Month: January 2020

Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump, And The Future Of Capitalism

Some lament the Trump administration’s animosity toward young people and scientists who speak common sense about a massive threat that we should confront through global cooperation. But Trump and his cabal appear to understand something that their liberal detractors do not: Their politics is the only authentic defense of contemporary capitalism.

Steven Mnuchin, US President Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, outraged liberal commentators at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos with a snide remark directed at teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. Responding to Thunberg’s call for an immediate exit from fossil fuel investments, Mnuchin said that she should go to college “to study economics” before “she can come back and explain that to us.” Two days earlier, Trump had referred to climate scientists as “the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers.”

The Trump administration’s attitude to climate change, and those campaigning for drastic measures to contain it, is ugly, nasty, and wrong. But behind the crassness and toxicity of Trump, Mnuchin, et al. is cold logic and brutal honesty: Their politics is the only authentic defense of contemporary capitalism. And, judging by Mnuchin’s patronizing advice to Thunberg, they understand that mainstream economics, unlike climate science, is their friend.

I, too, could not contain myself after Mnuchin’s Davos remark. “Mnuchin, sadly, makes sense,” I tweeted. “If Greta were to study mainstream economics, she would spend several semesters studying models of markets in which neither a climate disaster nor an economic crisis is possible. Time to transform both economic policy and economics!”

Many fellow economists were unhappy with my tweet. One tweeted back: “Not sure which undergrad programs you’re looking at but all the Econ 101 courses that I know of involve market failures, where climate change is the main example.” Quite right. But it is, I fear, beside the point. While many examples and concepts in economics courses would no doubt strengthen Thunberg’s resolve and arm her with powerful arguments against the likes of Mnuchin and Trump, she would also feel frustrated and ultimately undermined by economics and its effect on her fellow students.

One reason is the discipline’s framing and default settings. We all know the power of the default or baseline. In societies where organ donation is the default setting – automatic without a signed opt-out – the supply of transplant organs is substantially larger than in countries where people must carry donor cards. Framing is crucial in every setting where the human mind and heart must be energized against some ill.

Economics is no exception. The economic textbooks Thunberg would have to read begin with models of markets where the unfettered private profit drive is shown mathematically to serve the public interest. Only after she has learned these theorems, and has practiced the mental gymnastics needed to derive their mathematical proofs, will she be exposed to “exceptions” – for example, “externalities” of the production process, like climate-change-inducing pollution, which imposes costs not fully borne by the polluter. The very framing of market failures as an “exception,” perhaps caused by some “externality,” is an immense propaganda victory for the Trumps and Mnuchins of this world.

Worse, unlike organ donation, for which any society can decide to reverse the framing by making donation the default, college economics professors cannot simply reverse the framing by teaching externalities and market failure as the general case and presenting perfectly competitive markets as exceptions. The iconic theorems of economics cannot be proven in the presence of externalities. Alas, it is these proofs that impress students and the rest of society, especially those in power, and give economics professors their discursive hegemony within the social sciences, not to mention the lion’s share of public and private funding.

Viewed from this perspective, Mnuchin knowingly (or instinctively) delivered more than a sneering put down. Were Thunberg to take his advice, she would be weakened. A degree in economics, rather than in science, politics, or history, would either crush her spirit or divert her from endeavors that could make her even more dangerous than she already is to the economic interests Trump represents.

Some lament the Trump administration’s animosity toward young people and scientists who speak common sense about a massive threat that we should confront through global cooperation. But Trump and his cabal appear to understand something that their liberal detractors do not: One cannot acknowledge the perils of climate change, commit to doing whatever it takes to reverse it, and continue to think of capitalism as a natural system that can be tweaked to deliver shared, green prosperity.

Trump gets it: climate change is capitalism’s Waterloo. There is simply no feasible path toward the re-stabilization of the climate that is consistent with the maintenance of capitalism’s main pillars. The system we live in, unlike the one implied by college economics textbooks, turns on a pathological dynamic recycling mechanism: Oligopolies extract exhaustible value from humans and nature at breakneck speed, financed by debt-turbocharged financialization, which in turn fuels the extractive oligopolies.

