March 13, 2011 at 07:48:05

Get Ready for The Nuclear Energy Spin Assault

By Rob Kall (about the author)

The tragedy in Japan will quickly produce an army of PR flacks, fighting to protect the interests of those who have a stake in the building and maintaining of nuclear reactors and related nuclear energy facilities.

We know, from Wendell Potter's book, Deadly Spin, that there is a pattern of reaction that major industries engage in when they consider themselves under attack. The industry's primary corporations will work together to establish teams assigned to minimize damage and control message.

A Wall Street Journal article, Japan Nuclear Crisis Could Cause Reassessment in U.S. reports "The U.S. nuclear power industry believed it was poised for a renaissance." The industry had been "chipping away" at US citizens' concerns about nuclear power that developed in response to the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters.

Further, President Obama's proposed budget has $35 billion in loan guarantees to fund new Nuclear reactors. Obama has political capital invested in Nuclear energy, just as he had foolhardily invested political capital in offshore drilling-- a mistake made painfully evident when BP's Macondo well exploded.

it is becoming clear that the Japanese were lied to, at least at first, about just how bad things were.

Already, the spin has begun. The Wall Street Journal article reports,

Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group said the explosion should reassure Americans that their own plants will be prepared for any emergency, because the industry will disseminate lessons learned in Japan around the globe, helping other reactors shore up their defenses against even devastating natural disasters, like the quake and the tsunami that followed.

"At this point," Mr. Singer said, "I don't think we're going to see a major impact on the U.S. nuclear industry."

I think we can assume that Singer's statement is what the Nuclear Energy industry WANTS.

A New York Times article, Crisis Underscores Fears About Safety of Nuclear Energy, gives an indication of the kinds of PR flacking that can be expected. The NY Times quotes Nils J. Diaz, former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2003-2006 under George W. Bush. We might assume that as a Bush appointee his role was most like deregulation rather than regulation. Not surprisingly, the NY Times, quotes Diaz criticizing Japan, suggesting that the disasters occurred because of too many regulations. The Times article reports,

Mr. Diaz suggested that the Japanese might have acted too slowly to prevent overheating, including procedures that might have required the venting of small amounts of steam and radiation, rather than risk a wholesale meltdown. Fear among Japanese regulators over public reaction to such small releases may have delayed plant operators from acting as quickly as they might have, he said -- a problem arising in part from the country's larger nuclear regulatory culture.

"They would rather wait and do things in a perfect manner instead of doing it as good as it needs to be now," Mr. Diaz said. "And this search for perfection has often led to people sometimes hiding things or waiting too long to do things."

What the New York Times fails to do is report what is easily Googled, that Diaz is now chief strategic officer for Blue Castle Holdings, a Utah Nuclear Energy company. It's not hard to guess how the senators from Utah will lean in dealing with nuclear regulations.

Perhaps most important, we see the NY Times first report that people have had concerns, followed by citing of experts who say there is nothing to worry about. later in the article, the writers pass onto readers this unattributed statement that could easily be a PR operatives perfect plant, "In the case of Saturday's blast, experts said that problem was avoidable." It is followed by a closing assurance, "Mr. Diaz said that a comprehensive nuclear power plant safety program developed in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks would have prevented a similar accident at any of the nation's nuclear facilities."

Ha'aretz reports, in an article, Japan nuclear blast could be more deadly than Chernobyl, experts fear. Have we heard this from the US media?

No. We get this kind of message: Nothing to worry about. Don't interfere with the building of eight more US nuclear reactors before 2020. Don't increase the regulations and safety assessments of the existing 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states producing 20% of the USA's electricity.

And with Obama so heavily politically invested in nuclear energy, we can expect to see a slow, weak response, with obscure information from government officials, exactly as we saw during the BP disaster. It doesn't have to be that way. There's a chance there are people of integrity working in the Nuclear Energy field. Will they risk losing their jobs?

The American media are owned by major corporations. Will they follow in the footsteps of the NY Times, which already failed to do its job, simply informing readers who it was using as expert sources?

Wendell Potter has reported that there are far more people working as PR flacks than there are journalists, and the PR people are paid a lot more. We can expect a major investment in putting spin on nuclear safety and regulations and not much push-back from most of the mainstream media. It will take a bottom-up, grass-roots, alternative media, blogosphere, twitter, Facebook uprising to get the word out and counter the messaging that has already begun.

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

AlterNet.org

MEDIA

AlterNet / By David Rosen

How Does the Drug Industry Get Away with Broadcasting Those Deceptive Ads?

The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allows Big Pharma to advertise directly to consumers. How did we get here?

March 12, 2011 |

We’ve all seen them in newspapers and magazines, on TV and the Internet -- cheerful people in glossy, picturesque ads claiming that by taking a little magic prescription pill their lives were immeasurably improved.

As the TV ad fades, a cautionary voice quietly recites a host of “risk factors,” potentially catastrophic consequences that could result from taking the magical pill. One can’t but wonder if the cure is worse than the ailment.

A well-known ad features Dr. Robert Jarvik, a pioneer in the development of the artificial heart, pitching Pfizer’s cholesterol drug Lipitor. He comes across as a trusted expert with your best interest at heart, but viewers would not know that he is neither a cardiologist, nor licensed to practice medicine. (Lipitor’s 2009 sales were $5.4 billion.)

Another ad features Dorothy Hamill, the Olympic skating champion, skating effortlessly while promoting Merck's arthritis drug, Vioxx. The viewer would not know that Merck had for years knowingly withheld incriminating research from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The data would have barred the drug’s commercial release and may have saved the lives of an estimated 27,000 people who suffered heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths after taking it. After Merck made billions, the drug was taken off the market.

These are two of a never-ending barrage of pharmaceutical advertisements known as direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads that bombard Americans day in and day out. Such ads are permitted only in the U.S. and New Zealand. They are intended to provoke an individual consumer to request a specific prescription drug from their doctor. In 2009, the pharmaceutical industry spent an estimated $4.5 billion on such advertising. Total 2007 U.S. pharma industry sales were $315 billion.

DTC ads give viewers the illusion that they can and should be their own doctor; they are designed to make viewers believe that they can and should prescribe for themselves. By fostering a false sense of demand for prescription-required drugs, DTC drug ads undermine the real knowledge that doctors should have when, in consultation with the patient, a treatment plan is established.

