Diatribes of Jay: Fixing America: Adjust It, Don’t Burn It

For a brief update on corporate predation of labor, click here. For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here. For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here. For a discussion about reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here. For three things the Dems must do to win, click here. For suggestions on how Dems can improve their multi-candidate debates, click here and here. For an assessment of how bad the first two debates really were, click here for the first debate and here for the second. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Today’s United States of America is a paradox. We have a booming economy. We’re enjoying the longest business boom in our history, although we know it has to end sometime (and is likely to end sooner under a bad leader).

We still have the most innovative society in human history. In the last century or so we invented, among other things, electric light, phonographs, motion pictures, computers, atomic energy, nuclear weapons, the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, smart phones, and the Internet. We are now beginning to use a gene-editing technique that we invented to personalize medicine to each person’s unique DNA. We are slowly winding down the two unnecessary wars that Dubya started and that have caused so much bloody disruption in the Middle East and South Asia.

Yet some things about us are worse than ever since World War II. We have by far the worst president in our history—the most incompetent, inexperienced, divisive and personally vile. We have the most economically unequal and divided society since the First Gilded Age a century ago. And as tribal groups, we are at each other’s throats more than at any time since the Civil and Vietnam War eras.

If we don’t fix our rigged economy, the vast majority of our workers will become well-fed serfs. They may have full bellies and steady jobs, but their futures and their chances for social mobility will be grim. Many, if not most, will remain $400 away from personal financial collapse. The vast vistas of personal and social progress that distinguished America since our frontier days will vanish. Social mobility and real wealth, including the fine education that often precedes them, will become the exclusive province of our oligarchs and a diminishing upper middle class.

Race relations and religious harmony partake of the same paradox. In theory and in our law, we have a marvelously egalitarian society. But in practice we fall far short of our ideals. In the ghettos most people have as little hope and prospects for positive change as they might in a third-world nation. “People of color” can be insulted, oppressed, manhandled and even killed by police, largely because of who they are and what they look like. Crowds of incited white people can chant “Send them back!” referring to citizens duly-elected as members of Congress who happen to have a slightly darker skin tone, or to follow a non-Christian faith.

How can we fix things? How can we repair ourselves, when the good and the bad of our society seem closely intertwined?

Some say we need a revolution. But revolutions tend to throw out the good with the bad. They also tend to murder a lot of innocent people, as the Russian and French Revolutions proved. Unchecked popular zeal to change things for the better often morphs into zeal to destroy, to exact revenge, to wreak havoc. “Storm the Bastille!” is not a cry that encourages building anything, let alone with finesse.

We Americans may be moving toward that dark place. But we are not there yet. Our workers may be on the road to becoming serfs, but they are not there yet. We are not, like the Russians before their revolution, less than half a century from real, legalized, medieval-style serfdom, in which peasants, like our slaves, were treated as human property, appurtenances to the land on which they worked, and which the nobility owned.

We are still far from the condition of peasants and workers before the French Revolution. Our elite may believe that the rule “don’t mess with business” will make us all better off—a philosophy not far from the French aristocracy’s notion of the “best of all possible worlds” that preceded the French Revolution. But our better thinkers have come to understand that no such simplistic mantra has anything to do with practical politics, let alone science. They are discovering real, tangible and practical reasons for Trump’s presidency here, Brexit in Britain, and the turn toward bullheaded authoritarian leaders everywhere from Brasilia to Washington.

When you have a machine that runs rough and loses power, you adjust it. You don’t smash it. How much more should that rule apply to our governmental machine—the United States.

Our nation was the first in human history to be designed from the ground up on rational principles. It has endured for two and a half centuries. So when it starts running rough, we should fix and adjust it, not smash it.

Adjusting was precisely what FDR did. The rest of the world was embroiled in an idealogical death-match that later nearly led to species self-extinction, in the Cuban Missile Crises of 1962. But not FDR.

He welcomed the oligarchs’ hatred, but he didn’t try to eliminate them, let alone string them up. He just adjusted their power downward a notch, so that more far-sighted men and women could continue building a fair, equitable and egalitarian society. He did it by reigning in the bankers, continuing to break up the big industrial combines (an endless task his fifth cousin Teddy had started) and letting workers bargain collectively.

Today’s conditions are different, but the paradox is much the same. Business corporations are sources of our wealth and most of our material progress since FDR’s day. They design and make our cars, planes, appliances, homes, computers, radios, televisions, smart phones, and the medical supplies and equipment that insure our health and longevity. So it makes no sense to bash them, far less to foment a revolution against them.

