American Democracy Has Proven Itself to Be a Fraud
Paul Craig Roberts
In my younger days conservatives and libertarians contrasted government unfavorably with private business. Government consisted of black hat guys and business of white hat guys. If government won, tyranny would be the result. If business won, liberty would stay alive.
Conservatives and libertarians saw power as something that government wanted, but not business. There was no room for power in private life where business governed by competition competed for the consumer’s dollar. In the business sector, the people were king. In the government sector bureaucracies wrested power away from the people.
This was the narrative, and the US Chamber of Commerce kept it alive. For awhile I thought this way myself. Liberals reinforced the narrative, because they always wanted more power for government to rein in private sector wrongs. Liberals were perceived by conservatives and libertarians as wanting to transfer power from citizens to government regulators.
It didn’t take me long to see that this narrative had problems. If it were true, what explained the success of business lobbies that lined K Street in Washington, D.C.? You didn’t have to open your eyes very wide to see, for example, agri-business use an alleged oil crisis to collect a federal corn subsidy to dilute gasoline with 10% of ethanol made from corn.
The federal regulatory agencies that were created in the 1930s all ended up in the hands of the business interests that they were supposed to regulate. Think, for example, of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which the pharmaceutical industry turned into a shill for its interests.
The way modern capitalism works, if capitalism it still is, is by corporate pacs purchasing with political campaign contributions the House and Senate and then handing to committee chairmen laws that they want passed. As a person who has served on House and Senate staffs, both personal staffs and committee staffs, I have experienced the process.
Some years ago Congress passed a law, pretending to show its opposition to big business, that if a corporation paid an executive more than one million dollars, it could not be deducted as a business expense unless the pay was “performance related.” To be performance related means it has to result in higher profits, which supposedly serve shareholders but in fact are given to executives and boards in “performance bonuses,” the main source of their pay, and to shareholders in the form of higher stock prices.
Once this law was passed, anything that reduced costs increased profits and thereby executive pay.
The easiest way to increase profits is to lower labor costs. There are four ways of doing this. One is to move manufacturing jobs offshore where labor is cheaper. Another is for corporations to claim falsely that there is a shortage of American labor and to get H1-B and L-1 visas approved to bring in cheaper foreign labor to displace American workers. Another is to replace humans with AI and robotics. Another is to move back office operations and consumer service to countries where wages are low. The most visible are the work visa entrants into the United States.
When the corrupt US Congress passed the law that enables US corporations to fire their US work force and replace it with imported non-American labor, a few members who still represented Americans instead of corporations put into the law that the visa programs depended on corporations being unable to find American workers.
There were unlimited amounts of American workers available , including those abandoned by US corporations who took their production for US markets offshore to lower paid foreign labor. But American law firms rushed to hide the availability of American workers. For example, the law firm Cohen & Grigsby used a marketing video to demonstrate how the firm could enable clients to evade the restrictions on replacing their American workers with imported foreigners on work visas. Hire us, said the law firm’s marketing manager, and we promise “not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”
My book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, published by Clarity Press 13 years ago exposed the scheme that the US President, the US House, the US Senate, the US whore media, and the US whore economics profession perpetuated in order to transfer the earnings of middle class blue collar American workers into multi-million dollar bonuses for corrupt US corporate executives in the form of totally fake “performance bonuses.” The only “performance” was the success of the lie, aided and abetted by such US firms as Cohen & Grigsby. Wall Street shared with corporate executives the responsibility for replacing US workers by threatening corporations with takeovers if they did not take advantage of opportunities to lower labor costs.
The latest news is that Microsoft after receiving approval for thousands of visas for foreign workers laid off 6,400 Americans in order to make room for their foreign replacements. The difference in labor costs go directly into the pockets of the Microsoft executives. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fury-erupts-us-brand-fires-1600-employees-after-securing-thousands-foreign-worker-visas
Clearly American Capitalism No longer serves American citizens. Why haven’t Americans organized boycotts of their products. Why do Americans support firms that force social costs on them?
Economists who shill for jobs offshoring and work visas claim that it is necessary if US corporations are to compete. However, the US market is large enough to support successful companies, and it was the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to China that transferred the technology and business know-how that gave rise to foreign competition. Think about it, even today what competition does Microsoft and Apple, for example, have?
President Trump in one of his moments when he remembered that he is an American, not an Israeli, declared US corporations had to pay a $100,000 fee for each H1-B imported worker. This would have stopped the sacrifice of American jobs to corporate executive bonuses, but a federal judge blocked President Trump’s effort to protect Americans’ jobs in their own country,
So, you see, Trump can sacrifice the lives of American armed forces to serve Israel in its wars for the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel, but he cannot protect Americans’ jobs.
What can we do to make government serve us? As the Supreme Court has entrenched money in politics, not much. We could not vote. An election in which no citizen votes, not for president, the House, Senate, governors, state legislators, county commissions, has no credibility. This is the only way that democracy has of demonstrating that government at every level does not represent the people, and that American democracy is a fraud.
You will say that if you don’t vote, those who live on the public purse and ideologues who want to dispossess you of your property will vote and use the opportunity to take over sooner, and you will be correct. But if the process wasn’t gradual, it would be more noticeable and more threatening and might spur you to remember Thomas Jefferson’s words that every so often the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of tyrants. Even on rare occasions when your votes put in office people such as Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Green, the establishment evicts them. Neither party offers us leaders. The Democrats are giving us left-wing ideologues who want to abolish private property. The Republicans are offering Floridians a governor who belongs to real estate developers, data centers, and Israel, clearly a candidate selected by powerful interest group who will expect him to serve them.
The fatal flaw was to allow money to enter the system. The influence of money grew, and now the political system serves money.