No book details the historical relationship between big business and the Federal government better than this one. Though confined merely to the so-called Progressive Era in American history (1901-1914), Kolko manages to overturn all the misconceptions about the formation of government regulation in America. Instead of accepting the standard view that federal regulation of business was inspired by the Progressive intellectuals and activist political leaders eager to put a check on the rising power of big business, Kolko shows that it was really inspired by the drive of businessman to limit competition and bring “stability” into the market. The result is what Kolko calls, appropriately enough, “political capitalism.” Some earlier reviews have attempted to draw an ideological lesson from this book. This is a mistake. If there is a lesson to be drawn from Kolko’s work, it is the failure of all ideologies (whether from the right, left, or center) to adequately explain the rise of political capitalism in America. Both the right and the left share the common assumption that government regulation hurts big business. Kolko proves that this isn’t the case, that Big Business is in favor of regulation and the throttling of competition. Kolko’s book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what capitalism and politics is really all about.
What’s quite fascinating is in The triumph of conservatism Mr. Kolko identifies John D. Rockefeller as being directly responsible for the creation of US incorporation law :
Page 63
The Sherman Act was not, with rare exceptions, enforced throughout the 1890′s. By the end of the century the issue could no longer be ignored, if only because it was becoming politically inexpedient to continue to do so in the face of mounting concern over the growth of big business. In June, 1898, Congress created the U.S. Industrial Commission to study the entire economic structure and to take testimony from those interested in the problem. Composed of House and Senate members, but primarily of the representatives of a variety of economic organizations, the commission functioned for three years, and its nineteen volumes of testimony and reports are a goldmine of information on every aspect of the American economy at the beginning of the century.
The Industrial Commission accepted the necessity and inevitability of industrial combinations, urging that “Their power for evil should be destroyed and their means for good preserved.” More significantly, the commission’s hearings provided a forum for key businessmen on the question of federal regulation. Of some type in some specific area, and no interest was as strong in this demand as Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller, John D. Archibold, and H. H. Rogers of Standard called for a national incorporation law and the federal regulation of accounts and financial publicity. Inconsistent state regulation, the Standard spokesmen claimed, was vexatious. There should be, Rockefeller suggested, “First. Federal legislation under which corporations may be created and regulated, if that be possible. Second. In lieu thereof, State legislation as nearly uniform as possible encouraging combinations of persons and capital for the purpose of carrying on industries, but permitting State supervision. . . .” They were joined by Elbert H. Gary, of Morgan’s Federal Steel, who called for full publicity of financial data, and by John W. Gates and Max Pam of American Steel and Wire, who wanted strict federal incorporation laws and a national manufacturing commission to supervise incorporation, and by James B. Dill, the promotion lawyer, who also favored federal incorporation. There was of course, significant opposition to federal incorporation from John R. Dos Passos, the promoter, and Francis Lynde Stetson, but it is clear that important, if not dominant, big business sentiment was very much in favor of federal regulation.
This brings about a paradox in the right and the left. Glenn Beck is often critical of liberals for criticizing corporations, yet it was federal interference on behalf of big business which created our modern day incorporation laws to shield against liability. On the left there is a demand to regulate industry without acknowledging the dangerous fact big business is the main driver behind regulation. In most cases big business actually writes the laws to regulate themselves.
On on today’s show I will be covering the work of Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. The material will probably be quite offensive to some people. I don’t have enough time to cover all the material so I will post the information in it’s entirety here.
To start off I’m playing the audio from the first two video clips in this playlist.
In this video Noam Chomsky explains were he got the title for his book Manufacturing Consent. It actually came from Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion.
The one thing Noam Chomsky failed to do in Manufacturing Consent (though he didn’t make the film) was give a good explanation as to who Walter Lippmann actually was. The Wikipedia article on Lippmann states:
Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an influential American award-winning writer, journalist, and political commentator. Lippmann was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and 1962 for his syndicated newspaper column, “Today and Tomorrow.”