This “technostructure,” as John Kenneth Galbraith christened this mechanism in his 1967 book The New Industrial State, will never willingly accept the limits on physical growth and extraction necessary for containing climate change, because it could not survive. With the political class utterly dependent on it for campaign financing, any cap, quota, or emissions trading scheme imposed by the government will prove cosmetic and, ultimately, impotent. In the same way that economics students study market failures as exceptions to an otherwise well-functioning market system, centrist reformers undergo the Sisyphean task of imagining a reformed, green capitalism.

Uncouth and disagreeable, Trumpism is nonetheless an honest manifestation of the historic moment when late capitalism pushed humanity past the point of no return. Trump urges us to carry on, while Mnuchin suggests that Thunberg numb her soul with the opium of mainstream economics. The only alternative to their policy of accelerated climate change, to the oil and finance curses that drive capitalism, is the wholesale disintegration of today’s technostructure. Do we have the stomach for it?

We Need A President Who Will Help All Americans

To judge how an economy is doing for its richest people, look at the stock market. To judge how it’s doing for everyone else, look at life expectancy.

These two measures show that America is coming apart at the seams: the stock market is booming while life expectancy has declined for three years running. Those in the top 1%, with incomes above $500,000 a year, are delighted; those in the working class are dying of what researchers have come to call “deaths of despair.”

I am for one America, not two. Abraham Lincoln called for a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” — not a government of the rich, by the lobbyists, for the few. We need policies that produce prosperity for all Americans, including guaranteed health care, decent wages and job benefits, a green new deal and 21st century infrastructure. The 2020 presidential election offers the most important choice our country has faced in generations. American democracy is at stake.

Donald Trump didn’t create the divisions, but he is dramatically and willfully amplifying them. Our widening inequalities of wealth and resources can be traced to an infamous 1971 memo from lawyer Lewis Powell, Jr. to the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell wanted to put corporations into the political driver’s seat. That same year Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and Powell soon put his plan into operation. In 1978, Powell wrote a disastrous decision (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti) giving companies free reign to spend corporate money in politics, under the preposterous doctrine that corporate spending on politics is merely free speech under the First Amendment.

Since then, the lobbies have eaten our democracy alive. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that corporations and other groups can spend an unrestricted amount of money to promote candidates has massively exacerbated the problem. Since then, campaign funding through Super PACs and dark money groups has soared.

This contradicts what Americans want for our political system. By a huge margin, 77% to 20%, according to Pew Research Center data from 2018, Americans want limits on money in politics. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court opened the way for the corporate takeover of politics through massive campaign spending. In the future, the Supreme Court’s campaign contribution decisions will be as infamous as the Court’s reactionary decisions on slavery, separate but equal, and rejection of fair labor standards in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Since the early 1980s, inequality in the US has soared. Starting with Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, the rates paid by the richest Americans have been slashed. Since then, repeated rounds of tax cuts have further benefited the rich. By 2018, the richest 400 Americans paid lower taxes as a share of income than any other income group including the poorest Americans, according to Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The environmental movement, bipartisan at its start in 1969, was similarly derailed by big money in politics. Corporate lobbies have successfully pressured government officials to gut environmental regulations. America has gone from being the world’s environmental leader to being the environmental rogue as Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the only country of the 193 UN member states to leave the accord.

Six major lobbies have taken the helm of political power. Wall Street has financialized the economy so that corporate CEOs could be paid in stock options, compensating themselves excessively more than their workers, while unions were busted and workers’ pay stagnated. Big health care has monopolized local healthcare delivery and drug prices, leading to a healthcare system that costs more per person than any other country in the world. The fossil-fuel industry (coal, oil, and gas) has fought all attempts to limit global warming, up to and including America’s withdrawal from the climate agreement. The military-industrial complex has continued to push a worldwide network of hundreds of overseas military bases and perpetual wars backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of military spending per year, much of it for private contractors. Corporate-owned prisons took the prison system private, and then lobbied for policies that result in poor African-Americans being locked up to keep the prisons full.

