Regulatory Capture and the Public Interest: The FDA

The head of the Food and Drug Administration, Marty Makary, “resigned” in May, 2026 even though the decision had been made by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy “and then the White House signed off on it.”[1] Although Makary had been annoyance to drug-company executives, and to that extent his removal was due to pressure on President Trump by the CEOs, his “resignation” supports the theory of regulatory capture, wherein the regulated companies control the very regulatory agencies (and regulators therein) that regulate those companies, this case shows that it is possible for an industry’s interests to be aligned with the public (health) interest. Does the alignment regarding getting rid of a particular regulator lessen the unethical quality of the broader conflict of interest between business and government?

Without a doubt, the regulated industry was unhappy with Makery and his deputy, Vinay Prasad. For example, “(v)aping executives told Trump that Makary was blocking approval of their products, including new flavored e-cigarettes seen as crucial to the industry’s survival.”[2] Additionally, Prasad was “pushed out of the agency twice in less than a year for running afoul of specialty drugmakers and groups for patients with rare diseases.”[3] He had “rejection letters or requests to run additional studies” sent to more than six drug companies on drugs for rare or hard-to-treat diseases that had previously been approved by the FDA.[4] I do not have enough information to be able to assess whether his actions were in the public interest, as it is possible that the FDA’s previous approvals had been flawed. I have more confidence in concluding that he operated against the public’s healthy in going after an established coronavirus-vaccine maker. He had “repeatedly overruled vaccine staffers to restrict eligibility for new coronavirus shots.”[5] He even refused to “even consider Moderna’s mRNA shot for flu.” Moderna “called for intervention by the White House.”[6] In an internal memo, Prasad had claimed without evidence “that the FDA had linked COVID-19 shots to the deaths of 10 children.”[7] It seems that he was going more off an ideology than science.

It seems likely that the drug-company executives red-flagged the ideological distortion as it would decrease the companies’ future sales. The only ideology that rules in corporate boardrooms is that of the profit-motive, so any competing ideology coming out of a regulatory agency would be easily flagged. In such a case, the company-specific economic interests would be aligned with the public interest because the government-sourced ideology would be partial, hence partisan, and thus not in line with a bigger picture such as can reflect the public interest. In short, any pressure that the executives could bring on President Trump to remove Makary and his deputy would be in the public interest even though it would be a case of regulated companies getting rid of government officials who regulate those companies.

In general, regulatory capture of a government agency by a company or industry that the agency regulates is unethical because it destroys the power-relationship that is required for government regulation to exist. Another way of looking at the ethical problem is by realizing that a company, and even an industry, look out for their own particular (economic) interests, whereas the public interest is a whole. To put a part before or ahead of the whole of which the part is a part is essentially to have the tail lead the dog—a part leading a whole.

Because it cannot be supposed that a part’s interests are identical to that of the whole of which the part is a part, even cases in which the two are in sync cannot justify permitting the part to call the shots for the whole—to direct the whole. Put another way, it would still be unethical for a regulated company or industry to wield such power as could dominate a government in a republic because companies are private property rather than elected bodies. That specific cases such as Makary and Prasad justify the drug industry pressuring Kennedy and Trump does not mean that either official would be justified in being directed by that industry more generally. The problem is that corporate political-campaign donations can be so large that big pharma can have the political pressure to direct even a U.S. president. Going forward, company executives could try to justify such power by pointing to their “public” role in having shelved an ideology harmful to the public health that was pushed by Makary and Prasad. It is important to keep in mind, however, that regulatory capture is nonetheless unethical and contrary to democratic principles of public governance of private property, including companies.

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1. Matthew Perrone and Seung Min Kim, “Trump FDA Chief Is Leaving After Angering Pharma CEOs, Vaping Lobbyists and Anti-Abortion Groups,” APnews.com, May 12, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

Members of Congress Secretly Lobbied the Fed

As of late September 2012, more than one hundred members of Congress had lobbied the Federal Reserve and other regulatory agencies on the Volcker Rule, the part of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act of 2010 that prohibits banks from operating like casinos (e.g., trading with proprietary funds, rather than those of customers).[1] The rule stems from the importance of banks in our financial system. In September 2008, the world nearly witnessed the collapse of that system when banks stopped trusting each other (e.g., via commercial paper market) because of the risks that some of the big ones had been taking with mortgage-backed derivative securities and the related insurance swap securities. Awash in healthy-seeming fees, the banks purchased risky subprime mortgages and bundled them into bond-like securities that could be sold to investors.
Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, so it makes sense, and indeed is positive from the standpoint of accountability, that lawmakers remain involve as the relevant regulators (who are not elected) translate the broad legislative language into specific rules for banks. However, the newspaper’s report points to a less-than-salubrious practice wherein members of Congress contact regulatory agencies in private and before even the period for public comment. This raises the possibility that Wall Street was using its connections in Congress to weaken the public safeguards in the bill—essentially putting a narrow private interest in front of the public interest that the bill was designed to protect.

The access purchased comes not only from having information that the regulatory agencies need; banks (and American corporations in general) could contribute unlimited amounts of money from the corporate treasury (rather than from contributions from executives and employees) to “social welfare” non-profit organizations that can spend money on political ads in support of friendly candidates (and against their opponents) without having to divulge the identities of the donors. So Wall Street banks can furtively promote U.S. Senate candidates who support the repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act without any of us knowing it. In fact, the “social welfare” (54c) groups can in turn contribute directly to a candidate’s campaign without divulging the names of the donors. Not even the IRS, which has been concerned about whether the donors pay the required gift tax, bothers the “social welfare” organizations for donor lists after complaints from several U.S. Senators. Nor has the SEC pushed corporations to divulge to their respective stockholders how the political donations have been spent. I suspect that senatorial influence lies behind this inaction too.
It is not as though there were some uncertainty regarding the need for disclosure in a democracy. Even though eight of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices in Citizens United stress in their opinions the necessity of disclosure, corporations, no doubt well-connected in the halls of power in Washington from the donations already given, have a way to evade the transparency. Political and corporate democracy are both undercut as banks and business corporations can spend unlimited amounts (out of their respective profits) to help “pro-business” candidates for public office. Rather than being speech itself (and thus subject to free-speech constitutional protection), money is power that can be used to skew or otherwise limit the contours of public debate. After the election, the continued influence of the money is also stealth, such as when members of Congress lobby the Federal Reserve to weaken regulation meant to safeguard our financial system from a repeat of the near-collapse in 2008. For deregulation to be urged so soon after a near-depression gives us an indication of how dangerous “money as invisible speech” is to the public good, even if such influence is in the corporate interest.
As creatures of the state, corporations should not have a share in governance, for that function subverts the causal relationship between Creator and creature. That is to say, a corporate management (or board) presuming to influence members of Congress can be likened to the self-idolatry of a creature supposing itself to be God. Interestingly, as going concerns, corporations are immortal, legally speaking. As for us mere mortals, Rousseau reminds us that we are born free but live in chains—only we are under the delusion that we are still free because the confining elements are subterranean qua the furtive influence of great concentrations of private wealth. I suppose one question is whether finite bundles of subjectivity can somehow become aware of that which has been designed to be outside of our awareness, and, if so, whether a society can so move to protect its good in a viable republic.