To get better information on who Walter Lippmann actually was and why everyone should read his book Public Opinion
, I recommend yet another book Propaganda
by Edward Bernays. Propaganda was originally published in 1928. The book was recently republished by a Canadian publishing company Ig.
On the back of the book it explains who Edward Bernays was along with Walter Lippmann:
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called “engineering of consent.” During World War I, he was an the integral part—along with Walter Lippman—of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda machine that advertised and sold the war to the American people as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The marketing strategies for all future wars would be based on the CPI model.
I will jump ahead and read an excerpt from Propaganda which can be found here.
With Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays in mind I will play a few excerpts from a speech by Australian journalist John Pilger on Barack Obama and the antiwar movement. This is quite relevant because John Pilger brings up both Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann when describing the US political climate and Barack Obama.
You may want to read up on John Pilger so you know his background and understand he’s not some crackpot off the street.
I want you to see how different the perception is from someone outside of the United States, and how drastically different this man from Australia frames his argument than the US media.
Here Pilger explains Barack Obama is a phony who’s getting thousands of people killed by expanding war and military funding in the Middle East. Pilger states Obama did an internship at a company called “Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action and infiltrating unions on the left.” John Pilger states he is aware of this because they were especially active in his own country Australia.
I’m sure everyone will be quite shocked when they see the video because Pilger is speaking to Socialist Workers of America (July 4th 2009). It appears this is the information that’s being disseminated among socialists. Isn’t this far worse than claiming Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States? Also you probably can’t terrorize socialists by telling them someone is a socialist.
In the above video John Pilger states Barack Obama has authorized $46 million ($46,000,000.00) for a military base in Colombia.
The BBC recently reported Obama is sending troops to seven military bases in Colombia:
Left-wing South American leaders have condemned US plans to increase its military presence in Colombia at an emergency summit in Argentina.
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez said it was part of a US strategy to dominate the region. Bolivia and Ecuador also said the deal was a threat to peace.
But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe defended the plan, which will give US forces access to seven military bases.
Does this sound anything like what the US media is reporting? Listening to the US media you get the idea Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama are best friends, when that is farthest from truth.
With this let’s go back to Walter Lippmann. Walter Lippmann explained you have to “manufacture the consent” of the people because they are too self centered and out of touch to do “the right thing.”
In Lippmann’s book Public Opinion he explains in his opinion why democracy doesn’t work, and why the US was established as a republic rather than a democracy. I’m sure everyone will be horrified if they actually read what this man had to say. You have to take into account this is a man who had control over public relations for the government in World War I and helped established the public relations model (at the time known as propaganda) used by the government today.
They did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance every interest so that the government would be in a perpetual deadlock. They intended to deadlock local and class interest to prevent these from obstructing government. [Mind you Lippmann thinks this is a good thing.] “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” wrote Madison, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself ” In one very important sense, then, the doctrine of checks and balances was the remedy of the federalist leaders for the problem of Public opinion. They saw no other way to substitute “the mild influence of the magistracy” for the “sanguinary agency of the sword” except by devising an ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion. They did not understand how to manipulate a large electorate, any more than they saw the possibility of common consent upon the basis of common information. It is true that Aaron Burr taught Hamilton a lesson which impressed him a good deal when he seized control of New York City in 1800 by the aid of Tammany Hall. But Hamilton was killed before he was able to take account of this new discovery, and, as Mr. Ford says, Burr’s pistol blew the brains out of the Federal party.
The political center of that revolution was the question of patronage. By the men who founded the government public office was regarded as a species of property, not lightly to be disturbed, and it was undoubtedly their hope that offices would remain in the hands of their social class. But the democratic theory had as one of its main principles the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen. Therefore, when people began to look at the Constitution as a democratic instrument, it was certain that permanence in office would seem undemocratic. The natural ambitions of men coincided here with the great moral impulse of their age. Jefferson had popularized the idea without carrying it ruthlessly into practice, and removals on party grounds were comparatively few under the Virginian Presidents. It was Jackson who founded the practice of turning public office into patronage.