Next time you see one of these ads, make sure you are aware of the detailed risk factors that are either buried at the bottom of the page or mentioned at the commercial’s end. These risks tell only half the story of the drug’s real potential harm; the other half usually doesn’t get told: how the pharmaceutical industry is harming the health of Americans.

* * *

Federal regulation of drugs was the result of public outrage over scandals exposed by early-20th-century muckrakers, most notably Upton Sinclair, who revealed widespread adulterated food products and poisonous patent medicines. This led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. In 1938, Congress passed the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that gave the FDA authority over drug company marketing materials. In 1962, FDA authority was further extended to regulate advertisements of prescription drugs.

However, things began to change in the 1980s. In 1981, Merck published the first DTC ad for a prescription drug, Pneumovax, in Reader’s Digest. It was followed by numerous print ads, and in 1983, the first television prescription drug ad for Boots Pharmaceutical’s Rufen, prescription strength ibuprofen.

Over the next decade-plus, the pharmaceutical industry, emboldened by the Reagan-era belief in “limited government,” steadily pushed to deregulate DTC ads. In 1997, the FDA loosened advertising rules leading to an enormous increase in DTC ad spending. For example, in 1996, less then $1 billion ($985 million) was spent on DTC ads out of the industry’s total promotional spending of $11.4 billion; in 2005, total pharma promotional spending nearly tripled to $29.9 billion and the amount spent on DTC ads quadrupled to $4.2 billion.

According to an invaluable 2007 study led by Dominick Frosch, “Creating Demand for Prescription Drugs,” a typical American television viewer can expect to spend 16 hours per year watching DTC drug commercials. This does not include the ads on radio, newspapers and magazines, billboards and the Internet. DTC ads typically focus on a handful of chronic conditions like depression, erectile dysfunction and insomnia.

Nevertheless, a perfect target for pharmaceutical intervention is America’s children and youth, and no condition has been more aggressively pursued than Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Shire introduced Vyvanse in 2007 to replace its old blockbuster drug, Adderall XR, which had just lost its patent protection. The drug is targeted at children 6 to 12 years old, so the first DTC ads were placed in women’s magazines.

Some raised concern that the DTC ads violated the UN’s 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, but the FDA brushed it off. The drug did include the following ominous warming: “MISUSE OF AMPHETAMINE MAY CAUSE SUDDEN DEATH AND SERIOUS CARDIOVASCULAR ADVERSE EVENTS.” Gone unstated in the DTC ads was the fact that Vyvanse is chemically based on methamphetamine, a Schedule II controlled substance like methadone, morphine and oxycodone. (Vyvanse’s 2009 sales were $660,000.)

Scheming pharma execs and ad agency hacks are not above inventing an illness to sell a new drug. A couple of years ago, Eli Lilly discovered a "new" female condition, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), to promote Sarafem, a form of Prozac. It was the first and only FDA-approved prescription drug to treat a woman’s menstrual cycle. Menstruation can be painful, and for some women even debilitating. Lilly exploited this, turning one of nature’s most primal bodily functions into a "disorder." The ad promised women that the drug would "help you feel more in control."

This new condition was a surprise to the American Psychiatric Association, which did not recognized PMDD as a disorder. It has proved so profitable because it turned a real, bodily experience (with, for many, pain and discomfort) into a disorder that can be cured. A magic capsule could now control an all-too-human condition that is as old as humanity itself, one that facilitates the species’ reproduction. Science had become witchcraft -- and with a hefty profit.

* * *

A DTC drug ad is designed to address two pharmaceutical industry concerns. First, it is intended to promote both new and established prescription drugs. Second, it is used to offset a drug’s competitive challenge from a generic drug.

Two questions determine a DTC drug ad’s effectiveness. First, does it work in terms of medical factors; i.e., does it help a person effectively address a medical condition? And, second, does it work as measured in corporate terms; i.e., does it get consumers to ask their doctors about the drug, get a prescription and get a sale?

While an answer to the first question remains unresolved, the answer is clear with regard to the second question. In 2010, Thomson Reuters polled some 3,000 Americans about drug advertising. The study’s principal findings were revealing:

• Nearly two-thirds of respondents say they've seen, heard or received some kind of advertising for a prescription drug in the last six months.
• One-third of respondents say they talked to their doctor about a drug and got a prescription for it.
• Three-fifths of respondents said their doctor was the principal source for information about the prescription drug.

Not surprising, given the way people watch television, the study also found that many people didn’t pay much attention to the ads. Dr. Ray Fabius, chief medical officer for Thomson Reuters' health care and science business unit, noted "at least one-third of people aren't hearing them or tune them out."

Clearly, effectiveness of DTC ads is in the eyes of the beholder, whether measured against medical or business criteria. The pharma industry’s principal lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), supports DTCs, since “getting that information to patients and consumers is the goal of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising about prescription medicines.”

And DTCs seem effective, particularly in generating new sales. According to a Kaiser study, Americans in 1992 got an average of seven prescriptions per year; however, in 2008, the average number of prescriptions nearly doubled to 12 prescriptions a year. Either people have gotten a lot sicker or DTC ads are doing their job. The report notes, DTCs have “added about $180 billion to our medical spending.”

Direct-to-consumer drug ads are ostensibly educational or informational messages designed to help Americans address critical medical issues. While the jury is out as to their medical efficacy, the ads' contribution to the bottom line is undeniable. The question that remains unanswered is how much DTC ads are harming the health of Americans.

David Rosen lives in New York and can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.com.

AlterNet.org

Noam Chomsky's Official Site / By Noam Chomsky

Chomsky: Why the Fate of Democracy Is at Stake in Madison

Labor unions were crucial in the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, and are one of the few mechanisms the people have to protect themselves from corporate power.

March 9, 2011 |

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On Feb. 20, Kamal Abbas, Egyptian union leader and prominent figure in the Jan. 25 movement, sent a message to the “workers of Wisconsin”: “We stand with you as you stood with us.”

Egyptian workers have long fought for fundamental rights denied by the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime. Kamal is right to invoke the solidarity that has long been the driving force of the labor movement worldwide, and to compare their struggles for labor rights and democracy.

