The Thinking Press

The breathtaking battle that is taking place in America today over health care is deeply troubling in many ways, but the principle factor behind this contentious war is one that goes to the heart of our democracy. It is a corrupting power so intertwined with our American dream that it is arguably protected by our constitutions first amendment. What I am talking about is the enormous power of economically driven actors within our democracy.

The Source of Our Predicament

The United States has long been the darling child of worldwide capitalism. Since the end of World War II we watched as our country became the financial underpinning for rebuilding a war-torn Europe, and as the worldwide economic system turned to the dollar for stability it has since flourished as the worlds economic center, creating wealth so vast it is almost frightening to comprehend. As globalism has taken hold in recent decades it has only expanded this incredible wealth production system to a beast that dominates not just this country, but the very world we live in.

Capitalism, in theory, is not in any way an evil or malicious thing but an extraordinarily effective way to utilize certain aspects of human nature to generate wealth; the unmitigated need to further ones own interests. The danger lies not in our economic dependence upon capitalism but in our blind faith in it. Confusing our system of wealth generation for anything more than that very specific task has led us down a road more perilous than we can imagine, creating forces within a democratic society that overpower the social interests of its citizens with the cold, calculated financial self interests of a board of directors. It is a struggle between those warring factions that we are watching play itself out in breathtaking vitriol on the twenty four hour news cycle today.

Democracy is, on a basic level, the institutionalization of serving the organized interests of a countries populace. Our founding fathers, in their wisdom, created and protected the democratic governance of our country from many malicious forces which they saw with the power to rot the integrity of such a republic. Tyranny was their primary focus. John Adams fought tirelessly so that in throwing the British off the back of the colonies we did not end up in the yoke of another power such as the French. Thomas Jefferson, distrusting of large institutional forces, fought to ensure the rights of the individual to protect themselves and have a direct voice and role in their government, and created the visionary wall between church and state.

However our founders failed to foresee one major threat to the integrity of our democracy: large financial self interests in the form of corporations. This was likely intentional. Many of the founding fathers were wealthy landowners and from the very beginning the interests of the wealthy were well served, and attempts to challenge some of those interests would later lead to the American Civil War. These, financially driven, interests have grown today to a scale of monstrous proportions. For instance, the derivatives market, one of the key players in the economic crisis we now face, soars over $500 trillion dollars in outstanding derivatives.

The Problem of American and World Wide Economic Success

Our democracy is at risk of becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the worlds economic drivers, subverting the needs of its people to that of the needs of large financially self interested businesses. Very simply, the power of such economic forces in the world can overpower nearly any system set up to regulate them and reign them in. Our own political system is already over run with economically driven actors playing incredibly wide ranging roles, including funding campaigns of all our nations leaders and writing legislation regulating their own industries, and the supreme court is poised to open the floodgates of corporate money into our democracy.

If we are not careful these interests will be the only interests represented in our American democracy.