Noam Chomsky calls the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in the history of the world. We humans now have it in our power to destroy all human life on the planet in two different ways (global warming and nuclear holocaust--bioweapons may be a third) and the Republican are actively standing in the way of doing anything to fix either--indeed they seem to be pursing policies designed to make both situations profoundly more serious. Chomsky is right about the danger of the Republicans, and they need to be eliminated from government, but I think we need to keep in mind Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
The entities that are doing the damage are mostly corporations. A corporation is an entity which is created to organize some project or projects (usually making money for its owners) and limit their legal liability should something go wrong. It is like an animal that has no brain: it lives in an environment (the economy) governed by a set of rules which provide automatic response to a wide range of situations (usually to maximize profits or shareholder value) but need active intervention by the board of directors to make any consequential change to those rules. Natural selection tends to breed corporations that do the best job of maximizing short term profit, irrespective of long term consequences.
Within the corporation are humans who do have brains, but their power is limited to their ability to sway a majority of votes on the board of directors. Many large shareholders (e.g. endowments and large trusts) maintain an official policy of abstaining, and small shareholders usually abstain too, so garnering an actual majority to overturn a destructive policy is very, very difficult. Over the years there have been a number of laws and policies devised to minimize the consequences of this--e.g. anti monopoly law, restraint of trade laws, the Tillman Act of 1907 (which makes it illegal for corporations to donate to political campaigns), the Glass-Steagall law (which imposed a wall between speculative banking and mainstream banking), but most of them have been overturned or emasculated by short sighted politicians in the pay of corporations in recent years, or their judicial puppets.
A brainless corporation can be very powerful, and it is not limited by human lifespans, and it may have effective employees serving its short sighted goals as strongly as they can, without necessarily recognizing their destructiveness. The Russian word for such people is "Apparatchiks", and if they are allowed to do it, these apparatchiks may be members of congress and and executives of the government. The reason the Republican party is so dangerous is because many of them are apparatchiks, serving the goals of the brainless corporations and nothing else. For oil and coal companies, a way to maximize profits is to maximize the production of greenhouse gasses and minimize controls on pollution. For banks, the way to maximize profits is to minimize limitations on the sorts of investments they can do, without regard to possible consequences. For most companies, getting government payouts is a good thing.
We need to restore limits on corporate power. Things like the Tillman act limited the brainless corporations power in government. Their apparatchiks could still participate in politics, but they were personally involved, which imposed limits. The Citizens United decision effectively eliminated this control, and without it Natural Selection effectively forces corporations to become bad actors. We need to adjust things so corporations or at least their employees have a strong incentive to look out for the long term health of the environment and economy. This probably means breaking up large corporations, taxing harmful behaviors like polluting, mandating that they provide clean safe transit for the communities they serve, and so forth. I think there are a number of industries which are almost purely harmful and should either be eliminated or nationalized. For example, high frequency trading of stocks does nothing productive at all except make money, and it distorts the stock market. It should be banned. Health insurance serves no purpose but to make health care more expensive and harder to obtain. It should be nationalized and made available free for all. Lots more.
Ultimately, what we need to do is make corporations act like good citizens. Their limited liability is central to their ability to do serious harm. One of the most powerful things we can do is make sure corporate officers are liable for the harmful things they do. If an executive tells an employee to get rid of this toxic stuff, and does not offer any direction to do it a responsible way, the executive needs to be punished. If an executive bribes a politician, whether tacit or explicit, direct or indirect, that executive should be punished severely enough that they will not be able to do it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment