The Weakness and Incompetence of Today's American Government is Not an Accident
By Joseph Guth, Fellow, Science & Environmental Health Network
As the daily news makes painfully obvious, today’s American government is unable to respond effectively to the COVID-19 epidemic. The denial of scientific fact, disregard of intelligence, consequences of relentless budget cuts, and the current Administration’s unwillingness to deploy its Constitutional power to organize a National response have been laid bare to all the world.
But this is not an aberration. It is not inevitable or due to an unforeseeable catastrophe or attributable solely to the failings of the Trump administration.
We are now living in the weakened America that has been intentionally engineered over the past four decades by American corporations and super-rich individuals. In this America, government at all levels has become structured to serve those interests. The Nation has lost the political, legal and institutional structures necessary for government to act in the broader public interest. What is left is the ineffectual, incompetent, resource-poor, distrusted, and confused government now struggling before our eyes.
How did we get here? American business has long resisted government’s efforts to promote the public welfare.[1] But the comprehensive program that has brought us today’s American government was first laid out in the now-famous “Powell Memorandum,” commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971.[2] It was written by Lewis F. Powell, Jr., a prominent corporate and tobacco industry lawyer named later that year to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon.
The Powell Memorandum mapped out a program for American business to gain control of and dominate the American government for one purpose: to promote and defend what Powell called “capitalism” and equated with the “free enterprise system” and the “profit system.” The program was detailed and comprehensive. It explicitly called on American business to act by:
· Taking direct political action to cultivate, gain and aggressively use political power;
· Influencing the American judicial system by creating a network of prominent lawyers to institute a litigation program designed to defend and promote capitalism;
· Reshaping American academic thought by creating a network of scholars to develop work defending capitalism, who would publish, speak, write articles, pamphlets and books, become faculty members at American universities, particularly business schools, and write textbooks to influence American secondary education;
· Developing a staff of media specialists dedicated to crafting messaging in support of capitalism for all print, television and radio media;
· Redirecting substantial advertising by corporations from their products to political support of free enterprise and the “for profit system”;
· Mobilizing wealthy stockholders (i.e., funders) to support this program; and
· Aggressively attacking and penalizing all who stood in the way.
This has all come to pass. Consider not just the unabashed political activity of the Chamber of Commerce, but also: the rise of think tanks committed to the Powell program like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute and others supported by billionaires; the formation of corporate groups focused on state legislation like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); the rise of Fox News; the success of the Federalist Society, created in 1980, in nurturing judges and legal scholars committed to the Powell program; repeated tax cuts and toleration of tax havens for the wealthy and corporations and the resulting deficits that have impoverished government on all levels; the continual weakening of government institutions from the EPA to the CDC; government policy support for offshoring by American companies of millions of American jobs to low-wage countries.
Even more profound has been the restructuring of laws and democratic institutions to diminish government’s responsiveness to the needs of the general citizenry and direct it toward those of corporations and the wealthy: the extreme gerrymandering of political districts, dismantling of voting rights through voter suppression laws, and unchecked flooding of corporate money into the political system. Just as advocated by Powell, all of this came to be supported by a conservative Supreme Court (including Powell himself) that has imposed new interpretations of the U.S. Constitution favoring corporate interests and used them to invalidate acts of Congress and state legislatures and direct power away from the citizenry.[3]
But Powell in his Memorandum advocated something else as well, something even more insidious and corrosive for American democracy. He proposed a unifying political message for his program, “the message that, above all others, must be carried home to the American people.” He urged the American business community to equate capitalism and economic freedom with personal individual freedom, and to argue that “freedom as a concept is indivisible” so that denial of any freedom, including of economic rights, would lead inevitably to restrictions of other freedoms and rights. The message for Americans, a people that prizes freedom, was this: If government is permitted to diminish the economic rights of corporations and the wealthy, it can and will take away your freedoms next.
This message has indeed been carried home to the American people. Now, government efforts to regulate industry can be and are effectively attacked as restrictions on freedom, as “un-American.” Lost is the essential truth that no freedom is absolute, that rights often conflict and must be balanced against each other. There is freedom on both sides of most regulations: restricting carbon emissions by polluters liberates those burdened by the impacts of those emissions. Instead, corporate spending of money in our politics and resistance to government regulations are portrayed as exercises of freedom, even patriotic, never mind the concomitant trampling on the freedoms, rights and welfare of actual citizens and voters.
