Money is power, and power corrupts

QED: Money corrupts

Nearly all (people) can stand adversity, but if you want to test a (person)’s character, give (them) power. — Abraham Lincoln (and all quotes below)

Power enables us to survive and accomplish things. Without power, we suffer and die.

Power, like religion or a weapon, is a good thing when wielded by a good person. It is a bad thing in the hands of a bad person.

Money is a symbol of access to survival resources like food and shelter and other people. Money is a life-and-death business. Money is power.

Business Inc.

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles throughout the world. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that says “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of (people) as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Much of the saga of human history can be formulated as the struggle between those who want to be paid for their work and those who want to use their power to extract that labor to increase their own wealth. For the former, the ideal labor market is a sole proprietorship or union shop; for the latter, a slave plantation.

Throughout history, those with money and power have managed to bend the operation of institutions and the human heart to serve their interests. They have diligently conspired to overcome any limits to their power by corrupting those people and institutions that are meant to represent the legitimate interests of all the people (demos). It’s their nature to do this, and they have been very successful.

The ultimate form of concentrated money power is the corporation which is a privileged status given to a business by the state with certain protections and advantages. It is granted with the requirement that the business meets its responsibilities as a good corporate citizen. Corporate status, once conferred, can be revoked for violations of law and charter. But it rarely is.

Corporations use their privileged legal and financial status to pursue ever more advantages and entitlements by “lobbying” (legally buying political influence) government institutions. President Eisenhower warned against the interlocking power of the military-industrial complex in his farewell address (1961). Today, the warning in modern parlance would be about the corporate-government complex where wealth and government power align to shut out the interests and influence of the broad citizenry.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

There are people who ruth-lessly (i.e. without guilt) pursue their own interests, regardless of any harm done to others in the bargain. When a group of such people come together under a corporate structure that provides special protections and entitlement to pursue their shared interests, this self-ishness will increase exponentially. Damage to people, community and environment is viewed coldly as just the cost of doing business, a side effect and by-product (“externality”) of the prime directive to increase shareholder value.

The clinical term for an amoral and ruthlessly self-interested person who does harm without guilt is psychopath. In the shockingly eye-opening book The Corporation, the clinical symptom checklist for the psychopath is shown to be a perfect fit with corporate best practices for generating a profit. Extracting more and more work for less and less pay from workers is praised as efficiency by the corporate mindset, even as it wreaks the suffering and harm of burnout and illness and poverty. The cost of community and environmental damage is whitewashed from the balance sheet. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Labor vs. Capital

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves the much higher consideration.

As demonstrated by the extensive research of Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, there is no such thing as a free market. All economic systems are set up to favor work (labor) or wealth (capital) to varying degrees. For most of human history, governments have been captured (corrupted) by the wealthy and implemented policies to serve their interests. People are trained by corporate media propaganda to believe that the accumulation of wealth by a minority is natural and good for everyone (trickle-down economics) and that anyone who works hard enough can become wealthy themselves.

The only time in U.S. history when the wealthy oligarchs (big oil/railroads) relaxed their grip on the levers of government was during the Great Depression of the early 1930’s when unemployment reached the 25% level and large-scale riots and runs on banks were beginning. The corporate class recognized that the whole financial system was about to come crashing down, and so they held their noses and allowed President Franklin Roosevelt (viewed by the wealthy as “a traitor to his class”) to institute the economic policies referred to as The New Deal.

The New Deal was largely a program of income redistribution via a progressive tax system and massive public works projects. These policies created a thriving middle class (further fueled by the economic hyperactivity of World War II, a vibrant union movement and President Johnson’s Great Society programs) for 40 years until the Reagan Revolution (redistributing wealth upward) proceeded to dismantle it starting in the 1980’s.

This real economic and political history is not taught in our public schools, so most of our citizens are unaware of it. An uneducated electorate can be manipulated by lies and propaganda, broadcast through the channels of corporate media, to vote against their own economic self-interest. And they do.

This is what wealth and power in the hands of bad people looks like.

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Here is a satirical presentation of the corporate/capitalist world view as written by Paddy Chayefsky for his movie ‘Network’ (1976) and performed by the brilliant Ned Beatty. You may laugh and cry as you watch and listen:

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