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american enterprise institute
Dear Republican Friends: The Democratic Party Is Not Your Enemy
Sep 16, 2024
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." —Oliver Cromwell, 1650, imploring his executioners to reconsider
This is a missive directed to Republican voters, wherever it finds them. And here is the message: the Democratic Party is not your enemy.
No, your enemy is former U.S. President Donald Trump. He and the Republican Party care a great deal about your votes, but they don’t give a damn about you. They rely on your fierce loyalty to get elected and then betray you, serving instead the interests of great American corporations and a tiny stratum of immensely wealthy citizens. (The towering achievement of Trump’s presidency was a massive tax cut for precisely these clients.) The betrayal is not readily apparent, of course: It is disguised brilliantly and successfully with distortion, fabrication, and lies.
Donald Trump tells you the Democratic Party is a radical, far left, socialist enterprise and it must be defeated to protect the America we know and love. At his rallies you roar in approval, shouting USA! USA! USA!
Your patriotism is genuine and praiseworthy, but please heed Mr. Cromwell’s plea for open minds: Think it possible—just possible—you may be mistaken about the integrity of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party, and the messaging. Think it possible you are not being protected but victimized.
Let’s look at the evidence.
Mr. Trump is the spokesman and the Republican Party is the front group for corporate oligarchy, a tyrannical form of federal governance put in place decades ago, when corporate money overpowered American democracy. The well-being of the American people no longer takes priority in crafting public policy. Foremost now is the assurance of financial security for powerful corporations: creating new profit streams or enhancing and protecting those in place. This is what the Republican Party hides from view.
We must rid the corrupted Republican Party of its greedy corporate captors, and that means, first, Donald Trump and Republican Senators and Representatives must suffer a smashing defeat in November.
Corporate oligarchy is comprised of the corporations, yes, who contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns eliciting the candidates’ favor and spend billions more in lobbying for quid pro quos. But it also includes individual corporate owners and managers, and conservative billionaires with similar interests who pour personal funds into friendly campaigns. (Think about Elon Musk, say, offering Trump $45 million per month to win this campaign.)
The core ideology of corporate oligarchy is neoliberalism: “Free market capitalism” best provides for society’s needs, and “government regulation” only degrades the process. It is legitimized by conservative think tanks—notably the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.—and disseminated by sympathetic media—think the Fox News empire and conservative talk radio which blankets the nation with right-wing propaganda 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The consequences of corporate oligarchy are not trivial.
American people are suffering today the largest increases in food prices in 50 years, while the corporations marketing food products are reaping unprecedented profits. In two years from 2020 to 2022 the Cargill corporation (grains and meat products) doubled its profits, from $3.3 billion to $6.7 billion. In just a single year, from 2021 to 2022, the profits of the Kraft-Heinz company (cheese products, condiments, frozen meals, snacks) rose 448%, from $225 million to $887 million; Cal-Maine Foods (the country’s largest egg producer) grew 718%, to $323 million.
Extortionate consumer prices are not the only outrage imposed by corporate oligarchy. The rampant social and economic injustices in our country today are not the consequences of a functioning democracy: They certainly do not reflect the wishes of the people. Unprecedented inequalities in wealth and income are producing a two-tiered society of opulence and hardship. Homeless colonies blossom coast to coast. A full 31.1 million Americans, almost 10% of our citizens, lack access to healthcare, suffering unnecessary illness and preventable death. A total of 13.5% of American households are “food insecure:” They don't have enough to eat. ChatGPT will tell you it costs up to $60,000 per year to live modestly in America; a minimum-wage worker earns $15,080. Do the math.
Fifty years ago America was flourishing. The middle class constituted almost two-thirds of the population, and it was thriving. A single income was sufficient to raise a family, buy a home, cover healthcare costs, send the kids to college, and retire in comfort. Today, with both parents working full time, this good life is out of reach.
The ravaging of the American people was driven by corporate oligarchy—nothing else, not “socialism,” not the Democratic Party.
Republican friends and neighbors, who is your enemy?
