We the People? Nah!

I promise this will be short.

As an addendum to everything I have been pondering lately …

Don’t you find it odd that every time someone is elected who sits politically a little to the left of what is tolerated by the “sensible” or “centrist” folk the mumblings begin about just how impractical all those crazy “leftist” ideas are.

Worse still: such politicians are then advised to go talk to the wise elders of the business community because business interests have to be taken into account in any policy discussion.

And you all thought this was a democracy!

You thought the voice of the “people” mattered!

Nonsense.

This is about practicality.  It is about accommodation.  It is about understanding the “way things are”.  And it is about submitting the voice of the people to the veto of business interests.

There was a day, many decades ago — perhaps even centuries ago — that corporations received a charter that enabled them to go about their business only because said business was considered to be in the public interest.    Corporations were extensions of the state doing things that the state could not do, or didn’t want to do, or didn’t want to afford to do.  In return for undertaking such business a corporation received privileges like legal personhood and limited liability for the speculators who provided the financing.  

But business being business, along the way the public interest faded from the forefront.  Corporations kept the privileges but walked away from the bargain.  They captured the state.  Re-wrote the rules.  And then secured control of the legislative agenda.  Whenever their power slipped, even a fraction, they fought back to re-assert themselves.

This is the tale told by Schlesinger in his history of Jacksonian democracy.  He wrote back in 1945 so he had no inkling of the ferocity of the corporate attack on democracy executed since 1980.  The lobbying, political donations, corruption of the courts and academia, and the establishment and funding of a bevy of far right think tanks are all testimony to the intensity of political involvement of business interests.   The result being the almost total domination of legislation in favor of business over the past few decades.  Public interest be damned.  All that matters is profit.

And so here we are.

Every time a leftish sounding politician wins an election they are urged to bend the knee to business.

Why?

“We the people”?

Rubbish.