1. Ben Protess, “Behind the Scenes, a Lawmaker Pushes to Curb the Volcker Rule,” The New York Times, September 21, 2012.

Corporations and Political Debate: Taxation & Regulation

Under U.S. law, the corporation is a legal person, whose wealth can constitute political speech protected by the first Amendment. It is no matter that the corporation is an artifice constructed by the state for economic purposes: to concentrate wealth in order to produce goods or provide services. That such an entity would lobby and spend money (or “speak”) for political purposes may from this standpoint seem strange, or out of place. To be sure, political influence can indeed help the bottom economic line, but is a corporation a political actor if the purpose is economic? 
Large corporations arguably tend to have a strong arm in Congress,  but if that arm is so strong that it dictates the law, even literally, then entities that are part of society are de facto standing as government for the whole. For some parts of something to control the whole is problematic because those parts will naturally put their own particular interests above those of the whole (e.g., society, or the people). 
Even a dominant role in setting the terms of the debate in the public media during a political campaign can sway or tilt the whole to favor the part. If sustained long enough, pro-business values can become salient in a society's culture. That deregulation could have come out as a major winner in the 2010 election following the financial crisis in 2008 is mind-boggling, and yet the scores of new Republican representatives in the U.S. House had precisely deregulation as one of their main objectives. That unregulated financial derivatives based on risky mortgages had almost brought the economy down two years before was strangely forgotten. The debate was not on whether banks that are too big to fail should be broken up. Instead, the public got to talk about whether the existing regulation on businesses in general should be discarded in favor of economic growth. Such is the power of self-interested money in setting the terms of debate at the societal level.
Accordingly, debate on whether the corporate statutory tax rate of 35% should be lowered never bothered with the inconvenient truth that the weighted effective corporate tax rate (taxes as a share of profits) was 27.1% in the U.S. in 2012, hence below the 27.7% average rate of O.E.C.D. members. The weighted average marginal tax rate on corporations in the U.S. was only 20.2 percent.[1] A U.S. Treasury Department report concluded that 82 percent of the corporate tax was borne by capital, while 18 percent was borne by labor. Either American society was tilted in favor of the interests of capital or the electorate was duped into the false narrative that raising the corporate rate would hurt labor. 
General Electric, the sixth largest corporation in the U.S., had profits of $14.2 billion in 2010 and yet the mammoth company did not have to pay any corporate income tax. Even so, the political mantra that large American corporations pay too much income tax resonates in the political culture. Moreover, taxes are inherently bad, or even theft. It is as if American society has had a blind spot concerning the nature of and need for public goods like roads and airports. The competitive market, excellent in allocating goods and services, so eclipses the value of even esteemed public goods. 
In short, where the corporate advertising and lobbying dollars have already had such a significant influence in shaping the values people hold dear, the very society can tilt in favor of its business sector such that its advantages become invisible to large segments of the electorate. The corporate realm lives under democracy's radar, and thus conveniently beyond the reach of real accountability. 

1. Bruce Bartlett, “Some Big Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes,Either,” The New York Times, September 18, 2012.  

On the Political Power of Capitalism in American Society

In his confidential memorandum, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Lewis Powell, later to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote in 1971 that the “leftists” were launching a frontal assault on the “free enterprise system,” “capitalism,” or the “profit system.” Powell saw this as an attack on, rather than a defending of the “American political system of democracy under the rule of law.” That the corporate profit-interest might be a threat to “one person, one vote” apparently did not occur to the future Justice. Rather, what is good for GM he presumed must be good for American democracy. Moreover, both, he presumed, are consistent with, or perhaps even foundational for American values.

Powell goes on to write, “A visiting professor from England at Rockford College gave a series of lectures entitled ‘The Ideological War Against Western Society,’ in which he documents the extent to which members of the intellectual community are waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system and the values of western society.” Powell notes in his report that almost half of the students on twelve representative college campuses favored socialization of basic U.S. industries. He cites Stewart Alsop, who had written that “Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of ‘the politics of despair.’ These young men despise the American political and economic system.” It is strange, therefore, that, forty years later, the American political and economic system would be so well-undisturbed—having been so un-molested by the minions of educated young voters who had gone on to become leaders in that system. Yale, after all, contains in its mission the intent to educate the future leaders of America (and perhaps the world as well). There must have been a giant collective change-of-mind among the myriads of socialists before the Reagan landslide of 1980.

Powell goes on to suggest that business managers (including executives) “have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the [business] system. . . . The traditional role of business executives has been to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens.” The practitioners here are the citizens; Powell is not pointing to what would come to be called “corporate citizenship,” a marketing slogan designed to get customers to feel better about buying more widgets. Nor is Powell pointing to the related notion of “corporate social responsibility,” which was invented by businessmen (rather than by “socialists” adding to corporate obligations) in the late 1950s.

Absent from Powell’s description of the businessman is the role of corporations even in 1971 in lobbying Congress for favorable legislation and/or regulation that would translate into higher profits. Powell would be hard-pressed to account for the role of the banking lobby in getting the U.S. Senate to vote down Senator Durbin’s amendment that would have given bankruptcy judges the authority to modify mortgages in foreclosure. This is how the “free enterprise system” has fought back “attacks” from “socialists.” After the Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (2010), corporate money in unlimited amounts could go toward political advertising—including for or against a candidate—anonymously through “social welfare” non-profits. This is how corporate America has gone after its “attackers.”