Yet corporations’ wealth and power now do threaten our equality and our democracy, as much or more than they did in the First Gilded Age. Corporations are taking over the role of government, and they are using their power for their own and their leaders’ aggrandizement, not the common welfare. They have all but replaced the legal protections against government in our Bill of Rights with take-it-or-leave-it contracts that they themselves write.

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, owns a majority of voting stock in Facebook and therefore controls it absolutely. That ownership gives him near-absolute power over his 35,587 employees worldwide (as such) and absolute control over the way Facebook’s 2.3 billion regular users interact.

No medieval prince ever had such power over a city-state. The infamous Medici family, if resurrected, could only turn pale with envy. Even Genghis Khan, whose empire once extended over most of the Eurasian land mass, could claim no such influence over so many people spread over so much of the globe.

So Zuckerberg is our leading twenty-first-century global satrap. He presides over a global empire of more than one third of our entire species. And he has few legal and even fewer practical limits on what he can do.

His empire has no fixed boundaries. It’s abstract and ever-changing. But it’s real nevertheless. It’s probably responsible (through negligence, if not design) for putting Trump in the White House, for Britain’s agony over Brexit, and for strongmen like el-Sisi and Bolsonaro governing from Cairo to Brasilia.

And let me repeat: our Bill of Rights—the fount and apex of our rights as Americans—simply does not restrain Facebook or any other corporation. It only protects us against oppression by government. So insofar as Zuckerberg is king of Facebook, he has far more direct power over us Americans (let alone his employees) than George III, and far less restraint than any governor or president today.

Yet FDR fixed similar evils a century ago without destroying corporations. He adjusted their power and asserted some public control over them. In that way, he gave us at least four decades of the most vibrant, effective and fair capitalism in human history. Our markets and industries hummed like Swiss watches. They mostly treated workers fairly and with dignity, if only because strong unions stood behind them.

But FDR’s remedies (besides collective bargaining) were not general; they were mostly ad hoc. So 74 years after FDR’s death, we have regressed and relapsed. The oligarchs have found ways to increase corporate power without limit. Their ways include spewing massive propaganda through organs like Fox, changing the rules in their favor, buying and selling pols, regulators and governments, and disempowering and manipulating workers as a class. Corporations and the oligarchs who run them, as Bernie so rightly and succinctly put it, have “rigged” the system.

So what do we do now? Do we abolish corporations? Do we form mobs to imprison our oligarchs or lop off their heads, as the Bolsheviks and French Revolutionaries did to their respective aristocrats? Of course not.

We begin with a sense of humility and caution. Corporations are responsible for most of our wealth and power, both individual and societal. They bring us our modern conveniences, our creature comforts, our homes, food and drink.

At they same time, corporations are responsible for most of what ails us: massive pollution of our air, land, and water; abject dependence for energy on oil and gas, which are rapidly running out and heating our planet; unsafe and hazardous chemicals in our homes and environment; bought and sold politicians and legislatures; and a nation overloaded with weapons and far too prone to threaten or make war as a solution to routine geopolitical problems.

Our corporate media have sinned gravely, too. They are responsible for trivializating and sensationalizing our public discourse, for stressing gossip over substance, and for helping our leaders lose all perspective beyond the next “news” cycle.

Our corporations and their individual leaders often use the money they gain from their wealth-creating activities to influence, if not control, government itself. That control often leads to additional aggrandizement of corporations, to the detriment of both individuals and government.

Our Supreme Court’s fatal error in Citizens United was failing to recognize this fact of modern life. If corporations can use the vast sums they accumulate through legitimate business to influence and even control government, unrestrained by the Bill of Rights, they can convert our democracy into something much darker and narrower, all in their own narrow mercenary interests.

So again, what do we do? We know that corporations are the geese that lay the golden eggs. How do we get them to work more for the common welfare, and less for the aggrandizement of individual corporate leaders as modern kings?

The crux of the matter, I think, is an age-old conceptual error. We tend to think of corporations as just a more abstract legal form of individuals. Legal parlance often refers to them, along with real people, as “persons.” So it seems fair and proper, to some, that a single man like Mark Zuckerberg can lord it over a vast, global corporate empire just as did an emperor of ancient Rome or Persia.

But corporations are not people. They are legal abstractions that often have the size and power of nations. (As I’ve pointed out before, Apple once had more cash reserves than France.) So if “democracy” is to have any meaning in our Age of Corporations, we the people are going to have to exercise far more control over corporations than we do at present.

