by Jeff Strabone
Recent catastrophic events have brought renewed attention to the relationship between government and business in the United States. Over the thirty years since Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. President, the great ideological project of our era has been the narrowing of options in matters of political economy, and their replacement by the mantra that government is bad and all that it does is a restriction of freedom. The most fanatical equate the individual’s freedom to wield his money and property as he will with the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, as if the spending of money were up there with religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. This movement has reached its apogee, so far, in the government’s refusal to regulate derivatives in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, in the 2010 Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and in the unregulated hand wielded by BP and others in their deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. It is high time for the sun to set on that right-wing dream. Now is the time for a new morning in America, one where we all understand government’s proper role in the market.
Before we can get to that new ideological moment, we will have to see clearly the misunderstandings that the Reagan-era narrowing has yielded. In previous articles for 3QD, I have talked about the futility of lamenting that corporations ‘just don’t get it’. This is the sort of phrase one hears from those who mistakenly think that corporations can be shamed into humanitarian behavior. The more worthwhile consideration, shame being institutionally impossible, is how we can make corporations behave in more tolerable ways that don’t lead to economic collapses and ecological disasters. The problem and the solution are the same and can be summed up in one word: law. The thing we must recognize about corporations is that they will do whatever the law allows. It sounds so simple, yet the implications are vast.