attempted to institutionalize balance between the senate of the wealthy and the assemblies of the more numerous poorer free citizenry (the plebes), as well as by John Locke’s absolutist adherence to property rights (so absolute that Locke cast one’s right to life as one’s right to the property in one’s body).
Whether the political order in either Rome or early United States actually offered a “balance” between classes or was more of a Republican justifying myth even then,
the fact is that today, after the industrial revolution, the growth of the modern powerhouse called the corporation, the globalization of that corporate economic power, and the extreme inequalities in income, accumulated wealth, and political accessibility, what we have is what Aristotle called an oligarchy, and which I prefer to call a plutocracy. Whichever term one uses, it means such a disproportion of economic and political resources that it can in no way be called a democracy or even any sort of balance of political influence between the classes.
During the Great Depression following the crash of 1929, everyone suffered. Wealthy people were jumping out of their office windows. As the economy recovered, thanks in part to the New Deal and in part to the economic boost of the Second World War, a significant middle class was created that served as a balancer between the very rich and the very poor. In our present situation, that middle class, which had a good bit of its wealth in its houses and relied upon a strong job market to keep those houses, is being devastated. The wealthy bankers and investors, far from jumping out of their windows, are walking out of their Wall Street office buildings and into expensive New York restaurants, having been bailed out by taxpayers who could ill afford it. There is thus no longer that balance which even conservatives had argued was essential for sustaining their favored form of government.
If our modern Federalists can no longer have the original property qualifications for voting, they have leveraged wealth more heavily in the electoral system through the contrivances of corporate personhood and money as free speech.
The threat they face is that, just as the property qualifications were abolished and the electoral system became more inclusive at certain points in history, democratic forms might now be created as their capitalist “republican” system falters.
9. The myth that the only legitimate human economic human right is the right to private property.
I have argued in my book Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium that the basis for human rights is the potential for development that all human beings possess just by virtue of being human. I further argued that those human potentialities are developed within a web of cultural, economic, and social relationships that are both facilitating and constraining such development. Human rights are about facilitating the development through processes of what I call “co-and self-determination.” I further argue that ignoring the material, or economic, basis of this development is arbitrary and that while the right to private property is one human right, there are other economic/material needs that must be met in order for people to fully participate in the opportunities for development.
So, I try to make a logically persuasive argument for human rights to such needs as adequate nutrition, health care, housing, etc.
Some people are, however, not persuaded by logical argumentation but rather by whether a conception has been able to develop a consensus, or at least a majority agreement, around it. As of 2011, one hundred and sixty countries had signed and ratified the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which affirms such economic human rights. The United States stands outside this agreement. President Jimmy Carter signed it in 1977, but the conservatives in the Senate refused to ratify it. Once Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980, it was doomed. Neither Republican nor Democrats have raised this issue in the Senate since then. So the U.S. stands with a small minority of countries outside of the overwhelming agreement that economic rights extend well beyond the right to private property.
10. The collateral myth that that social security, health care benefits, and pensions are unearned and unaffordable “entitlements."
In fact, social security, health care benefits, and pension funds are not something just given to people by some exterior entity, but are the result of working people earning them through contributions from their wages, taxes, and wage concessions.
11. The myth that privatization is always more “efficient” than public goods and services.
We need only look at the US health insurance and delivery system: millions of people uninsured and high disease and infant and adult mortality rates among the poor, especially the minority poor. Yet the US spends more on health care than any other country, $2.6 trillion, or $8,402 per person. That is 17.9% of the entire economy. For all this spending, the US, with the highest GDP in the world, ranks 37th on the World Health Organization’s ranking of world health systems. This is below not only all Western European countries, but also Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica, and Oman. How does one define “efficiency?”
My own favorite tale regarding privatization was when I reserved a place on the train from London to Manchester shortly after the very reliable British Rail was privatized. Branson’s Virgin company was awarded the London-Manchester route. After informing my Manchester friends that I would arrive at a certain time, I was stunned after waiting some time at the station to be informed that Virgin had cancelled that train because not enough people had purchased tickets. Whose “efficiency” was being catered to here? Surely not the public’s.
12. The myth that the “official” unemployment rate in the United States is accurate and comparable to the unemployment rates in other countries.
We do not count people who have never been able to find a job, who have been unemployed for a long time and no longer claim benefits, and who are in prison—thanks largely to the war on drugs, over 2 million of them—a higher % of the populations than in any other country. People who have been released after serving prison time for felony convictions find it very difficult to find jobs and they too hide the real unemployment picture in this country, especially of Blacks who already have such a high unemployment rate. If these factors are taken into account, the actual rate of unemployment of working-age people is probably at least double the “official” rate, which would now put it at least in the 17% to 18% range.