The two are closely intertwined. Labor movements have been in the forefront of protecting democracy and human rights and expanding their domains, a primary reason why they are the bane of systems of power, both state and private.

The trajectories of labor struggles in Egypt in the U.S. are heading in opposite directions: toward gaining rights in Egypt, and defending rights under harsh attack in the U.S.

The two cases merit a closer look.

The Jan. 25 uprising was sparked by the Facebook-savvy young people of the April 6 movement, which arose in Egypt in spring 2008 in “solidarity with striking textile workers in Mahalla,” labor analyst Nada Matta observes.

State violence crushed the strike and solidarity actions, but Mahalla was “a symbol of revolt and challenge to the regime,” Matta adds. The strike became particularly threatening to the dictatorship when workers’ demands extended beyond their local concerns to a minimum wage for all Egyptians.

Matta’s observations are confirmed by Joel Beinin, a U.S. authority on Egyptian labor. Over many years of struggle, Beinin reports, workers have established bonds and can mobilize readily.

When the workers joined the Jan. 25 movement, the impact was decisive, and the military command sent Mubarak on his way. That was a great victory for the Egyptian democracy movement, though many barriers remain, internal and external.

The external barriers are clear. The U.S. and its allies cannot easily tolerate functioning democracy in the Arab world.

For evidence, look to public opinion polls in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. By overwhelming majorities, the public regards the U.S. and Israel as the major threats, not Iran. Indeed, most think that the region would be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons.

We can anticipate that Washington will keep to its traditional policy, well-confirmed by scholarship: Democracy is tolerable only insofar as it conforms to strategic-economic objectives. The United States’ fabled “yearning for democracy” is reserved for ideologues and propaganda.

Democracy in the U.S. has taken a different turn. After World War II the country enjoyed unprecedented growth, largely egalitarian and accompanied by legislation that benefited most people. The trend continued through the Richard Nixon years, which ended the liberal era.

The backlash against the democratizing impact of ‘60s activism and Nixon’s class treachery was not long in coming: a vast increase in lobbying to shape legislation, in establishing right-wing think tanks to capture the ideological spectrum, and in many other measures.

The economy also shifted course sharply toward financialization and export of production. Inequality soared, primarily due to the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent of the population – or even a smaller fraction, limited to mostly CEOs, hedge fund managers and the like.

For the majority, real incomes stagnated. Most resorted to increased working hours, debt and asset inflation. Then came the $8 trillion housing bubble, unnoticed by the Federal Reserve and almost all economists, who were enthralled by efficient market dogmas. When the bubble burst, the economy collapsed to near-Depression levels for manufacturing workers and many others.

Concentration of income confers political power, which in turn leads to legislation that further enhances the privilege of the super-rich: tax policies, deregulation, rules of corporate governance and much else.

Alongside this vicious cycle, costs of campaigning sharply increased, driving both political parties to cater to the corporate sector – the Republicans reflexively, and the Democrats (now pretty much equivalent to the moderate Republicans of earlier years) following not far behind.

In 1978, as the process was taking off, United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser condemned business leaders for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.”

As working people won basic rights in the 1930s, business leaders warned of “the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses,” and called for urgent measures to beat back the threat, according to scholar Alex Carey in “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.” They understood as well as Mubarak did that unions are a leading force in advancing rights and democracy. In the U.S., unions are the primary counterforce to corporate tyranny.

By now, U.S. private-sector unions have been severely weakened. Public-sector unions have recently come under sharp attack from right-wing opponents who cynically exploit the economic crisis caused primarily by the finance industry and its associates in government.

Popular anger must be diverted from the agents of the financial crisis, who are profiting from it; for example, Goldman Sachs, “on track to pay out $17.5 billion in compensation for last year,” the business press reports, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6 million bonus while his base salary more than triples to $2 million.

Instead, propaganda must blame teachers and other public-sector workers with their fat salaries and exorbitant pensions – all a fabrication, on a model that is all too familiar. To Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker, to other Republicans and many Democrats, the slogan is that austerity must be shared – with some notable exceptions.

The propaganda has been fairly effective. Walker can count on at least a large minority to support his brazen effort to destroy the unions. Invoking the deficit as an excuse is pure farce.

In different ways, the fate of democracy is at stake in Madison, Wis., no less than it is in Tahrir Square.

(Noam Chomsky’s most recent book, with co-author Ilan Pappe, is “Gaza in Crisis.” Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)

Corporations Are Working to Destroy the Few Tools We Have to Stop Their Abusive Behavior

AlterNet.org


ECONOMY

AlterNet / By Larry Beinhart

Corporations Are Working to Destroy One of the Few Tools We Have to Stop Their Abusive Behavior

When you hear about frivolous lawsuits and tort reform, what that really means is taking away your ability to make right a harm that’s been done to you.

March 11, 2011 |

Everyone has heard of the woman who spilled coffee on herself and won $3 million from McDonald’s. Perhaps you recall an editorial similar to the one that ran in the San Diego Union Tribune: “A winning lottery ticket…absurd… a stunning illustration of what’s wrong with America’s civil justice system.”

I saw the injuries. One look was all it took. An 82-year-old woman with such severe burns on the insides of her upper thighs, inches from her vagina, that they required skin grafts. You can see it too, in the documentary Hot Coffee, when it’s released. Hot Coffee is the most exciting movie ever made about tort reform.

The jury found out that McDonald’s served their coffee at temperatures between 195 and 205 degrees, “high enough to peel skin off bone in seven seconds or less.” They found out from McDonald’s own files that there had been 700 previous burn incidents serious enough that people had made formal complaints. The woman in the case only wanted her medical bills paid. The jury thought money might get McDonald’s to change its behavior, because burning at least 700 people hadn’t seemed to bother the company.

That’s what the courts and civil suits are for. To make whoever broke it pay for the damage that’s been done. The courts are also the only place where we—as ordinary, individual citizens—can force other individuals and corporations—tobacco, automobile, chemical, pharmaceutical, insurance, and banking—to open their books and divulge at least the recorded truth, often a history of previous offenses and cover-ups.

The courts are a way to make bad behavior—injurious, even murderous acts—cost enough to make a corporation stop.

