But capital is not speech – it’s power. Consider the example of
Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. The
company employs 613,300 people, roughly twice the number who worked at IBM when
I was employed there in the late 1990s. Amazon actually earned $171 billion in
revenue in 2017, with an overall net income of $3 billion, assets worth $131
billion and a stock valuation of just under $28 billion. Thus the equity per
employee of Amazon was a smidgen over $45,000. One could argue that the company
was and is a good buy at its current price of around $1500 per share. There is
a lot of value in its activity that is not captured in a stock price that low.
That value is divided, of course,
not among its employees, but rather its shareholders, the largest being Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos. Not that Bezos depends entirely upon undervalued Amazon
stock for his wealth. His early investment in Google (a mere $250,000) for
example, is now worth more than $3 billion and Bezos owns a lot of other stuff,
including a space exploration company and, through a limited liability
corporation called Nash Holdings, The
Washington Post, an asset that makes him a target of angry tweets by
President Trump. Overall, Bezos is said to be worth over $150 billion, slightly
ahead of Bill Gates, but considerably ahead of you and me.
Whether Bezos is the richest man in
the world, as Wikipedia and Forbes, assert,
or not depends on part on how one values the wealth of some off-the-books
types, such as Vladimir Putin ($200B, give or take[i])
or the 2,000-members of the Saud family said to be worth a total of roughly
$1.4 trillion, a significant amount of which is controlled by a handful of elders.
Saudi Arabia is, after all, the one country named for its ruling family.
A few years ago, when Bill Gates
first became the “richest man in the world,” it was a title that could be had for $30 billion. The subsequent
growth in these numbers reflects a fundamental tendency of capitalism to
accumulate and concentrate. If all the money in the world (currently somewhere
around 255 trillion US$) were divided equally among the eight billion people on
this planet, everyone would have a net worth a little under $32,000, which is
about one year’s tuition at an Ivy League school. So the likes of Bezos, Gates,
Putin and Mohammad bin Salman represents quite a bit more than their “share” of
the world’s wealth if we look at the planet as something akin to an asset that
belongs to us all.
Which means that these
disproportionate concentrations of wealth represent serious distortions of
power, including the power to concentrate food, shelter and physical wellbeing.
That is what politics is all about. In terms of wealth, Jeff Bezos has 4
million seven hundred thousand times that of the average human being. Dividing
Amazon’s HQ2 50,000 future employees among the residents of northern Virginia
and the Bronx is just one way to ensure that Bezos’ absolute economic influence
in the metro DC and New York City regions will be magnified by significant
voting blocs of people for whom what is in Amazon’s interest translates into
their own welfare. It’s the old “What’s good for General Motors” formula
updated for the internet age.
So the protection of wealth as
speech – again, the essence of Citizens
United – is intended to ensure that the concentration of capital will be
protected by the US Constitution. It’s a neat trick that Lewis Powell first
foresaw when he suggested the weaponization of the US legal system in his memo
to the US Chamber of Congress in August of 1971. Since then, the US right has
organized systematically to take over the courts, a process that has required
diligence, organization and a reasonably singled-minded focus for 48 effing
years to accomplish its goal with beer-boy Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the
Supreme Court and the Senate’s wave of confirmations of Kavanaugh knock-offs to
fill a wide range of lower court vacancies that built up during the Obama
years, complements of Mitch McConnell.
By way of contrast, future Arkansas
governor Bill Clinton was so appalled at the defeat of George McGovern by
Richard Nixon in 1972 that he founded the Democrat Leadership Conference to
ensure that Democratic politics in the next generation would not be weighed
down by any socialist-leaning ideas from the American Left. Clinton’s vision of
a Democratic Party working in unison with liberal aspects of corporate America
has governed the party pretty much until this last election. Even now, the
Democrats find themselves with Chuck Schumer, a US Senator who represents
exactly one city block of lower Manhattan, and Nancy Pelosi, a committed
centrist, running the party in Congress, plus a passel of disparate candidates
hoping to run for the presidency in 2020, exactly two of whom (Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren) might be characterized as “on the left.” Most, although
not all, of the rest seems to be following the Obama formula of looking
progressive while operating as centrists – no “out” centrist has won the Electoral
College since 1996. Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic Congressman who often
voted with the GOP and who can be characterized as a progressive only when
contrasted with the likes of Ted Cruz, is more typical of the field.
In short, we have a relatively
organized American right, currently being held captive by a politician who
demonstrates that party’s contempt for professionalism in politics, against a broad array of candidates most of whom
actively do not want to challenge the Democratic party’s symbiotic relationship
with Wall Street, Hollywood and tech billionaires. What an appealing choice!