And now big tech uses our personal data without proper protections of privacy and monetizes the data through online advertising and manipulations of e-commerce — all the while getting the President and Congress to protect the sector from fair taxation and regulation.

The method of the corporate lobby takeover was anything but subtle. Their power is money. Over the years, these industries have contributed billions in campaign funds.

They have spent billions more on lobbying outlays, some of which have employed former Congressmen and their families, in return for previous loyal support.

America’s political system has been sold to the highest bidder. Consider some of the numbers from the 2018 election cycle. Oil and Gas spent $85 million on Congressional campaigns in 2018, of which 87% went to Republicans, and $126 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Health spent $265 million on campaigns, of which 56% went to Democrats and $568 million on lobbying.

Trump is cruder than his predecessors in support of the corporate lobbies. He is forcing out or pressuring many government scientists and replacing them with corporate shills in order to gut environmental regulations. In 2017, Trump slashed corporate taxes and “paid” for the tax cuts by running up the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the budget deficit will reach $1 trillion in 2020.

Yes, the stock market is soaring as taxes are cut, but the richest 10% of Americans account for 84% of the American stock ownership, according to a 2017 study, while 57% of the low income Americans report hardships paying their medical bills.

According to recent survey data from NPR, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a majority of people in the top 1% report themselves to be “completely” or “very satisfied” with life. No big surprise. Meanwhile, less than half of poorest Americans reported this same satisfaction. The same survey also shows that less than half of the top 1% believe that the federal government should prioritize narrowing the gap between rich and poor in the future, compared with a majority of low-income Americans. Another recent poll by Reuters and Ipsos shows a strong majority for taxing the wealth of the richest Americans.

No other high-income democracy has faced the corporate onslaught on national politics as has America. The result: America is falling behind our counterpart nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on almost all major social indicators. America’s life expectancy now ranks 28th among the OECD countries.

America is the only one of the top 25 highest income OECD countries without the guaranteed right to healthcare. It is the only industrialized nation without guaranteed paid leave for new mothers and out of the 21 richest countries in the world, the US is the only one that does not guarantee paid vacation days. It costs more to be a college student in America than any other country worldwide, leaving many with crippling student debts, now totaling around $1.5 trillion for 44.5 million Americans.

As the other high-income countries amply prove, America’s problems can be solved if our democracy can be retaken from the corporate lobbies and the big money in politics.

Bernie Sanders is running a true grassroots campaign, relying on more than 5 million individual donations so far to beat the big money. His movement harks back to the progressive era a century ago, when a similar grassroots movement successfully took on the power of the industrial robber barons of the late 19th century. Sanders’ movement aims to wrest power from the corporate lobbies to reinvigorate our democracy — and that is exactly what the country needs.

Politics this election year is therefore about the two Americas, the small group at the very top versus the common good. Trump brazenly stands on the side of the richest Americans. A true grassroots movement can restore fairness and prosperity for working Americans. The 2020 election is our urgent opportunity to retake power from the corporate lobbies and breathe new life into American democracy.

Want To Do Something About Climate Change? Follow The Money

If you asked us why a dozen people sat on the floor next to the A.T.M. in a Chase Bank branch on Friday, waiting for the police to arrest us for this small act of civil disobedience, we would come up with the same answer as the famous robber Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.”

We don’t want to empty the vaults. Instead, we want people to understand that the money inside the vaults of banks like Chase is driving the climate crisis. Cutting off that flow of cash may be the single quickest step we can take to rein in the fossil fuel industry and slow the rapid warming of the earth.

JPMorgan Chase isn’t the only offender, but it is among the worst. In the last three years, according to data compiled in a recently released “fossil fuel finance report card” by a group of environmental organizations, JPMorgan Chase lent over $195 billion to gas and oil companies.

For comparison, Wells Fargo lent over $151 billion, Citibank lent over $129 billion and Bank of America lent over $106 billion. Since the Paris climate accord, which 195 countries agreed to in 2015, JPMorgan Chase has been the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels by a 29 percent margin.

