Tools and tyrants: Corporate power, economics and the corruption of public policy

Julia RavellJune 4, 2014

“Tools and tyrants:”

Corporate power, economics and the

corruption of public policy

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“Votes for Crooks and Cricket Stars” (Vaishnav, 2014) is

a light-hearted, even affectionate, look at commonplace

electoral corruption in the world’s largest democracy. It

reports Indian voters increasingly expect more “gifts” from

political aspirants, who may spend “up to 25 times” the

legally-mandated amount on their campaigns. Pre-election

bribery in an election expected to cost up to $5 billion

ranged “from the obvious (cash and liquor) to the surreal

(opium paste and bricks for home construction)”. One candidate

in Tamil Nadu distributed his $100 cash gift to each of the

district’s voters in an envelope accompanied by the party’s

voting slip tucked inside their morning newspaper delivery

(Vaishnav, 2014).

Candidates consider money required for elections as “a

down-payment on an investment that offers serious returns”, an

average 289% increase to their assets within five years of

election. Likely winner Narendra Modi “spared no expense” in a

technologically sophisticated campaign that “saturated the

airwaves”. A tea-seller’s son would be elevated to the highest

office in the land by funding from “several of India’s most

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prominent corporate titans” (Vaishnav, 2014). Modi, expected

to “remove obstacles to coal and gas production” (among other

things) campaigned for structural and economic “reform”

altering fiscal, infrastructure, and industrial policies and

governance to ease foreign investment capital’s entry into the

Indian market (Bagri, 2014). Bribing and bedazzling the voters

with rhetoric about “jobs creation and opportunity”, Modi was

bankrolled by big business for promising a flexible workforce

with which to plunder the country’s resources for private

profit.

Despite the quaintness of the petty bribes required to

secure votes from India’s impoverished, uneducated majority,

and their implied distance from developed democracies,

corporate money advancing neo-liberal capitalist interests has

become a feature of global governance. How have corporate

interests become synonymous with the public interest even as

they’ve usurped it? How can minority voices be heard in a

“marketplace of ideas” (a metaphor which itself suggests the

inescapability of neo-liberal capitalist discourse) when

political donations secure access and favourable policies only

to those with cash to pay? Why are populations suffering under

austerity programs dictated by self-regulated anti-democratic

institutions while the wealth of the very few continues to

grow? This essay is a short genealogy of the growth of

corporate power in policy-making. It analyses how neo-liberal

deference to global economic forces has become the

necessitarian, indeed normative, discourse through which all

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policy must be derived. Endorsing Rawls’ view that political

equality, the freedom to be heard and to influence the policy

arena, is at the heart of social democracy (Rawls 2001, p.

149), it argues that capital has fatally undermined

governmental transparency and accountability, and with them,

majority rule.

Towards a utopia of unlimited exploitation

In 12 years of political and demographic opinion polling,

a sizeable majority of informal voters explain their decision

with variations on the following statement: “Labor, Liberal,

they’re both the same. It doesn’t make any difference.

Politics is all about the top end of town.” These explanations

signify an understanding at some level that business-friendly

“reforms” favoured by both major parties conflict with social

interests. Labor, “New” or otherwise, Tory, Democrat or

Republican, BJP or Congress…A vote for any of these parties is

recognised as an illusion of choice.

Democracy decays when policy “soundness” is judged not by

the electorate but by the same international bodies that

control finance capital (Beder, 2008, p.9). Government is

accountable to “The Market” which becomes “the policeman,

judge and jury” (op loc.) of its decisions such that foreign-

investment-friendly policies are mandatory both for election

and a country’s continuing economic “success”. “Investor

confidence” in the value of national currencies is determined

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by credit ratings agencies. Capital’s “willingness” to locate

in one country rather than another in its benevolent disguise

as “jobs provider” depends on the pronouncements of

technocrats manipulating profit maximisation algorithms.