The Republican Party is, because it has been the driving force for the emergence of corporate oligarchy. The process began in 1971 with a lawyer who specialized in corporate mergers, who defended the tobacco industry in the smoking-and-cancer litigation, who advocated segregation in public schools, and who as a Supreme Court justice wrote the majority opinion that corporate political spending was an exercise in free speech.
His name was Lewis Powell, the progenitor of corporate oligarchy.
In 1971 the nation’s campuses were ablaze with protest, against the Vietnam War, against racism, against the savagery of capitalism. Ralph Nader was firing broadsides at American corporate corruption.
The United States Chamber of Commerce was alarmed. It commissioned Lewis Powell to propose a strategy for a corporate counterattack, and he did. On August 23, 1971 the Chamber published what came to be known as the “Powell Manifesto.” The Chamber carpet-bombed the business community with the Manifesto’s message: Corporate America needs to become politically active, quickly and massively. Especially vital was educating the American people about the virtue and vulnerability of “free market capitalism”: it can optimize society’s welfare only if it is uninhibited by “government regulation.” Neoliberalism had to become widely known and appreciated.
Corporate money rose quickly to the challenge, literally creating two of the most influential think-tanks in Washington today and funding a massive redevelopment of the third. The Adolph Coors Foundation and Koch Foundation provided the seed money that created the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, respectively, in 1973 and 1977. The American Enterprise Institute, pre-dating the Manifesto, was greatly enriched by the subsequent flood of corporate money flowing through a dozen conservative philanthropies.
Today these three powerhouses are virtual subsidiaries of the Republican Party, writing policy agendas for Republican presidents (cf. the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 written for Donald Trump) and providing revolving-door services: their members move seamlessly into staff positions in Republican administration, and when the party is defeated they return to the think tanks.
The pattern was established early. Soon after Ronald Reagan’s election, the Heritage Foundation submitted to the new Administration a list of 2,000 specific policy proposals aimed, among other objectives, at “reducing the size of the federal government.” By the end of Reagan’s first year in office 60% of them were implemented or initiated. Ronald Reagan said in later years the Heritage Foundation was a “vital force” in the achievements of his presidency.
The most vital achievement was Reagan’s suspension of the long-standing anti-trust laws. A staunch neoliberal, he reduced government regulation to allow free market capitalism to work its wonders. In doing so Reagan exposed the absurd contradiction in the neoliberal creed.
“Free market capitalism” will optimize a country’s economy only if intense competition for customers is present among many, many sellers. That’s Econ 101. Good for society, yes, but bad for the sellers who, historically, connive and conspire to minimize that competition—in the Golden Age of the late 1800’s, say, by the formation of “combines” and “trusts.” The sellers consolidated, becoming fewer and fewer but with greater and greater power to raise prices and reduce wages.
The counteroffensive was political, in the passage of the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts—government regulations—prohibiting “the restraint of trade.” Consolidation was made illegal, keeping free markets competitive for society’s benefit.
This we know: “free market capitalism” will benefit society only in the presence—not the absence—of “government regulation.” But neoliberalism gets it entirely backwards.
But Ronald Reagan bought in, virtually halting the enforcement of the anti-trust legislation, sparking a 50-year frenzy of mergers and acquisitions across the spectrum of the American economy.
Virtually every industry was consolidated into far fewer but immensely larger corporations. A quick ChatGPT query shows five grocery chains—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Albertsons, and Ahold Delhaize—today control more than 60% of the market. (And Kroger and Albertson's are in the process of merging.)
The number of American corporations was cut in half concentrating American industries into literal oligopolies, with pricing power to match. Compared to European countries—where anti-trust laws remain in force—American families pay on average $5,000 more per year for living expenses.
Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism did this. Republican friends your enemy is not the Democratic Party.
As the dwindling number of corporations expanded their economic clout they chafed at other government regulations—clean air and water, safe workplaces, fair labor practices—but had no means to do much about them. They lacked a corollary political clout.
Wittingly or otherwise the Republican Party provided this, too.
Since 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court has displayed without interruption a conservative majority—justices appointed by Republican presidents. And in that time the Court lit the fuse for corporate oligarchy to explode. It offered corporations the legal means of bribing Congressional candidates and tilting presidential elections as well—with corporate campaign contributions.