This investment sends a message that’s as clear as President Trump’s shameful decision to pull America out of that pact: Short-term profits are more important than the long-term health of the planet.

There are few financial institutions untouched by these climate change-causing investments. Amalgamated Bank, Aspiration and Beneficial State Bank are notable exceptions. Local credit unions rarely have major investments in fossil fuels.

JPMorgan Chase, in contrast, has funded the very worst projects — projects that expand the reach of fossil fuel infrastructure and lock in our dependence on fossil fuels for decades to come.

In Minnesota, for example, the Line 3 pipeline replacement project, financed in part by JPMorgan Chase, adds 337 miles of crude-oil-carrying pipeline across Minnesota.

If approved this year, the pipeline will carry 760,000 barrels of crude oil every day from Canada to terminals on the edge of Lake Superior. This project reroutes and expands existing pipelines so that more crude oil can flow to refineries in Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Ontario.

Tara Houska, a tribal attorney and member of the Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe, has demonstrated the impacts on the ground. If built, the Line 3 replacement route will endanger the wild rice crops harvested for at least 500 years by the people native to the upper Midwest. Many Ojibwe nations in the region have opposed the project.

But it’s just as damaging if the oil doesn’t spill. Refined and burned as gasoline or jet fuel, it will spew carbon into the air, raising the temperature of the planet.

The victims of climate change are primarily people who have done little to cause the crisis. A World Health Organization senior scientist, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, said in December that climate change is emerging as “potentially the greatest risk to human health in the 21st century.” In the same month, Oxfam reported that cyclones, floods and fires are now displacing three times as many people as wars.

Not all the victims of climate change are humans. An estimated 800 million animals have been killed in the Australian blazes, which came after record heat and drought. Neither of us have met a long-nosed potoroo; the news that Australia’s bush fires have likely driven it and other species to extinction makes the world seem poorer.

There’s nothing abstract about climate change any more. Slowing the pace of climate change is humanity’s great task.

One center of power in our world is political — that’s why young people have been demonstrating outside of parliaments, writing a Green New Deal and registering new voters: in the United States, 2020 will be a fateful year for changing the politics of climate.

But even if the most environmental candidates win, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be able to move our country at the pace science requires. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that if we want to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial temperatures, we will have to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, cutting them to net zero by around 2050 — and Washington is only one capitol.

It makes sense to go after the other center of power, too: the vast financial empire centered in our country. Insurance companies like Liberty Mutual and asset managers like BlackRock have also, through their investments in fossil fuels, enabled climate chaos.

These titans may be too big to pressure. Yet if we could get just one offending bank to move toward divesting from fossil fuels, the ripple effects would be both swift and global.

Imagine an announcement from JPMorgan Chase that it was immediately ending funding for new fossil fuel projects. It would echo around the world in hours, and there would be nothing the Trumps or Putins or Bolsonaros of the world could do to stop it.

We sat in and were arrested at Chase Bank on Friday for nothing smaller than the future of our planet. If you care about the climate, it’s worth moving your accounts away from these offenders. Cut up your credit cards.

If you want to stop climate change, follow the money.

Stephanie Kelton On Why Is This Happening?

Stephanie Kelton joins Hayes to discuss ‘the national deficit, the nature of money itself, federal spending, and why it’s time to stop comparing the deficit to a household budget’.

 

America’s Dangerous Iran Obsession

The US, seemingly with no awareness of its recent history with Iran, and led by an emotionally unbalanced president who believes he may commit murder and get away with it, is still acting out a 40-year-old psychological trauma. As usual, it’s others who are most at risk.

US President Donald Trump’s order to assassinate Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani while on an official mission to Iraq was widely hailed in Trump’s jingoistic Republican Party. Government-sanctioned murders of foreign officials, clerics, and journalists are commonplace nowadays. Yet there is something special about America’s bloodlust against Iran. It is a 40-year-old obsession that has now brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.

