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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-02-04
© 2010 Peter Belmont
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In 2010, while China, with an admirably effective (and of course authoritarian) system of governance charges ahead on many fronts, the USA is tied up in a paralysis which arises from our system of governance. On most issues the most we can do is not unlike rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Recently, however, our governance more closely resembled the manufacture of icebergs.
Popular democracy in the people’s interest, if practiced, would not necessarily lead either to paralysis or to senseless spasm. Our system of rule-by-monied-interests (which replaces popular democracy in the people’s interest in the US with a recent boost by the Supreme Court) does not alone explain either paralysis or spasm. Our system of social constraints on political discussion which creates a sort of national consensus—beyond whose borders “players” dare not go—may have more to do with the problem.
At any rate, we see far more of paralysis and of spasm than of good government in the public interest, and this essay tries to show the problem in a few instances and to account for it.
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China is an authoritarian country less afflicted with the problems of widely diffused political control than we are in the USA. The result is that China is charging ahead—whether rightly or wrongly—with a large head of steam while the USA sometimes sits on a siding with no observable fire in the firebox and at other times leaps energetically off the tracks.
The USA is often politically paralysed. What it has started, it usually cannot stop. What it has not done, it usually cannot do. Paul Krugman says it’s worse than I imagined. “Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland” [by allowing and encouraging use of a one-vote veto in the Senate!]. And Krugman delightfully continues: “It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis. But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries.”
We see paralysis in the health-care debates (early 2010), in job-creation, in rejecting taxation of the (these days rather excessively) wealthy as a path toward fiscal balance, and in paralysis regarding global warming.
(We see paralysis also in the USA’s long and irrational love affair with Israel. In this love affair, the US is not alone, having many co-lovers among the English-speaking countries. There is some hope that this long and ill-smelling affiliation may be coming apart due to Israel’s excesses—the Gaza war-crimes and the Dubai assassination using US passports and credit cards. See At what point will the West dump Israel?).
But US governance is not all paralysis and deck-chairs. We also see ice-berg creation. Earlier, we saw the unnecessary and unwise relaxation of the valuable systems of banking regulation at the instigation of giants of the banking industry, the consequent near-destruction of much of the world’s financial system, and the spasmodic efforts at rescuing the banks without (yet) any re-introduction of the earlier-abandoned regulations. We have also seen the US rush into unnecessary, pointless, and enormously expensive wars and, early in the Bush-II administration, enact energy legislation drafted in secrecy by energy industry giants and passed without apparent questions by a complacent Congress.
Pointless and vastly expensive wars continue because no-one can think how to stop them. Vastly expensive subsidies to fossil-fuel producers continue, despite global warming worries, and despite end-of-oil worries, because no-one can think how to stop them. We have a system of medical interventions which fails to constitute “health care” because Americans are less healthy than many other peoples in the world but which nevertheless soaks up 16% of GNP, about twice what Europeans pay[1]. And the US is powerless to make this “system” more effective (unless effective for enriching the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, and the industry of medical services provision.)
A case study in paralysis (and rearranging deck chairs) is the current health care fandango (I write in early 2010). The problem seemed to be two-fold: too many people lacked health-insurance and health-care was too expensive. After a lot of fooling around in the political mud pit, we seem to be arriving at a scheme which will increase the number of people insured by requiring everyone to buy insurance whether they can afford it at today’s prices or not, subsidizing people who really cannot afford health insurance, and paying for these new subsidies by raising taxes—but only on people whose employment (query: does this include government employment?) provides “Cadillac” health insurance. The total cost of insurance goes up, because more people become insured and no prices go down. The health insurance industry stays in charge and in place, the cost of pharmaceuticals which so very, very easily could be made negotiable, remains high. Patents for immensely profitable drugs are extended in time. Nothing is done to cut back on the number of procedures which are ordered by the medical establishment, or their cost. The USA will be paying more (18%, 20% of GNP) than Europeans (10%), but Americans will still be sicker. Was all this political grid-lock being conducted for the benefit of the American people? Or for the benefit of the corporations? I call these “deliberations” rearranging deck chairs. The boat is still sinking. And because the boat is still sinking, I also call it paralysis.