In the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, the Court declared spending money is the equivalent of free speech. In the 1978 case First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Court declared corporate contributions to political campaigns were an exercise of free speech, too. Finally in the 2010 case Citizens United v. the FEC, the Court declared as unconstitutional any limits on those corporate campaign contributions.
It did so with this preposterous reasoning:
...this Court now concludes that independent [campaign] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That [corporations] may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.
The Court with 100% predictability was dead wrong. In 1964—before the genesis of corporate oligarchy—77 percent of the American people trusted the federal government. Today—14 years after Citizens United—only 22 percent retain their “faith in democracy.”
But corporate campaign funding of public officials—some say the corporate purchase—is only one element of corporate oligarchy’s success. The other is the dominance of corporate lobbying, where obligated public officials get their marching orders to favor corporate interests over the public’s. Does corporate lobbying prevail? Corporations outspend citizens’ organizations in hiring lobbyists by a factor of 34:1.
Before the triumph of corporate oligarchy partisan conflict was congenial and productive. Republicans were conservatives, anxious to maintain the status quo which at a given point in time was quite satisfactory. Democrats were liberals, impatient with the status quo which at a given point in time could always be changed for the better. The two points of view were imperative in a functioning democracy and the tension between them produced public policy compromises that served the nation well, avoiding stasis on the one hand and turmoil on the other.
We can regain that form of governance.
Those of us in the rank and file of the political parties have far more in common than today’s bitter divisiveness suggests. We all love our country, cherishing its past and hopeful for its future; we treasure our families, honoring our predecessors and nurturing our children; and we find gratification in productive work and comfort in spiritual practice. We are ordinary Americans and conscientious citizens, millions and millions of us. We are the People, all of us victimized by corporate oligarchy and its patron, the Republican Party. If we put aside the partisan invective and focus on the imperative of restoring democracy, we can do it.
We must rid the corrupted Republican Party of its greedy corporate captors, and that means, first, Donald Trump and Republican Senators and Representatives must suffer a smashing defeat in November. Then, perhaps, the GOP can be rebuilt as the necessary and responsible voice of true conservatism—the indispensable countervailing force it was in the past. Democracy can flourish again.
Republican friends and neighbors, listen up.
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Mitch McConnell’s Plan to Sabotage Social Security From Within
Andrew Biggs, the senator’s pick to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board, is an enemy of the popular program.
Jan 30, 2024
Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans have a problem. They hate Social Security, because it is popular, effective, and doesn’t make any money for their billionaire donors. But their voters love Social Security. Ninety-four percent of Republicans oppose benefit cuts.
McConnell understands the political dangers of being openly hostile to Social Security. So instead, he is plotting to sabotage it from within. The latest instrument of that sabotage is Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the billionaire-funded American Enterprise Institute. Biggs is McConnell’s pick to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB), which “provides advice and recommendations to the President, Congress, and the Commissioner of Social Security on matters related to the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income programs and policies.”
If confirmed to the SSAB, Biggs would have increased influence with policymakers and the media. Biggs has a long history that shows how he would use that influence: To push for Social Security cuts that would devastate working and middle class Americans, while shielding billionaires from paying their fair share into the system.
Biggs seems to think everyone has a cushy, billionaire-funded desk job like his, and would be happy to work until they die.
Biggs served as an associate commissioner of Social Security under former President George W. Bush and was instrumental in Bush’s push to privatize Social Security. His goal was to hand the American people’s earned benefits over to Wall Street. Thankfully, the Bush privatization push failed due to massive grassroots opposition.
Biggs supports raising the retirement age, and has testified before Congress that people should work longer. In his words:
Go back to 1950, when we had a highly industrialized economy. You had coal miners, and farmers, and factory workers. The average age of initial Social Security claiming then was 68. Today, when your biggest on the job risk is, you know, carpal tunnel syndrome from your mouse or something like that, it’s 63... [T]he idea that we can’t have a higher retirement age, I think it just flies in the face of the fact that people did, in fact, retire later in the past, and today’s jobs are less physically demanding than they were in the past.
Nurses, firefighters, auto workers, and so many others would be surprised to hear that their jobs aren’t physically demanding! Biggs seems to think everyone has a cushy, billionaire-funded desk job like his, and would be happy to work until they die.