Powell’s message has transformed Americans’ view of their government. Rather than viewing it as their means of self-governance and balancing of social interests for all citizens to participate in, as a government they once fought a revolution for, many Americans have come to see their government as a distrusted tyranny to be resisted, weakened, and impoverished. Over the decades, only one government function has been strengthened under the onslaught of Powell’s program. The U.S. military, which receives massive public expenditures on the private defense industry and is supported rather than targeted by Powell’s program, has not just survived but has flourished.
The fingerprints of the Powell Memorandum’s continuing program are reflected throughout the Nation’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Many Americans are so distrustful of the government that they refuse to follow its recommendations to protect even their own health in the name of their “constitutional rights.” The federal government refuses to use the national organizing power allocated solely to it by the Constitution, leaving the states, health care systems, businesses and individuals to compete against each other in a chaotic, brutal, survival-of-the-fittest market.
Consider, for example, government’s reluctance to use its legal power under the Defense Production Act to mandate, in the face of industry objections, production and deployment of ventilators and other equipment needed to save lives. As the New York Times reported, President Trump’s advisors argued against “putting the heavy hand of government down.”[4]
The President reportedly views using the Defense Production Act as “un-American,” even though the U.S. military uses the law regularly, hundreds of thousands of times during the Trump administration alone, in its procurement contracts.[5] The President and his advisors were also reportedly persuaded by the Chamber of Commerce that government involvement would be “counterproductive”[6] and by “many” corporate executives that government intervention “would do more harm than good.”[7]
Does this mean that the American government has become incapable of directing and coordinating American industry, and that even the government itself now looks at itself this way? Does it suggest that the government agrees it should not interfere with the profits that industry expects to secure during the crisis?[8] Does it mean that American business would prefer the ineffectual government response we now have, further “proof” that government is the problem not the solution (as President Reagan put it), to an effective response that would demonstrate the value of government in the public interest?
As if this were not bad enough, the implications of an American government that can no longer act in the public interest extend far beyond the COVID-19 epidemic. For it is this same government that, alone among democratic western powers, cannot and will not provide basic health care to all its citizens, is unable to mount a response to the existential threat of global warming and is now unwilling even to seriously address any other problem that we can only solve by putting the public welfare first.
This is the America wrought by American corporations and the super-rich, led by the Chamber of Commerce, through their relentless pursuit of their own “freedom,” their own economic “rights,” at the expense of the welfare and rights of nearly all Americans. While we don’t know what the future holds, make no mistake, the Powell Memorandum’s program is not yet complete. The chaos introduced into America by the COVID-19 epidemic provides an opportunity for it to proceed still further.
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[1] As Nancy MacLean has shown in her important book, Democracy in Chains, anti-government campaigns began as early as 1954 to oppose school integration in the southern states.
[2] Powell, Lewis F. Jr. (August 23, 1971). “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=1&article=1000&context=powellmemo&type=additional
[3] Adam Cohen has described in detail the US Supreme Court’s consistent support for corporations and the rich over the poor since the Powell Memorandum, including Powell’s own decisions on the Court. See Adam Cohen, Washington Post, April 8, 2020, “Supreme Inequality: The high court has been siding with the rich against the poor since Nixon.” See also Adam Cohen, "Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America." Penguin Press 2020.
[4]New York Times, March 22, 2020, “Trump Bets Business Will Answer Call to Fight Virus, but Strategy Bewilders Firms.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-defense-production-act.html
[5] New York Times, March 31, 2020, “Wartime Production Law Has Been Used Routinely, Coronavirus.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/us/politics/coronavirus-defense-production-act.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage.
[6] New York Times, March 31, 2020, “Trump Bets Business Will Answer Call to Fight Virus, but Strategy Bewilders Firms.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-defense-production-act.html.
[7] New York Times, March 31, 2020, “Wartime Production Law Has Been Used Routinely, but Not With Coronavirus.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/us/politics/coronavirus-defense-production-act.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage.
[8] Six senators, led by Elizabeth Warren, have asked the Chamber of Commerce to explain itself. https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.03.23%20Letter%20to%20Chamber%20of%20Commerce%20re%20Lobbying%20against%20DPA.pdf.