Curious as it sounds to us, the principle of rotation in office with short terms was regarded as a great reform. Not only did it acknowledge the new dignity of the average man by treating him as fit for any office, not only did it destroy the monopoly of a small social class and appear to open careers to talent, but “it had been advocated for centuries as a sovereign remedy for political corruption,” and as the one way to prevent the creation of a bureaucracy.] The practice of rapid change in public office was the application to a great territory of the image of democracy derived from the self-contained village.
Naturally it did not have the same results in the nation that it had in the ideal community on which the democratic theory was based. It produced quite unexpected results, for it founded a new governing class to take the place of the submerged federalists. Unintentionally, patronage did for a large electorate what Hamilton’s fiscal measures had done for the upper classes. We often fail to realize how much of the stability of our government we owe to patronage. For it was patronage that weaned natural leaders from too much attachment to the self-centered community, it was patronage that weakened the local spirit and brought together in some kind of peaceful cooperation, the very men who, as provincial celebrities, would, in the absence of a sense of common interest, have torn the union apart.
But of course, the democratic theory was not supposed to produce a new governing class, and it has never accommodated itself to the fact. When the democrat wanted to abolish monopoly of offices, to have rotation and short terms, he was thinking of the township where anyone could do a public service, and return humbly to his own farm. The idea of a special class of politicians was just what the democrat did not like. But he could not have what he did like, because his theory was derived from an ideal environment, and he was living in a real one. The more deeply he felt the moral impulse of democracy, the less ready he was to see the profound truth of Hamilton’s statement that communities deliberating at a distance and under different impressions could not long cooperate in the same views and pursuits. For that truth postpones anything like the full realization of democracy in public affairs until the art of obtaining common consent has been radically improved. And so while the revolution under Jefferson and Jackson produced the patronage which made the two party system, which created a substitute for the rule of the gentry, and a discipline for governing the deadlock of the checks and balances, all that happened, as it were, invisibly.
More Information:
The BBC aired a documentary on the work and legacy of Edward Bernays titled Century of Self
One of the 30+ documentaries John Pilger had made was a documentary on US interventions in Latin America called The War on Democracy
Again the two books everyone should read are Propaganda (1928) and Public Opinion (1922). In the John Pilger speech posted above he mentions William Blum who’s books are posted below along with the other two. William Blum has documented every CIA coup since World War II. You can purchase these books on Amazon, or of course order them from a local book store. If times are tight, as they are for most people, try requesting these books at your local library.
How can maintaining an empire and propaganda harm the United States?
On July 10, 2009 Wendell Potter made an appearance on the PBS program Bill Moyers Journal. Potter was head of CIGNA’s Corporate Communications department — a position he attained during his 15 year career at CIGNA. In the interview Wendell Potter states he resigned after his conscience got the best of him.
One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.”
And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president’s, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality.” And when I read that, I said, “Oh, jeez, I– you know. I’m headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something.”
At the end of the show Bill Moyers and Wendell Potter discuss the future goals for the health insurance industry and lobby.
BILL MOYERS: For the government to require every one of us to have some policy.
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly. And that sounds great. It is an important thing that everyone be enrolled in some kind of a benefit plan. They e { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>[the health insurance companies] don’t want a public plan. They want all the uninsured to have to be enrolled in a private insurance plan. They want– they see those 50 million people as potentially 50 million new customers. So they’re in favor of that. They see this as a way to essentially lock them into the system, and ensure their profitability in the future. The strategy is as it was in 1993 and ’94, to conduct this charm offensive on the surface. But behind the scenes, to use front groups and third-party advocates and ideological allies. And those on Capitol Hill who are aligned with them, philosophically, to do the dirty work.
That’s what Robert Bennett’s Healthy Americans Act will do — require every person in the United States to enroll in a corporate health insurance plan.
While researching the history of fixing U.S. elections, I recently came across an interesting book by historian Gabriel Kolko.
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