Third World America - Arianna Huffington [49]
Unfortunately, the middle class doesn’t have a gaggle of lobbyists patrolling the corridors of power, offering cash incentives to Congress and the White House to protect the American people from the corporate crooks fattening their bottom lines (and filling their personal coffers) while our jobs, our houses, and our pensions disappear.
There are no lobbyists for the American Dream.
DEMOCRACY GOES ON THE AUCTION BLOCK
The epic struggle between financial powerhouses and the American democratic experiment—between the wealthy few and the struggling many—is as old as the country itself.
From the trust busting of Theodore Roosevelt to the major banking reforms put in place by FDR in the wake of the Great Depression, from the monopoly that was Standard Oil to today’s Goldman Sachs, there have always been powerful special interests pitted against the interests of the public.
Indeed, as far back as 1910, Roosevelt warned about the danger of corporations exerting influence on the body politic: “There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task …” Of course, far from being put to an end, corporate political activity has only gotten more pervasive, more aggressive, more ruthless, and more effective.17 Not only have we failed to control corporations, corporations have flipped the equation and taken control of us.
Teddy Roosevelt must have been spinning in his grave in January 2010 when the Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, voted 5–4 to extend the right of free speech to corporations and unions, lifting any limits on so-called independent expenditures on political campaigns.18 President Obama called the decision “a major victory for Big Oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”19
This decision will allow the giant pharmaceutical companies that knowingly permit unsafe drugs to remain on the shelves, the people running chemical plants releasing deadly toxins into the water and air, and the factory farm conglomerates filling our food with steroids to spend unlimited amounts of money to get their water carriers into office and defeat the all-too-rare candidates who actually stand up for the public good.
It has now become even easier to auction off our democracy to the highest bidder.
A VERY RISKY BUSINESS
Corporate America is a lot like Tom Cruise’s teenage character in Risky Business, who convinces his parents he can look after himself while they are away. Then, as soon as they are gone, he orders up a hooker, trashes his father’s Porsche, has his family’s furniture stolen by a killer pimp, and throws an out-of-control party—turning his parents’ house into a makeshift suburban brothel.
Corporate America bribed and browbeat our political leaders, convincing them that private industries could regulate themselves. So out went effective oversight … and in came an orgy of unrestrained capitalism and risky business that made the Cruise blowout look like a get-together at Mother Teresa’s house.
The destructive—and often deadly—consequences of this capitalism without a conscience have been on full display for years now. Just take a look at the immoral behavior of giant drug companies that have routinely sacrificed the health of the public on the altar of higher and higher profits, time and again leaving deadly drugs on the market despite the loss of innocent lives. Or the chemical industry’s long-term cover-up of the poisonous effects on unsuspecting workers and consumers of many of the eighty