Corporate Democracy; Civic Disrespect

by John K. Galbraith

With the events of late in the year 2000, the United States left behind constitutional republicanism, and turned to a different form of government.

It is not, however, a new form. It is, rather, a transplant, highly familiar from a different arena of advanced capitalism. This is corporate democracy. It is a system whereby a Board of Directors-- read Supreme Court -- selects the Chief Executive Officer. The CEO in turn appoints new members of the Board. The shareholders, owners in title only, are invited to cast their votes in periodic referenda. But their franchise is only symbolic, for management holds a majority of the proxies. On no important issue do the CEO and the Board ever permit themselves to lose.

The Supreme Court clarified this in a way that the Florida courts could not have. The media have accepted it, for it is the form of government to which they are already professionally accustomed. And the shameless attitude of the George W. Bush high command merely illustrates, in unusually visible fashion, the prevalent ethical system of corporate life.

Al Gore's concession speech was justly praised for grace and humor. It paid due deference to the triumph of corporate political ethics, but did not embrace them. It thus preserved Gore for another political day -- the obvious intention. But Gore also sent an unmistakable message to American democrats: Do not forget.

It was an important warning, for almost immediately forgetting became the media order of the day. Overnight, it became almost un-American not to accept the diktat of the Court. Or to be precise, Gore's own distinction became holy writ: One might disagree with the Court, but not with the legitimacy of its decision. Press references from that moment forward were to President-elect Bush, an unofficial title and something that the Governor from Texas (President-select? President-designate?) manifestly is not.

The key to dealing with the Bush people, however, is precisely not to accept them. Like most Americans, I have nothing personal against Bush, Dick Cheney, nor against Colin Powell and the others now surfacing as members of the new administration. But I will not reconcile myself to them. They lost the election. Then they arranged to obstruct the count of the vote. They don't deserve to be there, and that changes everything.

They have earned our civic disrespect, and that is what we, the people, should accord them. In social terms, civic disrespect means that the illegitimacy of this administration must not be allowed to fade from view. The conventions of politics remain: Bush will be president; Congress must work with him. But those of us outside that process are not bound by those conventions, and to the extent that we have a voice, we should use it.

In political practice, civic disrespect means drawing lines around the freedom of maneuver of the incoming administration. In many areas, including foreign policy, there will be few major changes; in others such as annual budgets and appropriations, compromises will have to be reached.

But Bush should be opposed on actions whose reach will extend beyond his actual term.

First, the new president should be allowed lifetime appointments only by consensus. The public should oppose -- and 50 Senate Democrats should freely block -- judicial nominations whenever they carry even the slightest ideological taint. That may mean most of them, but no matter.

And as for the Supreme Court especially, vacancies need not be filled.

Second, the Democrats should advise Bush not to introduce any legislation to cut or privatize any part of Social Security or Medicare.

Third, Democrats should furiously oppose elimination of the estate tax, a social incentive for recycling wealth to the non-profit sector, to foundations and universities, that has had a uniquely powerful effect on the form of American society. Once gone, this ingenious device will never be reenacted.

Fourth, the people must unite to oppose the global dangers of National Missile Defense -- a strategic nightmare on which Bush campaigned -- that threatens for all time the security of us all.

Fifth, Congress should enact a New Voting Rights Act, targeted precisely at the Florida abuses. This should stipulate: mandatory adoption of best-practice technology in all federal elections; a 24-hour voting day; a ban on private contractors to aid in purging voter rolls; and mandatory immediate hand count of all under-votes in federal elections.

With those steps taken, Democrats must also recognize and adapt to the new political landscape that emerged from this election. Outside of Florida, Democrats are finished in the South. But they have excellent prospects of consolidating a narrow majority of the Electoral College -- so long as, in the next election, there is no Ralph Nader defection.

What can prevent such a thing? Only a move away from the main Clinton compromises that so infuriated the progressive left. Nader's voters were motivated passionately by issues like the drug war, the death penalty, consumer protection and national missile defense -- issues where New Democrats took Republican positions in their effort to woo the South.

Clinton the Southerner succeeded at this -- but against Republicans who were only weakly "Southern" at best. Gore, on the other hand, was principally a Northern candidate, strongly backed by the core Democrats, who ran against, and defeated so far as ballots were concerned, a wholly Southern Republican. Future Republicans almost surely also be "Southern,"; for that is where the base of the party now lies. And future Democrats, if they are Northern candidates too, can beat them -- all the more so if they bring the Greens back into the Democratic fold.

In short, Al Gore's campaign proved that there is an electoral majority in the United States for a government that is truly a progressive coalition, and not merely an assemblage of sympathetic lawyers, professors and investment bankers. Rather, Americans will elect a government that firmly includes and effectively represents labor, women, minorities -- and Greens.

