Your Call Is Important To Us

by Penny, Laura

  Bush the Elder dismissed Reagan’s supply-side blend of heavy defense spending, reduced taxation, and attempts to balance the budget as “voodoo economics” before he joined the ticket, but proved to be a manipulator of the old chicken entrails himself once he was installed in office. His most fiscally responsible action, raising tax rates, got him booted out of office, even though it was a significant factor in the government surpluses during the Clinton administration. Those surpluses have, of course, gone down the drain, under the reign of the most corporate-friendly president of them all. Corporate tax revenues as a percentage of all tax revenues have been decreasing under Bush. According to Treasury Department figures, they fell 36 percent between 2000 and 2003, from $207 billion to $132 billion. Then, a couple of weeks before the election, Bush and the gang wrapped up their first term by passing another corporate tax cut package worth an estimated $143 billion.

  Even the previously blithe Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, grew less sanguine about the administration’s pro-rich, pro-corporate policies. He repeatedly warned Bush that his proposed tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, and would lead to huge deficits. Cheney dismissed O’Neill’s fussing and fretting: “After Reagan, deficits don’t matter anymore,” quoth the vice prez. By December of 2002, O’Neill was asked to resign. In his book about his time in the inner circle, The Price of Loyalty, he describes the intransigent president as “a deaf man in a room full of blind people.” Whether or not you agree with that withering assessment, the fact remains that the president has always been a rich man in a room full of rich people.

  The collapse of companies like Enron and WorldCom says more than I can about corporate power, and the perils of too many prevailing trends. All the typical bullshit is there: the emphasis on speculation and accounting gimmickry rather than production, the morbidly obese CEO bonuses, the disastrous effects of rapid telecom and energy deregulation, the cozy political connections, the contracts and tax breaks, the cooked books, the 401K retirement funds disappearing as loyal employees get dismissed over the phone or are given thirty minutes to pack up and leave. This is what happens when states allow corporations to do as they wish, and to flout the laws of the land. This is what happens when bullshit artists are allowed to flourish, their phony empires unimpeded by regulation or scrutiny. They certainly weren’t scrutinizing themselves, and seemed utterly enthralled with their own feats of bullshit artistry. The New York Times ran a lovely photo of the paperweights management used to hand out to Enron employees. They were smooth polished rocks emblazoned with the corporate logo and the word Integrity, which introduces the possibility of a deliciously ironic stoning in lieu of jail time.

  The corporation is a wonderful way to privatize vast amounts of wealth, while externalizing factors like labor costs, production costs, and costs for raw materials. Externalizing is biz-school speak for making someone else pay, and that’s what corporations do every time they leave a big smelly mess for citizens and taxpayers to clean up and sort out, be that in the form of GE dumping PCBs in the Hudson or the financial fallout of the WorldCom bankruptcy filing. Call me old-school, call me paleo-Pennsylvanian, but the appalling behavior of a number of corporate persons makes a little of that antiquated “injurious to the citizens” clause sound pretty good to me. I’m glad to be living among the glorious bounty that corporations have cranked out, of course, but I hardly think it traitorous for us, the real, to say something like, could we please cut it out with the poo puddles, mass firings, insulting wages, denial of benefits, rampant profiteering, flagrant tax evasion, and floods of brain-, white-, and hogwash?

  If you find this request impertinent, if it offends your free-market loyalties, just think of how lousy your neighborhood would be if all the real people started doing the kinds of things artificial people get away with. Put it to the Kant test. What if everyone did it? What if everyone behaved like the artificial people? Would it kill ’em to pay their fair share and clean up after themselves? That’s the least we ask of real people. Why don’t we demand it from the artificial people, the world’s Ltds and Cos and Incs?

  This is one of my vintage gripes. If this bad juju were Scotch, it would be aged to perfection. I grew up in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. If you’ve heard of Cape Breton, which is about as far east and north as you can go in Canada before you find yourself swimming to Newfoundland, it’s probably for one of three reasons. There’s the culture thing: maybe you’ve heard of writer Alistair McLeod, or fiddler Ashley McIsaac. There’s the pristine natural beauty of landmarks like the Cabot Trail. And then there’s the giant toxic lake of tar in Sydney, arguably the largest open environmental disaster in Canada, a leftover from the long-gone steel industry.

  The Sydney Steel Plant is as sad an example of artificial-people power gone horribly awry as one could ever hope to find. It’s a monument to the slow painful death of North American manufacturing, and the loss of the job security that went with it. I don’t want to romanticize the factory: the work was dirty and unhealthy. But at least factory workers were well paid, unlike their coevals in multinational manufacturing today, and their counterparts in rapidly growing fields like the service industry. Those good jobs were what justified the growing puddle of goo; besides, no one really figured out definitively until at least the eighties that industrial shit could hurt you. Once the jobs started to go, and only the waste remained, we all started to notice it more—not like it’s exactly hidden or anything. In fact, the tar pond is a couple of miles away from the main mall downtown, which is but a block away from my old high school, fantastically bad city planning on both counts. Moreover, Sydney was no more forward-looking with its human wastes than it was with its industrial ones. All that went, and continues to go, straight into the harbor. A network of creeks and brooks runs throughout downtown, connecting the harbor, the ponds in the park, and the great big lake of toxic tar. For some strange reason, Sydney’s cancer and unemployment rates are higher than the national average.

