[SaintessHeart]

From Madison to DC, capitalists tighten grip

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — This country is a mess: Twenty million people can’t find a decent job. Twenty million live in a home that’s worth less than what they owe on it. Forty-three million can’t afford to eat without handouts from the government. Health care is increasingly expensive and humiliating. Retirement is out of reach. Our bridges and roads are crumbling. Our children aren’t learning.

But there’s one group that’s doing just fine: the capitalists, you know, the people who own just about everything, the people we work for, shop for, die for.

Things look pretty good from where they sit, which is on a mountain of cash. The stock market is way up. Profits are soaring. Their incomes and wealth took a hit from the Great Recession, but they’ve weathered the storm pretty well.

Best of all, the capitalists — and the corporations they own and run — have captured our governments, and are bending our public institutions to their will.

You see it everywhere, from Washington to Madison, where so-called fiscal conservatives are mounting a highly visible attack on government spending. I say “so-called fiscal conservatives” because it’s increasingly clear that their attacks have little to do with balancing budgets and a whole lot to do with weakening federal, state and local governments and turning them into wholly-controlled subsidiaries of the corporations.

We know they aren’t serious about balancing budgets, because every time they have a chance to vote for lower taxes, they take it, regardless of the impact on the budget.

It’s blindingly obvious in Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans in the Legislature have dropped the sham argument that busting public unions is necessary to save money. By pulling the union-busting provisions out of the budget fix bill and passing a stand-alone bill, Walker and his allies have admitted that destroying the unions isn’t a budget issue, but a political one.

Unions are some of the few institutions left that can counter the power of corporations in the workplace or in the political sphere. Therefore, they must be eliminated. Stamping out unions is just one more skirmish in the class war that the capitalists, the corporations and their allies in both parties have been waging for 30 years.

It’s not just Madison. Here in Washington, corporations have been getting their way for years. They haven’t won every battle, but they’ve come out on top more often than not.

For example, the financial companies lobbied hard to get Congress to deregulate their industry. And then, when that deregulation helped cause the greatest financial crisis in 100 years, the banks and shadow banks lobbied hard to get Congress to bail them out. They made sure that the public paid for the crisis, and that the banks, their top executives and their owners suffered as little discomfort as possible.

And when it came time to re-regulate Wall Street, those same industries made sure the Dodd-Frank Act was as weak as possible. The big banks could have been broken up and made safe. But they weren’t. They are still too big to fail, and when they inevitably pull the same stupid stunts again that will imperil the global economy, they’ll be bailed out again.

The few provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act that could cause the banks some pain — such as the Volcker rule on derivative trading, or the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — are going to be impotent by the time the lobbyists write the rules.

Which brings me back to the faux budget cuts being championed by the Republicans in Congress. Sprinkled in among the cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood are deep reductions in agencies that watch over corporations and make sure they don’t get away with murder.

The Republicans’ bill hacks away at funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the USDA’s food inspection unit, and the Food and Drug Administration.

Does anyone honestly believe that we spend too much money preventing fraud on Wall Street or keeping contaminated food off the grocery shelves?

The amount of money being saved by gutting these programs is a pittance when viewed in the context of a $3 trillion budget, but it’s a huge present to the corporations for whom maximizing profits is the only thing that matters.

Corporations don’t just want to be free from regulations; they also want to profit by taking over the provision of public services.

Republican governors are pushing to sell as much of the government apparatus as they can to their corporate friends. Public roads, prisons, parks, schools, welfare agencies, water systems, and power plants are being privatized to raise cash, regardless of the long-term costs to the public.

In Washington, capitalists run Congress, the Fed, the independent agencies, and much of the executive branch. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has more to say at the Supreme Court than Justice Clarence Thomas does. And corporate control of our national government will only expand after the Citizens United decision that allows almost unlimited corporate money to dominate our elections.

Don’t get me wrong: I think capitalists and corporations have a vital role to play in our economy, I just don’t think they should have complete control over all aspects of our lives. Without the countervailing power of unions or democratically-elected governments, corporations will be able to keep us docile, powerless and divided.

Then the corporations will have achieved their goal of the perfect banana republic, where everyone’s duty is to the corporate bottom line. And if that bottom line says you must lose your job, or burden yourself with debt, or choke on toxic air? In the immortal words of John Boehner, “so be it.”