Detroit

Industrial cartels and plutocracy in America

As the debate over health care rages, OpensSecrets.org reports that health care special interests spent$133,018,194 on lobbying from April through June alone.

In other words, if ordinary Americans don’t fight like hell, the private health insurance cartel and other special interests will continue to kill 22,000 Americans a year.

What if the greatest danger to ordinary Americans is not the shadowy threat of international terror, but open and brazen plutocratic corruption at home?

What is Plutocracy?

Plutocracy is the Ancient Greek term for “government for and by the wealthy”—the opposite of democracy, “government for and by the people.”

In 1936, in his famous speech at Madison Square Garden, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described his war against plutocracy in America:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

In his view, powerful industries controlled by plutocrats had combined into industrial cartels that caused the Great Depression and did everything they could to prevent the creation of social-democratic programs like Social Security to help ordinary Americans suffering from the economic consequences of the plutocrats’ rapacious greed.

Now, as in 1936, the most dangerous enemies of the American people are the industrial cartels and the plutocrats who own them--the same forces of whom President Roosevelt said proudly, “They are unanimous in their hate or me—and I welcome their hatred.”

What is an industrial cartel? And why is plutocracy so dangerous?

An industry begins to take on the characteristics of a cartel when its constituent corporations evolve from simply competing with each other for larger shares of the existing product market (the existing pie) under current market conditions, to banding together into lobbying groups the purpose of which is to game government to engineer laws and policy to increase the size of the product market itself (grow pie), even if the growth of the market and the products sold and prices charged and profits taken run counter to the general public interest and blight the general prosperity.

Some of the most powerful industries, such as oil, underwent the cartelization process more than a century ago.

Although a particular cartel or alliance of cartels sometimes operates in the manner of a classic conspiracy, as when Dick Cheney met secretly with representatives of the fossil fuel cartels at the DOE behind closed doors in 2001in order to agree on the plutocrats' energy agenda, or when Hank Paulson met repeatedly in late 2008 with representatives of Goldman Sachs, etc., to decide on a “banking bailout” scheme for plundering the U.S. Treasury, much of the time the effort is more diffuse, with more generalized lobbying efforts. This is possible because many elected officials are in fact themselves agents of the cartels, which are legally permitted to donate staggering sums of money to their campaign coffers, to lobby them directly, and to offer them “revolving-door” job offers, such as the outrageous payoff of Congressman Billy Tauzin by the pharmaceuticals cartel.

If FDR could watch our struggles today, no doubt he’d say that the time has come for American progressives, social democrats, and independents to take back the Democratic party so as to have a tool to fight the hegemony of the cartels and defeat the plutocratic agenda in America.

Contact your representatives and insist on single payer! Fight plutocracy in America!