Capitalism and Democracy:
Do they really make Good Bedfellows?
It is important that people focus on producing and consuming because:
There is only limited time and the necessity of increasing consumption mandates that more time be spent shopping, consuming and working to sustain the consumer lifestyle.
Political and social aware citizens obstruct the interests of big business by questioning by uninformed but common and popular assumptions.
While corporations are basic to modern life in that they produce and deliver our modern amenities their meddling in the political process such as is evidenced by certain economic vested interests contributions to political campaigns--such as the tobacco lobby—undermines the principles that our democracy supposedly stands for.
As this nation has evolved and in fact as modernity has evolved certain decisions were made in relation to the direction of the country and the entire civilization. Democracy has become this social icon an institution by which we express our collective identity as Americans. As democracy has become a mythological icon in our society it has become ripe for exploitation. It is now by many accounts more of a public relations tool for those who control the levers of power than it is a practical tool for the citizens to self-govern themselves.
Political pragmatists say the country is too big to be ruled in a democratic way, well then maybe we should get off this super-size kick of more, bigger, better and faster and downsize a bit. Robert Dahl is a political scientist that raises us up to the reality of the hangover of modern existence. The institutions of our world are designed to deal with large quantities of numbers. Economics has been seen as the best and most efficient way to bring us those magic numbers that we humans equate with success. These numbers and systems that underpin and uphold them have become pivotal in dictating the make-up of the institutions of democracy. And so it was said quietly that the human quality of politics was to go the way of the folk cultures—to become an anthropological artifact—the price of progress. Dahl gave a fine eulogy full of rationalizations that one would expect a modern social scientist to make given the pragmatic realities that they face. Having had to choose between the integrity of a true culture where people mattered and the modern world of corporate complexity, and seeing that as the price of progress, he took the latter as have most modernists.
The problem is not simply that our power systems have become highly centralized and elitist, but that they are simply not effective and possibly leading us towards a troublesome road fraught with pitfalls and challenges that we are not at the present time well adapted to deal with. In the age of the affluent society, pop culture consumerism seems to drive us towards the lowest common denominator. Style reigns supreme over the substantive aspects of citizen democracy, a cruder courser element seems to quite many in their live and we seem to be drawn into it often despite our effort not to. Many no longer even have faith in democracy. What remains is a jinjoistic belief that America is superior in terms of its culture, its economy and military. Yet strangely enough the Hollywood stylization of our society is so profound that it is the celebrity allure not the econometrics that wins over critical thought and the commitment to empowerment through truth and conviction. While economics may promote modes of thinking that thrive when people are their worst, it is the commercial culture, churned out by the Hollywood culture industries, that effectively communicates these values to the masses.
The question arises: what would it take to wake people up from the mesmerizing spell of consumerism; this modernism gone awry. Democracy is meaningless if people cannot take effective actions in their own lives free of corporate influence. A redressing of Machivellian has become necessary in order to maintain the status quo. A “kinder, gentler machine gun hand” is a metaphor that describes how politically correct stratagems are used to disguise the true intent of those who control the levers of modern civilization.
The intrinsic reality of the present human dispassion for life is so immensely, overpoweringly negative with its expedient discarding of the spirit, so it is understandable that all that remains is an outward desire to consume and control. In search of short term wealth, we dispense with our soul. So much effort is focused on discarding the spirit, that humanity acquires a certain rancidity of having merged with the essence of death. Death is an important part of the process of life, but it is not a part of living experience, it is a rather an inevitable byproduct of it. Death is necessary, but in the process of existing in balance with life. In tipping the balance of death against life we sign our own death warrant, as a species. This signals dialectical disunion within the human collective consciousness. This dialectical disunion reflects our increasingly obvious disconnection with the reality of how the natural world works and the fact that we are still very much naturally derived beings working within it.
The mechanistic “deathkulur” hypothesis is articulated by several leading edge thinkers.