Without lawsuits we wouldn’t know that tobacco companies knew that cigarettes caused cancer even while they advertised them as healthy; that Firestone tires made Ford SUVs roll over; that the Catholic Church harbored and protected hundreds of pedophile priests; that Vioxx damaged people’s hearts and killed them.

Big business hates lawsuits. They hate being made accountable. They hate having to pay. So what can they do about it?

They hire PR companies to spread stories—frequently less than complete, often completely false—about frivolous lawsuits. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting those tales. At the same time, almost every settlement contains a non-disclosure agreement. The offenders are free to trumpet their tales far and wide. The victims must stay silent.

The poster child for the victims of frivolous lawsuits is the noble physician. No less a person than ex-president George Bush has told us that it’s the trial lawyers who are driving good ob/gyns out of their practices and depriving communities of decent medical care. It’s malpractice insurance (due to the frivolous lawsuits) that is making health care unaffordable.

Almost everyone believes this story.

Then there are the facts.

“Medical malpractice kills more people than automobile and workplace accidents combined.” (The Medical Malpractice Myth, Tom Baker, University of Chicago Press, 2005). You would think, therefore, that we spend more on malpractice insurance than on automobile insurance. In 2003, doctors, hospitals, and other providers spent $11 billion on malpractice premiums. U.S. businesses—not individuals—spent $27 billion on auto liability premiums and $57 for workers compensation premiums. “Medical societies own research showed that the real problem was too much medical malpractice, not too much litigation,” Baker writes.

Litigation seems to be a particularly American disease. Why? Most lawsuits are for medical bills (the McDonald’s case), and for lost wages and the inability to work. Other industrialized countries have universal health care, more significant unemployment insurance, social welfare, and pension benefits. We don’t believe in collective responsibility and collective solutions. The people who do the damage are supposed to pay for it. The only way to make them pay is to sue the bastards.

The second story in Hot Coffee is about a child who was born with brain damage caused by medical errors. The family sued for enough to care for their son, even after they were gone, which is what they worried about the most. The jury figured what it would cost and awarded that amount.

But the corporations were a jump ahead. They made campaign contributions to “pro-business” legislators. They hired lobbyists to sell them on “tort reform.” There was now a cap on how much could be awarded, significantly less than what the jury determined, transferring the burden from the insurance companies to the victims, the parents. After the parents die, their son will become, in all likelihood, a ward of the state. His care will be paid for by taxes, transferring the burden from the insurance companies to us.

Such laws have been passed in many states. They've been challenged. A series of state courts held they were unconstitutional under state constitutions, or federal law, because they take away the rights of individuals to get justice.

What do you about that?

Replace the judges. In most state judges are elected. Judicial campaigns are -- or used to be—pretty small, low-key campaigns. Five, ten, maybe twenty-five thousand dollars would do it. But then, Karl Rove, in his early days in Texas, came up with a great idea. Find “pro-business” judicial candidates, go to big businesses—tobacco, insurance companies, big banks and the rest of the usual offenders—and ask for big contributions. Then funnel the money through an organization with a name like Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse to avoid revealing who is really footing the bill and spend fifty, a hundred, five-hundred thousand dollars – whatever it took – to elect judges who would vote reliably vote for big business.

It worked so well in Texas that the practice was exported. I recommend John Grisham’s novel, The Appeal. It’s devastating. It’s worse now that I know it’s essentially a true story; first, of how hard it is to bring a real lawsuit, to win it, and how a corporation can beat its responsibility by destroying a good judge and putting their own boy in.

The final story in Hot Coffee is about a young woman who went to work for Halliburton in Iraq. She was housed, in spite of promises and her complaints to the home office, among men. She was drugged and gang-raped. When she tried to bring charges, she was put in a shipping container with armed guards to keep her in. The Bush administration had set up a system in Iraq that made it virtually impossible for military contractors, as individuals, or the companies they worked for, to be held criminally liable. For anything. Her employment contract had taken away her right to sue.

When you hear about frivolous lawsuits and tort reform, what that really means is taking away your ability to make right some harm that’s been done to you. The goal is to create a place where big corporations cannot be held responsible, even if they leave your child disabled for life, kill your spouse, or set you up to be raped.

That’s class warfare. And we’re losing.

Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." His latest book is Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net.

The Story of Citizens United

Annie Leonard’s new film asks: Why have corporations gotten so powerful? And what can we do about it?

posted Mar 01, 2011



Do you want a healthy environment, good jobs with fair wages, access to affordable health care? So do most Americans, but too often our political system stands in the way. Why is that, if we live in a democracy?

Annie Leonard (creator of The Story of Stuff, The Story of Cap & Trade, The Story of Cosmetics, The Story of Bottled Water, and The Story of Electronics) is back, this time with a pithy video that takes on the role of corporate power in American democracy. A year ago, the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. The Federal Elections Commission that corporations are persons with the right to free speech—including the right to spend unlimited money to influence the outcome of elections. In the next federal election, the 2010 midterms, outside groups spent more money than they had in all the midterms since 1990—combined.

Of course, corporations are much more powerful than most real people—of the 100 largest economies in the world, Annie points out, more than half aren't countries, but corporations—and they're also required, by law, to pursue maximum profits, even at the expense of the environment or jobs. So it's not that surprising that their interests aren't in line with those of most Americans, or that 85 percent of us now feel that corporations have too much influence in our democracy.

So what can be done about it?

Click here for Annie's tips: 5 ways you can help stop Citizens United.

5 Ways You Can Fight Citizens United

by Annie Leonard

Video courtesy of the Story of Stuff Project.

Interested?

• Read more of YES! Magazine's coverage of ways to respond to the Citizens United court decision.

More videos from Annie Leonard:

• The Story of Stuff
: The Story of Stuff will take you on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture—from resource extraction to iPod incineration—exposing the real costs of our use-it and lose-it approach to stuff.
• The Story of Cap & Trade: 
Asking tough questions about who cap and trade really benefits—and whether it will make a difference in averting catastrophic climate change.
• The Story of Bottled Water
: Should you be worried about your tap water? Yes, but not for the reason you expected.
• The Story of Cosmetics: What's in your shampoo, anyway? Annie Leonard explores the toxins in our bathrooms, and what to do about them.

