It’s Seems it’s Easy to Just Over-blame, Target, Scapegoat and Villainize a Group

A comment to this Frank Rich piece from the New York Times noted:

…..There is only one battle to be waged: Outlaw all bribes of government employees. Ban outright, any corporate money in politics. Limit annual campaign contributions to a maximum $250 per individual for any candidate. Enforce a life-time employment ban on revolving doors. If there is no financial incentive for selling votes to the highest bidders, then our government is stuck representing us, we the people.

This person fails to recognize –and in quite the opposite direction — that under our new, going in the direction of radical, Supreme Court (where a solid but non radical conservative — Justice Kennedy, made a mistake, and sided with four somewhat extreme leaning Justices) corporations are people too.

Regarding the financial meltdown and all of our bank bailouts, I put a comment up to Rich’s piece. What a mistake. Point missed. Overlooked. I suppose had I called bankers scoundrels, crooks, criminals who deserved to be tarred, feathered, and worse (as can be seen in several of the comments, including popular ones — it seems people love to mob rule scapegoat), then it would have gotten some attention.

What did Lehman Brothers do wrong? If principles did something illegal and immoral, then it is a criminal action. That is actionable. If not, then they did what they are allowed to do — take financial risk, and even do so foolishly.

And then their company goes bankrupt. And they fail.

That is the way it is supposed to work. Only people, rightly or wrongly, argued that they were “too big too fail.”

And whose fault was that?

We keep focusing on the surface of problems, and not the roots. We ignore, dismiss, or downplay the slow decline of our media, the increasing gap between rhetoric and reality, and increasing misinformation and even disinformation (extreme, yet leading example of the worst of this combined with wildly inflaming and demonizing rhetoric, here).

What were the root causes of this latest financial meltdown. Greed? Greed is good: Gordon Gecko, “Wall Street.” The pursuit of profit oils and drives our market. It’s not a bad thing. Financial risk is a good thing too, and with risk comes downside. When the industries are private, and the downside is nevertheless for the public, something is not working right.

It seemed right off the bat that there were two basic problems here (perhaps, among others that could use sensible redress; this is not an argument against any reform per se necessarily). Thus the comment linked to above, and largely overlooked, suggested:

Isn’t a big part of the problem that companies should be able to do whatever they want financially, with two minor corrections [required] for where we have gone astray over the past ten plus years?

1) They should be able to do whatever they want financially, but not if they are being backed or guaranteed by the U.S. government. That seems a simple one, and seemed a simple one at the time when Glass-Steagall was repealed a little over ten years ago, changing this.

2) The whole ‘too big to fail’ phrase has seemingly still not clued us in to what the real problem is. Lack of antitrust oversight. Capitalism is not oligopoly. Capitalism is true and robust competition. (In real capitalism, excessive, rather than fair, profits are often ephemeral, since competition will provide viable alternatives for consumers and business users alike.) Yet we have become a nation that has become implicitly antitrust phobic.

‘Too big to fail’ means that in capitalism, it is too big to exist as such. If it’s too big to fail, there is not true, robust efficient competition, and it means we have not adequately enforced antitrust laws.

Oddly, the intrinsic belief that capitalism needs no laws for its protection, rather than only requiring the protection from laws, is an oversimplification at best. When it comes to the most fundamental aspect of all, free and robust competition, antitrust laws lie at the heart of our system of free and competitive enterprise.

And their application, rather than their repeated dismissal, also precludes this “too big to fail” nonsense.

Are these suggestions not relevant?

Or is just easier, and in an overly blogified, comment thread, Internet information and misinformation, rhetoric, polarizing and often shouting and spin match age, to simply call all bankers the worst kind of scoundrels, now, and in response fight to over regulate rather than address the roots?

It seems so.

Relax, Campaign Finance Laws are Only to Protect Incumbents

(Update below)

Don’t worry about decisions such as Citizens United.  Politifact of the St. Petersburg Times says that Obama exaggerates when he claims that foreign companies will influence American elections.

As the Times points out, we already have laws preventing foreign corporations from doing so. So a Supreme Court decision that now has incorrectly equated corporations with individuals, and given them the ability to spend unfettered on behalf of a particular political candidate — thus essentially also equating speech with money — won’t open this up at all.

But unlike in the case of individuals, corporations are often not wholly denizens of one country alone.  Many of our corporations are in some very relevant ways, multinational. Thus after this decision, there is, on a practical level, no way to prevent it.

Moreover, corporations — though their interests by definition must be narrowly, and self interestedly tailored — now have the same “free speech” rights as individuals, via the expenditure of money as their sole basis for voice, no less. Even in so far as to trump the individuals’ rights to speak out on election matters, without being drowned out by a sea of self interested corporate expenditures where the right to speak becomes defined by the corporate ability to acquire dollars. Inherent rights now somewhat equal $$.