Paolo Soleri often sounds like a dark sage of science, give a vision of a future where survive by evolving into something that is no longer human. He sometimes speaks of the machine as our only hope. He says that the machine in its most sophisticated manifestation--the computer linked by a massive network called the Internet--has the power to remake the world with technology and so we will live happily ever after… But he warns us also of the global hermitage, and of the paradox of technology. Instead of truly linking us together, the Internet becomes a tool to separate and isolate us from the fearsome, status quo disrupting potential that we represent as a linked up global community of people.
Mad max scenarios run rampant poisoning the landscape with a dismal negativism about the future. We begin to buy into the idea that we are helpless to change our reality, and so these future visions become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Many have given up on any peaceful transition, and are beginning to prepare for a crash of modern civilization. They look to the future with anticipation of a truly dreadful period of unprecedented proportions—poetic justice for humanity; our just dessert. It is poetic justice to purge the unclean spirits of human mass consciousness. Others speak in a more moderate tone. They see that humanity needs a little push from nature, to remind them that no matter what our technological prowess is today, we still live within a natural system called the biosphere.
Soleri often uses the term "better kind of wrongness," to criticize organizations and individuals who do not think deeply about the ecological and social soundness of their technologies—technology without intention and wisdom. However the increasing influence of technology on humanity becomes a much less feared and a much more benign force when it is that it is managed by well-governed and well educated human communities that operate within a global compact. Right wingers speak dreadfully of UN world governance but their concerns are misplaced, and in fact only serve the trilaterialists they speak so fearful of. There is already global governance and it is run by the trilaterialists through a host of neoliberal institutions. That first took modern form through the post-WWII Bretton Woods accords. Rule of a massive global empire of over 24 trillion dollars and 6 billion people is all but assured through the sophisticated control of capital inflows and outflows to points all over the globe.
UN sponsored institutions like the Earth Summit seek to provide a forum to discuss pressing social and environmental problems.
The aspiration in terms of relentless economic growth and real estate development in the form of what is called sprawl seems to be reflective of a system that aims at total control using technology to create an artificial ecological infrastructure replacing indigenous wildlife along with indigenous human society. It is still possible that some kind of balance between the agriculture-industrial monocultures that we need to supply with the materials to create the built environment will be achieved. What this implies is that while much of the natural world will be rendered in plantation type monocultures, enough intact corridors connecting to wildlife preserves will remain so as to allow the natural systems to function on some nominal level.
We spread our resentment of life to others as we seek to make habitation in the human world as repressed, grey, blank-faced and morose as possible. Cannibalized of the presence of authentic real life experiences in so much of what makes up our lives, we pathetically pretend that our having more stuff means that our lives are improving, trading trees, vibrant oceans and wild lands for concrete jungles of fermenting evil. A frothy mixture of despotism emits a putrid smell of rotting flesh. The spirit of the city has died but the body lives on in a sprawling mish mash that extends absurdly from the center city like an army with overextended supply lines. This suburbanization merges confusingly with outlying rural environments to create a vast urban blight overrunning natural environments. Yet the center city is hardly better, filled with a mix of overpaid professionals who are the only ones who can afford to live in true urbanized American cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco, and the underclass who are increasingly pushed out of these thriving center cities, and are in extreme situations forced by unfortunate circumstance into sleeping on sidewalks.
Here the city lives a slow death of gasping misery. The city is not inherently unlivable for those who are so committed to live there, but to many it seems that the price of urban living is not justified by its many costs. The demise of the urban environment is due to the reduction of people to monetary units that sustain the modern economy. How can we change the corporate system so that it does not exert a dehumanizing presence upon our sacred social and cultural fabric?
With the globalizing economy the issue has become more perplexing because the people of the world are increasingly reliant on major corporations for their livelihoods. With treaties such as GATT, NAFTA, MAI and others, the corporate leaders work through the government to secure the power they think they need to compete and to dominate in the global marketplace. MAI sought to reduce national authority by putting checks on the regulatory power of national, state and local authorities. While MAI did not become reality due to a concerted effort by activists, new covert measures within these mouthpieces of neoliberal propaganda seek to ensure further domination by multinational corporations. The goal of these rollbacks on national and local regulatory power is to increase the ease by which capital can flow into multinational corporate coffers.