This is the government we must seek to elect -- if we get another chance.

And for that, the first task is to assure that the information ministries of our new corporate republic do not successfully cast a fog of forgetting over the crime that we have all just witnessed, with our own eyes.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith (go@greens.com), January 05, 2001

Answers

[the crime that we have all just witnessed, with our own eyes.]

My word, this is sore-loserism taken to soaring extremes. His guy lost a close one, and suddenly the entire system is corrupt. And I'll lay you any odds you care to name, that if the USSC had decided in Gore's favor, Galbraith would NOT be calling the election a "crime", he'd be saying that justice prevailed! One single vote on that court is the difference between the collapse of the republic as we know it and the triumph of our cherished traditions? What bullshit!

Meanwhile this is the fourth time the winner of the popular vote lost the electoral college vote. The nation has survived just fine. It's the second time an election too close to call has been decided by other means. The nation has survived just fine. And in four years, there will be another presidential election, and the winner will take office just as has always happened in the past.

And will Galbraith show up in four years to witness this and write that, oops, he was dead wrong about a "different form of government", especially if his preferred candidate wins? Hell, no! He'll whine today to anyone who will listen when he loses, make sweeping statements about "if we get another chance", and then clam up when, once again, he's totally dead wrong.

The amusing thing is, Galbraith knows it's bullshit. He excretes it because he himself has a constituency. Galbraith writes books for much of his living, and he knows just as well as, say, Ed Yourdon, how to appease the buying public for his brand of patent medicine. He's writing this for those you can fool all of the time, knowing those fools will have forgotten every word by the time events put the lie to them. Caveat emptor, everyone.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 05, 2001.

Flint, agreed. J.K. Galbraith is liberal economist who has a devoted following. Unfortunately, he is a better writer than an economist. In the field, Galbraith is something of a "pop" economist who writes for the popular press rather than doing "serious" research. He is a devoted anti-capitalist... and I imagine he has taken the triumph of the free market during the past half century rather badly. I dug around and will have another link for you....

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), January 05, 2001.

I remember picking up two or three of Galbraith's books when I was in Jr High or as a freshman in H.S,it reeked of bullshit then and his writings still hold that same caveat today.What is sad is that many people hold his words in such high esteem.

-- capnfun (capnfun1@excite.com), January 05, 2001.

Galbraith has always been an asshole but you gotta admire the prose, the diction and the dedication. I kinda liked Mao too but that's a another story.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), January 06, 2001.

Instead of acknowledging the fundamental truths of Galbraith's essay, you merely attack the man. Not the ideas -- the man, his politics, his history. No matter that he is one of America's most respected intellectuals, or that he speaks the truth. Why not point to specific assertions in his essay that are demonstrably false and prove that they are?

-- Transparent GOP Losers (can@only.attack), January 06, 2001.

All Too Human by Martin Peretz

Post date 12.21.00 | Issue date 01.01.01

In theory, the principle animating the Bush campaign in Florida was that votes should be counted by objective machines-- no interference from biased and fallible human beings. But, in practice, the Bushies' preference was not for technology over humans but for their humans over anyone else's. For instance, in Seminole and Martin Counties, where Republican election officials allowed Republican operatives to doctor absentee-ballot applications, while Democrats were not granted the same right. And in Tallahassee, where, months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a highly suspect, GOP-connected database company to purge the state's voter rolls of thousands of mostly minority citizens, many of whom it falsely categorized as felons. And in Austin, where Jeb Bush worked the phones on election night in a last-ditch effort to make sure Florida went his brother's way. And in Nassau County, where Republican election officials rejected the results of the machine recount, thereby adding 51 votes to Bush's margin. Did James Baker object to this rank subjectivity? Did Harris cry out against this human interference? No: Harris certified the new result, and Baker quietly played along.

But don't despair. The Bush campaign rediscovered its devotion to machines in time to savage the hand counts in Democratic Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach Counties--hand counts that would almost certainly have handed Al Gore the presidency. Baker held press conference after press conference to explain the virtue of voting machines. Yet if Florida has taught us anything, it is just how unreliable those machines are. Especially the machines used in Democratic areas--which represented the real "equal protection" question our esteemed Supreme Court refused to touch. Two counts of one precinct's votes by the same antiquated machine often produce two different results. Hand counts conducted by people of honesty and goodwill--character traits with which the Bushies, needless to say, are not overly acquainted--are much more reliable.

