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There was a fascinating contrast in two articles in the New York Times yesterday. The first was a news article, which I discussed in a post yesterday, which referenced the fact that Wall Street chieftains are privately relieved that the new financial reform bill, while it nicks them here and there and does add to/ toughen up some key regulations, doesn't fundamentally shift the way Wall Street does business. The second was a Paul Krugman editorial discussing the anger that many corporate leaders have toward Obama, and the huge amount of money they are shoveling to Republican candidates and conservative causes as a result.
It's an intriguing contradiction: on health care, on financial reform, on energy policy, on so many other issues, the administration and congressional Democrats are passing or pushing legislative changes that don't offer a fundamental transformation of the way big business operates in America. What they are offering instead is relatively mild reforms. Yet corporate bigwigs and their Republican allies are acting like we're moving toward socialist Armageddon.
No one thing explains this odd dynamic. Some of it is tactical: cynical corporate PR/legislative strategists figuring that if they scream bloody murder, they can move the debate more in their direction, and keep future legislative fights from going too far in the progressive direction. On the Democratic side, both tactically and psychologically, many Democrats want to claim that they are doing big bold things even when the actual legislation is a little less far reaching than the rhetoric suggests.
The biggest factor, though, is that big corporate interests are used to getting so much of what they want that when anything doesn't go exactly their way, they are stunned and outraged. From the 1930s to the 1960s, big corporations were still quite powerful, but they were not dominant: labor was stronger then than it is today, Democrats stood up to them more, regulators tended to be more aggressive. But for the last 40 years, conservative, pro-corporate Presidents have been in charge most of the time, and even when Democrats controlled Congress, there were enough boll weevil/blue dog/DC type of pro-corporate Democrats in Congress that they were able to form an alliance with Republicans to keep anything bad from happening to the big corporate interests. The Democratic Presidents we have had in this era- Carter, Clinton, and now Obama- have been pretty conservative in their economic policy. As the pigs at the trough never were forced to share the food they were eating, they grew even bigger and more powerful, making their ability to control politicians, push around regulators, and wreak havoc on the economy grow worse and worse.
Is this finally beginning to change? It depends on your perspective. Some of my progressive friends think that Obama and congressional Dems are almost as bad as the Republicans in terms of coddling Corporate America. Some of my optimistic friends in progressive politics like Bob Creamer think we are breaking through in a major way, setting the stage for bigger triumphs in the near future. And of course those corporate lobbyists who are screaming socialism at the top of their lungs and giving a lot more to Republican candidates can't believe they are only getting their way 80% of the time instead of 100%.
I am not as optimistic as Bob, nor as pessimistic as, for example, some of the folks at Firedoglake. As I have written before, I think we are breaking through a little, making some modest steps forward, but have a long way to go. What I do think is far more important than the debate between optimists and pessimists, though, is that some real thought go into what happens next. If Democrats shy away from picking fights with corporate special interests because of their growling, I fear the worse politically: in this volatile anti-establishment atmosphere, caution is what loses. We have to lean into the punch, and then punch back hard ourselves, to have a chance in the 2010 elections. The great thing about the corporate howling is that an a populist, anti-corporate special interest narrative is the best hope by far for the Democrats, and the Republicans are playing into our hands by opposing financial reform, defending the Citizens United decision, and embracing the corporate screamers. Retreat means defeat right now, both in electoral politics and in the question of whether this change moment becomes bigger or dissipates into the mist.
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