Democracy and its economy

Democracy implies and requires a supporting economy lest it segue into an oligarchy or tyranny. That economy must insure that a society’s productivity is distributed in a reasonably equitable manner otherwise that productivity, usually expressed as wealth, will gravitate to those who are more successful at acquiring it. The process of acquiring wealth increasingly favors those who have wealth until the society devolves into one of the rich and the poor. Because wealth breeds power this means the wealthy will control the society and democracy will no longer exists. Thus a democratic society requires a reasonably equitable distribution of its productivity. Even at the beginning of our country Thomas Jefferson understood the threat a maldistibution of wealth posed to democracy. It was for this reason that he, in contrast to Hamilton, proposed a nation of independent farmers each with his own plot of land. Such a citizen would be more independent than one who worked for another in an industrial or commercial firm. We no longer have such a society. Agriculture itself has been industrialized and controlled by corporations that employ others to work the farms.

To preserve our democracy, if for no other reason, we must insure distribution of wealth sufficient to prevent domination by the wealthy. Being as our economy is a capitalistic one, we must determine whether it can be made into a democracy-supporting economy or not. Under FDR we had reasonable success in controlling wealth distribution by taxation and public works. Today Europeans are doing the same basically through taxation. If we look at wealth accumulation as a threat to democracy, perhaps we can finally get past the plethora of myths running from Horatio Alger to personal wealth as a measure of success. It is useful to note that even at the planetary level James Tobin has proposed, and stimulated a movement, to impose a tax on the immense amount and size of the daily transactions of the global stock and monetary markets. (See http://www.ceedweb.org/iirp/.) This money would be used to redress the radical monetary imbalance on this planet by relieving the abject poverty rampant in so much of the world and providing a stable base for societal development.

I suggest that the preservation and enhancement of democracy can be a unifying focus and rallying point for progressivism, which currently does not seem to have such a unifying concern. The call of democracy broke the power of kings; perhaps it is still powerful enough to break the power of corporations.

Bob Newhard

Clarifying Clinton

The lead article in the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic magazine is devoted to Bill Clinton and his post-presidential carrier of inducing corporations to fund needed social solutions, e.g. AIDS, energy conservation, etc. (The article plus a slide show and interview can be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200710/clinton-foundation.) Reading the article and watching a video presentation by Clinton did much to clarify for me what has happened to the Democratic Party I once knew as a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. As with many Democrats, I have long known that Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council had abandoned the people and their needs as the prerequisite and defining purpose of a democracy. Roosevelt was under no illusions about the need to protect citizens from the aggrandizing power of the corporations. It was one of the functions of government to redistribute a portion of the gross national product to the people in the interests of preserving a democracy, which cannot exist in a nation of the rich and the poor. I asked myself how a Democrat could auction off large segments of the publicly owned communication spectrum with no public benefit required. We should have required ample prime time for public affaires such as elections. We should have created an independent network such as the BBC. Everybody knew the media was the problem, but these “Democrats” sold it to the very corporations that were polluting our airwaves with trivia and worse and with no public interest strings attached. This scenario has been repeated time and again by these people, whether it was a health plan that bent over backwards to accommodate the corporations, but still could not satisfy corporate greed, or a welfare program that forced people on welfare to find a job in an obviously declining job market and when those jobs often did not pay a living wage. This is democratic concern for the people?

The article is appropriately headlined “Let’s Make a Deal” on the cover of the magazine. In the article it becomes clear that Clinton views corporations as fundamental and government’s role is to facilitate them as much as possible while extracting whatever quid pro quo it can from them. In 2005 Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation (URL http://www.clintonfoundation.org/index.htm) to carry out his vision called the Clinton Global Initiative. As the author of the Atlantic article notes, “Clinton can and certainly does raise money, but he didn’t have enough to endow a major grant-making foundation. What he did have was an ex- presidential bully pulpit, a deep Rolodex, the power to attract attention and talent, and an inkling that those assets might be used to do for public goods something like what entrepreneurs and investment bankers do in the corporate world: midwife new markets or scale up underdeveloped ones.” The author describes the annual, somewhat frenetic, gathering of corporate executives and their flunkies to negotiate what “commitments’ they will make toward improving the world. There is no question that the Foundation does a type of good. Apparently its AIDS initiative was quite successful, but the instrument for doing this good is corporate charity, not government. This is analogous to the Clinton administration’s doing enormous good for the corporations in the hope that the corporations would, in some measure, reciprocate. Robert Reich, Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor, recounts the cold shoulder he got from multinational corporations when he asked for their support in improving labor laws in return for the enormous benefits that the administration had bestowed on them. I believe this charitable approach to dealing with social issues, which Democrats of the FDR period thought the business of government, was endemic to the Clinton administration. That Clinton’s foundation continues in the same vein accounts, I believe, for the friendship between him and the first Prescient Bush who appealed to a thousand lights of charity to solve social problems. This approach implies that the citizens have no right to a decent standard of living, which FDR declared they did.

The charitable approach to dealing with major social issues is, in my judgment, very dangerous. If and as it becomes the norm we lay the groundwork for fascism, which, as Mussolini pointed out, is a fusion of corporations and government. Presidential candidates in the 2008 election should be scrupulously examined for this same approach to government, most notably, Hillary Clinton who is taking large amounts from media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Robert Newhard