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. brooke. (2011, March 01). The Story of Citizens United. Retrieved March 06, 2011, from YES! Magazine Web site: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/the-story-of-citizens-united. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

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The Left - Complicit In Establishing A Corporatocracy?

Chris Hedges' Columns

‘The Left Has Nowhere to Go’

Posted on Jan 3, 2011

Flickr / Nick Bygon (CC-BY)

By Chris Hedges

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”

Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope. If you were one of the millions who backed down in the voting booth in 2008, don’t do it again. If you were one of those who thought about joining the Washington protests against the war where 131 of us were arrested and did not, don’t fail us next time. The closure of the mechanisms within the power system that once made democratic reform possible means we stand together as the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration. If we do not engage in open acts of defiance, we will empower a radical right-wing opposition that will replicate the violence and paranoia of the state. To refuse to defy in every way possible the corporate state is to be complicit in our strangulation.

“The left has nowhere to go,” Nader said. “Obama knows it. The corporate Democrats know it. There will be criticism by the left of Obama this year and then next year they will all close ranks and say ‘Do you want Mitt Romney? Do you want Sarah Palin? Do you want Newt Gingrich?’ It’s very predictable. There will be a year of criticism and then it will all be muted. They don’t understand that even if they do not have any place to go, they ought to fake it. They should fake going somewhere else or staying home to increase the receptivity to their demands. But because they do not make any demands, they are complicit with corporate power.

“Corporate power makes demands all the time,” Nader went on. “It pulls on the Democrats and the Republicans in one direction. By having this nowhere-to-go mentality and without insisting on demands as the price of your vote, or energy to get out the vote, they have reduced themselves to a cipher. They vote. The vote totals up. But it means nothing.”

There is no major difference between a McCain administration, a Bush and an Obama administration. Obama, in fact, is in many ways worse. McCain, like Bush, exposes the naked face of corporate power. Obama, who professes to support core liberal values while carrying out policies that mock these values, mutes and disempowers liberals, progressives and leftists. Environmental and anti-war groups, who plead with Obama to address their issues, are little more than ineffectual supplicants.

Obama, like Bush and McCain, funds and backs our unending and unwinnable wars. He does nothing to halt the accumulation of the largest deficits in human history. The drones murder thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they did under Bush and would have done under McCain. The private military contractors, along with the predatory banks and investment houses, suck trillions out of the U.S. Treasury as efficiently under Obama. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus, have not been restored. The public option is dead. The continuation of the Bush tax cuts, adding some $900 billion to the deficit, along with the reduction of individual contributions to Social Security, furthers a debt peonage that will be the excuse to privatize Social Security, slash social services and break the back of public service unions. Obama does not intercede as tens of millions of impoverished Americans face foreclosures and bankruptcies. The Democrats provide better cover. But the corporate assault is the same.

“Obama has the formula now,” Nader said. “You give the Republicans a lot of what they want. Many of them vote for you. You get your Democrat percentage. You weave a hybrid victory. That is what he learned in the lame-duck session. He gets praised as being a statesman and a leader and getting things done. Think of all the rewards he can contemplate while he is in Hawaii compared to what they were saying about him on Nov. 5. All the columnists and pundits say that now he can work with John Boehner. But once you take a broader view, it is the difference in the mph of corporatism. McCain is 50 miles per hour and Obama is 40 miles per hour.

“The left has disemboweled itself,” Nader said. “It doesn’t even have a strategy every four years like a good poker player. The best example is Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO. Obama has given them nothing. Therefore, they are demanding nothing. They huff and puff. They make tough speeches. But Trumka hasn’t even made Obama’s campaign pledge of a $9.50 minimum wage by this year an issue. If you want to increase consumer demand, what better way to do it than to unleash $300 billion in wages? The card check for unionization, which Obama pledged as his No. 1 sop to the labor unions, is dead. The unions do not even demand a hearing. And now wait till you see what they will do to the public employee unions. Part of it is their own fault. They are going to be crushed. Everybody is ganging up on them. You have new class warfare. It is non-unionized lower income and middle class taking it out on the unionized middle-income public employees. It is a classic example of oligarchic manipulation. It will start playing out big time in New York State with Andrew Cuomo and others. They will start saying, ‘Why are you getting this? Most workers who pay the taxes, who pay your salaries, are not getting this.’ This plays.”

The banishment from the corporate media, Nader argues, has been one of the major contributors to the demoralization and weakening of the left. Protests by the left, which get little national or local coverage, have steadily dwindled in strength across the country. The first protest gets little or no coverage and this leads to movements, as well as the voices of activists, being diminished and finally suffocated.

“The so-called liberal media, along with Fox, is touting the tea party and publicizing Palin,” Nader said. “There was an editorial on Dec. 27 in The New York Times on the Repeal Amendment, the right-wing constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn federal law. The editorial writer at the end had the nerve to say there is no progressive champion. The editorial said that the liberals and progressives have faded out to let the tea party make history. And yet, for months, all The New York Times has done is promote Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. They promote Newt Gingrich and the neocons on the Op-Ed pages. The book pages of the newspaper ignore progressive authors and pump all the right-wing authors.

“If we don’t raise hell, we won’t get any media,” Nader said. “If we don’t get any media, the perception will be that the tea party is the big deal.

“On one notorious Sunday, Oct. 10, two of The New York Times’ segments led with a big story about Ann Coulter and how she will change her strategy because she is being outflanked by others,” Nader said. “There was also a huge article on this anti-Semite against Arabs, this Islamaphobe, Pam Geller. Do you know how many pictures they had of Geller? Twenty on this front-page segment. The number of anti-war Op-Eds in The Washington Post over nine months in 2009 was 6-to-1 pro-war. We don’t raise hell. We don’t say Terry Gross is a censor. We don’t say that Charlie Rose is a censor. We have got to blast publicly. We have got to hammer them, because they are the tribune of right-wing fascist forces.

“Three thousand people rallied to protest the invasion and massacre in Gaza two years ago,” Nader said. “It was held four blocks from The Washington Post. It did not get a single paragraph. People should march over to the Post and say ‘Fuck you! What are you doing here? You cover every little blip by the right-wing and you don’t cover us?’