That doesn’t mean that “we the people” ought to take over day-to-day management. The whole point of having corporations at all is to separate productive and economic activity from politics’ partisanship, intrigue and inertia. But insofar as corporations influence larger questions of policy that affect the whole of society (such as continued dependence on planet-heating fossil fuels), the people must have more say, somehow, than they do now.

I would begin with three changes. First, I would have Congress pass a uniform, national, federal corporate law.

Today one of our tiniest states (Delaware) sets the rules for most of our giant corporations. It does so simply by making its rules laxer than those of other states, so that big corporations want to incorporate there.

Delaware applies a “business judgment rule” to the acts of corporate managers, directors and shareholders, under which those acts can be negligent and even thoughtless. As long as not done in “bad faith,” i.e., not made for self-dealing or evil purposes, corporate law can’t touch them. It’s as if our entire menagerie of corporations had adopted Google’s credo “Don’t be evil.”

Unfortunately, as Zuckerberg has so brilliantly demonstrated, you can unload an ocean of wrong upon the public without meaning to be evil. You can simply be negligent. Or you can leave a lot of “collateral damage” in the wake of a single-minded effort to grow and profit.

Facebook seems to have subverted most of the world’s democracies, without Zuckerberg meaning to do so, in his zeal to grow unstoppably and “move fast and break things.” The bankers who brought us the Crash of 2008 weren’t trying to do that; they were just trying to get rich quick without thinking much about consequences.

All this must change. On questions that influence the whole of society, or that cause injury or death to multiple individuals, corporate chieftains and their directors must be held accountable. Little Delaware will just have to find another way to fill its coffers.

The second big change I would make regards individuals’ power over corporations. It’s also absurd that Mark Zuckerberg, a single individual barely old enough (at 35) to run for president, has absolute power over Facebook and its worldwide empire, simply because he founded it. That unfortunate fact is just as absurd as putting today’s France, Britain or the United States under a single absolute monarch, as if the last four centuries of social progress had never happened.

The third big idea is another Bill of Rights, one that applies directly to corporations and protects both employees and customers as such.

Corporations should not be able to stifle employees’ or customers’ free speech with gag agreements, as they do (or try to do) so often now. When corporations accuse employees or customers of wrongdoing, the accused should have access to appropriate due process, whether or not they are members of unions, although that process perhaps need not be as exhaustive as in our courts.

The law should protect employees and customers against assault, battery and wrongful death in short comprehensible sentences, which apply regardless of any conflicting language in non-negotiated contracts. Finally, a Bill of Rights that constrains corporations should provide explicitly for class actions, so that corporations do not have a monetary incentive to perpetrate swindles that make a lot of money collectively but are too small to sue for individually.

All these rights should appear in short and simple language that any citizen can understand. That’s the genius of our Bill or Rights, and the same approach should apply to rights against corporations.

Many subsidiary ideas are also worthy of consideration. Germany has labor representatives on the boards of its big corporations. We could have public members as well, either appointed by elected officials or elected directly by the public.

The idea of mandatory corporate ombudspeople is worth considering. These officers might be empowered to handle public complaints and, in extreme cases, to operate as “whistleblowers” and reveal corporate wrongdoing, like VW’s pollution-testing evasion, before it gets out of hand.

Proper and fair taxation of corporations is also vital. When a corporation like Apple has greater cash reserves than France, it can’t help but be tempted to use some of that cash to influence government by every means: propagandizing the people, lobbying the legislature, and suborning pols with big campaign contributions and even outright bribery. Perhaps inordinate corporate treasuries, or their use, should be limited in some way, if not applied to corporate business or investment, in order to encourage corporations to “stick to their knitting.”

These are just a few preliminary ideas. But the underlying principle cries out for implementation. Corporations are the new nation-states. They are much like the old European city-states before they melded fully into nations. They can rise from nothing to global dominance in a flash. Facebook, for example, is just over fifteen years old; yet it has has nearly (if unintentionally) brought down democracy worldwide.

In abstract economics, fast action is a good thing. The rapid rise of some corporations shows how quickly a good product or service can produce new wealth and increase human happiness. It’s all part of Schumpeter’s famous “perpetual gale of creative destruction,” which is capitalism.

But that gale also has darker clouds. The sudden rise of vast financial and secular economic power can overwhelm and undermine government. It can give unelected and unvetted individuals like Zuckerberg the power of kings.

As the global avatar of capitalism, the United States is the epicenter of this trend. We have more corporate “kings” and “queens” in greater positions of real financial and secular power than any other nation on Earth. So it’s up to us to figure out fair ways to restrain their power while keeping the dynamism of our capitalist culture and some kind of democracy, too.