Nobody has quite accused Baker, Jeb Bush, or Harris of the sin of simony in their efforts to get the Miami-Dade election supervisors to void the votes of their own constituents. But what else could the Florida Supreme Court have been thinking when it stipulated that Miami-Dade's ballots be scrutinized not by its usual canvassers but by court officials? In any case, given the magnitude of the theft that has occurred, the whole story will come out, sooner rather than later. This is a grand crime against democracy, and it was committed by a candidate whose overriding campaign claim was that he could be trusted. Once the story of Florida 2000 is known in full, George W. Bush may well wish he had become baseball commissioner rather than president.

But not yet. For now, Bush remains "excited ... excited about the potential" of being president. He expressed surprise at receiving congratulations from so many heads of state, as if maybe he didn't realize quite how many there were. But, his ignorance notwithstanding, Bush is already learning to be imperious. When asked at a photo-op about House Speaker Dennis Hastert's opposition to his huge and hugely irresponsible $1.3 trillion, across-the-board tax cut, the president-elect responded: "I have made it clear to the speaker once before that, you know, I campaigned on a package that I thought was fair and fiscally sound and responsible." And, later that day, Hastert changed his tune and fell obligingly into line.

Al Gore's elegant and eloquent short talk congratulating Bush on his election was actually painful for me to hear. In Texas, Bush is widely known as "the great executioner." His death chamber is, as The New York Times pointed out this week, the busiest in the nation. But now he has another mantle: He is the great usurper. It's true that he's not the first dynastic president--John Quincy Adams also inherited from his father a first name, a last name, and a spot in the Oval Office. But Adams was a truly great man: intellectually imaginative, philosophically deep, politically brave. By contrast, George W. is our first true dauphin: truly unserious, remarkably undistinguished, designated only because he is the eldest son of the last chief executive to produce a line of hopefuls and because his father's friends paved his path to the White House with campaign finance gold.

For once, even the talking heads seemed to appreciate Gore's speech, its grace and its deep feeling for democratic continuity. Even Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson appreciated it, and Bill Schneider and Tim Russert, too. To be sure, they'd been waiting for Gore to give up ever since they stayed up late on November 7 misinforming the nation about the results of the election. And, like others in the dreary CNN/Fox/CNBC commentariat, they had wished him ill long before that. But, even in their satisfaction at Gore's defeat, they couldn't suppress their long-resisted admiration for the originality and intellectual coherence of his views. They will have reason to recall these rare and valuable traits every time they hear our next president utter the commonplace phrases he mistakes for ideas.

In his speech to the nation, Gore cited the phrase inscribed above the portals of the Harvard Law School library: NON SUB HOMINE SED SUB DEO ET LEGE, "Not under man but under God and law." In the very same place, some students at the law school have now unfurled a banner expressing their fury at the Court they were taught to revere. Their banner says NOT UNDER GOD OR LAW BUT UNDER REHNQUIST. As it happens, Chief Justice William Rehnquist's career of limiting citizens' access to the voting booth goes back many years. An article by Dennis Roddy with the headline "just our bill," which appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 2 (and is accessible on the Web at www.post-gazette.com), recounts how in the election of 1964 the then-youngish Republican lawyer William Rehnquist intimidated blacks and immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, from exercising suffrage. Then he did it as the thuggish boss of an insidious project called "Operation Eagle Eye." Now he does it in a long black robe from behind the great bench.

Neither my son Jesse nor I put much stock in the prophecies of Nostradamus. Especially when Nostradamus's "prophecies" come from the Web, which has a tendency to manufacture quotes for occasions like these. But I'll share the "quotation" from the medieval prognosticator that Jesse e-mailed me anyway, because, whoever penned them, the words couldn't be more true, or more sad:

Come the millennium, month twelve, In the home of greatest power, The village idiot will come forth To be acclaimed the leader.

-- Thanks 'Publicans! (for@electing.idiot), January 06, 2001.

"fundamental truths..." Boy, you lose me there Mr. Transparent. Galbraith's crap works just fine in a society dedicated to the preservation or encouragement of non participation. His whimpering here about the electon shows perfectly how narrow his world is. Other than the politics that make all of us say strange things you can't really get behind this clown....can you?

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), January 06, 2001.

Aw crap.

Cut and paste thread killing bullshit.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), January 06, 2001.

Translation from Carlos:

Aw hell! More rationally written, intelligent, outraged commentary from intellectuals and thinkers! Stop it, would you? I don't want to read this stuff -- it's outside my extremely narrow range of vision and it makes me damn uneasy! So stop giving me more information, more process. I just want soundbites, tiny little things that I don't need to process.

Don't give me the truth, just give me my picture of things.

Aw hell. Guess I just have to find a thread where people are agreeing with me, and I won't have to actually read anything.

-- Carlos, A Very Humorous Case (of@resisting.thinking), January 06, 2001.