“They are afraid of the right-wing because the right-wing bellows, and they have become right-wing,” Nader said of the commercial press. “They have become fascinated by the bias of Fox. And they publicize what Fox is biased on. The coverage of O’Reilly and Beck and their fights is insane. In the heyday of coverage in the 1960s of what we were doing, it was always less than it should have been, but now it is almost zero. Why do we take this? Why do we accept this? Why isn’t Chris Hedges three times a year in the Op-Ed? Why is it always Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and all these homicidal maniacs? Why are they there? Why is John Bolton constantly published in The Washington Post and The New York Times? Where is Andrew Bacevich? Bacevich told me he has had five straight Op-Eds rejected by the Post and the Times in the last two years. And he said he is not inclined to send anymore. How many times do you hear Hoover Institution? American Enterprise Institute? Manhattan Institute. These goddamned newspapers should be picketed.”

The timidity and silencing of the left fuels the steady impoverishment of a dispossessed working class and a beleaguered middle class. It solidifies a corporate oligarchy that is dismantling the anemic regulatory agencies that once protected citizens from predatory corporations. The economic system is designed to bail out Wall Street rather than replace the trillions of dollars and millions of jobs lost by workers. And the only hope left, Nader argues, is if the conservatives in the right-wing movement break from the corporatists. If the big banks again start going to the cliff and calling for new bailouts, Nader says, this may provoke a schism between conservative groups embodied by figures such as Ron Paul, and corporate lackeys.

“Every major movement starts with field organizers, the farmers, unions, and the civil rights movement,” Nader said. “But there is nothing out there. We need to start learning from what was done in the past. All over the country people are pissed off. They hate Wall Street. They know they are being gouged. They know they are slipping behind. They know their kids will not be as well off as they were, and they were not that well off. But no one is putting it together. Who could put a thousand organizers in the field, besides George Soros? The labor unions. They have the money. They have a lot of cash. These idiots are going down. The UAW is a paradigm of a suicidal, supplicant labor union. It is disgusting. They are a puppy dog of GM, Ford and Chrysler. They have huge reserves. The labor unions could organize the country, but they are into their own emoluments and high salaries. The union leadership has so distanced itself from the rank and file that it is ashamed to do anything controversial. These union leaders will not go on TV on Labor Day because they do not want someone saying ‘Why are you making $500,000 a year with a pension that is six times your rank and file?’ There is corruption at the top. The only way the union leaders can continue is to be in the shadows. And you don’t build a strong movement in the shadows.

“The black swan question is whether something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable,” Nader said. “It is amazing that it hasn’t happened in any pockets of the country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don’t.”

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

Want Proof of Corporatocracy's Hostile Takeover? Read This.

The Huffington Post

David Sirota

Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Posted: April 13, 2006 12:46 AM

Want Proof of the Hostile Takeover? Read This.

The basic premise of my book Hostile Takeover is that there are no longer any lines or distinctions between Big Business and government. In Washington's corrupt, money-dominated politics, Corporate America and the American government are one and the same -- both looking to fleece the average citizen as much as possible. The book goes onto note that the only way we are going to take our government back is to stop letting both parties deny that a hostile takeover has occurred. To help end this denial, I find it helpful to show folks concrete examples of what I mean by a "hostile takeover." A new story in the Wall Street Journal today is one of those concrete examples.

Back in 2003, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers to introduce an amendment to outlaw so-called "cash balance" pension conversions whereby companies, without warning, reduce the pensions they promised workers without giving those workers a choice to stay in their old pension plan. The amendment ultimately passed the House of Representatives (though was killed in the final conference committee) over the strong objections of Corporate America, including IBM, which had been one of the biggest companies to try to shaft its workers with these kind of pension rip-off schemes.

But the amendment didn't pass without the Bush administration quite literally turning over the Treasury Department to IBM. As the Washington Post reported at the time, IBM sent around a document to congressional offices labeled "Treasury talking points" that said the Treasury Department "strongly opposes the Sanders amendment to the Transportation/Treasury appropriations bill." Treasury soon admitted that "the department had prepared" the materials, but had never actually released them to corporations to help them lobby to defeat the bill.

Now, years later, the Wall Street Journal reports that "an investigation into ties between Treasury Department officials and International Business Machines Corp. shows the Treasury worked closely with IBM on pension issues and provided information that was subsequently misused in the company's lobbying." A report demanded by Sanders from the Treasury Department's Inspector General "said a Treasury official disclosed nonpublic information to IBM and failed to report expenses paid by a lobbyist for a pension-industry trade group."

Those are shocking revelations, even for a corporate-owned administration like the one we have now. However, perhaps more shocking is the fact that the Journal also notes that "the Justice Department didn't pursue criminal or civil charges in the matters because they didn't meet the agency's 'prosecutorial threshold.'" In other words, yeah, they broke the law and illegally turned the people's government over to Big Business, but that's not worth prosecuting.

This is your government, ladies and gentlemen of America -- a government that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business. A government where an agency as powerful as the U.S. Treasury Department routinely operates like an arm of the companies such as IBM that it is supposed to be regulating. A government, in short, that is the victim of a Hostile Takeover.

BuzzFlash Interviews

David Sirota, Up in Arms About the 'Hostile Takeover' of American Democracy

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

If the opposition party becomes part of the corporate consensus, in effect part of a hostile takeover, then you have an entire political system where ordinary people’s interests are not even being represented in the debate, much less in public policy. ... the middle and working class in America are being absolutely crushed everywhere they turn.

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David Sirota is a writer, political operative, and clear-eyed strategist. His new book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back, not only spells out the central problems in American politics today, but offers up some real solutions. Jim Hightower has it right when he urges us to "Use this book as a lesson plan and action plan for taking our government back." Just maybe, David Sirota's ideas, efforts, and positive energy will be the guide book that Democrats and Independents have needed to figure out how to get this country turned around and back on course. Corruption, after all, wasn't part of the founding fathers' dream.

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BuzzFlash: Thom Hartmann educated me about a court ruling in California in the late 1800s that bestowed what could be called "personhood" on corporations, setting a precedent for court rulings in the future. Was that the beginning of corporations emerging as a force unto themselves in the governmental process?

