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Welcome to the Plutocracy
John Medaille, Front Porch Republic
onservatives have long believed that the power of the courts to “legislate from the bench” was a great and anti-democratic evil which could only be remedied by strict interpretation of the Constitution combined with sensitivity to the “original intent” of the founders and deference to the legislative branch. And they had good reason to believe this, since it is unlikely that the founders would have approved of many pieces of court legislation. Abortion, for example, could not be part of the original intent, and such a “right” is neither in the Constitution nor in its “penumbra” (to use Justice’s Douglas’s rather inventive term.) Indeed, many prominent features of American life are, for better or worse, not products of our democracy, but of our judicial system.
Alas, when conservatives themselves gain control of the court, it seems they are no better at exercising judicial restraint than are their liberal counterparts. Indeed, the “conservative court” has on several occasions completely changed the political landscape of the United States. This happened, for example, in Bush v. Gore, when the election was decided by five members of the court. And it happened again this last Thursday in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
The case concerns a movie entitled “Hillary” (as in “Clinton”) put out by a non-profit corporation, “Citizens United,” whose president is Floyd Brown, a long time political activist who is credited, among other dubious achievements, with the Willie Horton ads. “When we’re through,” Brown remarked, “people are going to think that Willie Horton is Michael Dukakis’s nephew.” Brown came up with a clever way around the campaign finance laws which banned political ads from corporations or unions 30 days prior to an election. He would run ads for the movie, and since he was just advertising a movie, it wasn’t political advertising at all. Never mind that the movie, and the ads, were derogatory at best. The Federal Election Committee refused to go along with the ruse, and CU sued.
All CU wanted was for the court to bless their end-run around the campaign laws. Corporate contributions were not an issue in the case, and not part of the relief that plaintiffs were seeking. But for some unknown reasons, the court decided to re-hear the case on grounds that had nothing to do with the plaintiffs plea. The rehearing was peculiar, not only in widening the grounds of the case beyond the issues that were placed before it, but in ordering the rehearing for September 9th, a full month before the court’s session normally began. This seems to indicate some undue haste in deciding so pivotal an issue. One is tempted to think that the majority wanted this issue decided in time to dismantle the current laws in advance of the coming congressional elections. One is permitted to ask here whether the court’s agenda is judicial or political.
…The Founding Fathers of our Republic were very suspicious of corporations, since the royally-chartered companies had been used as instruments of oppression against the colonies. The Navigation Acts, for example, gave them exclusive shipping rights to the colonies, much to the detriment of American entrepreneurs. And it was East India Company tea that the colonists used to color the waters of Boston harbor in the original tea party. For a jurisprudence that pretends to be interested in “original intent,” the colonial attitude towards corporate power cannot be overlooked.
Corporations prior to Santa Clara were creatures of the state that had no “rights” save those that were granted by their charters, charters that always excluded their participation in politics. Santa Clara extended the protections of the 14th Amendment (no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) to the corporations. The Amendment was originally designed to protect the freed slaves, but since Santa Clara it has been used mainly as a tool to protect big business…
(25 Jan 2010)
The Neoliberal State
Raymond Plant, The New Statesman
Neoliberals wanted to limit government, but the upshot of their policies has been a huge expansion in the power of the state. Deregulating the financial system left banks free to speculate, and they did so with reckless enthusiasm. The result was a build-up of toxic assets that threatened the entire banking system. The government was forced to step in to save the system from self-destruction, but only at the cost of becoming itself hugely indebted. As a result, the state has a greater stake in the financial system than it did in the time of Clement Attlee. Yet the government is reluctant to use its power, even to curb the gross bonuses that bankers are awarding themselves from public funds. The neoliberal financial regime may have collapsed, but politicians continue to defer to the authority of the market.
Hardcore Thatcherites, and their fellow-travellers in New Labour, sometimes question whether there was ever a time when neoliberal ideas shaped policy. Has public spending not continued to rise over recent decades? Is the state not bigger than it has ever been? In practice, however, neoliberalism has created a market state rather than a small state. Shrinking the state has proved politically impossible, so neoliberals have turned instead to using the state to reshape social institutions on the model of the market – a task that cannot be carried out by a small state.
An increase in state power has always been the inner logic of neoliberalism, because, in order to inject markets into every corner of social life, a government needs to be highly invasive. Health, education and the arts are now more controlled by the state than they were in the era of Labour collectivism. Once-autonomous institutions are entangled in an apparatus of government targets and incentives. The consequence of reshaping society on a market model has been to make the state omnipresent.
Raymond Plant is a rarity among academic political theorists, in that he has deep experience of political life (before becoming a Labour peer he was a long-time adviser to Neil Kinnock). But he remains a philosopher, and the central focus of The Neoliberal State is not on the ways in which neoliberalism has self-destructed in practice. Instead, using a method of immanent criticism, Plant aims to uncover contradictions in neoliberal ideology itself. Examining a wide variety of thinkers – Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, James Buchanan and others – he develops a rigorous and compelling argument that neoliberal ideas are inherently unstable…
(7 Jan 2010)
Parecon & Participatory Society
Michael Albert and Matt Grinder, znet
In this interview, Michael Albert, one of the originators of Participatory Economics (along with Robin Hahnel), is interviewed by parecon advocate Matt Grinder.
Matt Grinder: Could you briefly summarize Participatory Economics, or parecon?
Michael Albert: Participatory Economics, or parecon for short, is a vision for how to conduct economics in a classless manner. It delivers to workers and consumers self managed say over their economic lives, a condition of solidarity with others, equitable incomes for their labors, diverse opportunities and options, and ecological balance.
Parecon achieves the above by way of a few core institutions though, when implemented in real historic societies these core institutions would be augmented and refined depending on the society’s development, its size, its history, and so on, with wide variations between countries, inside countries between industries, and even between workplaces inside industries. The core institutions, the part of economic vision it makes sense to conceive and advocate now, are:
· productive property that is overseen and directed by those it affects, as indicated below, but that is owned by no one – called participatory property.
· workers and consumers councils in which members, individually and collectively, have a say in decisions proportionate to the effect of the decisions on them, whether as individuals or in groups – called self management.
· remuneration for socially valued labor in proportion to duration, intensity, and onerousness of one’s effort – called equitable remuneration
· a division of labor in which each worker does a mix of tasks conceived so that on average every worker’s overall work situation is comparably empowering as every other’s – called balanced job complexes
· allocation by cooperative negotiation among affected workers and consumers, acting through their councils – called participatory planning.
Grinder: Could you briefly summarize the four social spheres, and a participatory society?
Albert: Parecon is itself a vision only for a society’s economy, but of course we want a good society in all key dimensions of life, not just one. Some centrally important spheres of social life that make sense to highlight and develop vision for are at least:
· the polity – or the institutions centrally responsible for adjudication, legislation, and implementation of shared agendas.
· kinship – or the institutions centrally responsible for birthing, nurturing, and training the new generation, as well as for sexuality, and what might be called daily social relations in living units.
· community/culture – or the institutions centrally responsible for how people define and celebrate their national, racial, ethnic, or other cultural identities, including cultural practices, celebrations, language, etc.
· economy – or the institutions centrally responsible for production, allocation, and consumption of goods and services…
(12 Jan 2010)
More about Parecon: Life After Capitalism here.
