Unstoppable (3 page)

The Hijacking of the Conservative Label and the DNA of Corporatism

Write an article, as I have, in a widely circulated publication about such an alliance of Right and Left, and back comes a blizzard of buzzwords—an oft-repeated semantic wave whose ultimate purpose is to stop further discourse. You've heard them. Billions of dollars of propaganda over the past century have succeeded in making the two major political camps engage in chronic, if not knee-jerk, jousts against one another. Here are some of the conclusory and provocative charges designed to end deliberate, evidential thinking: “that's socialism,” “anti-capitalism,” “free market,” “big government,” “overregulation,” “deregulation,” “confiscatory taxes,” “tort reform,” “welfare,” “against free enterprise,” “stifles competition,” “freedom of contracts,” “tax and spend,” “borrow and spend,” “deficit spending,” “job-killing legislation,” “defense—whatever it takes.”

Presently, the most effective of all buzzwords is the label “conservative,” cleverly used by corporate power brokers to provide semantic cover for their radical strategic plan for the union of Big Business and many government institutions. Their actions have nothing to do with actual conservatism, but no matter. The word
is more powerful than any deeds to the contrary. Take President Ronald Reagan's statement that he had a “conservative” agenda, namely, “a strong defense, lower taxes and less government.” That he was not consistent—under his presidency there were much larger deficits, taxes reduced were later raised, and government grew—did not affect his image. He knew the hypnotic power of a slogan endlessly repeated.

Corporate lobbies, knowing a good thing when they see it, seize the label “conservative” to shield many very
unconservative
demands and policies. They have misleadingly exploited revered economic philosophers, such as Adam Smith, whom authentic conservatives draw on for justification, authority, and identity. But no matter how often these corporate commercialists call themselves conservatives, it is hard to mistake them for old-line conservatives since the two minds (corporate versus old-line) hail from very different moral, historical, and intellectual antecedents. Whereas true conservatives look back to Smith, Edmund Burke, and other major theorists as their forebears, corporatists' antecedents hail from the worshippers of Mammon and those who held and abused their wealth in the days of merchant power. True conservatives should disdain such precursors. Meanwhile corporatists ride on conservative coattails and claim as their own the old-line conservative thinkers.

Corporatism or “corporate statism,” as Grover Norquist calls it, is first and foremost a doctrine of corporate supremacy. Whatever advances that system of power and status over the constitutionally affirmed sovereignty of the people comprises the widening, all-encompassing corporatist agenda. As befits the ever-concentrating command of ever more mobile capital, labor, and technology—as well as its own media—the corporations' dynamic of expanding control with ever more immunity knows no self-imposed limitations. Large corporations usually push, with whatever political, technological, economic, marketing, and cultural tools are
required, the frontiers of domination in all directions. Wielding the tools to advance their agenda is an army of diverse experts and operators bound together by common economic interests within the authoritarian hierarchy of the modern global corporation. However you might describe them, it is hard to deny that their DNA commands them to control, undermine, or eliminate any force, tradition, or institution that impedes their expansion of sales, profits, and executive compensation. That is what their extensive strategic planning is all about. What they want is maximum predictability and the most feasible control of outcomes, with government being the preferred servicing or enforcement tool.

That is what is meant by corporate statism. And as it gets stronger, it delivers a weaker economy for a majority of Americans, a weaker democratic society, and record riches for the few.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though hailing from the patrician class, put his finger on the dangers of corporatism. He wasn't charitable in his message to Congress in 1938, successfully calling for the creation of a Temporary National Economic Commission (TNEC) to examine the concentration of corporate power. He averred that “the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than [the] democratic state . . . in its essence is fascism.”
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Though World War II's Axis powers gave the word a more lethal meaning, Roosevelt was equating fascism with the corporate state, uniting corporate influence with, over, and inside the government at state and national levels.

In recent years, as trade, investment, and other relations between nations have tightened, the corporate state has heightened its international “governing” power through such transnational systems of autocratic decision making as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and various regional agreements. Corporate managed trade, with its many pages of self-serving rules, is not “free trade.”

Neither of the Left Nor of the Right

Given the increasing influence of corporations, it hasn't taken corporate political strategists or their public relations firms long to see how powerful, if not decisive, alliances between the Left and Right can be in influencing Congress or other public bodies of decision-making. So one part of the corporate agenda is to get both sides fighting each other, so they are distracted from collaborating on shared goals, which would otherwise cause serious discomfort for corporatists. Corporations themselves, meanwhile, have no faith in these labels. We saw that seizure of the conservative label by corporate interests allows them to appropriate conservative philosophy and provides resources for its notable thinkers to degrade the image of the liberal label.

On the other hand, untroubled by ideological niceties, these expedient corporations do not hesitate to exploit and profit from programs uniformly identified with liberal politics, such as the war on poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and foreign aid. All these programs have proved to be extremely lucrative for corporations that contract with government agencies. Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute has charged that the country's biggest corporations, including J. P. Morgan, are profiting from the explosive growth of these programs designed for the poor. “Welfare in America is supposed to be a safety net for those in need, but instead, it's become an insider's game of power and profit,” Schweizer said, referring especially to the food stamp program's contractors like J. P. Morgan.
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Key to understanding corporate behavior is the recognition that, while its propagandists trumpet the irreconcilable differences between Right and Left, corporations are remarkably flexible in relation to these divisions. What is behind this plasticity is a laser-like focus on expansion, profits, and bonuses. Corporate behavior transcends the normal meanings of opportunism. Corporate action
is easy because there is rarely any steadfast, internal, interfering moral compass in the way.