David Sirota: The short answer is yes. We went from a legal definition of the corporation as something that was subservient to society to something that has equal rights with human beings. We basically empowered big money interests with even more power than their money already gave them. These corporations live longer than humans - they can live for eternity. A corporation already has a lot of power, because it basically is a concentration of wealth, but it also has other extraordinary powers, like basically living forever, and never really being subject to being put in jail like a human. Thom Hartmann is absolutely right on the history of this.

But I will say this. There used to be a line between government and the business sector. They used to be two separate entities. The government was there to protect citizens from the excesses of corporate capitalism through economic policy. It was there to protect the integrity of a properly functioning free market system that corporations and human beings operated under. Now government and big business are one and the same.

The name of my book is Hostile Takeover. The premise is that the big money interests have performed a hostile takeover of our government to the point where business and government are literally one entity. The regulator is part of the regulated. The regulated controls the regulator. Once we understand that that’s what’s really going on behind all of the happy sounding rhetoric, we can better understand why we get the public policies we get, and, more broadly, why we are now living in a society where the middle class and the working class in this country are being crushed.

BuzzFlash: Many Republicans might be scared by David Sirota and basically say that you’re anti-capitalism, you’re a socialist or a communist, because you say that corporations shouldn’t be allowed to have this influence on the government. Is there a difference between a level playing field of the free-market economy and a basically oligarchic corporate control of the government?

David Sirota: I’m sure I’ll be called any number of things. But this book is about small "d" democracy. I consider myself a small "d" democrat before I consider myself a big "D" Democrat, or a progressive, or anything else. The fact is that a democratic society requires there to be a government that enforces laws objectively in order to protect its citizens. That, basically, is what the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all about – we, the people.

The folks who endorse the current system, by which big money interests are able to essentially control and write public policy and manipulate our political debate in this country, are the people who are anti-democratic. Those people do not really believe in the ideals that this country was founded on. They think our society should be a "survival of the fittest" race to the bottom. I categorically reject that vision. Citizens are fighting to take back their own government, and this fight is really fundamentally all about democracy. People who are on the other side don’t believe in democracy.

BuzzFlash: If you look at something like a Wal-Mart, you basically have a bureaucratic institution like a government. It’s very different from a small bike shop in Bloomington, Indiana. The person with the small bike shop isn’t controlling or unduly influencing the Washington, D.C., government. It’s the Wal-Marts, the Exxon-Mobils, the mega-corporations that have the money to, in essence, buy off the legislators.

David Sirota: That’s why I use the term "big money interests." Part of the key is "big." One of the sectors that’s most under attack and most affected by the hostile takeover of our government is small business. You walk down any Main Street in America, and you see that all the time. I live in Montana, where upwards of 80% of workers work for small businesses. In this country, there is a disparity between big money interests and the rest of us, and that includes citizens, workers, and small businesses.

That is a very critical distinction. The book is not about pro-business, anti-business. That’s one of the biggest mistakes in our political debate, and one that I actually think is deliberately fabricated by big money interests. They want to say that any effort to have the government protect citizens is anti-business. That’s absolutely not true.

BuzzFlash: We’ve returned to a robber-baron age with ever larger corporations. Halliburton and the oil companies basically are not for a free-market economy. They’re for monopoly control over their sectors.

David Sirota: That really cuts to what I assert in the book. One of the most important things the public needs to understand is that the terms of our entire political debate are artificially rigged. Just take the veneration expressed in our media and by our politicians of the "free market." We’re led to believe that we live in a truly free market, and our government is always working to protect free markets. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What our government works to do is to rig the market – to weight and to distort the free market by permitting monopoly power by, for instance, telecom companies; by permitting monopoly power by large oil companies; by passing all sorts of protectionist policies in our "free trade" policies that preserve unfair patent and copyright protections to create high drug prices in the Third World. So we don’t have a free market. That’s one of many very good examples of how big money interests deliberately skew our political debate with terms like this, and thereby make us think our government is doing exactly the opposite of what it is doing.

BuzzFlash: Let’s take one example relating to the Internet. We just saw a vote in a House committee against what is called Internet neutrality. In essence, even most of the Democrats on that committee went along with the telecom industry, allowing them to set up a two-tier Internet. The Internet is a great example of democracy in action, and it has had a huge impact because of its low barrier to entry. Already the industries that provide the pipes for it are starting to put up the barriers. They’ve got the money, which they give to the legislators who vote, and the legislators are voting to put up the barriers.

David Sirota: Meanwhile what’s absolutely lost, even beyond that, is the fact that the Internet was started in part, if not in full, with taxpayer investments.

BuzzFlash: The University of Illinois was kind of an incubator of the first wave of the Internet.

David Sirota: That’s right, and I assume the project there got federal funding. I know that the military had a lot of funding for creating the Internet back in the seventies, the point being that this is another example of something that has been papered over in our political debate – the idea that taxpayers, in many cases, are the original investors with high risk in major pieces of our economy.

Yet when those investments turn out to be profitable, taxpayers are immediately cut out of the deal. It gets privatized. And now Congress is going along with corporate America’s efforts to cut the public out of the democratic benefits of the Internet. It’s a perfect example of how there no longer is a difference between corporate America and the American government. That is to the detriment of society.

BuzzFlash: Does Jack Abramoff symbolize the hijacking of America by corporate greed?

David Sirota: Jack Abramoff shows just how permissive and out in the open the hostile takeover has become. Everyone pretends to be just totally outraged and surprised that something like this would be going on in Washington. Jack Abramoff is only the most public example of the kind of bribery that goes on in Washington every day. He really is a symbol of exactly how out of control our system has become, and exactly how undemocratic it’s become, and exactly how pervasive the hostile takeover of our government really is.

BuzzFlash: The Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, was founded in large part on the principle that the Democrats had to compete for corporate contributions, and had to be nice to the corporations – we're stereotyping here, to some degree.

David Sirota: Actually the evolution of the DLC is just a bit different. Back in the mid-eighties, the DLC started out as an organization, at least publicly, based on trying to shift the Democratic Party on cultural and social issues, mainly in rural America. That’s why you had people like Dick Gephardt, who on many economic policies was a very solid progressive, involved in its beginnings. The organization evolved in the late eighties into what you’re talking about. I think it's important for people to understand that what really happened was this organization became a vehicle for the hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.