So that we infer from these trends in the economic leadership that it would logically follow that it be best that the people of the world do not interfere in these processes for they are too ordinarily pathetic to act in their interests. The masses are at their best, according to many of the powerful people that run the economy, when they are distracted and simplified by the special effects allure and trickery of the mainstream entertainment apparatus. So the media is a powerful utility for the corporations, in that it serves up an interpretation of reality that conforms to the interests of the corporate elite.
Our economy has deregulated and privatized itself, shaking off the repressive yoke of a government inclined to over-regulate. Big government may be in many respects dead and that may not be all bad, but that leaves a vacuum in the power relationship of the corporate-state society. This vacuum is potentially threatening to the evolving democratic experiment in America. As Republicans have exploited this vacuum, the corporate community has found that it can improve its bottom line not only through technological and organizational innovation but also through funding Republicans and Democrats who fid the political correct neoliberal model.
The Peripherary
Most people are distant from corporate and state centers of power. The people who run our world are quite removed from the reality of life that we face as common people. This problem of distance has become so extreme that the rich living their sheltered lives either have no idea or have forgotten what it is like to be an ordinary person. The attack on the Twin Towers was not so much about terrorism but about how frustrated so many people have become in this world. How can it be said with any seriousness that the leaders that we elect rule in our interests, when it is that the power they have does not flow from the electorate but rather the people that fund their campaigns.
If economic growth accrues disproportionately to the rich, this means more levels of separation from between those at the top and those at the bottom. Typically the compulsion within power hierachies is to remove oneself as much as possible from the lower levels of society. We become more distant from everyday life as we gain more power. So it is any surprise that as we modernize and grow the global economy that the powerful have become more and more distant from the needs and voices of those at the bottom of the global society?
Peripheries are secondary to the core regions such as Washington, New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. Yet this is simplistic since power and access correlative to geographical distance and proximity as much as it is to the simple ability to have the right phone numbers and email addresses. The peripheries are those regardless of geographical location isolated from social networks that are of primary importance in determining world events and trends. While the elite who run the global community in Davos, Switzerland or Jackson Hole, Wyoming, most of the rest of us in the peripheries whether we live in the Bronx, Africa or middle America, are far removed from the reality, perception and direct influence of prominent and notable people.
Big business now has more free and open reign to exert control over the peripheries of society and as a result of coordination with neoconservative elites and their cynical political strategies they have achieved a level of influence and power not seen since the 1920s. It is no coincidence that the new deal has been almost completely rolled back. In this unregulated atmosphere certain groups gain power relative to others. The control of the media ensures that the public mind is not stained by the realization of how the work actually works under corporate domination. The American electorate is also reluctant to accept that it has a degree of complicity in this by continually affirming and giving approval to leaders who support what has come to be the status quo in America, and this means it has a common interest with the power elite to resist such realizations.
The deregulation of the American economy has allowed economic and cultural elites to get more and more lavish pay increases, while poor people increasingly struggle with making ends meet. Although his pay has been cut in 1998 at the peak of the internet bubble Michael Eisner's received a 565 million dollar salary and another media elite, Gerardo River's got a 40 million dollar contract with NBC (The Nation. "Underground Economy" 1/12/98 P3).
In what now seems like another age we had President Clinton bragging about what he called the "strongest American economy in a generation," The media remained "fixated on the terrific performance of the stock market driven in large measure by the downsizing of a workforce that is of interest only when its decimation pushes up stock prices."
The supposedly American belief in sharing and caring for one another in my view has always been weak, so the idea that it is in danger of being lost does not wash. It has always been a struggle, not just in America, but throughout history to maintain a decent society whose people are not driven towards selfishness--as Edward Kennedy put it, "asking only what we can do for ourselves," but instead to give of ourselves to others within the greater human community. So it is no surprise that when we look deeply at the people who most loudly call themselves patriots and who are quickest to shout down those who say are anti-American, we see a hollowness when we allow ourselves to get beyond their rhetoric and look at not simply their words but their deeds.
