Inequality

Bob Herbert wrote a column in the New York Times about a new book that has just come out by Hacker and Pierson, two political scientists entitled, Winner Take All Politics. It is about the growth in inequality in this country over the last thirty years. Their explanation of this growth is that essentially big business has coopted government, and has relaxed and changed the regulations and rules by which business operates so that the rich have become very much richer, to the detriment of the rest of the people, especially the middle class.

To my way of thinking, this is something that the wealthy naturally try to do-it is in their nature to try to make themselves even richer. The problem has been that there is in our government no functioning counterweight to these efforts of the wealthy. For a short period after the depression labor was allowed to develop power and serve as a counterweight, but it has systematically lost power through the efforts of big business. At present there is effectively no counterweight to big business, and so banks get bailed out and the perpetrators of the financial collapse do not suffer, and in fact are making even more money. One can sympathize with the Tea Party movement on this, but why they should ally themselves with the Republicans, the party of big business is mystifying. Their solution, smaller government, would have the result of only letting big business have more freedom to gain more of the wealth. We need big government to be able to stand up effectively to big business.

What is missing in our government is the absence of strong, effective, competitive political parties who will have to respond to the people, not just business, to get elected. We, uniquely in the western world, have a weak party government, and that weakness is what allows business to control government. Business is able to use the "checks and balances", the constraints on majority rule, to prevent effective, party based control of the government in the interests of all the people, not just the wealthy.

Katrina vanden Heuvel in the Washington Post today has a column about the power of the US Chamber of Commerce in the election yesterday. She points out that the Chamber of Commerce is almost totally a tool of big business, not of commerce in general. "Only 249 of 7000 local chambers are now members." I am not going to argue that the US Chamber of Commerce should be stopped from spending its money, or that disclosure is somehow going to change its behavior. The issue for me is not that they spend so much money, but that there is no one else on the other side to compete with them. Given that today labor is weak and ineffective, there has to be some other organization, working perhaps with labor, to counteract the influence of the US Chamber of Commerce and other such organizations.

To have other such organizations, we have to recognize that business is not a monolithic force. Like any other area of life, within business there are differences about how and what to do. Heuvel points out in fact that one such organization, the American Sustainable Business Council, is in fact opposed to much of what the US Chamber of Commerce promotes. We need such organizations to become more active and outspoken about what needs to be done for this country, but without effective party organizations, such groups have nowhere to go.

Strong political parties, even if both represent only factions within the business community, would be better than what we have now, and would give the people a real choice when they vote. If this is class warfare, then so be it.