MEME: Separation of corporation and state

Somebody else said this on Democraticunderground.com, and it's the best way to frame a progressive attitude toward business.

Like religion, capitalism will flourish best if it cannot BUY special treatment and privileges from the government.

When you have a state religion, laziness and apathy creep into that religion as posers seeking financial gain and political favor start to fill their ranks. Likewise, with capitalism, when some corporations can rig the rules, the temptation becomes greater and greater to make their profits from gaming the system rather than providing a superior product at a superior price. That's what gives us Halliburtons and Enrons. The first abuses its parasitic relationship with the government to the degree that they can chase off any accountability and whistleblowers. The latter provided essentially no product at all. In the film on Enron, THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, an investor asks the CFO during a conference call what exactly Enron made or did, and the CFO swore at him and hung up.

If a handful of corporations have a "special relationship" with the state, new, smaller, and more innovative companies have less of a chance of elbowing their way into the market, or even supplanting a whole category of product, as is the case with oil.

One way of doing this is to say you can't be an umpire if you played for one of the teams or will in the future.

We have to stop the revolving door between corporate America and the corridors of power.

We should start at the TOP--once you retire as president, vice president, senator, admiral or general, if you accept any money from anyone, your pension should be cut off.

We give these guys a nice chunk of change for the rest of their lives.

If they want to sit on boards,do speaking engagements, or even lobby for a cause or industry, fine. Let them do it out of the goodness of their heart. But they or their spouse should not be compensated for it in any way.

In the case of someone coming from corporate America, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ban the awarding of any new government contracts to that company for the duration of the elected officials term in office.

This is not anti-capitalism, it is anti-corruption and pro fair competition.

We cannot have a democracy as long as our elected officials trade their government access for financial favors.

This is a pro-market message, that, if the DLC was really just moderate, and not whores whistling and lifting their skirts trying to attract Johns, could get behind.

See the discussion of this on

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PROBLEM: public attention deficit vs. corporate terminator

A serious problem with making any lasting reform is that it is difficult to get the public to pay attention for more than a couple of years to trying to fix a problem, and once fixed after a while they forget the problem that required the solution in the first place--like the followers of the right wing who have forgotten why we needed the New Deal or even unions.

The good side of this is when a society goes off the deep end religiously like Iran now or England under Cromwell, or politically like Stalinist Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution. Most people get tired of "the cause," it's requirements for zeal and sacrifice of liberty or other things.

The downside of this is that we face opponents, corporations, that are designed to accumulate money and power irrespective of the people who tend the "machine." If someone loses interest, they are replaced. The goal is constant, the people change. They are the Terminator, and money and power is Sarah Connor (the rest of us are the extras that get shot along the way).

Democracy is the opposite. We have roughly the same people to work with for long periods of time, but absent some catastrophe, those people don't act together, and even when they do, they dribble away and drift off to other things over time, collecting Hummel figurines or watching Croatian yard darts on ESPN.

It's like we're all holding a door shut, and the terminator is relentlessly ramming against it. When a certain number wander from holding the door, he busts in, kills who he wants, and makes a mess of everything else. We curse, get together, and try to make a new room with a new door we can stand against--until we lose interest.

Right now, the terminators are break dancing in our family room.

In real life, this is the cycle of robber barons and reform.

This wastes a hell of a lot of time, energy, and money that could be used for real progress instead of fighting these same battles over and over again.

What I want to know is how we can build a door we don't have to stand against.

How can we reshape our political structure so that it is as single-mindedly focused on the broader public good (the way corporations are on ass-raping us) and can't be over-whelmed or hijacked during periods of relative political apathy.

I think when we get to the end of this Buzi push to pull us back to feudalism, we will see a period of FDR-like idealism...and then the forgetting will start and the terminator will start ramming the door.

When we get a chance to clean up, this should be part of what we do.