What accounts for this paralysis? What accounted for the earlier spasms of unwise activity such as the de-regulation of the banks and the harmful (secretly drafted) energy legislation?
Well, popular democracy is not the cause. Democracy (of the people, by the people, for the people) has not been practiced in the USA for years.[2] “Democracy if you can keep it” someone might once have said. Hard to keep, though, when monied interests (a/k/a “fat cats”) keep buying-up the legislatures. And the elected judges. The Supreme Court’s recent decision only makes all this more poignant.
The US Constitution calls for a skewed system of representation (as far as population goes) with Senate membership on a per-State rather than a per-capita basis. This makes the Senate undemocratic by design. The Senate’s “filibuster rule” makes it even less democratic, delivering to any 40% of the senate (together possibly “representing” far fewer than 40% of the US population as a whole) the power to prevent legislation. This makes paralysis a likely pattern in American governance.
However, the “filibuster rule” is bad for a reason unrelated to population. After all, our democracy does not provide any but nominal representation of “the people”, so that there is no reason to count people in toting up that 40%. Rather, it is sufficient to consider how much money must be spent by the monied interests who do run the USA to freeze the Senate into ineffectiveness. Not much, it would seem.
The major reason for our paralysis—when we experience paralysis—and for our leaps into unwise spasms of anti-people legislation seems to be a combination of factors.
First, we are effectively ruled by the ebb and flow of pressures exerted upon Congress by a panoply of monied interests who (or which) exert their pressure by campaign contributions, lobbying, and, perhaps, by other mechanisms—together scarcely distinguishable from bribes and kickbacks or outright purchase. “The best Congress that money can buy” someone almost said.[3]
This very effectively removes power from “the people” but does not explain the paralysis or the spasms of unwise legislation.
These arise in part, but only in part, I believe, from the resolute single-minded refusal of the wielders of all this money to take a “long view” or a “broad view.” They look to their own interests and usually only at their own short-term interests, letting the future take care of its own dead (or debts).
When popular legislative proposals erupt into legislative consideration which run too contrary to a fat cat’s interests, lobbying et al. are set in motion to prevent it. This leads to paralysis.
On the other hand, when a fat cat sees a chance to enact special-interest legislation helpful to its own corporation or industry, however noxious otherwise, the same mechanisms—capture of the legislature by the lobbies—lead to what I have been calling spasms of unwise legislation. Anytime one reads about an enormous bill which passes a house of Congress without being read by anyone, one knows that the “fix was in.”
Whenever a completely sensible bill (like a bill to force pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell drugs at a reasonable price) fails, one knows, again, that this paralysis arose from the “fix” of lobbying.
If our rulers, chiefly the harried rulers of large corporations (some of them “American corporations”, whatever that means these days) had the time and energy and inclination to look at a wide range of issues, they might not act as they do and we might not be forced to enjoy (enjoy?) either the paralysis or the ice-bergs that American oligarchy bring upon us.
There is no reason in principle that CEOs of large corporations cannot take the long view, cannot look out for interests other than their own (although a corporation is not supposed to expend funds other than to advance the interests of that corporation). There is no reason (returning to ice-bergs) why corporations must always play the game of dividing up the pie with each other: I’ll enrich myself and you enrich yourself. But, it appears, that is what in fact happens.
Even industries suffering from high employee and retiree health-care costs do not oppose the machinations of their sister-industries, the health-care-insurance, health-care-provision, and pharmaceuticals industries.
It is not impossible to imagine enlightened legislation springing from an oligarchy—from a small number of “captains of industry” saving the rest of us from the follies of popular democracy. But it doesn’t happen. The captains do not form a team and do not rule in the general interest. They look after themselves. And Congress, dancing to their tune, looks to their interests (and not to the public interest) as well.