Generally speaking, corporate American knows very well how to shut down its opposition in the halls of Congress. Powell’s memo pushes beyond the need for “public relations” and “governmental affairs” to urge a “scale of financing available only through joint effort” and related “political power” through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Business must learn the lesson “that political power is necessary…it must be used aggressively and with determination.” The corporation—created by the government—must, one might say—become the government, necessarily from within—through the system—rather than via revolution.

This sally into the political arena includes funding a highly competent staff of lawyers at the U.S. Chamber to argue before the courts in line with corporate interests. In the 2011 term, the Chamber’s ensuing legal defense department batted 100% on U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Powell could well have added that business’s lobbying and campaign dollars could be directed to not only defeating threatening legislation and regulations, but also influencing the nomination and confirmation of justices to federal (and state) courts. The astonishingly high success rate was therefore no accident.

In short, the threat to American democracy and even to the American principle of market competition may come not from “socialists” in academia and the media, but rather from the supposition that political power oriented to the corporate good rather than the public good is itself a good. That is to say, Powell’s memo may have the story turned around. His antagonists may have been oriented to saving the American system, whereas his proponents would actually subvert it in line with their narrow self-interest.

Source:

Lewis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” Memorandum, 1971. See pdf download at page-bottom of: http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/2/

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Power beyond Corporate Governance

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did not attend a committee hearing at Canada’s Parliament on May 28, 2019 in spite of having received summons from Bob Zimmer MP, the committee’s chair. Instead, Facebook sent its director of public policy and its head of public policy for Facebook Canada. “Shame on Mark Zuckerberg and shame on Sheryl Sandberg for not showing up today,” Zimmer said toward the end of the hearing.[1] For sending two representatives rather than themselves, Zuckerberg and Sandberg faced the possibility of being held in contempt. They had testified before the U.S. Congress, so by sending two representatives the two leaders of Facebook may have acted rather dismissively concerning Canada’s federal legislature. At the time, Zuckerberg had virtually unchecked power at Facebook, including over the other stockholders. From his perch, the power may have been going to his head; even after two years of user-privacy scandals, Facebook’s CEO and Chairman of the Board may have determined that summons from legislatures where the company was operating were beneath him. Such a mentality is dangerous for a person with autocratic control of such a large company.

Corporate governance can pale up against a formidable CEO who also chairs the board whose raison d’etre is in part to hold the CEO accountable. Even that such a structural conflict of interest could be allowed persist at a company suggests that its corporate governance system is weak, with too much power going to the management at the expense of the non-management stockholders. In the case of Facebook, Zuckerberg founded it, and on this basis he doubtlessly believed he was justified in being the sole holder of class B stock, each share of which having 10 votes such that he was the majority stockholder. In a show of just how pathetic minority stockholder rights can be, Zuckerberg voted down stockholder proposals “to put checks on Zuckerberg’s ironclad grip on the company he founded.”[2] This took place just two days after Zuckerberg had failed to show up at the Canadian committee hearing.

Zuckerberg was doubtless awash in power, for he had refused a legislature’s summons and could easily control his company’s corporate governance. Lawmakers in Congress and even Facebook insiders were raising concerns not only about whether Zuckerberg had too much power, but also the company itself, given the scandals that had been going on for more than two years. Shareholders argued that Zuckerberg’s holding of the board chairmanship “contributed to Facebook missing, or mishandling, a number of severe controversies.”[3] Stockholders also believed that eliminating the Class B shares (i.e., 10 votes per share) would enable stockholders to limit Zuckerberg’s power and “hold management accountable.”[4] As scandals—even one at the time hinging on Zuckerberg’s refusal to take off a distorted video of Nancy Palosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House—came up, stockholders had no recourse to management, which could safely ignore the complaints even though stockholder value was being affected.

I submit that the business judgment rule accords corporate managements with too much power in corporate governance over non-management stockholders. At the broad policy-level in which boards of large corporations operate, business expertise, while relevant, should not push out the role of non-management stockholders being able to act as a check on a CEO’s power. Fundamentally, even beyond the value of business expertise, ownership of the corporate wealth supersedes its management. As stock options as “firm-aligned” compensation for executives becomes more popular, the role of non-management stockholders becomes more important if accountability, or a check, is to be part of the system of governance. In other words, boards of directors should not be controlled by their respective CEO’s. In the case of Facebook, its breaches of private information and its role in influencing political elections as well as politics suggest that the corporation’s system of governance should include accountability.

In such a case in which a company leaves a huge societal footprint, with a potentially dire downside, and yet the corporate governance is monopolized by one person, it is only natural to look to external accountability in the form of anti-trust enforcement. Sure enough, U.S. House Rep. David Cicilline the chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee, had called for an antitrust investigation into Facebook, “with a focus on its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp,” both of which had more than a billion users in May, 2019. Even Facebook’s cofounder, Chris Hughes, “called for Facebook to be broken up and raised concerns about Zuckerberg’s ‘unchecked power.’”[5] Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, said Zuckerberg should “give up” some of his power and hire a new CEO.[6] Awash with power, Zuckerberg could ignore such advice. As for the prospect of being broken up, Zuckerberg could use more of the company’s wealth to make political campaign contributions and help lawmakers in other ways. When the lack of accountability in a company senses no threat from corporate governance and the reach of governments, then the exercise of such power can become virtually unstoppable.

See Taking the Face Off Facebook: Strategic and Ethical Issues, available at Amazon

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[1] Donie O’Sullivan and Paula Newton, “Zuckerberg and Sandberg Ignore Canadian Subpoena, Face Possible Contempt Vote,” CNN.com, May 28, 2019.

[2] Seth Fiegerman, “Facebook Shareholders Pressed for Checks on Mark Zuckerberg’s Power. They failed,” Cnn.com, May 30, 2019.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

Behind Corporate Loopholes: Wealth and Power

A company in the U.S. wants a tax loophole to apply. Starbucks, for example, wanted to be able to use the manufacturing deduction by stretching manufacturing to include the roasting of coffee beans. So in 2004 the company hired Michael Evans, a lobbyist at K&L Gates who had just a year before worked as a top lawyer on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, which writes tax law. Evans was able to urge his former colleagues in the Senate to expand the definition of manufacturing to include roasting in a clause added to a 243-page tax bill called the American Jobs Creation Act.  As you might imagine, Starbucks was not the only company to get a tax break written into that law. By 2013, the manufacturing deduction had saved Starbucks $88 million that the company would otherwise have had to pay in corporate income tax. In 2012, corporate tax breaks and loopholes added $150 billion in lost revenue for the federal government, increasing the budget deficit by that amount.[1] Three lessons can be gleamed from the hidden corporate loopholes. 

