Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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People on the right have never really understood how markets work.
The goal of any business is to increase market share.
Shareholders want market share.
Boards of Directors fire CEO's who do not build market share.
A monopoly is the point of building market share.
Steve Jobs doesn't want competition. He wants every tablet user to own an iPad.
The largest corporations have enough capital to fund elections and staff government. They have enough money to capture whole regulatory bodies.
In short, large corporations buy government and media assets in order to create the legal, regulatory and discursive environment for building and sustaining monopolies. Eli Lilly, by pumping money into congress, was able to shut down competition from generic and foreign competitors. Big oil did the same with energy. They successfully defended their control over energy from a host of different challenges. Capitalists don't want competition. Their shareholders win biggest when they capture the largest possible block of consumers. The point of business is to achieve a monopoly so that you can raise prices without fear of having your customers stolen.
Reagan, for instance, was funded massively by big oil. Remember: Carter posed a threat to big oil. Cater desperately wanted energy competition. Carter predicted that our reliance on high petroleum use would lead to crippling gas costs. He wanted alternative energy and conservation to compete with big oil - to pose solutions which eroded the market share of big oil and forced them to lower prices to retain customers. Reagan successfully defeated the challenges posed to big oil. He used government to solidify the monopoly power of big oil and he tied consumers to energy costs that would some day destroy the economy. This is what happens when special interests capture politicians and rig markets. Reagan helped rig the market in favor if his donors. The Left does the exact same thing.
Republican voters who talk about free markets don't get it. None of the corporations who exist inside markets want a free market - they want market share; they want monopolies - they don't want competition to destroy their profits. Competition erodes market share. Corporations use their profits to buy regulators and politicians in order to rig markets and get more market share. This allows them to raise prices without losing consumers to a competitor. Once you understand this, you will understand what has happened to U.S. capitalism since Reagan. We now have a bunch of special interests running the economy.
The big problem is that we have no means to fix this problem. Sean Hannity is paid by the same special interests who run the economy to defend these monopolies as "freedom". Sean will never tell his voters that companies like Eli Lilly and Exxon can raise their prices because Washington has helped them destroy the competition. If you try to break the monopolies and restore competition, Glen Beck screams "socialism".
God help us.
Your usual excellent post Londoner.
Here is a liberal who not only understands how the market works, but he also understands the ethical and moral imperatives that must be part of the rules and regulations required to make the market a benefit to everyone, not just the few. The best example of the dangers of regulatory capture are polluters, who pose a physical danger to human life, human health and our precious life sustaining resources.
What his uncle, our President, said 49 years ago was directed at the Soviet Union, but sadly, it can now be applied to the left and the right in America:
"So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
I strongly recommend reading the whole speech.
2005
I want to say this: There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. That's what we do with the Riverkeepers -- we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full-time, paid Riverkeeper -- each one agrees to sue polluters.
At Riverkeeper, we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists anymore. We're free marketers. We go out into the marketplace, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We're going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits, because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country. What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient, and the kind of corporate-crony capitalism which has been embraced by this White House, which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity, and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria. [applause]
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.
And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.
This White House (Bush) has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined; they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction.
The only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy. You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny, where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but, over the long term, the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number-one issue for all of us: to try to restore American democracy, because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.