Transparency International’s corruption index measures the

ease with which foreign investors can do business in a country

rather than the role of foreign investment in government. The

needs of the electorate – pay that keeps pace with costs,

public services, human rights to education, affordable

shelter, clean air, food and water – are all subsumed by

economic imperatives that discount people into units of

labour.

Sovereign debt interest encourages governments to make

the transition from Keynesian national welfare states to

Schumpeterian post-national workfare regimes.1 In the vast

pyramid scheme that is our fiat currency system that creates

money out of debt, compound interest requires exponential

1 In Keynesian welfare states, government actively protects the citizens’well-being by regulating business, encouraging full employment,redistributing wealth through progressive taxes and other measures.Government acknowledges public responsibility to provide a safety net forthose unable to provide for themselves. Keynesian “demand-side” economicsincreases government spending and lowers taxes to stimulate demand to avoideconomic depression. By contrast, Joseph Schumpeter’s Spenserian-Darwinist-style “evolutionary economics” is a supply-side theory that valorisesdynamic change, Post-Fordist just-in-time workplace “flexibility” (i.e.workforce casualization) and innovation-driven “structuralcompetitiveness”. Relying on “creative destruction” in which old ways ofdoing things are renewed through innovation, it regards state regulation ofbusiness activity as an impediment to “free” market “efficiency”.Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy agreed with Marx that capitalismwould eventually collapse but that this would come about not with aproletarian revolution but rather from internal conflicts within capitalismitself (Amin 1994 passim).

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growth and intense competition because the fractional reserve

multiplier ensures that there is not enough money to go around

to pay interest on all debts issued. Someone has to lose out.

According to the current fractional reserve banking system,

banks are required to hold only a fraction of their deposits

and the rest can be lent to other borrowers (or used for

speculation in the US). Lietaer and Dunne explain fractional

reserve multiplication with an example: A central reserve bank

injects 10 million units of high-powered money into the reserve

account of a bank, whose fractional reserve makes it possible

for that bank to make loans of 100 million. These 100 million

end up being deposited somewhere in the banking system by the

recipients of these loans which enables the banks that receive

these deposits to provide a new loan for 90 million to others.

The new loan for 90 million will in turn lead to deposits for

that amount somewhere else, enabling the next bank to provide

another loan for 81 million (90% of 90 million) and so on.

“What started out as 10 million units of high-powered money can

create up to 200 million units in credit money as it trickles

down the banking system” (Lietaer and Dunne 2013 Location

697). The authors add that although new loans are being

created, the interest on the principal is not. “Nowhere in the

system is this additional money created. This gives rise to

scarcity which, in turn, creates competition to acquire the

extra money to cover the loan’s interest” (ibid, Location

693). “Debt-based money requires endless growth because

borrowers must find additional money to pay back the interest

on the debt. For the better-rated debtors (eg. in normal

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times, government debt), the interest is simply covered

through additional debt, resulting in compound interest:

paying interest on interest. Compound interest implies

exponential growth in the long run, something that is

mathematically impossible in a finite world” (ibid, Location

723). By the time credit money has “trickled-down” to ordinary

consumers, the imposition of interest at various stages and

its multiplication into numerous other loans on banks’

computer systems has considerably reduced its value.

Creditors, or at least the ratings agencies on which they

rely, make austerity seem mandatory by tying further lending

to “structural adjustments”. Countries with “junk” status must

borrow at usurious rates to make interest repayments to banks

that are speculating on their currencies and rigging

exchanges.2 Committing to the idea of a neo-liberal dream

world, what Bourdieu (1998) calls the “utopia of unlimited

exploitation” ensures that credit flows. Competing for foreign

investment is thus a race to the bottom created by a systemic

flaw in the monetary system, an invention that has served for

hundreds of years to channel the work of many into the hands

of a few that is only now coming up against the limits of a

finite world where there are no externalities.

2 On May 21, European anti-trust regulators added JPMorgan Chase, HSBC andCredit Agricole in addition to Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank ofScotland, Societe Generale and Citibank to indictments for manipulating andfixing interest rates on London’s Libor and Europe’s Eurobor exchangemarkets that determine borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in loans,credit cards, and mortgages (“E.U accuses more banks of rigging interestrates,” International New York Times, May 21, 2014 Kindle edition).