That’s the Bill of Rights according to our somewhat radically right wing Supreme Court, and the equally corporate loyalist CATO Institute — which seems to confuse unfettered corporate power that can be in conflict with individuals, with “individual liberty.”

But relax. As Roger Pilon of the CATO Institute so convincingly suggests, “there’s no more corruption in states with minimal campaign finance laws.”  So Pilon sees the issue as one of corruption?  Not of undue, by definition self interested, and purchased with money influence upon our elections, not by individuals, but by amalgamations of individuals united for a singular purpose (normally the making of profit, but not always) who therefore are not longer acting as individuals, and can not act as individuals.  Not that issue?

Dear Mr. Pilon: If the issue of corruption were the main problem with this decision, it wouldn’t be as problematic to begin with, since corruption, so long as our other processes are working properly, can at least sometimes be discovered. It also does not normally arise from opinionated or advocacy “speech” whether voluntarily offered, or voluntarily purchased with money.

But perhaps by corruption, Pilon meant corrupting influences, or compromises to election information integrity.  And if so, since such “influences” are now protected by our Supreme Court’s radical decision as “speech,” now by definition they are not  ”corrupting” or compromising influences.”  If they were, it wouldn’t be “free speech.”  By protecting such speech, we can’t know if there is “corruption” under this very loose definition, because any corrupting influences is in the speech itself.  In other words, the issue with this decision is not corruption, as traditionally defined, but undue monied influences over actual speech.

But Pilon’s reasoning really spirals out of control when he suggests that such laws prohibiting corporations from spending, unrestrained, are really just to protect incumbents; not the actual free speech of the citizens comprising our Democracy from  being drowned out, manipulated by, or undermined by excessive monied interests and influences.

And that’s because the real reason we have this campaign finance law is not, and never has been, to prevent corruption.  The dirty little secret — the real impetus for this law — in incumbency protection.

In other words,  corporations are zealously anti incumbent, since incumbents are never looking out for corporate influences.

All that money spent on lobbying by corporate interests as it is? Not enough to overcome the intense anti corporate prejudice of our elected officials, apparently.  And those laws designed to prevent corporations from now unduly influencing election results directly themselves, via the known, and direct, correlation between influence and money? Nothing to do with protecting true free speech, but everything to do with protecting incumbents from the “truth” that corporations, by the happenstance of “money equal right” political speech, will no doubt now be able to bring to the populace directly on behalf of their favored candidates (and incumbent candidates) themselves.

And if one looks carefully at the Bill of Rights, one will see, right in between Amendments I and II, that little old Amendment IA.  ”Corporations are people too.”  Just ask John Oliver.

Pilon is not the only CATO Institute Fellow in support of Citizens.  Here’s the normally very thoughtful  Julian Sanchez, being too cerebral by half, and seemingly missing the conceptual differences between money and speech; money purchased speech and non-purchased speech; corporations and individuals; corporate and individual purpose; corporate, purchased, speech and individual purchased speech; along with the free speech interests in maintaining some form of protection from what is by definition non individual motivations and everything that money can buy speech influence, as opposed to equating everything that money can buy — including what is by definition non individual motivations — with full unbridled individual free speech itself.

Here’s Pilon also:

The First Amendment is not a “loophole.”  It’s the very foundation of our democracy, and we are the stronger today for this decision.

See?  The First Amendment doesn’t always guarantee the right to free speech, it guarantees the right to corporate profits, and then to spend those profits in the self interested corporate pre election advocacy on behalf of candidates who will further the goal of achieving those profits. Or of ideological interests.  So whoever has the most money, wins.   Thats certainly “free speech.”  Not to mention,”one person, one vote.”  Except here,just substitute “dollar” for person; and with this decision, we move closer to that brilliant “foundation of our democracy” First Amendment principle.

Update: From the New York Times, January 31, a commenter, recommended by eighty readers and counting, writes here, in a Times highlighted comment:

Actually, Obama completely and inexplicably misrepresented the SCOTUS ruling by saying that it allowed foreign companies to pay for ads when the ruling did not in fact allow them to do so. Alito shook his head softly and silently mouthed “that’s not true.” He did not “say” anything, let alone “you lie,” and again Obama was in fact not speaking the truth. But yes, I know. He should have sat motionless as the most powerful man in the world told a bald-faced lie about his work while standing 10 feet in front of him.

Maybe this commenter, and the eighty readers who recommended this, can show us how a Congress that can not even pass a simple health care bill that makes sense (or any bill) is going to effectively disentangle the now inextricably multinational dimensions of most of the world’s most powerful companies.  Or how even an effective Congress could possibly do so.

As noted above, this comment was also highlighted by the NY Times comment editors.  Highlighting, according to the Times, means “a selection of the most interesting and thoughtful comments, which represent a range of views.”  Perhaps the Times can answer the question put just above.  Along with how falsely claiming that Obama “completely and inextricably misrepresented” and “told a bald-faced lie” — over something that was as a practical matter essentially not only true, but an extremely important point — is “interesting and thoughtful.”