Further, the longer the Republicans can control the Senate and the executive
branch, the more damage they can do and the longer it will take any bottom-up
mass movement of Americans to overturn the right’s stranglehold on at least the
judiciary.
And did I mention that climate
change makes the problem more urgent every day?
It’s enough to make a Chomskyian
out of a sane person, if only because Chomsky’s complaints about the rapacious
nature of capitalism tend to be reasonable. The real problem is how to undo
what has been done and overturn capital’s stranglehold on the polis. If you
don’t break that stranglehold, any short-term fixes will prove as fragile as
Barack Obama’s progressive heritage.
I think that the answer to the
first question has to lie in a series of Constitutional Amendments, the first
of which declares that money is not speech. But I wouldn’t want to call a
Constitutional Convention in the present political climate, would you? Handmaid’s Tale, here we come.
Long term, it will take at least the single-minded focus that
the GOP has demonstrated since 1971 and a
degree of organization that is the equal of the Republican right. One aspect of
that organization has to be a consistent never-ending critique of capital’s
role in society, precisely its capacity to concentrate power.
It is that disequalibration that
underpins all the ways that capital empowers every form of privilege that
exists: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, age privilege, you
name it.
If I look at how Jeff Bezos employs
his wealth, he seems innocuous enough. Amazon’s corporate contributions have
skewed slightly Republican, but not significantly so, and Bezos himself has
mostly supported establishment Democrats. His ownership of the Post has been hands-off in pointed contrast with the Murdoch clan,
allowing professional journalists to do their jobs, even if a lot of Post contributors clearly suffer from
inside-the-Beltway conventional thinking. Bezos’ more important political
contribution has been a $10 million gift to With Honor, a non-profit cofounded
by GOP strategist (and never-Trumper) David Gergen to elect more veterans to
Congress. Not all veterans are conservatives – Ron Dellums was a member of the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as well as a former Marine. But the
overall impact of such giving, like hiring some 50,000 employees in two key
districts on the East Coast, seems poised to ensure the well-being of Amazon
itself as it remakes the commercial sale and distribution of products in a
web-driven world.
And progressive-sounding
politicians who do nothing to ensure the election of progressives at the state
and local level, as was the case with Obama, or who do nothing to disengage US
foreign policy from the interests of international corporations – as was also
the case with #44 – do little more than ensure that the worst immediate
consequences of capital may be inhibited while the deeper stranglehold of
wealth on history and privilege continue unabated. I think it’s arguable
whether or not Obama made the ascendancy of a racist and fascist to the
presidency inevitable, but he certainly helped to magnify the damage that man
can do while in office. Voter suppression campaigns in Wisconsin, Georgia and
elsewhere, are a direct result of Obama’s abandonment of state and local
politics while in office. The disarray of US foreign policy reflects the
reality that Obama’s international vision amounted to little more than
continuing the use of US military might (this
time with drones!) to bolster a global order tailor-made by and for US
corporations[ii]. When
Trump came to pull that house down, it was already in considerable shambles.
The same year that Lewis Powell
penned his infamous memo to the Chamber of Commerce, he was nominated by
Richard Nixon to the US Supreme Court where he would serve for 16 years. He
died finally in 1998, some twenty years before the Kavanagh nomination ensured
that a nation that leans to the left will have its laws interpreted for a
generation by a court that leans markedly to the right. That’s a vision of a
long arc, a vision the left has lacked for a generation. With the growing
threat of global warming sure to push ever larger numbers of people to
increasingly desperate acts, it’s really now or never.
[i] A problematic figure suggested first by Bill Browder,
the Russian investment oligarch son of former US Communist Earl Browder, and
man most likely to grip a poisoned doorknob for his opposition to Putin.
[ii] Henry Kissinger’s corporate sponsor throughout his
career was Nelson Rockefeller. His Democratic counterpart, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, was in turn sponsored by David Rockefeller. The company the
Rockefellers inherited was Standard Oil, the global predecessor to Exxon. Kissinger
and Brzezinski ran foreign policy during the Nixon and Carter years, and were
replaced during the Reagan era by Casper
Weinberger and George Schultz, both of whom ran divisions at Bechtel. Reagan’s
vice-president was the only CIA official to ever own his own oil firm,
George HW Bush. Oil’s tight control of
foreign policy fit right into the rise of the automobile in post-WW2 America,
as well as the automobile’s greatest achievement, the American suburb and the
physical remaking of every metropolitan region in the nation. Why are the
Saudis our friends? What’s good for General Motors?