BuzzFlash: We’re still seeing this hostile takeover going on. For instance, do we vote with telecom in this committee, with the people who give us our campaign finance money? Or do we vote for open access to the Internet, which is really what democracy’s all about and what the Democratic Party and America should be?

David Sirota: The DLC has really moved well to the right of not only the Democratic Party, but of most Americans. They are largely a neo-conservative operation. The president of their think tank was one of the original signers on the PNAC letter.

But back on economic policy – you’re absolutely right. The DLC has in recent years taken huge amounts of money from the largest corporations, including Enron. It has become a vehicle to try to preserve and increase corporate America’s influence in the political process as a whole. The DLC’s role is to try to ensure that the Democratic Party does not become the counterweight to the other corporate party in America in a real, contrasted way on economic policy.

BuzzFlash: So it’s to be in the Republican Party’s shadow? What are you voting for if you vote for the DLC approach? It’s the cliché of "Republican lite."

David Sirota: At the ballot box, I usually vote for the Democrat. But there are forces within the Democratic Party that are equally as dangerous and equally as opposed to citizens taking back their government as there are forces in the Republican Party pursuing the same goal.

You saw it recently with the "Hamilton Project" announcement by Citigroup chairman, Robert Rubin. They are attacking teachers' unions. Here’s where the DLC and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party are actually more dangerous to this country than even some Republicans over the long term. Here’s the thing – the Republicans are supposed to be the corporate party. They don’t really pretend to be anything else. If the opposition party becomes part of the corporate consensus, in effect part of a hostile takeover, then you have an entire political system where ordinary people’s interests are not even being represented in the debate, much less in public policy. That leads potentially to a very long-term, massive shift in our society – a shift in a bad direction, and one that we are living through now, with basically all of these indicators showing that the middle and working class in America are being absolutely crushed everywhere they turn.

BuzzFlash: Let me bring up the infamous Dubai Ports security contract for $7 billion. Whatever one thinks of Bush foreign policy, this was an example of the corporate interest dominating over and probably conflicting with what our foreign policy interest would be. Financial interests now often supersede the national interest.

David Sirota: That is one of the great unspoken truths in our government today. The profit motive, in many cases, is driving our national security and foreign policy. While the President and politicians can go out and talk about, for instance, spreading democracy throughout the world, or securing the homeland, they’re only talking about that within the very narrow confines of what is permissible by the big money interests that run our country. While the President goes out and talks about homeland security, he’s talking about creating better safeguards or better national security protections only within the context of our international trade policy. Thus you see the fiasco with the Dubai Ports deal. It’s very, very troubling, and it’s bound to get us into a lot of trouble in a world where our neo-conservative foreign policy is further inflaming anti-Americanism.

BuzzFlash: My supposition and the supposition of many is that the lesson to be drawn from the Dubai incident is that, when push comes to shove, it is the financial interests that drive the deal, not the national security interest.

David Sirota: That’s absolutely true. It’s important to understand, though, that there was a victory in this specific case in terms of finally raising into the public debate the conflict between national security and the profit motive within a corporate-run government. That that issue got raised was a victory. What’s frightening is to think about how many decisions are being made on a daily basis that don’t rise to the high-profile level that this one incident came to. Throughout the national security bureaucracy, the State Department, the Defense Department, and all the other pieces of our government, decisions are made on a daily basis. Many decisions are being made purely in the interests of serving the big money interests that run our government.

BuzzFlash: Thomas Frank, author of the wonderful What’s the Matter with Kansas?, has praised your book. As he points out, despite a strong history of populism, Kansas has become a fundamentalist red state where a lot of destructive things are happening. The people seem to have been hoodwinked by the Republican Party into voting against their own interest.

How do we get them to understand that the large corporations that want a monopoly pose a threat to small business, pose a threat to the line worker, and pose a threat to the average American in Kansas? How do you convince those people that you’re on their side? You’re the one that wants to improve their standard of living. You’re the one that wants to help them participate more in the governmental process. You’re the one that wants to keep the big corporations from making financial decisions that might negatively affect national security. How does one convince these people?

David Sirota: I’ve thought a lot about this. And the first thing I’ll say is there’s no playbook. Every state and every district is different. But to understand why social issues have, in many cases, trumped economic issues, you have to give Americans some credit. I think what has happened over the last twenty or thirty years is that the public has very smartly picked up on the fact that neither party in Washington is representing their economic interests in any real way. Polls show that. They show that the public thinks both parties are corrupt, that the political process is too dominated by big money, that the corporations have too much power in our society. Polls have shown that for years.

Of course, the media doesn’t talk about that. But I think that the public understands that and has basically made a rational decision, in many cases, that if neither party is looking out for the ordinary American’s economic interests, then I’m just going to vote on who’s going to get the government out of my face and who is going to sound more like me on religious and social issues. That might be a slight oversimplification, but I think we have to understand that that is what’s going on.

Now, how do you convince people, as a political candidate or as a political party, that you are serious about representing ordinary people’s economic interest? How do you put economic issues in a real way back on the table? I think that requires political candidates who are willing to take on big money interests in a frontal way, in a public way. I think it requires political leaders who are not afraid of the labeling that the right wing and the corporate forces will throw at them if they take populist positions. The fact is, on almost every major economic issue, if you look at a poll, the public is far more progressive than what is coming out of Washington, far more distrustful of free-market orthodoxy, far more insistent on a strong federal government and state government that protects ordinary citizens. Right now, we don’t have too many politicians who are really willing to walk into that fire.

But I think there’s hope. As just one example, out here in Montana, we’ve seen an economic populist elected governor as a progressive Democrat in a state that Bush won by 60%. Governor Schweitzer, in the latest opinion poll, has his favorable to unfavorable at 74 to 18. And he’s not the only one. There are other people out there breaking the mold.

But this is a long-term battle. We have to understand that these stereotypes about both parties are in people’s minds, and the cynicism is very deeply ingrained. It’s going to take many, many years for us to turn the tide back, but I’m confident that it can be done.

BuzzFlash: Thank you so much. You do wonderful work.

David Sirota: Thank you very much.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Interview Conducted by Mark Karlin.

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RESOURCES:

Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back (Hardcover) by David Sirota, a BuzzFlash Premium.

Sirota Blog: http://www.davidsirota.com/

Biography: http://www.davidsirota.com/bio.pdf

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