But even if these CEOs had “time and energy and inclination” to govern in the public interest, they still might not be able to do so, for still another very American reason, information-control and communication-control (socially-enforced censorship).
The problem is not merely that these great leaders are too busy to look at “all the issues”, although, in fact, they probably are too busy. It is not merely that they are businessmen charged to seek the short-term advancement of their own corporations without regard to unrelated issues, although this does very much narrow their areas of active concern.
And these reasons are very important indeed.
The head of Goldman Sachs probably does not spend very much of his well-remunerated time thinking about health care or war, because these do not clearly and immediately affect Goldman Sachs’s bottom line for June 30 Or December 31 next.
The head of Aetna, Inc., a health insurance company, probably does not spend very much time thinking about whether corn subsidies or automobile mileage requirements are good or bad from the stand-point of global warming. If he thinks about global warming at all, he may well conclude that global warming will one day mean more illness and better business for Aetna. Whatever he might say in public to the contrary, if he has said anything. Corporate responsibility usually trumps civic responsibility.
But even if these immensely powerful CEOs wanted to act in the public interest (in the manner proper to the Congressmen whom they control as puppets) they would nevertheless be stymied by another American phenomenon—censorship by consensus discussion.
We do not have government censorship in the USA. We have something far more powerful and equally dangerous—consensus suppression of discussion.
No-one may aspire to be a major blogger, talking-head on TV, politician, not-yet-tenured university professor, or think-tank honcho without having a keen sensitivity to the “accepted bounds of public discussion”, the “received wisdom”, the boundaries beyond which discussion of public issues is not supposed to go. Call it politesse. Call it political correctness. But be sure to find your own name for it, because there are things that proper people do not do (or say) in public, and this system of restricting communication is also a form of thought police. What cannot be said cannot, in a sense, be properly thought, for discussion is an element of thought, and where discussion is thwarted, thought is suppressed.
Therefore, what passes for discussion of major issues of public interest in the USA is strictly confined. The Congress and the CEOs (and the public too, of course) cannot know what the problems really are because some problems are not named in public and some facts and perspectives and viewpoints and opinions are “beyond the pale” and are, therefore, effectively invisible.[4]
Now, in the theory of representative governance, representatives are supposed to have a wide awareness of problems, issues, facts, opinions, public interests, etc., and are supposed to somehow merge or coalesce or integrate these things into a plan of action. Each might act either in the “national interest” broadly conceived or in the more parochial interests of her own constituents. This senator votes yes, that senator introduces legislation, another senator makes a speech—all these actions are supposed to result from a working together of a wide range of materials (sort of like kneading bread dough or cooking a delicious meal from a diverse collection of ingredients).
But it doesn’t work that way. Not in the USA. Not today.
The senators don’t get time to hear all this stuff (except from the above-limned monied-interests). They are too busy for such things, implicit in the theory but forbidden by the practice, of representative governance in the USA today. Running a business and lobbying keeps the CEOs busy (and single minded). Fund-raising and receiving the attentions of well-monied lobbyists occupies all the available time of Senators and Congresspersons.
Neither CEOs nor Senators has time, or inclination, to look at the big picture or to be concerned with the public interest or the drift of the ship of state as it passes among, or crashes into, icebergs—including those created by these captains of industry who have arrogated to themselves the role of captains of the ship of state but without either the interest or the time or the qualifications to do the job properly.
While the senator is not single-minded (there are, after all, a lot of different lobbyists out there representing a lot of different interests, all claiming her attention), her interests are necessarily limited. She has little time to do original analysis of the great problems that face the nation. And little reason to attempt to do so. Doing so will not often help her get re-elected and will not help her husband’s consulting business or her son’s career, with which various monied interests have so generously helped out in the past and hinted they might continue to help out in the future. Global warming? Even if real at all, that is a long way off, not on today’s “radar screen”, not of interest to the lobbyists she sees every day, and therefore not of interest to the Senator.
