The U.S. Postal System Crisis: Product of Conservative “Reform”

Today, the postal unions representing America’s postal workers is organizing a nationwide “Day of Action” to save the US Postal Service (USPS). National news media have reported extensively on the budget crisis facing the USPS, but has done a typically abysmal job of explaining why the crisis exists. These are the facts…

Republicans, with the support of the Postmaster, are demanding service cuts and layoffs due to the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) inability to fund $5.5 billion due on September 30 to its federal retiree health fund. The expected 100,000 layoffs, in addition to exacerbating an already grim unemployment picture in the U.S., will hit African-Americans and veterans particularly hard – two groups that already have much higher unemployment rates than the national average. But apart from the employment issue, we need to be asking why the USPS is in such dire straits in the first place.

The biggest budget problem by far facing the USPS is the mandate placed on it by an outgoing Republican congress in 2006, requiring USPS to pre-fund, over a decade, its employee pensions for 75 years. The USPS is among a handful of employers still offering a defined benefit pension plan that provides real security to retirees after a lifetime of work. The pre-funding requirement, never asked for by the postal unions, was and remains a poison pill for a federally run postal delivery service. No other pension plan, either public or private, is required to pre-fund pension obligations for 75 years into the future in order to be considered solvent. Without this burden, the USPS would be in the black today. The cost of pre-funding has exceeded $20 billion over the past 4 years – an amount that about equals USPS losses for the period.

There are a number of ways to solve the budget crisis in the postal service, but certainly the continued pre-funding required under the 2006 postal reform law should be curtailed. It is unreasonable. But even barring this, there are other options. The Inspector General has determined that USPS overpaid into a number of other funds – between $50 and $120 billion! Those funds could be redirected to the USPS pension fund, allowing it to meet the extreme pre-funding mandate. That, of course, would require commonsense action by a current congress in thrall to Tea Party conservatives bent on decimating government services, including the delivery of mail.

The shuttering of 4,000 mostly rural Post Offices and proposed reduction of service will create real hardship for small-town residents across America. Unlike FedEx and UPS, the USPS has a mandate to serve every American, wherever they live. The private delivery services do not have to deliver to rural regions where it is not profitable, unlike the USPS. In fact, the private companies use the USPS to deliver to some rural areas, because it is cheaper for them to pay the Post Office than to deliver to these areas themselves. Clearly, the private sector will not rush in to provide service when the USPS pulls up stakes in small-town America.

Republican calls for the USPS to “operate like a private business” is undermined by the pre-funding mandate they forced on the agency in 2006, and is unreasonable given the longstanding and laudable USPS mandate to serve all Americans regardless of where they live. Instead of calling for layoffs, reductions in service, and the shuttering of thousands of Post Offices, we ought to be talking about repealing the pre-funding requirement and even subsidizing the Post Office for providing the public good of rural delivery to areas that the private sector find unprofitable to serve.

The current USPS crisis is a wholly manufactured one brought on by conservatives who have wanted to bring down the USPS for decades, allowing private companies to pick up the profitable parts of the service while leaving the rest. We must not let that happen.

America’s System Failure: Only a Wave of Democratic Participation Can Save This Country

 I didn’t write this… but posted it because it is well worth reading!

America’s System Failure: Only a Wave of Democratic Participation Can Save This Country

As welcome as it was, the removal of George W. Bush was not enough to cure what ails us. It goes to the root of our political system.

by Christopher Hayes 

February 3, 2010

There is a widespread consensus that the decade we’ve just brought to a close was singularly disastrous for the country: the list of scandals, crises and crimes is so long that events that in another context would stand out as genuine lowlights — Enron and Arthur Andersen’s collapse, the 2003 Northeast blackout, the unsolved(!) anthrax attacks — are mere afterthoughts. We still don’t have a definitive name for this era, though Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling captures well the sense of slow, inexorable dissolution; and the final crisis of the era, what we call the Great Recession, similarly expresses the sense that even our disasters aren’t quite epic enough to be cataclysmic. But as a character in Tracy Letts’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, says, “Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm.” American progressives were the first to identify that something was deeply wrong with the direction the country was heading in and the first to provide a working hypothesis for the cause: George W. Bush. During the initial wave of antiwar mobilization, in 2002, much of the ire focused on Bush himself. But as the decade stretched on, the causal account of the country’s problems grew outward in concentric circles: from Bush to his administration (most significantly, Cheney) to the Republican Party to — finally (and not inaccurately) — the entire project of conservative governance.

