teaunbagged.net — This is a blog written by TeaintheHarbor. It is good food for thought and I think we all need to read it. I have his permission to post this. Nine Dogs8. January 2010 by Tea in the Harbor. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the structure of our country and the way it relates to the structure we had after the revolution, when the nation was in the hands of our founders. We hear all the time from our fellow citizens on the right how the United States is by nature a capitalist society and how the freedom to make money trumps all other considerations. They purport that we were founded to allow American wealth to remain in American hands, which is true enough, but it wasn’t just King George they were rebelling against. The Boston Tea Party, for instance, was not a protest against the King, but against the British East India Company at who used their monopoly to enact the tax to which the colonists were protesting. It wasn’t the Monarchy that sparked the revolution, it was corporate greed. If there is any doubt in your mind as to the veracity of that statement, I would refer you to something we were all taught in school as evidence of the moral integrity of our first President. George Washington was offered the post of King of the United States by the Continental Congress, he turned it down. If it was Monarchy that had caused such discontent, would they have offered to set up the same system after winning the bloody war for independence? The following is an excerpt from a paper entitled “The Uncooling of America” by William Kalle Lasn and includes a link to the full article. “Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were “artificial, invisible, intangible,” mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they “inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered.” The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren’t allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn’t buy stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place. In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but subordinate role. The people — not the corporations — were in control. So what happened? How did corporations gain power and eventually start exercising more control than the individuals who created them? The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century — the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that “corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed.” As you can plainly see, our founders did not believe in unregulated free enterprise. That is a rouse created by the benefactors of the Gilded Age, an era properly brought to an end by Theodore Roosevelt when this liberal republican President broke up the monopolies of Standard Oil and it’s contemporaries. It had concentrated the wealth of the nation into the hands of a few and had thus become a threat to our democratic republic itself. We are under the same sort of threat today, as can be easily seen in the recent meltdown of our economy. We are all aware that our politicians are bought and sold on an open and legal market we know as “K Street.” The system of bribery for access that we have somehow been convinced is a needed part of our government. It isn’t. It is exactly what the first republican President warned us of. This new Gilded Age is even more starkly stratified than the last one was, We the People have a smaller piece of the pie than ever before in American history. This is the reason we are susceptible to bubbles and bursts, because the decisions of the few over rule the wisdom of the many. When ninety percent of the wealth of the nation is in the hands of two percent of the people and those two percent consider it their duty to investors to make a play for the remaining crumbs is it any wonder that the remaining ninety eight percent of the people are left wanting for basic necessities? Reason says it would be impossible for any other result to be expected. Perhaps an experiment would be useful to illustrate the point. Suppose you had ten dogs and enough food to feed them all with twenty percent left over. Now give ninety percent of that food to one dog and let the rest fight it out for the remainder. How many happy dogs do you suppose you will have? How long before the one with ninety percent of the food is attacked and killed so that the rest of the pack can survive? Please don’t actually try this, but would you consider the nine dogs immoral? Of course you wouldn’t, they are doing what they must to survive. They are simply playing by the rules of the natural economy, an economy that we, even with all our contrivances and complications, are also subject to. We are the nine dogs, but for some reason unfathomable to me we are fighting over the scraps and leaving the dog with all the food alone. This would never happen with real dogs of course, the rich dog would eat his fill and walk away leaving the rest to his fellows, but we are not as moral as those dogs would be. Those who suggest we should adopt the morals of dogs are called socialists and told that what is good for the pack is an insult to individual aspirations. We are told that if we suggest that we all survive together we are a stain on our national reputation. I think it is time that the American people adopt at least the level of morality of a pack of dogs.

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