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Capital interferes in elections and governance to such an

extent that government has become defective. A recent

Princeton-based study even went so far as to characterise

America as an oligarchy after multivariate analyses of 1779

policy decisions from 1981-2002 revealed that citizens’

interests had a statistically insignificant impact on policy

which overwhelmingly represented outcomes favoured by the

business elite (Gilens and Martin 2014).

Corporate “personhood” and propaganda

For Carey, three important developments characterise 20th

century politics: “the growth of democracy, the growth of

corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a

means of protecting corporate power against democracy” (Carey,

1996). Corporate power’s unprecedented freedom from regulation

also owes much to a legal clerical mistake in the late 19th

century after which corporations became “persons” with all a

natural person’s rights but none of their responsibilities.

The U.S Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroads

(1886) did not in fact decide that the railroad company was

entitled to the 14th Amendment’s equal rights under the law to

be taxed equally to “every other citizen” on the basis that it

had the rights of a natural person. None of the case judges

agreed with the railway’s argument that “corporations are

persons”, but the decision was awarded to the railway on

other, technical grounds. The court’s clerk made a factual

error in his headnote case summary about the grounds of the

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decision, attributing it erroneously to corporate personhood

because the railway had attempted to make this argument.

Although headnotes written by clerks are not legally binding,

subsequent cases cited the summary mistake as a precedent and

it became a convenient truth for corporate lawyers who have

since built on it to create a large body of corporate

personhood cases, successfully making this legal fiction into

established law (Hartmann, 2010).

Legal cases in the early 20th century (1908-14) citing

corporate personhood “struck down minimum-wage laws, workers’

compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labour laws—

every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its

citizenry from abuses” (Hartmann, 2010, p. 33). Corporations’

Fourth Amendment “rights” to freedom from unreasonable search

and seizure protect them from random pollution, and health and

safety compliance inspections (Hartmann, 2010, p. 191).

Corporate constitutional misuses protecting free-speech,

privacy and freedom from over-zealous prosecution continue to

infringe on citizens’ rights by denying government legal

authority to regulate on behalf of their citizens or the

environment (Hartmann, 2010).3 As Chomsky states “the theories

devised to justify these ‘collectivist legal entities,’ as

they are sometimes called by legal historians, are based on

ideas that also underlie fascism and Bolshevism: that organic

entities have rights over and above those of persons” (1999,

Location 688).3 As Chomsky states “the theories devised to justify these ‘collectivistlegal entities,’ as they are sometimes called by legal historians, arebased on ideas that also underlie fascism and Bolshevism: that organicentities have rights over and above those of persons” (1999, Location 688).

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The Citizen’s United constitutional law case which

decided that corporations and associations are entitled to

freedom from political restraint on their “right to free

speech” expressed as political donations4 is perhaps the most

egregious illustration of America’s obsession with “freedom

from state interference” combined with corporate personhood.

It disregards the impact that corporations’ freedom from

restraint has had on the majority’s freedom to engage in

political discussion (Tham 2010, p. 16). When money talks and

well-funded private interests out-compete the voices and

interests of ordinary citizens, the biggest players in the

“marketplace of ideas” gain power to influence the policy

agenda that matches their investments in lobbying and

donations. As Deniss and Richardson state: “When the costs of

a policy change are diffused across the community and the

benefits concentrated in the hands of a few there is likely to

be a 'market failure' when it comes to the ear of government”

(Denniss and Richardson, 2013).

Free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific

Partnership Agreement (TPPA) globalise American legal

fictions, exposing governments and their citizens to corporate

claims to “freedom from restraint of trade”. Phillip Morris

Tobacco’s challenge to Australia’s plain packaging laws was

4 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. ____(2010) held thatpolitical spending by corporations, wealthy individuals and associations ofthem is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. Since Buckley vValeo 424 U.S 1 (1976) freedom of speech in the US has included spendingmoney.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Reports


defeated in the High Court.5 However, under Investor-State

Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses in free trade agreements,

claims against governments are decided by unelected business

representatives behind closed doors in what the Democracy

Centre has described as “a privatised justice system for

global corporations” (McDonagh 2013, p.8). Corporations’ right

to freedom from restraint of trade infringes on governments’

freedom to make laws protecting public and environmental health.