Biggs also wants to turn Social Security from an earned benefit into a poverty-level flat benefit. That means huge cuts for middle class workers who’ve been paying into the program their entire lives. It would destroy Social Security’s political popularity by turning it into a welfare program—a sitting duck for Republicans to make even larger cuts.
What Biggs doesn’t want is for his billionaire donors to pay their fair share into Social Security. He doesn’t want the American people to know that if billionaires pay into Social Security all year long on all of their income, not only can we protect Social Security—we can expand benefits.
Andrew Biggs is an enemy of Social Security, and we need to keep him off the SSAB. The Senate Finance Committee is holding a hearing on the nomination this week, and the Senate may hold a vote soon. Democrats have a majority in the U.S. Senate, and they must stand united to protect Social Security from Mitch McConnell’s saboteur.
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1984 Arrives Thirty Years Late: Say Goodbye to Privacy Forever if This Bill Passes
Legislation called "The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act" has been introduced in both houses of Congress. Nice name, no? Don't you think you should have "the right to know before you go" to a college or university?
What it really means is that the federal government will:
Jun 22, 2015
Legislation called "The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act" has been introduced in both houses of Congress. Nice name, no? Don't you think you should have "the right to know before you go" to a college or university?
What it really means is that the federal government will:
authorize the creation of a federal database of all college students, complete with their personally identifiable information, tracking them through college and into the workforce, including their earnings, Social Security numbers, and more. The ostensible purpose of the bill? To provide better consumer information to parents and students so they can make "smart higher education investments."
Big Data, the answer to all problems. All you need do is surrender your privacy and become someone's data point, perhaps the point of sales.
Barmak Nassirian, writing on the blog of Studentprivacymatters, warns about the dangers this legislation poses. He wrote originally in response to an article endorsing the legislation by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who viewed the invasion of personal privacy as less significant than the need for consumer information about one's choice of a college or university:
First, let's be clear that the data in question would be personally identifiable information of every student (regardless of whether they seek or obtain any benefits from the government), that these data would be collected without the individual's consent or knowledge, that each individual's educational data would be linked to income data collected for unrelated purposes, and that the highly personal information residing for the first time in the same data-system would be tracked and updated over time.
Second, the open-ended justification for the collection and maintenance of the data ("better consumer information") strongly suggests that the data systems in question would have very long, if not permanent, record-retention policies. They, in other words, would effectively become life-long dossiers on individuals.
Third, the amorphous rationale for matching collegiate and employment data would predictably spread and justify the concatenation of other "related" data into individuals' longitudinal records. The giant sucking sound we would hear could be the sound of personally identifiable data from individuals' K12, juvenile justice, military service, incarceration, and health records being pulled into their national dossiers.
Fourth, the lack of explicit intentionality as to the compelling governmental interest that would justify such a surveillance system is an open invitation for mission creep. The availability of a dataset as rich as even the most basic version of the system in question would quickly turn it into the go-to data mart for other federal and state agencies, and result in currently unthinkable uses that would never have been authorized if proposed as allowable disclosures in the first place.
This is a bill that conservatives and liberals should be fighting against. Imagine if such a data set existed; how long would it be before the data were hacked for fun and profit, exposing personally identifiable information about students who had never given their consent? Didn't the government recently become aware of a massive hack of its personnel records?
According to the New York Times:
For more than five years, American intelligence agencies followed several groups of Chinese hackers who were systematically draining information from defense contractors, energy firms and electronics makers, their targets shifting to fit Beijing's latest economic priorities.
But last summer, officials lost the trail as some of the hackers changed focus again, burrowing deep into United States government computer systems that contain vast troves of personnel data, according to American officials briefed on a federal investigation into the attack and private security experts.
Undetected for nearly a year, the Chinese intruders executed a sophisticated attack that gave them "administrator privileges" into the computer networks at the Office of Personnel Management, mimicking the credentials of people who run the agency's systems, two senior administration officials said. The hackers began siphoning out a rush of data after constructing what amounted to an electronic pipeline that led back to China, investigators told Congress last week in classified briefings.
How long will a treasure trove of personally identifiable student data remain confidential?
If this bill passes, farewell to privacy.
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