As much of the country came to share some version of this view (tenuously, but share it they did), the result was a series of Democratic electoral sweeps and a generation of Americans, the Millennials, with more liberal views than any of their elder cohorts. But it always seemed possible that the sheer reactionary insanity of the Bush administration would have a conservatizing effect on the American polity. Because things had gone so wrong, it was a more than natural reaction to long for the good old days; the Clinton years, characterized by deregulation and bubbles, seemed tantalizingly placid and prosperous in retrospect. The atavistic imperialism of the Bush administration had a way of making the pre-Bush foreign policy of soft imperialism and subtle bullying look positively saintly.

Toward the end of the decade, as the establishment definitively rebuked Bush and sought to distance itself from his failures, the big-tent center-left coalition took on an influential constituency — the Colin Powells and Warren Buffetts — who didn’t want reform so much as they wanted restoration. This was reflected in a strange internal tension in the Obama campaign rhetoric that simultaneously promised both: change you can believe in and, as Obama said at a March 2008 appearance in Pennsylvania, a foreign policy that is “actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father.”

If the working hypothesis that bound this unwieldy coalition together — independents, most liberals and the Washington establishment — was that the nation’s troubles were chiefly caused by the occupants of the White House, then this past year has served as a kind of natural experiment. We changed the independent variable (the party and people in power) and can observe the results. It is hard, I think, to come to any conclusion but that the former hypothesis was insufficient.

So what, exactly, is it that ails us?

In pondering the answer, it’s useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that’s warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands. It didn’t happen overnight, of course, and the devolution has been analyzed and decried by a host of writers and thinkers in these very pages.

It’s also not the first time. Indeed, the story of the American Republic is the never-ending task of redistributing power that always seems to collect and pool and re-form, a cycle in which we break up the power trusts, only to find them reassembling, Terminator 2-like, and requiring yet another dose of the founders’ revolutionary fervor to be broken up again.

The central and unique paradox of our politics at this moment, however, is that our institutions are so broken, the government so sclerotic and dysfunctional, that in almost all cases, from financial bailouts to health insurance mandates, the easiest means of addressing the first set of problems is to take steps that exacerbate the second.

As an illustration, consider the following hypothetical.

You’re a social worker or a parish priest in a poor urban neighborhood that lives under the malignant, if stable, stewardship of an organized-crime protection racket. The small business owners all have to pay a protection fee, which most of them can afford, but a significant portion of bodegas and nail salons operating on razor-thin profit margins struggle to come up with the money. When they fall short (which is often) they are subjected to beatings, harassment, vandalism and other petty cruelties.

Now, it turns out that you can raise enough money through your organization so that you can reliably cover the protection fees for the struggling shop owners operating on the margins. Whenever they can’t come up with enough money, you can make up the difference. The improvement to residents’ lives would be massive: no longer forced to live in fear, they would be allowed to transact their business and go about their lives free from the constant, degrading fear of physical violence. But by taking this action you would also be channeling revenue into the pockets of the protection racket and, perhaps more insidious, further entrenching its power by conceding its central premise: that all local businesses must pay up in order to survive.

This is, in rough allegorical fashion, the dilemma at the heart of the recent intra-left battle over the Senate version of the healthcare bill. Those arguing that the bill will be a massive step forward in reducing the misery of the uninsured are for the most part right. And those arguing that the Senate version of the bill is a grotesque sellout to Big Pharma and, to a lesser extent, Big Insurance, are more or less correct as well. When the White House used its muscle to kill a bipartisan amendment that would have allowed reimportation of drugs, it was as if our fictional social worker or priest took to shaking down shopkeepers to stay in the good graces of the local thugs. For what it’s worth, I’m generally in the pay-off-the-thugs camp, because of the concrete benefits it would provide (Medicaid expansion for 15 million) but also because by enshrining the notion that the government is responsible for managing the healthcare system, the crimes of the insurance racket can now be laid at the feet of our politicians. In the short run, that accountability may spell political trouble; in the long run, I’m hopeful that it will force the government to crack down.

