Has American Aristocracy Created a Monarchy?

Is the American presidency being transformed into a quasi-monarchy?  What else do you call it when 196 enormously rich people can use their money to elect the president of their choice?

At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation — drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99 percent — electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1 percent. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063 percent. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.

Of course their money doesn't stop at the White House.  They're also vying to skew Congress their way and the success of backroom organizations like APEC shows they're winning, big time.   This is, effectively, the rise of corporatism to displace democracy in the United States.

Defending Canadian Labour

We've been warned.   The Harper government's rash interventionism in Air Canada and Canada Post strikes has to be seen as a declaration of a war on organized labour in Canada.

I'm a left-leaning Liberal but not what, to the Canadian Left, would qualify as socialist.   My support for organized labour is genuine but it is also measured.

For most of my working life I belonged to some sort of union or guild or professional society.   Even lawyers and doctors have collective representation.

I value organized labour as an essential component to the maintenance of a healthy, robust and viable middle class which is the very backbone of our democracy.  A strong middle class is the very engine of social and economic mobility.   It is the ladder by which the poor can climb out of poverty and clears the path for them to ascend into the trades and professions.

The middle class operates as a buffer against extremism on the Right and the Left.  When it functions properly it provides people with hope and security, a vested interest in their society.

The middle class is not homogeneous.  There are layers or sub-classes within the class although the distinctions are usually vague.   These layers actually strengthen the middle class and make it more resilient to external forces.  Organized labour is an essential component of that, overlapping several of these layers.   Neutralize organized labour and you greatly weaken the middle class, sapping it of both strength and resilience.

As I wrote yesterday, the right to organize trade unions is specifically acknowledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   In signatories to that declaration, Canada included, it is a fundamental human right.   You cannot allow people to organize trade unions and deny them the right to strike for that deprives them of their fundamental human right.  And that, sadly, is just what Harper seems intent on doing.

Harper is trampling underfoot Canada's human rights obligations.   He is withholding from a group of Canadians what is their fundamental human right.  This is tyrannical.

We do ourselves and our cause a great disservice if we fail to recognize Harper's incremental ways.  He builds on small steps and acts as though his feet have not moved at all.   That is what makes his assault on labour so threatening.  Back to work legislation ought to be a last resort for any democratic government.  Yes, indeed, it may be necessary in some circumstances, eventually, when the strike remedy proves intractable and no longer a tool of consensus.  Then, perhaps, but not before.

Harper brushes all that aside.  You strike.  He orders you back to work, your demands and grievances nullified.  He dismantles what the Supreme Court of Canada described in 2007 as "the human dignity, liberty and autonomy of workers."

Mr. Rae and then Mr. Layton took Harper to task over this but Harper wouldn't listen to them when he was obliged to so he's hardly going to heed them now that he has his majority.   So, if Parliament is incapable of rectifying Harper's excesses, how is society to find redress?


In circumstances such as these there is really only one effective response and that is the general strike.   Labour walks out, shuts the place down, says "oh no you don't."  A general strike in defence of a fundamental human right is not excessive nor unjustified in a truly democratic society.

Corporatism, that has taken such a malignant hold in the United States, is setting into Canada also.   Harper is not genuinely conservative.   He is corporatist.  He bridles at what are, for him, the shackles of law and conventions and everything outside his very twisted and narrow notion of decency.   His actions this past week speak for themselves and we act at our peril if we don't listen.

Corporatism Watch

Corporatism, more accurately described as corporate statism, has taken hold in the United States.  It is inherently anti-democratic, concentrating power in the control of a political-economic elite.   21st century corporatism seems to be evolving differently than its predecessors in that it seeks to organize society not for the general welfare and betterment of society but to entrench the advantage of the privileged.

Keith Olbermann's abrupt consignment into obscurity has some of us mystified.  AlterNet suggests if you want to know what happened to Olbermann, you should ask GE, General Electric, the corporate owner of MSNBC.   It contends that KO was just too progressive for the corporatist media:

Now, with Olbermann’s permanent departure on Friday, the remainder of MSNBC’s liberal evening line-up, which also includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell (who will fill Olbermann’s 8 p.m. slot), must face the reality that any sustained friction with management could mean the bum’s rush for them, too.

The liberal hosts also must remember that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after all other programming strategies, including trying to out-Fox Fox, had failed – and only after it became clear that President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping.

Media corporatism, of the variety now comfortably blanketing Canada's news outlets, is a vehicle of corporatist statism.   Media, concentrated in the hands of but a few interests, is in a position to benefit in many ways by placing itself at the service of compatible political interests.  There are subsidies to be had, regulations to be rewritten or scrapped entirely, all for promoting a partisan point of view to an often unwary public.   The political beneficiary of this kindness need dispense nothing but the public interest in an independent, vibrant mass media.

What is beginning to happen in Canada is old hat in the US.  Corporatist statism there has advanced by leaps and bounds ahead of its Canadian adherents.   The forces of corporatism there not only have their "bought and paid for" Congress in their service but also the Supreme Court itself.  The Citizens United decision in which the US Supreme Court invested corporations with political rights, ignoring the fact that corporate personality is a simple legal fiction, was the hallmark of the judicial branch's conversion to corporatist statism.  Last week the progressive state of Vermont moved a resolution to reverse this decision, hoping it will lead to a groundswell of anti-corporatist outrage elsewhere, but we'll have a good wait before we see if that defies the odds to succeed.

Corporatist statism was manifest in the Bush/Cheney years.   Imagine a government waging two, enormously expensive wars on money borrowed from foreign lenders also enacting tax cuts for the rich likewise funded by money borrowed from foreign lenders.  It suffered a blow with the election of Obama and the Democratic capture of both houses of Congress but, aided by the corporatist media, the Republicans were quick to retake the House.

America stands as a warning of the perils of media corporatism and what it holds for Canada.    We witnessed the sharp turn to the right in the Globe & Mail when it fell to Bell Globemedia.  We saw the rise and fall of the blatantly partisan CanWest.  Sun Media needs no elaboration.   Now, in the West, we have the emergence of the new media monolith, Shaw Communications.

From a lowly cable TV company, Shaw has rapidly branched out into a regional, internet service provider and a telephone service provider.   Recently it acquired the broadcast interests of CanWest, that now adds to its corporate structure the elements of broadcaster and TV content provider.  It appears Shaw next intends to get into the cellular phone business.   Have we unleashed a potential monster?   Is this expansion truly in the public interest?

This is the very sort of problem I once would have expected the Liberal Party to address.   I keep waiting to hear today's Liberals speak out on the entrenchment of concentration of media ownership and media cross ownership in Canada.   I wait forlornly for Liberal advocacy for the restoration of independent, robust and vibrant media in Canada.   Yet all I hear is silence.