The Corporate State and the Subversion of Democracy

Posted on May 31, 2008

By Chris Hedges

(Page 3)

Take a look at our government departments.  Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture?  The Food and Drug Administration?  Who runs the Department of Labor?  Corporations. And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power.  The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty.  They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy.  They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes. 

We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight.  These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority.  They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs.  This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity.  Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history.  The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet.  The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War even as we have more than $400 billion in annual deficits.  More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense.  This will not end when Bush leaves office.  And so we build Cold War relics like $ 3.4-billion submarines and stealth fighters to evade radar systems the Soviets never built and spend $ 8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense that will be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb.  The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation’s resources and investment capital.  These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account.  Melman, like President Eisenhower, saw the defense industry as viral, something that, as it grew, destroyed a healthy economy. And so we produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule, and our automotive industry tanks.  We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve technologies to fight against global warming and renewable energy.  Universities are awash in defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies.  This massive military spending, aided by this $3-trillion war, is hollowing us out from the inside.  Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay and our safety net is taken away.

The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens.  Only 7.8 per cent of workers in the private sector are unionized.  This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s.  There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.”  Our health care system is broken.  Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can’t afford health care.  That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year.  But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation.  We are diverted by bread and circus.  News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip.  The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox’s celebrity gossip program “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “700 Club” as “bona fide newscasts.”  The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse “participatory fascism.”

How did we get here?  How did this happen?  In a word, deregulation—the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state.  Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy.  This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power.”  In it, he wrote:

“The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself.  That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.  The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century.  Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy.  And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences. 

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”  In depressed former manufacturing towns from Ohio to Kentucky it was the same.  There are tens of millions of Americans for whom the end of the world is no longer an abstraction.  They have lost hope.  Fear and instability has plunged the working class into personal and economic despair, and not surprisingly into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation.  And unless we re-enfranchise these Americans back into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed. 

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