This does not take into account the increase in the working poor, many of whom can only find part-time jobs that usually do not offer benefits.
13. The myth that the U.S. offers the highest rates of upward mobility in the world.
It was once true that the U.S. offered very high rates of upward mobility to its white male population. That is no longer true. The New York Times (1/5/11, A1:12) reports that five recent studies indicate that the U.S. is now less mobile than Canada and Western European countries, with family background and education being the major determinants. One study found that 42% of American men in the bottom fifth remain there. Sixty-two percent of American men and women raised in the top fifth stay there. When I first did work on class stratification and income disparities in the 1970s, the U.S. class structure showed less disparity in both income and wealth, and higher rates of mobility, than in most Western European countries. That has been completely turned around. We are now one of the most economically unequal and least mobile countries in the industrialized world.
14. The myth that there is no alternative to the capitalist system that manifests the above characteristics and treats the worker as a commodity.
There are some short and longer-term measures that democratically-minded people can fight for to try to counteract the plutocracy. These include an amendment to reverse Citizens United; opposition to the massive privatization; restoration of union rights to organize, bargain, and strike without employer intimidation or use of replacement workers; minimum wage laws that truly reflect the actual cost of living; more investment in public services and infrastructure; publically financed jobs programs with strong training components; a single-payer healthcare insurance system; strong anti-trust laws; highly progressive taxes at both state and federal levels with a closing of loopholes used by the wealthy; capital gains taxed at the same rates as other income; restoration of anti-trust laws (no more enterprises that are “too big to fail”); increased regulation over finance and banking; the restoration of the separation between investment and commercial banks; the retention of home mortgages in local banks or credit unions; the closing of phony off-shore tax havens for tax avoidance; criminal, not just civil, prosecution of corporate law-breakers; a national “usury” limit on credit-card interest; public financing of elections; and some element of proportionality in the electoral system so that parties, such as a labor or ecological party, might arise on the national scene to offer more critical perspectives in the seats of political power.
But we should also be thinking about a more fundamental and democratizing change within the economic structures themselves. Here I would propose devoting serious effort to the expansion of public services in some areas (e.g., health, transportation, energy, water), but cooperative forms of ownership in most of the others.
I use the word “expansion” when referring to cooperative ownership because this is not merely an abstract idea. There are some very interesting examples of more democratic forms of economic organizations that remain largely unnoticed. An observation by the economic historian Gar Alperowitz would startle most Americans. This is that thirteen million workers in the United States are working in worker-owned enterprises. This number is greater than the number of private sector American workers who are unionized. There are workers in single-plants, such as in the plywood industry in the Northwest (see the work of Edward Green), and there are attempts to create broader networks of worker-owned cooperatives as in Cleveland (see community-wealth.org).
The most successful form of federated worker cooperatives of which I am aware is Mondragon in the Basque area of Spain. Founded in 1956 by a Basque priest influenced by both Catholic social thought and the Welsh socialist industrialist Robert Owen, it is the seventh largest corporation in Spain, and the largest machine tool operation. It employs almost 84,000 worker-owners. Aside from approximately 80 individual cooperative industrial enterprises, it has its own technical college, bank, R & D lab, social insurance and pension fund, and retail grocery outlets. I strongly encourage people to view the two videos on Mondragon on the web at community-wealth.org.
We might draw some inspiration from Mondragon. First, when enterprises attempt to close down their operations in order to chase lower wage rates or taxes elsewhere, workers could be given an option to purchase the plants. A national cooperative bank could assist such workers, or other people who simply want to start producer cooperatives. Existing credit unions or local banks devoted to community development, such as the already existing Union Partnership Bank (formerly Shore Bank) based in Chicago, could be brought into such a cooperative financing network. States could be encouraged create state-owned banks, such as that in North Dakota, which might be more inclined to extend credit to cooperative endeavors than commercial banks might be.
In sum, we should not succumb to the pessimism that there are no alternatives to the dominant forms that control over lives. Sometimes we just have to imagine alternatives before they exist, like Robert Owen and Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, the Basque priest he inspired to create Mondragon. But often there are concrete examples of possible alternatives that do get attention by the dominant commercial media and so remain outside our field of consciousness. To empower ourselves, we need to both think anew and search out the pockets of democratic counter-power that are hidden under the cover of the disempowering ideological fog.
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Aside from practical action, I would encourage people to read the books of Michael Albert and Gar Alperovitz and “Toward a Political Economy of Human Rights,” chapter 5 of my own, Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium.