First, the damage done to the U.S. debt by corporate loopholes has been significant. While dwarfed by the debt incurred to finance the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ($2.4 trillion added to the debt by 2013), $150 billion of lost revenue from corporate tax benefits for that period alone is nonetheless significant. 

Second, the “insider influence” itself violates the principles of openness and fairness, which are so esteemed in a democracy. The many points of access to influence legislation can be abused by legislators and lobbyists alike by their stealth dealings, sometimes literally in the middle of the night as a bill is about to be voted on. Ideally, the many points of access refers to the fact that various groups (and citizens) can reach legislators, not that the most powerful interests can abuse their ability to contact lawmakers for private gain (both to the interests and the lawmakers, thanks to political campaign contributions). In fact, for a lobbyist, including a corporate lobbyist, to have disproportionate influence on a bill to make it financially beneficial to the lobbyist's clients can be reckoned as a conflict of interest because even the information supplied is apt to be biased. The many points of access is meant to dilute the influence of the private interests that stand to benefit most from loopholes. 

Third, the contacts that lobbyists have in government from having worked there themselves can play a major role in the loopholes being granted and even in secret. Other self-interested interests cannot check the self-interested influence of the companies or industries that would gain most, so the private benefit gets away with eclipsing the public good. A law prohibiting former legislators and Congressional staffers from lobbying for at least ten years might make a dent in the inordinate insider influence of corporations in Congress. However, the influence of a Speaker of the House such as John Boehner, who became a corporate lobbyist after resigning from Congress, would hardly be diminished in his private influence, and thus earnings. Information that only insiders have sells. 

Like water, pent-up power naturally seeks its way around an obstruction with the objective of reaching an objective. The influence of wealth inexorably finds its way into the halls of power, especially in democracies as they have many points of access. This vulnerability is particularly great in cases in which candidates for public office must raise large sums of money to get elected. Asking the candidates to look the other way when a big donor is knocking at the door runs against human nature; even if laws prevent large donations, power finds its own way in the dark. The power both of candidates/lawmakers and corporations can be so massive that space itself bends toward mutual objectives. Perhaps the question is whether trying to bend space back only slightly is worth the time and energy of passing a law. Although removing the financial need of candidates for campaign funds (e.g., by public funding of advertising) could in theory take out part of the incentives on one side of the equation, corporations could tempt the incentive for private gain in other ways, such as with the promise of a lucrative job afterwards. 

In the end, the threat to the democracy is the inordinate power from the concentration of private wealth as in large corporations. The citizens are hardly focused in their collective use of their power, so the insiders in government tend to be influenced inordinately by the moneyed interest at the expense of the public good, the good of the whole.  

1 Ben Hallman and Chris Kirkham, “As Obama Confronts Corporate Tax Reform, Past Lessons Suggest Lobbyists Will Fight For Loopholes,” The Huffington Post, February 15, 2013.

See Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon. Conflicts within the U.S. Government, in business, and between business and government are explored, as well as the very nature of an institutional conflict of interest. 

Public Access to the Public Domain Increasingly Privatized for Profit

To Aaron Swartz, the subject of the documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s a question of who gets heard,” he said.  Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI, which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system, especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the public domain in terms of the internet.

The full essay is at "The Internet's Own Boy."

Corporate Appointees in the West Wing: A Counter-Productive Way of Holding Business Accountable

Presidents in governments are called to be leaders, which means advocating a vision of change from the status quo. Otherwise, they are merely administrators. So it would be counter-productive for a U.S. president to fill his administration with people financially invested in the status quo. Yet President Obama did just that, in spite of the fact that his rhetoric envisioned radical change in health insurance and still regulations on Wall Street to prevent another financial crisis. In short, he not only let the regulatees in the room, but also gave them important roles with power that would affect their respective industries.

For example, President Obama's chief of staff, William Daley, had been a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where according to The New York Times, he was paid as much as $5 million a year and supervised the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. Daley also served on the board of directors at Boeing, a large military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which had "billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system." Although some argued that the White House needed someone on the inside who had the ear of business, the conflict of interest in having someone so tied to vested commercial interests decide on who gets into the Oval Office and determine the President's agenda ought to be troubling. Just one year earlier, a Wall Street reform bill had been passed that sidestepped the question of whether banks too big to fail should be allowed to exist and did nothing to address the fact that executive compensation had been so out of step with performance in the years leading up to the financial crisis. Also, the enacted health-care reform law, Obamacare, included a mandate and excluded a public option as per the interests of the heath insurance lobby. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest like this one is enough to spur us on to investigate it even though Obama's time in office has passed. That there were more blatant conflicts of interests in Obama's choice of appointees should raise even more of a red flag. Was he blind to them (unlikely), or did he intend to stay within the status quo in spite of his rhetoric against health insurance companies and investment banks? Put another way, if he really intended to offer an alternative to private insurance companies and constrain Wall Street firms in the wake of the financial crisis, putting corporate insiders in key offices would be counter-productive. Of course, he may have meant to hold back on his rhetoric, given all the financial inducements that the corporate sector could offer. Obama was much richer leaving office than he was when he entered the White House.
Larry Summers, whom Obama appointed as his chief economic advisor, had been instrumental in the Clinton Administration in keeping derivative securities from being regulated. How could Summers advise on a solution when he was against regulating the financial sector, at least where most needed (CDO's), and had actually played a role in causing the financial crisis? Simply in his choice of Summers, Obama sent a signal that he was a creature of the status quo (and its powerful adherents). 
Timothy Geithner, whom Obama nominated to be Secretary of the Treasury, had been president of the New York Fed, a job that not even Geithner saw as regulating. The big banks had had a formal say in his assuming that role--Citigroup being his sponsor. It is no surprise that he played a major role in AIG paying Goldman Sacks dollar-for-dollar on the CDO swaps even though AIG was essentially on life-support with federal money. So he would be an unlikely pick for a president who wanted systemic change involving the relationship between the federal government and Wall Street. Mark Patterson, Geithner's chief of staff, had been a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and Lewis Sachs, a senior advisor at Treasury, had been head of Tricadia, which bet against the CDOs (mortgage-based derivatives) it was selling to clients.
William C. Dodley, President of the New York Federal Reserve after Geithner left to become Treasury Secretary, had praised financial derivatives (including sub-prime-mortgage-based) before the financial crisis and, not coincidentally, had also been the chief economist at Goldman Sachs.
Gary Ginsler, Obama's head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, had been an executive at Goldman Sachs. He had helped ban the regulation of financial derivatives, including those based on risky sub-prime mortgages.
Mary Shapero, Obama's head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had been CEO of an investment banking self-regulation body. As a MBA student, I volunteered to help a professor with his research on NASD self-regulation. I was attracted by the application of systems theory to the notion of industry self-regulation. In hindsight, I was very naive concerning the propensity of a self-regulatory body to hold to the public good, rather than take the industry's own interest as a starting point and perhaps even devolve to enable a few bad participants with the self-regulatory body serving as a cloak. Even at the industry level, money talks; securitizing especially sub-prime mortgages was very profitable for investment banks through the first seven years of the twenty-first century.
Campaigning on September 29, 2008 in heat of the financial crisis, Obama said, "The era of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street and in Washington have led us to a financial crisis." That is, "A lack of oversight in Washington and on Wall Street got us into this mess." Even so, as president he signed the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, which in hindsight has been recognized as moderate at best, for it left the conflict of interest at rating agencies, executive compensation, and CPA firms largely entact. Obama resisted adding strings to the TARP federal funds for the big banks, such as restrictions on executive compensation and employee bonuses even though the E.U. enacted new restrictions. Furthermore, as of mid-2010, no financial firm or individuals therein had been prosecuted under Obama for fraud--not even Countrywide. In short, Obama as president fell well short of the "Real Change" mantra of his campaign. As one person observed at the time, Obama put together a Wall Street government. To think that real change could come from such a status-quo of appointees is so incredulous that Obama's very claim of real change could only be taken in hindsight as a false selling-point not unlike the traders at Goldman Sachs who were telling even good clients that the bonds based on sub-prime derivatives were safe even as the traders privately regarded them as "crap." Whether misleading the American people or good clients, the culprit is private advantage over public good via deceit. 
In the case of Obama, I suspect the answer can be found in following the money. Goldman Sachs contributed $1 million to Obama's presidential campaign. Also, he was considerably richer after his two terms in office. I suspect that he had discovered that he could say one thing in public and do another thing in private. It may be that representative democracies are susceptible to becoming invisible plutocracies with a patina of democracy to satisfy the masses while the representatives and the business executives make out quite well working together.