That said, the whole system that produced this legislative approach sucks, and recalls nothing so much as the Bush/GOP passage of Medicare Part D.

In the abstract, the putative goal of Medicare Part D was laudable (even if it was driven by Karl Rove’s crass desire to curry favor with an important electoral demographic): reduce the cost of prescription drugs for seniors on Medicare. The method of achieving this laudable social end, however, was repugnant. Medicare was statutorily barred from using its market share to negotiate lower drug prices, thereby ensuring hefty (and largely unearned) profits for Big Pharma in perpetuity. Drug reimportation was off the table as well. And since Republicans don’t believe in taxes, and our political institutions are increasingly incapable of raising revenue, none of it was paid for. One Democratic Senate aide told me that right before his boss voted for final passage of the bill, the senator turned to him and said, “So, I guess I have to go vote for this piece of shit.”

At the time, Medicare Part D looked like the nadir of GOP governance, but two things have happened in the interim. One, the program, despite early chaos, has become quite popular: seniors like getting cheaper drugs. And two, the basic policy approach has been adopted, in somewhat altered form, by the Obama administration. We are all Medicare Part D now.

There’s a word for a governing philosophy that fuses the power of government and large corporations as a means of providing services and keeping the wheels of industry greased, and it’s a word that has begun to pop up among critics of everything from the TARP bailout to healthcare to cap and trade: corporatism. Since corporatism often merges the worst parts of Big Government and Big Business, it’s an ideal target for both the left and right. The ultimate corporatist moment, the bailout, was initially voted down in the House by an odd-bedfellows coalition of Progressive Caucus members and right-wingers.

In the wake of the healthcare sausage-making, writers from Tim Carney on the right (author of the provocative Obamanomics) and Glenn Greenwald on the left have attacked the bill as the latest incarnation of corporatism, a system they see as the true enemy. There is even some talk among activists of a grand left-right populist coalition coming together to depose the entrenched interests that hold sway in Washington. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake touted her work with libertarians to oppose Ben Bernanke, more AIG bailouts and the Senate healthcare bill (“What we agree on: both parties are working against the interests of the public, the only difference is in the messaging”); David McKalip, the tea-party doctor who got into trouble for forwarding an image of Obama with a bone through his nose, wrote an open letter to the netroots proposing that they join him in fighting the “real enemy,” the “unholy corporate/government cabal that will control your healthcare.”

I don’t think that coalition is going to emerge in any meaningful form. The right’s anger is born largely of identity-based alienation, a fear of socialism (whatever that means nowadays) and an age-old Bircher suspicion that “they” are trying to screw “us.” Even in its most sophisticated forms, such as in Carney’s Obamanomics, the basic right-wing argument against corporatism embraces a kind of fatalism about government that assumes it will always devolve into a rat’s nest of rent seekers and cronies and therefore should be kept as small as possible.

But the progressive critics hold that we can and should do better. The Medicare Part D model is a terrible way of running a government for a number of reasons. First, and most practical, it’s expensive. When paying off protection rackets is the price of passing legislation, you have to come up with a lot more money. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices would have saved the government as much as $30 billion a year. The strong public option would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, save $85 billion over ten years. Once everyone has laid claim to their vig, you soon find yourself tapped out.

The second problem is that this form of governance degrades the integrity of the state. Historian Tony Judt made this point eloquently in his October 19 lecture “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy.” Delegating fundamental state activities to private actors, he said, “discredits the state.” Instead of a straightforward relationship between citizen and state, we have a mediated one that has the potential to perversely feed the anti-statist arguments of the right as the state becomes, in Judt’s words, “represented in the popular mind by a grasping private profiteer.”

But the corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest — and increasingly, that’s the only kind of change we can get.

In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties. He was motivated by a simple question: why were parties of the left, those most ideologically committed to democracy and participation, as oligarchical in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right?

Michels’s answer was what he called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy.” In order for any kind of party or, indeed, any institution with a democratic base to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. As this bureaucratic structure develops, it invests a small group of people with enough power that they can then subvert the very mechanisms by which they can be held to account: the party press, party conventions and delegate votes. “It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors,” he wrote, “of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.”

Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. “After the old man’s death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being.”

“The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy,” Michels wrote. “Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense.”

After a rather dispiriting few months, the treasure in this case may seem impossibly remote, but one thing the Obama campaign got right was its faith in America’s history of continually and fruitfully tilling the soil of democracy, struggling against odds until, at certain moments of profound progressive change, a new treasure is improbably found.

It was the possibility of such a democratic unearthing that gave Obama for America its moral force. The most inspiring thing about the campaign had nothing to do with the candidate and everything to do with average citizens from Dubuque to Atlanta who were taking the time and energy to search for a small piece of that treasure. Likewise, the message of the Obama campaign was as much about empowerment, reinvigorating democracy and changing the ways of Washington as it was about the central planks of his agenda. It’s for this reason that the greatest disappointment of his first year is the White House’s abandonment of this small-d democratic impulse in favor of a strategy almost wholly focused on insider politics.

What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization. The crucial moments of American reform and progress have achieved this: from the direct election of senators to the National Labor Relations Act, from the breakup of the trusts to the end of Jim Crow.

So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to thea filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the frontiers of the possible.

If I had to bet, I’d say that not of one of these will be won this year. The White House won’t be of much help, and on some issues, like breaking up the banks, it will represent the opposition. Always searching and never quite finding is grueling and often dispiriting work. But there is simply no alternative other than to give in and let the field turn hard and barren.

Are Bailouts for the Super-Rich Inevitable? Ask Paul Krugman

Are Bailouts for the Super-Rich Inevitable? Ask Paul Krugman

“There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out.” Paul Krugman, 3/29/10

“The recovery of big banks not only benefited bankers. It also created huge paydays for hedge fund managers, with the top 25 taking home an average of $1 billion in 2009.” New York Times, 4/1/10

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and influential New York Times columnist, says Wall Street institutions have become so big and powerful that they will never be allowed to fail. The only hope he sees is to regulate them thoroughly. He greatly prefers the stricter rules now being offered by Barney Frank in the House to the softer ones coming from Chris Dodd in the Senate. (Neither bill truly tackles the derivatives casino.)

Krugman criticizes Senate Republican leaders who portray proposed bank regulations as just another Wall Street bailout. In fact these hypocritical leaders are doing all they can to thwart the Obama administration’s modest reforms and befriend Wall Street, hoping to net some cold, hard political cash from the bankers.

Unfortunately, when Krugman says bailouts are inevitable, he’s handing the government haters another round of ammunition. “See, the liberal/pinkos are going to just keep on bailing out Wall Street,” they piously intone.

But, why isn’t Krugman calling for an end to all financial bailouts for the wealthy, instead of announcing that they will go on forever?

One reason is that he doesn’t think breaking up the big banks will work: “I don’t have any love for financial giants,” he writes, but I just don’t believe that breaking them up solves the key problem.” He argues that a run on thousands of little banks, as in the 1930s, would also require bailouts to avoid another Great Depression.

Krugman’s sad fatalism is particularly worrisome to those of us who usually welcome his insightful commentaries. We expect thinkers like Krugman to imagine a better financial system — even if it’s not politically attainable right now. And that vision shouldn’t involve bailing out the richest, most reckless financiers, no matter what. Why should we ever accept or justify plutocracy?

Just think about the implications of Krugman’s stance. Wall Street remains in firm control of our nation’s economy since they know they’ll always get bailed out of trouble. The inevitability of bailouts encourages bankers to find yet more ways to gamble with investor and taxpayer money. How long do you think it will take our ingenious financial engineers and tax lawyers to “innovate” around Congress’s new rules (especially the Senate’s extra-weak ones)?

With everyone going so easy on the bankers who just sank our economy, Wall Street is using our bailout funds to reward its executives with bonuses that have no relationship to any real value they create for our economy. Just look at what is going on in the world of shadow banking. In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression (29 million Americans unemployed or forced into part-time jobs — with the BLS March 2010 jobless rate at 17.5 percent), the top 25 hedge fund managers “earned” on average $1 billion each! And that money is taxed only at 15 percent since it’s counted as capital gains. I defy anyone to show how those “earnings” can be justified in terms of job creation, contribution to our economy or social utility.