As Senator Bernie Sanders said of the rapacious market forces

to which “free” trade exposes people, “neither the average

working people of rich nations nor those of poor nations have

benefited from free trade or its corollaries: The gains have

gone to a few hundred corporations that are each larger,

economically, than most nations” (Hartmann, 2010, p.138).

Globalization serves as an effective means for high-speed

capitalism to evade state regulations and taxation (Hall 2011,

p. 706). Since the 1970s, neo-liberalism, defined by Harvey as

capitalism’s response to Keynesian welfarism in which open and

unregulated markets represent the optimal mechanism for socio-

economic development (2007), has deployed military, political,

cultural, economic and discursive power to install itself “as

the only, necessary and most desirable way (of constructing

capitalist modernity)” (Clarke, 2004, p.30). The neo-liberal

myth “that democracy can’t exist without unrestrained

capitalism” or that “democratic socialism—a regulated

5 See Phillip Morris’s intervention in British American Tobacco Australasia Ltd. vCommonwealth, No. S389/2011, 26 March 2012.

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marketplace, a strong social safety net, and democratic

institutions of governance—will inevitably lead to the loss of

‘freedom’”(Hartmann, 2010, p.9) has been successfully

promulgated by the military-industrial-entertainment complex’s

manipulation of core community values for the past 230 years.

Since 1792 when James Madison warned of “the rising

developmental capitalist state that was ‘substituting the

motive of private interest in the place of public duty’”,

becoming government’s “tool and tyrant” (Chomsky 1999,

Location 675), American business has influenced public opinion

with propaganda passed off as “education”. During its attempts

to combat “creeping socialism” in the 1930s, the National

Association of Manufacturers claimed to represent 35,000

businesses and five million employees. NAM’s “economic

education” was devoted to changing community beliefs about the

benefits of unregulated free enterprise and engineering

consent to its predations. In Propaganda (1928), Edward Bernays

begins:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of theorganized habits and opinions of the masses is animportant element in democratic society…The intelligentminorities must make use of propaganda continuously andsystematically…to mold the mind of the masses…(so thatthe leadership can) regiment the public mind every bit asmuch as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers”…(and) “they will throw their newly gained strength in thedesired direction” (1928/1955, p. 37).

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, one in five corporations

provided educational material to “mold the mind of the

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masses”. Corporate America spent $50 million in one year

(1954) on classroom packages that “championed individual

achievement over collective achievement through government

measures”, values that have acculturated generations of

Americans. Coca-Cola’s Our America curriculum taught more than

30 million primary school children to conflate personal,

political and economic freedom with “The American Way” (Beder

2010, p.3). “Ideology works best by suturing together

contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments

finding what Laclau called ‘systems of equivalence’ between

them” (Hall 2011, p.713). Criticism of the economic system

amounted to a subversion of political freedom in the Ad

Council’s America’s Economic System…And your part in it. This pamphlet

emphasized the importance to global competitiveness of hard

work, increased productivity and unrestrained consumption as

well as the benefits of free market ideology. It received free

airtime and column space in thousands of publications, radio

and TV stations. Ely Lilly’s Opportunities to Learn About Business

involved a nine-day lecture program and business game in which

students formed a company to compete in the market. The US

Chamber of Commerce’s films, teaching materials and booklets

on the economic system and package entitled Economics for Young

Americans contained lesson plans and texts on productivity,

profits and the environment (Beder 2010, p.4). Phillips

Petroleum’s film American Enterprise narrated by Star Trek’s

William Shatner reached eight million students and Exxon

joined with Walt Disney Educational Media to produce a film

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for high schools about two enterprising students who

collaborate to start their own successful business.