For more on institutional conflicts of interest, see Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.com

Sources:

 Eric Lipton, “Business Background Defines Chief of Staff,” The New York Times, January 6, 2011.
"Inside Job" (2010), Sony Pictures Classics.

Auto vs. Oil Industries on Emission Standards: Putting a Part Above the Whole

When a company or an entire industry skips over the good of the whole—the public good—in lobbying for legislation that only reflects the needs or desires of individuals (qua consumers only), the society itself (and even the Earth) is slighted and thus more at risk. For the good of the whole is more than just the cumulative needs and desires of individuals in part because the latter do not take into account the wider effects of their choices. When an individual company or industry takes this point into account and rebuffs favorable legislative proposals because they would do too much damage to society and/or the planet, social responsibility is at hand. Companies or industries that do not are thus irresponsible from the standpoint of the whole, which, through government, is justified in keeping an eye on them (especially in making transparent their efforts to influence legislation and regulation. The American auto and oil industries can be distinguished in this regard.

“When the Trump administration laid out a plan” in 2018 that would have eventually allowed “cars to emit more pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went too far even for them.”[1] Too far even for the obvious winners—an amazing statement, considering that companies and industries generally try to get as much as they can in terms of deregulation and favorable laws.

Another industry, however, fueled by the efforts of Marathon Petroleum, “was pushing for the changes all along.”[2] The campaign’s main argument “for significantly easing fuel efficiency standards” was “that the United States [was] so awash in oil” that energy conservation need no longer be a worry.[3] This statement blatantly misses the point that the standards that were in place then were also to reduce emissions of CO2 from what they would otherwise have been from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Interestingly, the American oil industry must have missed the memo on the continuing increases in the emissions.

In fact, 2017 saw a record amount of emissions added to the atmosphere; the Paris Accord in 2015 was already proving to have been a failure.  Issued in early October, 2018, a “landmark report” from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought.”[4] The report states that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.”[5] This was the context in which the oil industry was running “a stealth campaign to roll back car emissions standards.”[6]

The industry’s rationale reduced everything to the needs and desires of individual customers with no consideration of the impact on even them, not to mention humanity—including possibly its very survival. “With oil scarcity no longer a concern,” Americans should be given a “choice in vehicles that best fit their needs,” read a draft of a letter that Marathon helped to circulate to members of Congress over the summer. Official correspondence later sent to regulators by more than a dozen lawmakers included phrases or sentences from the industry talking points, and the Trump administration’s proposed rules incorporate similar logic.”[7] Of course, that a “quarter of the world’s oil is used to power cars, and less-thirsty vehicles mean lower gasoline sales” was not missed on either Marathon or its industry as a whole.[8] But the notion of a whole apparently stopped at the industry level; externalities beyond that, even one bearing on the future of mankind, were apparently of no concern.

Marathon Petroleum even “teamed up with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a secret policy group financed by corporations as well as the Koch network, to draft legislation for states supporting the industry’s position. [The] proposed resolution, dated Sept. 18, describes [the then] current fuel-efficiency rules as ‘a relic of a disproven narrative of resource scarcity’ and [urges that ‘unelected bureaucrats’ shouldn’t dictate the cars Americans drive.”[9] The resolution’s language doubtlessly included the council’s talking points, which, in staying on the “resource scarcity” rationale for standards, neglect the obvious link between emissions and climate change. Furthermore, the smack on “unelected bureaucrats” demonstrates no regard for government as standing for the interests of the whole when externalities from cumulative individual decisions are too much from the perspective of the whole. To be sure, with industries swaying legislators and regulators in democracies, laws and regulations can indeed benefit a part at the expense of the whole, but this deplorable flaw does not negate the need to protect the whole from parts from exploiting conflicts of interest. Unlike the auto industry, the oil industry sought to exploit its conflict of interest by putting its narrow interest ahead of that of the whole where the whole supposed to be paramount—in the halls of government.

