The best democracy money can buy
By Richard Mellor in California
Trump was right when he talked of the media in such derogatory terms, the media that didn’t promote him of course. But the mass media is not so much ‘fake’ as biased.
The mass media has a class bias whether it’s CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. It is owned and controlled by capital, by the US ruling class and its purpose is to present the ideology of the market and the ‘superiority’ of the capitalist system in a way that is believable, that despite its faults, it is the only system that works.
In this venture, language matters. I have raised many times how during the PATCO strike that opened up the offensive against organized labour in the 1980s, a reporter asked an airline passenger delayed due to the stoppage, how they felt being ‘held hostage’ by the workers on strike. Isn’t that what lawyers call a leading question?
I read reports in the media yesterday that Facebook and Amazon, whose CEOs have been questioned by friends in the US Congress regarding antitrust activity, are preparing for “new scrutiny of their businesses” by the Biden Administration. They are relying on a “time tested” strategy the Wall Street Journal reports (January 24) and that is “opening their pocket books”. This is an even nicer term for lobbying, which is the usual term to describe what they are actually doing which is bribing members of the body politic. At the same that they are being “investigated” for illegal practices, they are handing over swathes of cash to the investigators.
Facebook’s multi-million-dollar bribes
Facebook spent $20m bribing politicians in 2020, an 18% increase from 2019. Amazon, whose CEO, Steve Bezos, is worth $193bn as of this month, according to Forbes Magazine, spent $18m in 2020, an 11% increase from 2019. It appears that 2020 was a good year for some. Compare the experience of these social parasites to the treatment health care workers received, or how ER nurse Cliff Willmeng was treated for demanding PPE that wouldn’t infect his family or members of the public.
Just for the record, Apple spent $6.7m in 2020, Alphabet, the Google parent company, $$7.5m. Even these figures pale when compared to some:
The amounts spent bribing politicians, according to Open Secrets website, was:
National Association of Realtors: $84,113,368
US Chamber of Commerce (largest gang in the US bigger than MS-13): $81,910.000
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: $25, 946,000
American Hospital Association: $23,648,466
Blue Cross Blue Shield (Health care industry): $22,662,720
American Medical Association: $19, 575,000
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Every single member of Congress (and there are hundreds) each has the equivalent of dozens of lobbyists working to pressurise, bribe, intimidate or otherwise influence them.
One important conclusion working people must draw from this, especially trade union members, is that those Congress representatives your union has been trying to influence on your behalf don’t stand a chance alongside the far more numerous corporate lobbyists.
Capitalists are called capitalists because they are the owners of capital. Collectively they own the means of creating that wealth and determine how it is created, how it is spent and allocated. They do no productive labour, they live as we say, off the profit of capital and profit has its source in the unpaid labour of the workers.
The tiger won’t give up its stripes
Spokespersons for Facebook and other firms have made pronouncements about how they value integrity and support “updated regulations” and new laws, etc. It’s just hot air. The tiger will not change its stripes and the fox will never guard the henhouse, except to protect his next chicken dinner.
I added up the top numbers for a rough count on those figures above and they come to $254m. This is a tiny amount of the bribery money spent every year and that has been spent for decades. When you add the defence, er, I mean ‘offence’ budget, there’s another $700bn minimum. The total amount wasted on feeding these parasites at the public trough is inconceivable and most of it is kept from us.
Just imagine that Jeff Bezos’ $193bn net worth is somewhere around 800 times that $254m figure. And if my language is harsh, go read how the big business press, especially the right-wing journals refer to poor people, economic refugees and workers in general. Trump called us murderers, lazy, and so on. A worker couldn’t steal in a lifetime what the above steal every minute of every day.
And this very same body politic can’t provide its citizens with health care, decent public transportation, a minimum wage that can actually keep a family from poverty ($15 an hour is not it. Where I live, a closet is $1000 a month) housing and much more. I remember when a truck driver could actually earn a decent living in the US.
Workers only have the numbers
The capitalists have a lot more money than we have, or the unions have; that’s why they’re called capitalists, so we cannot outspend or outbribe them. Not only that, but the recipients of their monetary gifts are also political representatives in parties that are financed and funded by the capitalist class as a whole.
What we have as workers is the numbers and the capitalists know it, so for them, instituting legislation that causes division in society is as natural as breathing; using language like “opening their pocket books” for bribery when describing their activity is a conscious decision based on class interest. It’s why they will never eliminate racism in society, when it’s been their most successful divide and rule tactic so far. In Northern Ireland, religion plays this role.
Working class solidarity means solidarity across borders. Workers never created the borders of modern nations states; the capitalist class did. All the talk about walls and obstacles to immigration or migration, doesn’t apply to capital. For capital, there is only the world and what US capitalism strives for, as do all the major capitalist powers including state capitalist regimes and for want of a better description I include China in that, is to dominate in the plunder of global resources.
Biased structure of the Senate
The US political structure is profoundly undemocratic. Just consider the Electoral College or the US Senate. After the Georgia elections, the Democratic half of the US Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half. But that doesn’t change the relationship of power between the two parties.
As Ian Millhiser points out at Vox.com, “If the Senate were anything approaching a democratic institution, however, the Democratic Party would have a commanding majority in Congress’s upper house. The Senate is malapportioned to give small states like Wyoming exactly as many senators as large states like California — even though California has about 68 times as many residents as Wyoming.”
While it is important for workers to strive for reforms, because we learn through struggle, in the last analysis this particular animal cannot be reformed, it has to be discarded and dismantled. “James Madison, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and a future president, stated that the American constitution he helped to write would mean “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share [in the government]”.” Guardian (January 25). That, in particular, is what the Senate is for.
Society needs new managers.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
