Greedy Trial Lawyer
Free-Market Fundamentalism Will Destroy America's Middle Class
Category: Seeing Clearly Now
Teddy Roosevelt, we need your help. There is a political and economic belief that is dismantling efforts to use government as a protection against the sharpest edges of unfettered capitalism. David Sirota, in a posting on his Sirotablog, warns us of the impact of free-market fundamentalism. He sees the overall destruction of America's middle class unless leaders like you step forward again.
From David Sirota's excellent article entitled Execs Target Shareholders with Orwellian Intimidation:
Americans have always guarded their privacy, and have always had a distrust of large institutions that may infringe on that privacy. But in recent years, we have witnessed Corporate America quietly try to chip away at that privacy, for all sorts of self-serving reasons. And using huge campaign contributions, Congress has either sat by and watched, or actually helped these efforts. Still, few efforts have been as brazen as those described in a little-noticed story in the Financial Times this week – an effort that goes from merely the typical brazen corporate power play, and into the Orwellian realm of Big Brother.The Times reports that "U.S. companies, alarmed by the number of activist investors on the prowl, are hiring surveillance firms to find out who their shareholders are and which ones might cause trouble." Let's state it another way: company management is now going all out to identify – and perhaps target with retribution/harassment? – the owners of the company themselves (aka. the stockholders) if those owners are expected to "cause trouble."
The move, in some ways, looks like a modern-day (though at this point less harsh) version of the famous Pinkertons, only now that Big Business has been so successful in crushing unions, the surveillance is now being directed at shareholders. And just remember what Corporate America really means my "activists" causing "trouble." Big Business doesn't mean stockholders who are going to help executives pay themselves more, or stockholders who are going to demand wage cuts for ordinary employees. It more likely means the opposite – shareholders (or shareholding institutions) that are going to demand changes that management doesn't like.
The question, then, is simple: what will it take for the public to finally say enough is enough? We live in an age of free-market fundamentalism, where every message we get from politicians or the media Establishment is designed to reinforce the assumption that Big Business is all-powerful, on par with uncontrollable forces of Nature. But in reality, if we continue to treat corporations as above any laws whatsoever, we will see more Enrons bilk shareholders, more Wal-Marts rip off workers and destroy communities, and the overall destruction of America's middle class.
Is that really the inevitable future of this country? As an eternal optimist, I'd like to think not. But that means we must work to make these huge issues of corporate power central to America's political debate. We must reject politicians whose only goals are to use the political process to enrich themselves and increase their own power, and we must reward those leaders who stand up to Big Money interests, and who, in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, seek to use government as a force that protects the interests of ordinary citizens against the sharpest edges of capitalism.
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