I suggest, therefore, that heightened scrutiny is warranted where a company or industry (or the business sector—still but a part of the whole) seeks to influence lawmakers, regulators, or the general public in line with the private (profit) interest. This is especially needed in a culture that is generally in line with its business sector’s values. People and government officials alike in such a culture (such as that of the U.S.A.) find it difficult to realize the need to see that such conflicts of interest are not exploited. In fact, in my book, Institutional Conflicts of Interest, I argue that a conflict of interest is inherently unethical even if it is not exploited. A few other scholars on the subject argue in contrast that if a conflict of interest is not exploited, no harm is involved, but I contend that another reason exists why arrangements or situations that include conflicts of interest are unethical. I actually met one of those scholars on the Loyola campus in Chicago, but once in his office, I found he only wanted to talk about Obama. So much for scholarly exchanges.

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1. Hiroko Tabuchi, “The Oil Industry’s Covert Campaign to Rewrite American Car Emissions Rules,” The New York Times, December 13, 2018.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Coral Davenport, “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040,” The New York Times, October 7, 2018.

5. Ibid.

6. Hiroko Tabuchi, “The Oil Industry’s Covert Campaign to Rewrite American Car Emissions Rules,” The New York Times, December 13, 2018.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

Handouts in Averting the Fiscal Cliff: The Price of Politics?

What is that nebulous thing called politics? Might it be that the practice is essentially exploiting or creating what are known as principal-agent costs? That is, might politics boil down to a skill in the agent (elected representative) in putting his political or economic interests ahead of doing the bidding of his principal(s) (i.e., his constituent body).  
In the U.S. Senate bill in early 2013 to obviate the “fiscal cliff,” for example, the Democrats may have agreed to benefits for the Republican lawmakers’ campaign backers in exchange for going along with a more progressive federal income tax system. Among the added provisions were special expensing rules for certain film and television productions—no doubt those made by particular campaign contributors. The provision for tax-exempt financing for the New York Liberty Zone around the former World Trade Center may also have been a favor to a particular someone. Lest it is wondered what an extension of the American Samoa economic development credit was doing in an expedited measure to obviate the “fiscal cliff,” the answer may have had to do with a particular Republican lawmaker’s relationship with someone having an interest in American Samoa. I can only speculate here, as I was not privy to the actual relationships and negotiations. However, the sheer strangeness of such provisions in such a bill suggests that the particular political or economic interests of particular Republican lawmakers may have been the culprit.

 Is money the language of politics?    citizen.org

Such interests need not stem from particular relationships. To get the Republicans to “move on principle” regarding progressive taxation, the Democrat negotiators may have agreed to give on particulars on another law—in this case, Obamacare. The bill also contained a provision to remove the Community Living Assistance Services and Support program, or CLASS, which was proposed to enable millions of elderly and disabled people to stay in their homes rather than be placed in institutional care.

Generally speaking, the pattern involves essentially “buying off” particular lawmakers so they will “shift over” on a larger principle—in this case, progressive taxation. Give a bit on Obamacare and include a provision financially beneficial to a particular Republican lawmaker or one of his or her financial contributors or patrons—anything satisfying a particular interest of a particular lawmaker—so he or she will move from the preference of his or her constituents. The agency cost is the difference that a lawmaker (agent) skirts for his own political or economic interest from doing the bidding of his or her official constituents (principals).

If the skill called politics involves a politician’s particular interests at the expense of one of his or her principles or official duties (i.e., to constituents), then negotiation cannot be expected to be confined to compromising on the merits of the bill itself. Rather than merely going back and forth on numbers for the upper income subject to the Bush tax cuts, a Republican negotiator might propose an unrelated provision benefiting one of his or her friends, business associates, or campaign contributors. Granted the provision, the negotiator would then give on the numbers. One might ask whether the inclusion of particular exogenous interests is necessary to negotiation on a given policy. Wouldn’t the final product in terms of the policy be better were the unrelated benefits kept out of the mix? That is to say, is their incorporation a decadent or inferior form of politics, or an essential element that cannot be removed? Perhaps the answer lies in whether negotiation on a given policy, such as deficit reduction, can be done without the negotiators bringing up their particular interests (as a means of shirking their principles or duty). Perhaps ethical leadership in politics involves refusing to enable (or exploit) another’s “agency costs” by incorporating the unrelated provisions, in which case politics itself could find higher ground and the resulting policy would more closely match the preference of the body politic.  

Source:

Reuters, “Fiscal Cliff Bill Proposed By Senate Packed With Mix of Handouts, Takebacks,” Huffington Post, January 1, 2013.

Were Raises at Bailed-Out U.S. Companies Approved by Treasury?

In early 2013, the Special Inspector General for Troubled Asset Relief Program reported that the U.S. Treasury Department disregarded its own guidelines in order to allow large pay increases for executives at three major companies that had received bailouts during the financial crisis. In particular, eighteen raises for executives at American International Group (AIG), General Motors, and Ally Financial were approved. Fourteen were for $100,000 or more. A raise for the CEO of a division of AIG was $1 million. Treasury approved these raises even though they exceeded the pay limits set in Treasury’s own guidelines.

Was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner smirking because his friends were happy?     NYT

In assessing Treasury’s approval of the raises, one must weigh the argument that they were needed to retain expertise needed to restore the companies to financial health (and thus be able to pay back the bailouts) against the argument that bailouts should come with strings such that the funds are not used opportunistically. At the very least, executives associated with the companies’ failures should not be rewarded. However, what about new-hires brought in to restore the companies?  If the restoration is successful, shouldn’t those managers be compensated?  Even if the raises were not necessary to retaining talent, managers who had not been part of the problem should be compensated for effective work. At the same time, it is proper and fitting that companies being bailed out be subject to strings, and thus neither the companies nor their employees should be able to benefit inordinately.
That Treasury disregarded its own guidelines can be read as an indication that the officials were concerned that vital talent would be lost had the guidelines been followed. The bailouts in the E.U. contained limits on executive compensation without any apparent hindrance to the viability of the banks. In other words, the argument that the raises were necessary to retain talent could have been a ruse. An alternative interpretation consistent with this scenario is that the business sector had too much influence over Treasury officials. In addition to lobbying influence and connections between Treasury officials and former colleagues on Wall Street, it is possible that pro-business officials had adopted the business line that government should not interfere with business—even companies being bailed out.
Put another way, contrasting the lack (or ignoring) of strings at Treasury with the salience of strings in the case of the E.U.’s bailouts may illustrate a cultural difference between Americans and Europeans generally with respect to pro-business ideology. Had executives at the three bailed out companies above enjoyed inordinate influence within Treasury, the conflict of interest for the government officials could have been enabled by a shared ideology: namely, what is good for GM is good for America.