And where did all that money come from? From us! If we hadn’t bailed out the big banks, these hedge fund managers would have earned nothing at all. Because the financial pay scales are so outlandish and unconnected to the production of real value, it makes effective regulation even more difficult. Can we really expect government regulators with civil service salaries not to cast their eyes on the sweet sinecures they might snag in the financial sector after they’ve finished their grubby tour of duty in the government? How hard are they really going to press their future employers? (Any bets on where Chris Dodd will end up?)

Krugman has focused some much needed attention on the deregulation of finance since the 1980s and the rise of the shadow banking system, which evolved into a crazy unregulated casino of finance. But that’s only half the story. Why isn’t he — and why aren’t we all — talking about the gutting of progressive taxation, which also started in the 1980s? We didn’t just deregulate Wall Street back in the disco era. We threw out the whole idea of significantly taxing the super-rich. The marginal tax rate on those who earned more than $3 million (in today’s dollars) dropped from 91 percent during the Eisenhower years to 28 percent by 1990. Now the richest 400 people in the US are effectively taxed at only 16 percent, according to the latest IRS report. And that doesn’t even include the money these stupendously wealthy people didn’t declare and the resulting taxes they didn’t pay. In fact, we are losing $100 billion in taxes from the super-rich each year because they are hiding their money in overseas accounts. They’ve stashed it there for one purpose only — to avoid taxes that they are legally required to pay. (We lose another $30 billion a year in corporate profits taxes hidden in the same ways.).

If we forced those tax cheats to pay what they owe, we could fund free tuition for every student in America who was admitted to a public college or university. And if we had even more nerve and reinstituted progressive taxation, we could put America back to work, rebuild our infrastructure and build a new green economy — without going further into debt.

Let’s also talk about how deregulated finance and tax cuts for the super-rich destabilized our economy. We created the perfect conditions for big-time financial gambling. The super-rich had amassed so much money that they literally ran out of decent investments in the real economy of goods and services. And so shadow banking was born. Investors started chasing after fantasy finance securities like synthetic CDOs. Those were the casino chips that financed the savings and loan fiasco, the dot.com bubble and the housing explosion. Too much money in the hands of the few is the root cause of financial speculation and crashes — same as it ever was.

Along the way much of our economy was financialized. By the 1990s, a lot of people thought the future was in hybrid financial securities, not hybrid cars. Shortly before the crash nearly 40 percent of all corporate profits came from financial corporations producing little of real value. Wall Street wasn’t serving Main Street. Rather, Main Street — and all of us — were serving the Wall Street bankers. The result: a financial crash and an obscene distribution of wealth.

Allow me to share again with you the one factoid that says it all: It 1970 the ratio of compensation between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker in the US was 45 to 1. By 2008 it was 1,071 to one. No one can justify that gap on the basis of talent, knowledge or effort.

So here we are in our new billionaire bailout society. Its features include a collapsing infrastructure, chronic high unemployment, a gutted public sector, a hollowed out middle class and a depleted environment. It’s a place where the super-rich keep on getting richer, not because they are creating new jobs for Americans, but because they are gambling yet again, knowing we will bail them out.

Yes, regulation is critically important. But it’s not enough. If financial institutions truly are too big and too interconnected too fail, then we have only two choices: Bust them up so that they are small enough to fail, or turn all the major banks and their large shadows into public utilities.

It’s just not right or sane to let private bankers and investors walk off again and again with billions of taxpayer dollars for what amounts to wrecking our way of life. But alas, this is the nightmare we’re going to keep having until our best thinkers put forth a compelling vision to end the insanity.

Come on, Mr. Krugman — let ‘er rip! We know you’re not ready to make peace with our pampered and grossly overpaid financial elites. Americans are looking for a way out of our billionaire bailout society. Lead the way!

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (MPA 1975), Les co-founded and currently directs two non-profit educational organizations: The Labor Institute (1976) and the Public Health Institute (1986). He designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics. He is now helping to form an alliance between the United Steel Workers Union and the Sierra Club. Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

The Real Message in the Massachusetts Special Election

The more I think about this Massachusetts election outcome, the more I am concerned… but not about the Democrats.  I worry for the Republic.