Economic education materials spread prolifically in the

UK and Australia in the late 60s and early 70s. The Australian

Chamber of Commerce justified its education donations in an

annual statement: “The free enterprise story has to be told in

a way that will obtain public recognition and understanding of

the role of profits and individual initiative in the progress

of this country” (Beder 2010, p.5). Australian sponsors have

included the Bankers Association, Mining Industry Council,

Industries Development Association (later merged with the

Business Roundtable to form the Business Council of

Australia), American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, and

numerous conservative think tanks that persist today. The

activities of these organizations include conferences and

presentations to teachers, business people and school students

(op loc).

Aimed at producing compliant employees and citizens,

enterprise education is now mainstream in more than 100

countries (Beder 2013, p. 7). It has been so successful at

creating depoliticised subjects unable to think outside of

neo-liberal capitalism that “marketing and selling metaphors

now threaten to swamp public discourse” (Hall 2011, p. 722).

When wages have been static for three decades and social

mobility is one-directional,6 celebrity and wealth are6 Both Stigliz (2002) and Picketty (2014) argue that inequality is a by-product of an increasingly dysfunctional capitalist economic system.

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attractive fantasies and “the market is hypostasized: it

‘thinks’ this, ‘does’ that, ‘feels’ the other, ‘gets panicky’,

‘loses confidence’, ‘believes’” (Hall 2011, p. 722). But if

the corporate media’s synecdoche for global finance has also

become naturalised as a person, its emotional range is not

extensive. Empathy, compassion, generosity, altruism and

social responsibility are absent from its cost-benefit

calculations. “Economic Man” personified is a psychopath,

immortal and immoral. “Collectivist legal entities”,

anthropomorphized and individualized, are doubly personified

both as entities with needs and rights as well as embodied in

images of the heroic corporate CEO (Clarke, 2004, p. 31). At

the 2008 World Economic Forum, 81% of these CEOs agreed that

governments’ central bankers had lost power over economic

governance and that they were in control (Financial Times

2008).

Conclusion: Subordinating the social

Thatcher once said that there was no such thing as

society, just individuals and their families (Keay 1987). Her

neo-liberal project stigmatized welfare recipients, withdrew

state support from education, health, housing, and social

services and impelled people “towards new, individualized,

competitive solutions” with a “homespun equivalent for the key

neo-liberal ideas behind the sea-change she was imposing on

society: value for money, managing your own budget, fiscal

restraint, the money supply and the virtues of competition”

(Hall 2011, p.712). Reagan’s “Rugged Individualism” served the

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same purposes across the Atlantic.7 Decades later, the Abbott

Budget’s equivalence between the Federal Treasury and the

domestic “purse” is eerily familiar. Human rights to health,

welfare and education must be limited to “what we can afford”.

Universal health with an ageing population is “living beyond

our means”. Doubling the deficit with creative accountancy to

manufacture a crisis8 gets “the budget back on track”. Ensuring

our “global competitiveness” requires a shock and awe campaign

to assault our Keynesian state while the stunned or apathetic

public must resign themselves to the pain of “paying back what

we owe” as though sovereign debt is someone’s household

mortgage. As Hall says of the Cameron government’s identical

austerity program “‘market forces’ is good for restoring the

power of capital and destroying the re-distributivist illusion

… It always begins negatively (‘clearing up the mess the

previous government left us’), but ends by positively

embracing radical structural reform as the solution” (Hall

2011, p. 718). For Chicago School economist Milton Friedman,

catastrophic shock provided exciting market opportunities for

a clean canvas. Cataclysm enables radical change “when people,

with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted

out of the way” and “democracy seems a practical

7 See Chomsky (1999, Locations 774, 862, 869, 884, 1180 and 1266).8 University of Canberra economist, Phil Lewis, examined the AbbottGovernment’s claims about Australia’s “looming structural crisis” bycomparing the country’s key economic indicators with four otherindustrialized countries in the OECD: the US, UK, Germany and Japan, aswell as the OECD average. Australia has the lowest government debt as apercentage of GDP (34.39%) compared with the next lowest country, Germanyat 86.06% and the OECD average of 110.29%, the third lowest youth andgeneral unemployment and the second highest labor productivity which whencombined made it “the envy of the OECD” (Lewis 2014).

