Our antagonists accuse us of “class warfare” but it is they that have been waging war on the American way of life for the last decade. Industry special interests use their financial resources to exercise undue influence on public policy and then blame government for the distorted policies that special interest money generates. In doing so, they are able to undermine the social contract and abdicate their responsibility to provide for the common good. They have succeeded in fundamentally changing the rules; instead of industry being subject to government regulation designed to align private gain with the public interest, government has been placed in the service of industry and enormous public losses have been incurred to protect private gains.
The legislative products of special interest lobbying are not that hard to spot. The pharmaceutical industry lobby’s opposition to allowing Medicaire to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs that costs the federal government tens of billions of dollars every year. The prison lobby’s support for “tough on crime” policies that have our country spending more on prisons than schools and resulting in the highest incarceration rate in the world and an only slightly lower incarceration rate than the Soviet Union gulag system under Stalin. The real estate lobby’s continued support for mortgage interest tax deductions that deprive the treasury of revenue, inflate housing costs, and have been shown not to increase homeownership rates. The defense industry lobby’s opposition to reducing the defense department budget even as we spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined (we are ~42.8% of the total according to Wikipedia). The agricultural lobby’s opposition to eliminating farm subsidies and the oil industry’s opposition to eliminating oil company subsidies even as commodity prices continue to rise. The financial lobby’s success at repealing the Glass-Steagall Act—allowing commercial banks to take greater risks with government insured bank deposits and helping to precipitate the financial crisis. The list goes on and on. The financial and social costs of this type of bought-and-paid-for legislation are incalculably high. Even before the financial industry bailouts, industry-specific lobbies were in the process of raiding the public trust. The sheer magnitude of the bailouts, however, exposed the hand in the cookie jar and made it impossible for people to ignore it any longer.
With so much of our government’s resources tied up in the service of industry, it has neglected the will of the people from whom they derive their power. How can this happen in a democracy? The high cost of running a successful campaign for office means that candidates are dependent on their constituents not only for votes but for money as well. The democratic vision of “one person, one vote” has given way to the reality that one person capable of making a $2,000 donation is inherently more valuable to the candidate than one person incapable of making a donation, as the contribution can be leveraged to influence other voters. Given that people tend to “spend money to make money,” it is only logical that the large donors are not necessarily the wealthiest people in the room but those who stand to gain the most, financially, from their candidate’s election. Therefore if the goal is to win the election, it is in the candidate’s interest to promote the financial interests of their well-heeled constituents even at the expense of the national interest. And, so, the industry lobbies have wielded enormously outsized influence and the needs of the many who are poor have been sacrificed to the whims of the few who are rich.
As a result, the institutions which allow people to endure and lift themselves out of poverty have been allowed to deteriorate. Social welfare programs that provide people with an economic safety net are being cut or are threatened with cuts. Public primary and secondary schools in disadvantaged districts around the country are failing the students entrusted to their care. Coveted private higher education slots, that were once one of the surest paths to advancement and available to our best and brightest, are now reserved only for those who pay more in annual tuition than the average American household makes in a year. Even at many public state universities, the cost of tuition has risen much faster than inflation and is increasingly out of reach of those of modest means. In an attempt to keep up, our nation’s youth have accumulated more student loans than the sum of every credit card balance in the entire country. While many other countries allocate scarce higher education slots based on merit, and thereby provide the disadvantaged equal access to future advancement opportunities, our country has decided to confer yet another advantage to the already privileged. Education, once a large contributor to class mobility is now, instead, reinforcing class differences.
What our antagonists call “class warfare” is, instead, an attempt to restore government to its rightful place in society and empower it to protect the public interest once again. The Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements are two sides of the same coin, reflecting populist anger at the establishment’s failure to protect the public interest. But, they have very different visions for the role that government should play. Our (the left, not necessarily OWS) vision is that a democratic government should be responsible for aligning private gain with the public interest and ensuring that the needs of the many are not sacrificed to the whims of the privileged few. Their vision is that, from the EPA to the FDA, industry should be left unregulated and left to pursue private gain without any regard as to how it impacts the public interest. But, the broken government we find ourselves with today is a product of the fact that industry has been left unchecked for too long and has been allowed to exercise undue influence. A reformed government, and not an absent one, is what we desperately need!