  I haven’t even gotten to the insane part yet, which is that governments have thrown millions and millions of dollars at the mess, either trying to keep the dying corp up and running, or whoring for new industries. If they had pitched all the money straight into the pond, it would have been plugged up, if not cleaned up, a long time ago. My father particularly savored the tale of Hustler Industries (I kid you not). They got an incentive package from the government and the jobs lasted less than a year before the board of directors cried bankrupt and bailed, like so many other less aptly named ventures.

  If you want to see what years of corporate mismanagement and government waste look like, hie thee to the thumping heart of downtown Sydney. Gaze out upon that great big gross lake of deadly goo. Given the current state of the cleanup plan, which nobody wants to pay for, it should be there for a good long while. I like my niceties as much as anyone, but there’s something about that pond of poison tar smack dab in the middle of my hometown that leaves me a smidge skeptical about the glories of the free market and the wisdom of the government. And when those two hold hands and get smoochy, you had better watch out.

  Fat state subsidies for corporations are not just bad policy. They’re bad economics. When corporations and states get too cozy, it brings out the worst in both of them. You get the inefficiency and glacial slowness of bad government mixed with the shortsighted greed of big business on a tear. And this seems to happen whether they cuddle up for right-wing reasons, or ostensibly lefty ones. Under the Reagan-Bush model, you end up with lax regulatory agencies, inordinate subsidies and tax breaks, and a lack of corporate accountability to the community. Under a state-owned Crown corporation like Sydney Steel, you end up with lax regulatory agencies, inordinate subsidies and tax breaks, and a lack of corporate accountability to the community.

  If people are going to flap their lips about the glories of the free market, maybe we should try having one first. It would be swell to put a little capitalism back in the capitalism, and a little governance back in the go
vernment. The entitlements that corporations enjoy are not merely unfair. They’re also antithetical to competition, which is supposedly one of the engines that drives our glorious economy. This lack of competition leads to a lack of choice as well. Not a lack of choice between products; nope, there are plenty of those. Why, you could pick and choose from thousands of just one product—like a computer, say. But the odds are pretty good that whatever computer you buy, it’s going to be running Windows, and the chips inside will come from one of the couple of companies that dominate the industry. No matter what we buy, all our money pretty much ends up in the same few places. The wrappers and the ads are different, but the same few folks, artificial and real, pick up the bucks. Most sectors today are dominated by a few colluding concerns, which hardly squares with classical economic notions like transparency, competition, and free trade.

  The global marketplace is riddled with de facto monopolies and oligarchies, neither of which Adam Smith was down with back in the day. When Smith was writing about businesses, he meant something more like a small business, so that the owner’s interests were bound up with the quality of the product. Today’s free market bears little resemblance to Smith’s version of the market: instead of running itself via Invisible Hand, our markets are inextricably entwined with the world’s governments, propped up on a cushion of subsidies and reclining on lax laws.

  It is clear that corporations excel at churning up a profit. What is unclear is exactly how much we all pay so that they may do so, and what we get out of it. When those profits are skimmed off the top and handed out to CEOs and major shareholders, they aren’t shared with mutual fund and pension plan investors, or plowed back into the continued health of the company or into the care and feeding of its workers or into the management of wastes the company produces or into the quality of its products and services. The past twenty years demonstrate that corporations will not invest in such long-term interests, let alone serve the public good, unless they are made to do so, either by law or by force of consumer, shareholder, and employee ire. Corporations evade taxes, cook their books, create big toxic messes, and screw their workers for the best possible reasons: because they can; because it pays; because we, the chumps, are willing to pay for it so long as we get our little sliver of the tasty pie.

  The Bush administration has another term to keep on out-Reaganing Reagan, slashing taxes on the rich, spending billions on defense, and racking up record-breaking deficits. After the 2000 debacle, a friend pointed out the limited upside of the election of a fresh batch of familiar Republicans: at least music would get better. He rhymed off lists of great Reagan/ Thatcher–era singles, angry desperate rawk and melancholy pop fueled by the general sense of economic and social malaise, like old REM and the Clash, the kind of stuff you hear at a bar on Retro Night. And it started to make sense; Reagan begetting Bush begetting Bush, Dynasty sequins and Sid Vicious belts on the runways, the new sad punks, the same old shite. We are living in the undead eighties, all the more powerful for coming back from the dead, like Jesus and zombies. Culture wars, a new evil empire, that Jennifer Lopez video that is Flashdance—it’s the eighties all over again, even though they only just happened. Now that Dubya is back for four more years, one Retro Night track strikes me as especially apropos: a song by the marvelously mopey Smiths from their 1987 release, Strangeways, Here We Come, a bitter little ditty called “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

  —RONALD REAGAN

  Politicians are synonymous with bullshit. It is a truth universally acknowledged that prevarication is practically part of the job description. The last three American presidents have all bullshitted flagrantly and publicly in their own special ways. Reagan thought facts were stupid things, and conjured chimerical scenarios involving wealthy, Caddy-driving welfare queens and air-polluting trees. Bush the elder was more of an omitter, erecting a wall of sentence fragments between his office and his creepy business concerns. Clinton lied about sex and then lied about lying about sex and then dropped bombs on Baghdad during his fib-filled, fib-fueled impeachment. It should be pretty clear by this point in my little screed that I think the current president is a world-historical bullshitter, as his no-bullshit pose—nuance is for pussies!—only makes his bullshit all the bullshittier.