Heavily funding and pressing the two major parties into a duopoly of concessions to corporate demands, the leaders of Big Business, after an election change, have only to readjust their Washington Rolodexes for high-level contacts, if the new appointees to cabinet and subcabinet levels are not already their business buddies. Whether Democrats or Republicans are in control, corporations still receive the same wasteful or expanding assorted privileges and immunities, inflated contracts, and other perks of crony capitalism and weak law enforcement—though in an unerringly rising arc of money and benefits. This is some of what President Eisenhower was alluding to in his 1961 farewell address when the retired five-star general gravely warned the American people of the “military-industrial complex” and its threat to our liberties and well-being.

Even while the harmony between the business lobbies and the two major parties may occasionally be disrupted by either inter-corporate conflicts or principled opposition from authentic conservatives and liberals/progressives, the well-budgeted corporate think tanks will continue to provide a torrent of selective ideological cover for the broader corporate agenda, with tactics like promoting rigid opposition to taxes and regulations. To the uninformed, these groups are proven masters of plausibility, offering covers for corporations' not-so-hidden agendas.

The counterweight put forth in this book relies on the supremacy of civic values to which commercial pursuits must adjust (what Adam Smith may have meant by his phrase “moral sentiments”) and with which they can properly thrive.

Escaping the Labels

Moreover, there are more and more examples of Left-Right alliances coming forward every year. They rarely break through to achieve
their objectives. But they are escaping the “pitiless abstractness” of their adopted theories and working in the world of reality in a way that both reflects and disciplines more concretely their general philosophies.

The evocative phrase “pitiless abstractness” comes from an experience that conservative columnist George F. Will had in the late 1970s.
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While sitting at home in his Washington, DC, study, where he was writing his syndicated column, he heard a loud crash. Running out the door, he saw a woman lying on the street who had just lost her life in a vehicle collision. Returning later to his desk, he wrote that he had had enough of “pitiless abstractness” and, contrary to the Reagan position, declared his support for mandatory installation of air bags by auto manufacturers.

What Will did was to descend the abstraction ladder of general antiregulatory dogmas to the facts on the ground. He derived a life-saving principle—mandating long-tested safety technology—from the grisly remains on the street. Mr. Will had seen “the other.”

Let's look at some other examples where Left-Right convergence occurred, often prompted by real-world experiences. In 2008, demands from both the Left and the Right on and inside Congress led that body to ban genetic discrimination by health insurers. This went against the position of the influential insurance industry and its allies. It would not have happened without this alliance testing its different principles in facing the injustice of any person, adult or child, being denied insurance based on a corporate classification of their birth genes.

Note the power of addressing concrete situations. Fred Stokes, a career army and Vietnam War veteran and a self-styled Southern conservative, was president of the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM). OCM is a small, feisty, farmer-protection association that challenges the predatory behavior of large agribusiness suppliers (Monsanto seeds, fertilizers, etc.) and buyers (the giant grain and beef packing plants) that are squeezing small farmers and
ranchers off the land or turning them into a modern form of contract peons. I helped start OCM and worked with others who call themselves liberal or progressive and who joined together with the farmers and ranchers. What is the common ground? A call for fair competition and enforcement of the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act. Those in the group insist on the freedom to sell to and to buy from competitive, not concentrated or monopolistic, buyers and suppliers. OCM members sit largely to the Right of the political divide on social issues and military and foreign policy. But when it comes to their focus on active OCM issues, liberals and progressives collaborate with them because they're right on!

I found what might seem an even more surprising resonance in 1998, when I received an invitation to address a United Methodist Church convention in Washington, DC, about the conflict between corporate and conservative values. One of the frictions I described at length was the deliberate commercialism of childhood. There was the well-planned marketing strategy to sell unhealthy junk food and drink and violent, sadistic products and programming directly to young children, bypassing and undermining parental authority, day after day, everywhere. I called these relentless, harmfully addicting companies “electronic child molesters.”
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It did not take any time for the parents in the room to resonate with my description of how corporate advertisements are consciously designed to induce parental guilt and provoke constant requests by children to get their parents to buy the touted product. Madison Avenue advertising firms coined the bold phrase “high nag factor” to praise and reward creators of ads that produce a high rate of pestering from children. I received a vigorous ovation from an audience whose views on many other subjects, from government regulation to the choice of candidates seeking office, undoubtedly ran counter to mine. Those differences, however, did not detract from the common desire we felt to protect our children from avaricious motivations traceable all the way back to Mammon.

Indeed, another case where a marked conservative agenda intersects with very liberal ideas comes in my next example. Few people recognized this intersection because stereotypes lead to abrupt prejudgments and dismissals of people who are seen as being on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. It is like not being able to see the trees because the forest is distantly seen as a monoculture when, given its microdiversity, it definitely is not. The example that comes to mind is the 2002 Texas State Republican Platform. If any political statement invites stereotyping, it would be that platform. Think: Republicans, Texans, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney. In many of its planks, these self-described conservatives do not disappoint. The platform calls for an end to the personal income tax, inheritance tax, corporate income tax, payroll tax, and minimum wage. It also calls for eliminating the Department of Health and Human Services, Commerce, Labor, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and, for good measure, the “position of Surgeon General.”