Source:

Marcy Gordon, “Treasury Disregarded Own Guidelines, Allowed Executive Raises At Bailed-Out GM, AIG,” The Huffington Post, January 28, 2013.

See also: Skip Worden, Essays on the Financial Crisis.

Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs in the White House: A Hidden Agenda?

Rex Tillerson, the U.S. Secretary of State fired by U.S. President Donald Trump and former CEO of Exxon, an international oil company based in the U.S., did not allow his difference with the president of tariffs on steel and aluminum to be a deal breaker. In this respect, the ex-CEO was not doing his company’s bidding. That is to say, he was not primarily in public service to serve the private interests of a multinational corporation. Unfortunately, this cannot be said of Gary Cohn, the ex-president of Goldman Sachs who quit as Trump’s chief economic advisor just after the tariffs were announced. Tariffs in general and especially to protect goods in another sector are not in the interests of a major American banks with substantial international business. If the former president of Goldman Sachs had taken the post in government to further Goldman’s interests, the question is whether public service is mere window-dressing at the highest levels of government—plutocracy being the real name of the game.

In a statement at the time of his resignation, Cohn wrote, “It has been an honour to serve my country and enact pro-growth economic policies to benefit the American people. In particular the passage of historic tax reform.”[1] That reform lowered the corporate tax rate and thus was a financial benefit to Goldman Sachs. Cohn left this point out and instead cited the benefit to the American people, which might thus have been a mere subterfuge designed to hide the possibility that the ex-president of Goldman Sachs was actually doing his firm’s bidding.

That Cohn was instrumental in getting the corporate tax rate reduced and that he resigned at least in part because President Trump acted aversely to Goldman Sachs’ interests in enacting tariffs—even just as a negotiating tactic in the trade negotiations then going on—suggests that Cohn had taken the governmental post to safeguard and promote the financial interests of Goldman Sachs. Perhaps President Trump had been obliged to fill the position with such a person in exchange for having accepted campaign contributions from the firm or even the financial industry more generally. It would then be no accident that the Secretary of the Treasury was also a Goldman alum.

The larger question regards whether the public interest can be served in a political economy in which large companies have substantial political leverage over aspiring candidates for office via campaign contributions. At the time of Tillerson’s firing, President Trump remarked that he was finally able to have a cabinet of his own—of his choosing. This statement implies that he had been obliged initially to hand over several cabinet positions to people not of his own choosing. Had Exxon purchased the de facto first chance to fill the Secretary of State position, and Goldman Sachs the U.S. Treasury and chief economic advisor positions? With public statements insisting on having served the American people, which would hardly be need to be said were it true, it should come as no surprise that the American people have been kept in the dark concerning the influence of “dark” money on “public” offices at the expense of the public good.

For more on this topic, see Institutional Conflicts of Interest

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1. Kate Kelly, Maggie Haberman, and Peter Baker, “Gary Cohn to Resign as Trump’s Top Economic Advisor,” The New York  Times, March 6, 2018.

Political Black Holes: On the Power Behind the Throne

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole. If this is news to you, there is no need to go hide under a rock. It turns out our black hole is not the biggest by far, and it doesn't spew out a lot of excess energy that falls into it. Even so, it is ours, and we can be glad that we have one of our very own even if it isn't the biggest one on the block. In case you are interested in seeing it’s baleful look in a picture, I’ve got bad news for you; it is invisible. No light can bounce off it.  You are probably wondering how the scientists found it.  Well, they knew that black holes are in the center of galaxies, so the crafty lab coats used light to find our center because there is too much gas there for much there to be visible to us.  The scientists noticed that the speed of stars speeds up around a certain point and posited the existence of a highly-dense black hole.

Using the phenomenon of black holes as an analogy, political "scientists" might investigate whether power, whethere in business, government or society, tends by its very nature to consolidate. In the Micheal Moore documentary on capitalism, two members of congress point to the immense power of an anti-democratic corporate banking elite that was able to turn around the House vote on the bank bailout (TARP) using the democratic leadership as runners. If so, such power was invisible to the public. Likewise a black hole is of course invisible. In the case of the banking elite, we couldn't point our fingers at who exactly gave the marching orders that turned around the no-questions-asked government loans to the banks too big to fail.  Nor do we, or will we, know who told the U.S. Senators: hands off meddling in foreclosures.  Indeed, we shall have no idea whether a power behind the throne told Congress not to even debate the alternative of giving the TARP money directly to home borrowers in trouble.  That this was not seriously debated for foreclosures involving mortgages that banks and mortgage companies should not have given in the first place hints of the existence of a massive albeit hidden political black hole. Finally, such a black hole may have been behind the administration's decision not to push for banks too big to fail to be carved up while extant rather than simply "orderly liquidated" once they have fallen under their own weight.

Neither the American people nor the American media companies go far enough in investigating even the existence of invisible black holes in the American political universe, let alone what damage they do from the standpoint of the public or common good.  Micheal Moore suggests that Citibank and Goldman don’t fear popular election much because they expect the 1 person, 1 vote thing won’t turn on them because most people think they could be in the elite too. The financial elite is 1% of the vote; 1% of the population holds 90% of the wealth, so if the other 99% happen to wake up and notice, they might take back the reins. The big business would be worried, but, alas, Wall Street is not shaking in its golden boots. As to why, I would add to Moore’s explanation by pointing to the extent to which Americans are manipulated without even knowing it.  Lest it be missed, the giant media companies are corporate too.

Is it an accident, for example, that so many stories on Afganistan pop up when it is in the interest of the defence contractors? Are they simply using the people to urge Congress to support a surge?  I would call this “direct manipulation” because we are being summoned to debate what has been put on the table for us.   The other kind is “indirect,” which involves a political black hole keeping an issue or policy-option off our radar screens.  President Obama’s suggestion, for example, that the banks too big to fail be reduced in size (and money) so they would not be so dangerous in failing, quietly went away. In looking for indirect manipulation, the important thing to notice is the absence of  any visible event or change that could explain the removal of a proposal by some new issue being covered by the media. We ought to be examining what political black holes do not want us to talk about because of private interests. For instance, we now know that health insurance companies gave their surrogates "death panel scare stories" to fan out discussion of a public alternative in health insurance.  Scaring a proposal off the radar screen is among the silent weapons used by political black holes.  Again, the source of such weapons is invisible.