After 10 years of nearly uninterrupted growth
the poverty rate has stagnated and approximately 50 million Americans--13 percent of the population-- are under the poverty line. Includes
1 in 4 children under the age of 18
1 in 5 elderly people
3 in 5 single family households
Average weekly earnings for workers reached a high of $ 315 in 1973 and a low of $256 in 1996, a decline of 19 percent.
New York state has the widest income gap between rich and poor. There the gulf has widened by 127 percent since the seventies.
Yet growing inequality is not just dangerous for democracy, but morally wrong. Benjamin Schwartz in World Policy Journal points out that income inequality has been a constant feature of U.S. economic history
In 1828, the richest 4 percent of New Yorkers owned 63 percent of the corporate and non-corporate wealth.
1890, 12 percent of the population owned about 86 percent of the country's wealth.
The whole idea behind the progressive and New Deal eras was that this income inequality was threatening our democracy. Looking both at the quantitative, the qualitative evidence of contemporary abuses of power and the historical precedent it is difficult to believe that we can truly have a democracy with top 10 percent owning 90 percent of the wealth (as is the case today).
The myth can only be successfully perpetuated by the sophisticated array of corporate owned media systems whose job is not to keep the public informed, but to defend the status quo, which disproportionately benefits the rich and powerful.
If these progressive eras had been able to challenge the power elites by actually putting some of our nation's democratic mechanisms to work, we might have had a revolution. The reforms that resulted from these progressive eras flattened out income inequality, but in ways that were
only temporary. In other words, we are resolving the fundamental issues of income inequality, but when it starts to fester and look we real bad pass some progressive legislation that has the desired effect of putting a band aid on the problem.
According to some economic conservatives, the explosion of growth in government transfer payments -- from welfare to Social Security is the cause of wealth inequality. While there may be a burden that is imposed on the productive economy by more taxes the present period (post Reagan) has seen a lessening or a stagnation of progressive taxation structures (the rich are paying less in proportion wit the total amount they make), and the reduction of the welfare state. This theory simply does not stand the test of history.
While higher taxes do create burdens on the productive economy, we have to ask whether the marketplace does not also creates burdens on the working classes, the environment, and the various people that are exploited out of weakness and ignorance (nearly 100 percent of the American population in one form or another). This creates a burden on the productive economy that is not convenient for the defenders of the status quo to discuss so they avoid discussing marketplace failures all together.
Those most inclined to gain power are the people whose commitment to profit is greater than their obligation to society. This relationship is especially true when the polarization of society results in an increased distance between the elite classes and the people at the bottom, because a lack of relatedness with all the parts of society is generated by the increase in distance from one another. In the lower levels of the periphery they cannot relate and have trouble understanding. So the lack of relating with the different people of different classes and sub-groups within society reduces our perceived need to commit to their well-being. In addition the reduced power of government to regulate business makes it easier to seek to extricate oneself from the dim reality of not only the poor but of the common people as well.
Those that are most extremely disadvantaged and dispossessed are assigned the class-rank of poor in the most disgusting and shameful degree. It must be seen that the poverty rises from a distance from the mean of the distribution of the society's resources. As the distance rises as a result of polarization of the extremes, the poor appear more lamentable. And the distance is of course for the most part driven by the wealthy classes desire to be richer. Wealthy people desire and need wealth for two reasons: (1) To consume new frontiers of wealth (2) and to distance themselves from the masses.
The distance of the rich from the common people complicates this relationship of rich and poor, in that the rich see all the common people as poor. In a sense, poverty is expanded to include all those who are not well-off--who do not have resource to obtain whatever they want. What defines the common people is not so much a lack of intellect as much as it is that they have not the resources to do important, fulfilling things. Now when I describe the commoner in this way it must be qualified with the stipulation that success is not defied by wealth but by the drive to live in the service of the people. To serve humanity is the most ultimate way to not only serve oneself but to be successful as a human being. So defining or equating success with monetary affluence is a false and misleading equation of thought and logic. Rather what I mean to say is that in society so dominated by money, the forces that sustain the social order in this monetary society create as much pressure to make achievement flow around the idea of money. Those with no money find it quite difficult to acquire what they want from life because they are influenced by these social forces to conform to the idea that money buys you happiness.