  Politicians are among the first people to tell you that politicians are full of shit, decrying their fellows as flip-floppers or flimflam artists or outright liars. It’s no surprise that mudslinging is de rigueur on the campaign trail, and has been, since North America was colonized. Negative campaigning is not a recent invention. But over the past twenty-five years political campaigns have gone beyond simply saying that the other guy is Beelzebub. Now government itself, and in general, is bad. Nobody seems more delighted to describe, in exquisite detail, just how corrupt government is than someone who happens to be running for it, or an elected member of it.

  For your consideration: “We propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives. That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.” Splendid! I could use a government with less cumbersome fine print! “Official evasion and posturing”—that fairly rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Testify, soul brother. What young firebrand could have penned this feisty manifesto? I regret to inform you, dear reader, that this stirring invective comes from the preamble to the Contract with America, one of the epic ballads of the ongoing and oxymoronic conservative or Republican revolution.

  Ronaldus Magnus, as some conservatives call him, began the popular chorus against government strangleholds on free enterprise. He didn’t come up with it, but he spread the notion that markets do just about everything better than the sucky old public sector. For the freshman Republican Congress of 1994, this kind of anti-government governance was the object of revolutionary fervor. Ten years later, Bush’s reelection, and Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, seem to indicate that the Republican revolution has been a riproaring success, and that the people want a government that wants less of itself—at least in word, if not always in deed. Even though Bush’s policies have generated a very big and costly government, including a whole new department, he talked about his tax cuts in terms of getting government off the backs of the people, and letting the just plain folks have their own money and power. He is using the same sort of sell to push privatizing Social Security. The “ownership society” and “culture of responsibility” are squishy revamps of the language of the Contract.

  The Contract was the usual mishmash of deregulation, privatization, and freewheeling free marketeering. But it was wrapped in a rich, creamy coating of rhetoric about personal and fiscal responsibility and government accountability. It called for an audit of the Congress itself for waste, fraud, and abuse. And though Market Good, Government Bad was the first psalm in the book of the conservative revolution, it should be noted that this sort of full-on froth-at-the-mouth was by no means a solely right-wing phenomenon in the nineties. Newt Gingrich wouldn’t have gotten the kind of press that he did, including Time’s 1995 Man of the Year cover, had he not glommed on to an anti-government sentiment swirling about the Zeitgeist. Government-hating transcended party lines. You had a spectrum of loathing that stretched from the extreme survivalist build-me-a-compound right all the way to the latest wave of black-clad bohemian malcontents. It was Clinton, representing the long-standing official party of great big government, who declared that “the era of big government is over.”

  If you go back to the Founding Fathers, an approach advocated by no less august an historian than Mr. Gingrich himself, you will find an anti-government streak in American democracy right from the get-go. Jefferson, for example, thought the best government was the least government. Thomas Paine’s cla
ssic pamphlet Common Sense argues that an independent government is simply a necessary evil; it’s either the republic or more British tyranny. Paine certainly isn’t chuffed about government in general. He begins his treatise by differentiating between society and government. Society is the realm of voluntary fellow-feeling, but we need government as well, he argues, to punish the inevitable wickedness that threatens the friendly bonds of social life. If we were all sufficiently endowed with conscience, government would be unnecessary. Alas, we are not, and consequently we must enter a social contract, agreeing to surrender up part of our property to furnish the means of protecting the rest. Paine thought it nonsensical that Americans be subject to some distant, tyrannical king, and instead proclaimed that people should live under the rule of law.

  I mention Paine at length because I dig him, but also because of the persistence of the phrase “common sense” in conservative policy agendas. The Harris Conservatives in Ontario called their movement the Common Sense Revolution. One of the provisions in the Contract with America was called the Common Sense Legal Standards Reform Act, which called for “reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.” Not exactly stick it to the king, but tort reform was the sort of thing that passed for a commonsensical notion in governance at the time. And please understand that by “reform,” Newt and company meant “get rid of.” If the first psalm in the book of the conservative revolution was Market Good, Government Bad, the second was, We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules. The freshman Republicans in Congress were hell-bent on doing away with as many ridiculous regulations as possible, thus allowing trade to grow and thrive. They saw themselves as the rightful heirs to Reagan, but this wasn’t just morning in America; this was a revolution, and you were in or out. Congressmen like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay aggressively led the charge to replace the old Liberal Welfare State with the brand-spankin’-new Conservative Opportunity Society. And if they had to totally shut down the government to save the government, as they did in the 1995 budget dispute, so be it.