The Politicians Are Not In Control

By Paul Kesler

By now, most of us have heard of Senator Dick Durbin's recent complaint about Congress: "The bankers own the place."

But it's not just Congress the bankers own. It's the media; the judiciary; in short, the entire government apparatus and its institutional handmaids. Meanwhile, most leftists, even in the alternative media, concentrate on politicians, either claiming or implying that if we only had a new group of politicos, the system might improve.

A recent example of this kind of thinking arrived in my email a few weeks ago in the form of an article by the journalist Charley Reese, arguing that the politicians are responsible for the mess we are in. Says Reese: "One hundred Senators, 435 Congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court Justices — 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country."

And a little further along: "Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do. Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power."

There's a sense in which Reese is correct . These agents are theoretically capable of rejecting all bribes and threats to their ostensible roles as public servants. Nevertheless, his argument ignores practical realities. The more fundamental truth is that most politicians, especially at the Federal level, are merely "hired guns" for the banking, corporate, and financial aristocracy. It is they, not the public, who choose political candidates in the first place, and who then insure that they do their bidding through enormous campaign contributions that the citizenry cannot match.

In other words, politicians are not in control. This does not mean they cannot influence decisions on issues that aren't of paramount importance to private industry, such as abortion or stem cell research. But on major issues like war and healthcare, where profit potential is enormous, they dare not "vote" with the people, since doing so is tantamount to political suicide.

The current debate over healthcare is exemplary. President Obama is facing the same kinds of pressure and opposition to a "public option" that Bill Clinton faced in his first term, principally from Big Pharm and the AMA. So it's highly unlikely that anything amounting to significant health reform will result

We might say as a general rule that the further up politicians are in the overall hierarchy, the less control they have over legislative decisions. And it's not because they lack legal power, but because they have no practical power to change the rule-making process. Further, we should realize that politics is merely one element in an overall "matrix," where the three branches of government intersect not only with private industry , but with the media and educational establishments. Finally, and even more importantly, these sectors are dominated by a system of monetary and financial control, centered in the Federal Reserve and Treasury, which in turn coordinates with an international monetary system centered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, but which also operates through "subsidiary" institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the WTO.

Few seem to realize just how powerfully international financial and trade rules influence U..S. domestic policies. Noam Chomsky has explained this in very clear terms: "We might also take note of the striking similarity between the structural adjustment programs imposed on the weak by the International Monetary Fund, and the huge financial bailout that is on the front pages today in the North. The US executive-director of the IMF, adopting an image from the Mafia, described the institution as 'the credit community's enforcer.' Under the rules of the Western-run international economy, investors make loans to third world tyrannies, and since the loans carry considerable risk, make enormous profits. Suppose the borrower defaults. In a capitalist economy, the lenders would incur the loss. But really existing capitalism functions quite differently. If the borrowers cannot pay the debts, then the IMF steps in to guarantee that lenders and investors are protected. The debt is transferred to the poor population of the debtor country, who never borrowed the money in the first place and gained little if anything from it. That is called 'structural adjustment.' And taxpayers in the rich country, who also gained nothing from the loans, sustain the IMF through their taxes. These doctrines do not derive from economic theory; they merely reflect the distribution of decision-making power. The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism, and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies, the first and third worlds. This wonderful anti-market system designed by self-proclaimed market enthusiasts is now being implemented in the United States, to deal with the very ominous crisis of financial markets."

So the huge financial bailouts (at public expense) tendered to Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America, et al., are no accident. They're the inevitable and predictable result of financial policies already in operation at the international level, and, as Chomsky notes, are now being imposed on the United States.

So what does this tell us about the state of politics today? First, it reiterates what John Dewey observed long ago: "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business." Second, it reveals that business, in turn, is the shadow cast on all countries by the legal structures of international finance. And, third, it tells us that the de facto manner in which politics operates in the U.S. cannot be changed significantly in a "populist" direction unless the rules of international finance are radically altered.

As the economist Jack Rasmus has noted, labor, functioning synergistically on both domestic and global levels, must act as a critical agent in any revolution of the international system. But he also notes that labor activism must be integrated with community activism, so that the entire citizenry is involved at some level. This requires a form of labor-community synergy that does not currently exist, but which is necessary before major progress can be made.

So, "revolution" does not need to be violent, but it does need to be widespread, interactive, and, most of all, coordinated and aimed at the proper targets. That is our project for the future.