So like sheep, the American people is led to debate or focus on something or to forget something else, In the process, we are unwittingly giving up, or failing to grasp, our democratic power, which can be used for the public good. To be sure, there are excesses and drawbacks in democracy and these too should be discussed, but there are hidden dangers to political black holes, and we miss these if we do not even know that such things exist.  That is to say, the democracy we do have may be rather wan in comparison to the gravity of the political black hole at the center of our political society.

Perhaps the question on your mind is:  So how do we get it back?   It might involve nothing short of waking up out of the Matrix.  So many of us don’t realize how much we are being manipulated.  Realizing it, and not tailoring our thoughts and discussions along its lines will wake others.   Once people start waking, we can start to look for candidates who do not, like Obama, take a $1 million from Goldman after promising real change.  We need candidates willing to forego being bought out by the elites who sense that democracy might possibly get the upper hand in an election.  Pay particular attention to the matter of teeth in such candidates’ proposals with respect to big business…and ask at their speeches whether they are taking money from the establish that has a vested interest in the status quo.  Don’t buy the “I’m not influenced by money.”  …which should be treated as a laugh line.   If you find genuine candidates willing to effect systemic change even where it is at the expense of the big corporate players, know that the elite will offer such candidates so much if the elite view the candidates as viable and  not under their control.  Control, by the way, can be more subtle than using a leash.  This is perhaps my major point here…political black holes are invisible and yet their anti-democratic gravity is HUGE…even as it is in a tiny space, or office.

In the Roman Empire, the games in the arena (which means “sand” in Latin) were a devise to distract as well as mollify and entertain the masses.  Today, we have American Idol and the Super Bowl, as well as the World Series.  Besides their entertainment value made possible by the talent involved, these idols are effective in gravitating popular attention…and this can be useful to the extent that the US is a plutocracy (i.e. ruled in the interest of the top 1% of the wealth) and vested powers fear the 1 person, 1 vote power of democracy.  But as Micheal Moore points out, Citibank and Goldman Sachs can rest easier knowing that many of us don’t use the power of the vote to take from the banks because many of us believe we might be among the plutacracy one day. 

I would add that we tend to be easily manipulated into following the media’s current (which, kein Zufall, tends to move around the interests of the major houses so as not to disturb the islands of capital).   We stop wondering about the distant promises to do something about the banks too big to fail because the media has conveniently stopped reminding us.  We forget that an option is to break up the banks too big to fail (which, by the way, have gotten bigger since September, 2008 and are still active at the casino).  We unthinkingly join the media in debating Obama’s banking consumer protection proposal, as though that were primary.  In other words, Goldman Sachs, which was Obama’s largest campaign contributor according to Micheal Moore (over $1 million), is content to have us debate a potentially pain so we will be appeased by Obama’s pledge of “real change” and not ask, demand, or VOTE to apply anti-trust law to financial houses.   In short, we allow ourselves to be dupped and we don’t even know it.  We don’t even realize we are taking our eyes off the eight ball.  Goldman lets Obama have four more years and 1 person, 1 vote is once again not a threat to either Goldman or the change agent that the bank bought.  Don’t expect Obama to rock the boat in bringing any real change that is not in the interests of the most powerful of the corporations.  Obama’s challenge is to show us just enough that looks like real change while not acting outside the interests of his corporate backers.  However, aren’t real change and status quo vested intersts mutually exclusive?  If so, how does Barak Obama get around this?  He gives us just enough to appear…   Meanwhile, the systemic change that is needed on the players at fault in September, 2008, goes by the wayside and we remain vulnerable even though We the People are convinced that a new consumer protection agency will do the trick.  The trick, ladies and gentlemen, is on us–and we don’t even know it.  We don’t know what we don’t know…while we presume we know it.

In 2009, Moammar Gadhafi of Libya gave a speech  at the annual opening of the General Assembly at the UN in New York City.  Substantively, he pointed to the drawbacks in having the UN remain in New York.  He also advocated a permanent seat for the African Union in the Security Council.   Fifty-three states are represented in that Union.  In an interesting twist, he remarked that the US contains fifty countries, so Africa too deserved a permanent seat.  I was utterly surprised that the man who was disorganized and sporatic in his delivery (and whose government would kill hundreds of unarmed protesters in 2011) could grasp the nature of the US in terms commensurate to the AU. He added that the EU should have a seat.   This makes a lot of sense because it is not fair for three of the EU’s states to have seats while all of the 50 United States have one. It occurred to me in listening to his speech that he understood the nature of the US as an empire-scale polity better, actually, than most contemporary Americans do. This is a bad commentary on the condition of civics classes in American high schools.  So I was surprised to find the mainstream media report the speech simply as “disorganized" without reporting any of the substance, as though there had been no serious content whatsoever.   Someone must have wanted to discredit Qaddafi for political or economic reasons.   The summary verdict was so immedate and total that none of Qaddafi’s content was covered.   The media’s treatment had all the footprints of a hidden strategy--that is, of a black hole's pull.  If I am correct, I’m left surprised that the subterfuge itself could be so blatant.  For a journalistic standpoint, the reporting was really bad.   Alternatively, the journalists could have reported what the man had said (as well as on his style and approach) and have left it to the readers to decide whether the content should be dismissed due to the style.   Something else was going on.  I’m just not sure what. I contend that something else typically goes on in terms of what is debated in the public discourse via the media. The invisible source steering and pruning what travels across our public radar screen is none other than a political black hole: a very dense concentration of private power functioning akin to an invisible elephant in a small living room. One person senses a trunk--another a leg--but we as a people miss the very existence of the elephant.  We are too distracted, and this is no accident, as it manifests by the very black hole that we do not suspect exists.

In short, both the content and frequency of topics reported by the media bear traces of the black whole that they are orbiting. As long as the source of the gravity is invisible, the black hole will continue to be quite useful.  Put another way, as long as Americans take the press reports as simply journalism, we will miss what is going on behind the scenes and therefore continue to be subject to being manipulated.  Micheal Moore asks: when will democracy ascend over the power of big business?  It is possible, but not probable.   This, by the way, is the expression that Kant uses in discussing his Kingdom of Ends (treating rational beings as ends and not just as means). Beyond the latent or actual subterranean power of corporate America over our public airwaves and legislative chambers, we ought to reflect on the threat to a republic in there simply being political black holes.

  

See: Nova on Black Holes
 (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/)