The Sophistication of Our Corruption

“Or, to put it more dramatically, the richest 400 Americans own more assets than the bottom 150 million.” Mark Blyth, Austerity: The history of a dangerous idea.

Even Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, can’t provide a coherent definition of what socialism means. Bill Maher tried to coax a concrete answer out of Sanders last week, but all Maher got for his effort was a monologue about free health care and free tuition at public colleges and universities. Maher’s audience approved of this answer, but the question deserves a fuller response.

I don’t have much hope for Bernie’s campaign, as I’ve written here before, because in the end Hillary Clinton has too much campaign cash and media love for Sanders to overcome. Plus, when you bill yourself as a socialist in America – even a democratic socialist – you will be demonized. Americans have been conditioned to fear socialists, communists, leftists and Marxists.

What I want to hear Sanders talk about, in the time left before he folds his tent and exits the field, is the need for a counterweight against corporate power. Without robust government regulation and monitoring, capitalism inevitably produces a relative few spectacular winners and a staggering number of losers, which is the sad pass we have arrived at today. Years of tax cuts and tax breaks and other legal means of tax avoidance for corporations and wealthy individuals has created conditions typical in what used to be called “banana republics”; a handful of wealthy people who own practically everything and segregate themselves from the unwashed masses, a professional class that lives comfortably, a tiny “middle-class” and the working poor and dirt poor.

The only way to have any semblance of economic fairness for the majority is to deliberately engineer it. That means government policy, rules, regulations, and laws that can’t be circumvented. I appreciate services that only government can deliver on a mass scale, like clean water, breathable air, decent public schools, single-payer health care, national parks, safe bridges and freeways, courts that give average citizens a legitimate means of redress, and a safety net robust enough to smooth the jagged edges of capitalism; I like knowing that the foods and medicines I consume are safe, free from chemicals and genetically-modified ingredients.

Of course we have to pay for all these social benefits. That entails taxing the super wealthy and corporations, it means revising the byzantine tax code and shrinking the national security apparatus and the military. What might have been done to help American citizens with all the money we have wasted fighting a losing war in Afghanistan, a war we started and cannot finish? Think of the opportunities lost and human lives ruined.

This feels to me like a dangerous time for the American Republic. The mechanisms of our government are rusted because the political system has been perverted by money -- money that buys lawyers, lobbyists, think tanks and PR flacks – and rendered completely incapable of addressing critical problems. Citizens barely matter any more, we are paid lip service by the powerful and our legitimate needs are ignored because the political and corporate elites know that the masses are unorganized and easily divided. We are fed a steady diet of horseshit about the majesty of the free market, freedom, and American exceptionalism.

News flash: America is exceptional only in terms of the sophistication of its corruption.