So to summarise:
Information and analysis are controlled to a large extent and there is a tacit agreement among all “in the know” “important” people in the USA that some topics may not be discussed. This limits the range of things that powerful people (CEOs mostly, but also Congressmen and presidents) are likely to become aware of (even dimly).
They wear blinkers. Not quite voluntarily. But when anyone does become aware of something “off the community radar” and tries to talk about it, he may get “shot down” pretty fast. If, for that reason, he stops talking about this topic, it has become “voluntary” but is, in reality, rather strictly enforced by social pressure.
If we cannot talk about a problem, we cannot know that the problem is “there” and we certainly cannot try to solve it.
If the CEOs don’t want to talk about something because it is a matter of no immediate concern to their corporation or industry, then that too cuts down discussion and attention, because the Congressmen respond to what they hear from lobbyists for these CEOs and to little else.
Conversely, if the CEOs want to curtail discussion of a topic because it seems to cut too close to their business interests (as global warming does to energy industry interests), they have the tools to enforce paralysis on such issues.
The CEOs may well be so ignorant that they fail to pursue even their own corporation’s real interests. This can arise from their own education, from the corporation’s internal information systems, from concentration on short-term goals (“apres moi le deluge”), and from the social-pressure-censorship already mentioned.
Imagine how effective a push there would be toward large-scale spending for job creation if most industrialists told their lobbyists to call for it! And how “conservative” legislators instead of fighting necessary spending during this time of economic down-turn would be calling for a new WPA.
But it is not happening. China is forging ahead. America is stagnant. And the reason is the clear and present differences in out systems of governance,
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[1] August 7, 2009, last viewed 2010/2/4.
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[2] H. H. Munro, writing as “Saki” in “The Comments of Moung Ka”, tells this story: “The feeling of the people of Britain has not been consulted, and will not be consulted,” said Moung Ka. “The Act of Partition will pass through one Chamber where the Government rules supreme, and the other Chamber can only delay it a little while, and then it will be made into the Law of the Land.” “But is it wise not to consult the feeling of the people?” asked Moung Thwa. “Very wise,” answered Mough Ka, “for if the people were consulted they would likely say ‘No,’ as they have always said when such a decree was submitted to their opinion” * * *. [But why?] “The people of Britain are what is called a Democracy,” said Moung Ka. “A Democracy,” said Moung Thwa, “what is that?” “A Democracy,” broke in Moung Shoogalay eagerly, “is a community that governs itself according to its own wishes and interests by electing accredited representatives who enact its laws and supervise and control their administration. Its aim and object is government of the community in the interests of the community.” “Then,” said Moung Thwa, turning to his neighbor, “if the people of Britain are a Democracy --” “I never said they were a Democracy,” interrupted Moung Ka placidly. “Surely we both heard you!” exclaimed Moung Thwa. “Not correctly,” said Moung Ka; “I said they are what is called a democracy.” The complete works of Saki, introduced by Noel Coward, Doubleday 1976, p.562-3.
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[3] ”It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress,” Twain said again and again in the many lectures he gave to American and foreign audiences from the time he went on the lecture circuit regularly in the 1860s until his death in 1910. “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” he would say, to guffaws and applause. It was his favorite way of starting a lecture.
The homespun Rogers, a part-Cherokee cowboy, declared in his laconic way on his popular radio program and on the lecture circuit: “Congress is the best money can buy.” See: here
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[4] Some American presidents have spoken of a freeze in Israel’s construction of new settlements. No American president in my memory has called for a roll-back of all Israeli settlements. Politeness allows mention of a freeze, but not of a roll-back. Thus, no American president can mention that all of Israel’s settlers are present in occupied territories illegally. It’s just not done. There are boundaries, after all, on admissible political discourse. See essay 73 on this blog.
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