 I think both parties are in much deeper trouble than their leaders realize.  And that spells trouble for the Republic.

Why?

America has become ungovernable.  Every election is about “throwing the bums out,” no matter who’s in the majority.  Seems to me we have a major populist shift in attitude in the country, with no populist leadership coming from either party, because they’re both in thrall to their corporate masters.

Candidates talk a populist game in the heat of the campaign, but they don’t govern that way (Brown rode around Massachusetts in a pickup truck to polish his populist bonafieds).

The anger is growing, but is unfocused.  That anger is evidenced by the utter breakdown of civility either in the halls of Congress or in the political discourse taking place everywhere. It’s reflected in the xenophobic hatred of immigrants and an uptick in violence against racial and other minorities.  The teabaggers, birthers, and the Town Hall screamers are evidence of the growing rage, but there is also a growing rage among traditionally left-leaning voters, who have not yet realized it, but they have some common cause with these so-called nut-cases on the right.

Rules in the Senate, and the peculiar dynamics of how we apportion Senators and how they’re elected, in particular, make it impossible for either party to effectively address the populist demands of voters.  Leadership failure and a generation of brainwashing of the populace by corporate media and corporate marketers have produced an angry public, but one that can’t really grasp the complexities of the big  issues we must face…they just want to “throw the bums out who are in there now.”  As if a near carbon copy of those “bums” will somehow ride to the rescue “this time.”  But of course, it never happens. 

Even more intractable than Senate rules, we’ve got 200 years of legal opinion giving corporations “personhood,”  thanks to a very broad judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment (which was intended to bring freed slaves into the mainstream of society).  Corporations are a LEGAL FICTION… an invention of (state) governments that permit their charter.  Corporations do not need safe food to eat, clean water to drink, or clean air to breath. They can split themselves into smaller parts or combine themselves into bigger entities. They can spawn “children” without the need for healthcare.  They can “move” to another state, or another country, overnight.  They cannot go to jail for crimes.  They are designed exclusively to protect PROPERTY and wealth.  Yet they have all the rights and protections of real, breathing human beings.  They can exercise “free speech” by spending for political campaigns (by direct contributions, or unlimited “issue advertising.”)  They can claim discrimination if any law is passed that does not also apply to real human beings.  Yet, in fact, they are “SUPER humans” that real human voters simply cannot compete with. 

It’s worth noting that over the course of US history, people have gained rights through grassroots action leading to Constitutional Amendments (rights to vote, due process, etc)… while corporations have gained their rights through the courts.  Corporate robber barons had the money to take their cases to the Supreme Court. Women, African-Americans, and others did not. 

 Party leaders on both sides think that if they just spin the facts this way or that, they can win the hearts of their core voters, either on the left or the right. 

This is NOT about left or right.  It’s more “up and down.”  That is, it’s about a population fed up that there are no real opportunities to get ahead anymore… where working hard won’t get you ahead.  It’s about a middle class under attack and a yawning gap between the richest and the poorest.  It’s about voting for change, and then our leaders cutting deals with big business as usual.. the financial sector, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the trial lawyers, and on and on. 

 Perhaps it is time for a real rules change.  Perhaps a Constitutional change.  Thomas Jefferson believed in a little bit of revolution now and then, but our system of government has survived for 230 years while the world and its problems have changed in ways the Founding Fathers could never have imagined. 

Foreigners still  want to be like Americans… but have you ever heard anyone say, “Gee, I wish we had your Senate!.”  Parliamentary systems seem better able to deal with big problems in the modern world.

 Of course, Constitutional change is highly unlikely unless a great leader emerges to focus the anger and bring the left and the right together in common cause.  And a Constitutional Convention would be a fiasco. 

So what is to be done? 

Muddling through is certainly not working.

Perhaps a change of attitude in the judicial community regarding the personhoodof corporations?  That’s not likely either, and wouldn’t work unless other countries also moved in tandem…. multinational corporations have colonized governments worldwide, not just in the US. 

I’m flummoxed as to how we fix this.  But really concerned.