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impossibility” (Klein 2007, location 463).

The political mobilisation of “collectivist legal

entities” constitutes a hegemonic project in its “impact on

common sense and everyday behaviour” (Hall 2011, p.728).

Ironically, propaganda extolling capitalist innovation has so

thoroughly permeated “popular thinking and the systems of

calculation in daily life” (op loc) that it stifles our

ability to think beyond neo-liberal capitalism to more

sustainable futures. Perhaps this need not be fatal. There is

a structural flaw in an economic system that relies on

exponential growth to create vast, increasing inequality,

where private wealth plunders the earth and its immiserated

communities. This system is collapsing from its own internal

contradictions, as Schumpeter predicted. Turning the economic

pyramid on its head and cancelling all debt radically reforms

our flawed monetary system. What worked for post-war Germany,

Argentina and Iceland would work equally well for the world.

The “Washington Consensus”9 has failed. Its collapse creates

that blank slate state Friedman craved for reform that not

only ends our politicians’ peonage to global financiers but

also clears the way for genuinely sustainable alternatives –

9 Characterized by former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stigliz as“neo-liberal fundamentalism” to “stabilize, liberalize and privatize”(Stigliz, 2002), The Washington Consensus is a 10 point structuraladjustment policy imposed by financial institutions such as the World Bank,the IMF and the European Central Bank on borrowers that dictates fiscal“discipline”, trade liberalization and opening markets to foreigninvestment, legal security for capitalist property rights, privatization ofstate enterprises, and deregulaton (Chomsky, 1999, locations 178, 180, 194,254, 267, 276, 324-328, 957, 1077, 2168).

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corporations become Mondragon co-operatives10, carbon-based

demurrage monetary systems, community currencies11 … The

conditions for these changes exist today. Occupy showed how

community values are shifting. Social and environmental

conditions will only progress when “we the people” demand

government for people and not for profit. After all, “We’re

all in this together” as our leaders like to say.

Ends.

10 Mondragon Cooperative Corporation is a federation of worker cooperativesbased in Spain’s Basque region. The 7th largest business in Spain withcorporate offices and subsidiaries in 41 countries and sales in 150, itemploys more than 80,000 people and made a total revenue of € 14 billionlast year. Founded by a Jesuit priest more than 50 years ago, it is ownedby all its worker-members who participate equally in profits, wages anddecision-making. CEOs are elected for four-year terms and receive no morethan five times the wages of the lowest paid workers. Cooperatives arelimited in size to 400 members, but anyone can join if they adhere toMondragon principles. These include the subordination of capital to labourand egalitarian decision-making. If slack market demand forces these membercooperatives to “downsize”, workers are transferred elsewhere in theorganisation. Mondragon has had a zero unemployment rate since it wasfounded. See http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/eng/co-operative-experience/our-principles/ andhttp://www.democracyatwork.info/studies/mondragon/ for an explanation ofthese concepts.11 Demurrage and cooperative currencies such as eco-money, the TerraInitiative, Brixton Pounds, BerkShares, and Totnes (for example) are eitherlocal currencies designed to support regional businesses or currencies inwhich the value of units is designed to fall over time at a fixed rate.Negative, demurrage interest promotes “high velocity” circulation andstimulates cooperative activity. Neither of these alternative currenciesare barter systems. See Lietaer and Dunne (2013, locations 1055, 1091,1094, 1099 and chapters 7, 10 and 12) for the history, uses, effectivenessand varieties of these alternative monetary systems.

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http://www.democracyatwork.info/studies/mondragon/

http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/eng/co-operative-experience/our-principles/

http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/eng/co-operative-experience/our-principles/


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Tools and tyrants: Corporate power, economics and the corruption of public policy

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Transcript of Tools and tyrants: Corporate power, economics and the corruption of public policy