THE BLUE WAVE OF 2022
AND THE END OF CORPORATISM
BY: T. D. DUFF
We must suffer no constraints by the tyranny of the practical, which pleads that we must just wait and the peoples' politics, what "we the people" want, will come about.
"We the people," say to the elected blue wave of progressive democrats, elected in 2022, "wait for what?"
Our country has suffered forty-one years of inhumane inequality under the economic fraud of supply-side economics. The wait must now be over! The evil virus of corporatism must be forever eviscerated.
Without mobilizing the political and civic energies of the citizenry, even with the best of intentions, no political party can effectively deliver. So long as that party continues to reward the very power brokers whose avarice has contributed to the destitution and perpetuated social injustice, that party has failed its own stated ideals.
Sadly, this has been the legacy of the Democratic Party since 1980. As the 1960s turned toward the '70s leading into the Nixon administration, the corporate chiefs seemed at a loss, until they discovered in August of 1971, what has come to be known as the "Powell memorandum." Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, delivered his analysis of the power balance in Washington, and pronounced it a crisis for big business.
The forces of reform had brought many businesses under a variety of consumer protection regulations, and business was on the defensive. Powell urged a fundamental expansion and strengthening of the corporate lobbying apparatus, using many of the techniques that the consumer, environmental, and other citizen interests were deploying.
The results were the corporate think tanks, aggressive manipulation of the media, advancing business views on campus and in the curriculum, greater involvement in elections, and a mobilization of corporate executives.
It was time, Powell said, to mount an aggressive counterattack to those liberals, whom he believed would subvert the free enterprise system. In 1971, Nixon named Powell as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1972, the Business Roundtable, comprised only of top-level CEOs, was established.
It took some time to embed this craven counterforce. There were the years of Nixon and Ford, virulent years of inflation, large price increases, the energy crisis and Watergate. But, the momentum from the fifties, sixties and early seventies was not tapped out. The Democrats controlled congress, and were still effective. In 1975 and 1976 Jimmy Carter was campaigning saying he would appoint the right kind of regulators and that one of his top domestic priorities would be the creation of a Consumer Protection Agency, CPA.
After Carter was elected, he did appoint some good people to head the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the auto safety commission. However, he did very little to press the CPA bill through the House, where consumer and labor groups were defeated, and many liberals defected to the side of the Business Roundtable men, the largest business coalition up until that time to oppose a bill. Instead, Carter aggressively pressed Congress to pass natural gas deregulation.
Because the CPA's mission was not regulatory, but rather advocating for consumer's interests, nearly every industry imaginable felt the potential impact of this small protective agency, disturbing the cozy relationships they had juiced up with these so-called regulators.
The CPA's defeat represented the turning of the tide to the favor of corporatocracy and the business lobbies. The Democrats were struggling, not just with their reactionary southern wing, but even among their more mainstream liberal members.
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