Antitrust law is helpful, but it’s not nearly enough. It didn’t even prevent our banks from getting “too big to fail” and bringing on the Crash of 2008. If the truth be told, our antitrust laws and courts are far too deferential to corporate management. Our courts hardly ever break firms up, in part because Delaware and its near-monopoly of corporate charters have conditioned them to the business judgement rule.

What we need is a new legal and governance regime for corporations. It ought to adjust their power and public influence without overturning their great benefits. It must include fair taxation, the rights of individuals and other private groups against them, some limit on cash hoards and their use to buy government, early disclosure of corporate malfeasance (without disclosing real trade secrets), and strict limits on the unchecked power of managers, directors and shareholders. With this adjusted regime, a proper balance between corporate and government power could outlast the tenure of a single wise and skilled leader like FDR or Barack Obama.

Like modern democracy and science, business corporations are about four centuries old. Their advent was a seminal and largely positive development in human social evolution. For its part, science as a human institution has literally transformed our lives: the immaculate hospital laboratory, with its whirring CAT scanners, has replaced the blood-letting and the dogmatic priest, waving his crucifix in an effort to “exorcise demons.”

But now the unchecked power of corporations has begun to overwhelm both democracy and science. The money that corporations rightly make for the benefits they provide us goes partly to subvert and “rig” our government. And that subversion often also undermines science, as it does today in rejecting, as a political matter, the near-unanimous scientific consensus on global warming and its human causes and effects.

Corporations simply have gotten too powerful, in ways that have little to do with the value of the products and services they offer. We have to cut that power back, not with revolution, but with step-by-step changes in law and taxation. We must give corporations a wide berth if they “stick to their knitting” but prevent them from using their money and expertise to influence or subvert the larger society to their own narrow advantage, regardless of wider consequences.

Doing so will require adjustment, not revolution. But it’s absolutely vital to the survival of a rational, democratic society. Finding the right balance will probably take decades, if not generations. So we ought to start now.

Endnote: More on Labor As if on cue, the social/economic commentator Farhad Manjoo today blasted yet another example of modern corporate predation, in this case of part-time “gig” workers. What drew his ire was a recently discontinued policy of the meal-delivery firm DoorDash. That policy seemed indistinguishable from bald theft of tips for the delivery workers.

The story’s basic outline is familiar in our digital economy. DoorDash was founded in 2013, a mere six years ago. It was, of course, incorporated in Delaware. According to Manjoo, it’s now a “unicorn,” with a market value of seven billion dollars.

DoorDash tried to pass off its transparently predatory policy by describing it in confusing terms. Like many corporations today, it tried to sell its version of tip theft as promoting efficiency.

Some day, one hopes, labor organizing on the Internet will catch up with corporate exploitation of gig workers under the loophole for independent contractors. Social media seem ideal vehicles for organizing widely dispersed workers like Uber drivers and DoorDash deliverers, without the usual in-person rallies and demonstrations. Those workers are unlikely to get a fair shake, either from the law or their employers, until they organize and demand it, under threat of strikes. And organizing on the Internet ought to enjoy strong protection under our First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

So let us hope that, some day soon, an enterprising labor organizer will discover the power of many-to-many communication. He or she may discover how easy it is to design a special-purpose social medium. Such a person may even start an independent labor-media Website, siphoning traffic away from democracy-killing Facebook and reducing its monopoly power. The future of gig workers as anything other than digital serfs may depend on it.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here.
For brief analysis of the House’s resolution censuring the President, click here.
For good reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here.
For a discussion about reparations for the descendants of slaves and how to make the reparations work, click here.
For three things the Dems must do to win the White House, click here.
For an assessment of how the second debate propels the Dems toward losing, click here.
For suggestions on how to improve multi-candidate debates, click here.
For a more general discussion of how to improve debates, click here.
For a review of the first Democratic Debate, click here.
For a third, simpler look at why Trump won in 2016, click here.
For seven reasons not to make war on Iran, click here.
For discussion of Warren’s ability to defend science, and why it matters, click here.
For comment on the quality of Elizabeth Warren’s mind and its relevance to our current circumstances, click here.
For analysis of the disastrous effect of our leaders’ failure to take personal responsibility, click here.
For brief comment on China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and its significance for our species, click here.
For reasons why the Democratic House should pass a big infrastructure bill ASAP, click here.
For an analysis why Nancy Pelosi is right on impeachment, click here.
For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Diatribes of Jay

24 July 2019

Fixing America: Adjust It, Don’t Burn It

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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