The US fixation on Iran dates back to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Iranian students took over the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. That traumatic experience has made it psychologically impossible for American politicians to calibrate US policies. It is the reason, for example, that Trump has now threatened the war crime of destroying 52 targets in Iran, including cultural sites, one for each of the 1979 hostages, if Iran retaliates for Suleimani’s murder.

Trump is claiming the right to murder a leader in a foreign country and to commit war crimes if that country retaliates. Yet this criminality is widely applauded in the US. It reflects a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder of the US political system, at least on the right. It is similar to America’s reckless launch of wars across the Middle East after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The fact that Trump is psychologically disordered adds to the fury. Recall that he famously boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue “and not lose any votes.” With his order to murder Suleimani, he is evidently determined to put that proposition to the test.

What most of the American public and much of the American political elite fail to comprehend is that the US has committed far more crimes against Iran than vice versa. The US has willfully and recklessly created an enemy for no reason other than its own misguided actions.

Consider the key milestones since the early 1950s.

First, the US and the United Kingdom overthrew Iran’s government in 1953, after the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, moved to regain control of Iran’s oil, which had been captured by the British empire. The US then replaced the democracy it had overthrown with the authoritarian regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was propped up by the SAVAK, his brutal intelligence agency and secret police, during the quarter-century from 1953 to 1978. The Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran after the deposed Shah was admitted to the US for medical treatment.

The following year, the US armed and encouraged Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to invade Iran, triggering a nearly decade-long war that killed around 500,000 Iranians. As of 2014, some 75,000 Iranians were still being treated for injuries from the chemical attacks Saddam used.

The US also hit civilian targets. In 1988, the US military shot down Iran Air 655 – easily identifiable as an Airbus A300 if the US had been taking suitable precautions – killing all 290 people on board. And in 1995, the Iranian public became subject to tough US economic sanctions that have never been removed, only tightened over time.

This continued even after 9/11. Iran supported the US-led invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, and also supported the new US-backed president, Hamid Karzai. Yet in January 2002, US President George W. Bush called Iran part of an “Axis of Evil,” along with Saddam’s Iraq and North Korea.

Likewise, rather than press all Middle East countries, including Israel (with an estimated 80 nuclear warheads), to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and support efforts to establish a nuclear-free region, the US exclusively pressured Iran.

Then, in 2015, the US, under President Barack Obama, the UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany, negotiated a deal with Iran under which Iran agreed to end its nuclear reprocessing in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions by the US and others. The United Nations Security Council unanimously backed the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Yet, according to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the JCPOA was an act of appeasement. Trump unilaterally repudiated the deal in 2018, the only signatory to do so, and then dramatically tightened US sanctions.

The purpose of stricter sanctions is to crush the Iranian economy in an attempt to destabilize the regime. Iran is now in a US-induced depression, with GDP down 14% between 2017 and 2019 and inflation in 2019 at 36% (both according to recent IMF estimates), and severe shortages of medicines and other vital goods. Meanwhile, despite repudiating the JCPOA, the US has continued to insist that Iran abide by its terms.

The US, seemingly with no awareness of this history, and led by an emotionally unbalanced president who believes he may commit murder in broad daylight and get away with it, is still acting out a 40-year-old psychological trauma.

At this moment, the world should remember the wise and enduring words of a very different type of US president. In June 1963, just months before himself falling victim to an assassin, John F. Kennedy addressed the Irish Parliament:

“[A]cross the gulfs and barriers that now divide us, we must remember that there are no permanent enemies. Hostility today is a fact, but it is not a ruling law. The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God and our common vulnerability on this planet.”

There is no reason why Iran and the US could not be at peace. By building on the 2015 nuclear agreement and their many common interests, a new relationship is yet possible. But with Iran’s retaliation already underway, it is especially urgent now that the European Union not follow the reckless Trump administration into a spiral of escalation that could result in war.

Corporate Social Responsibility Is A Scam

Boeing recently fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg in order “to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”

Restore confidence? Muilenburg’s successor will be David Calhoun who, as a long-standing member of Boeing’s board of directors, allowed Muilenburg to remain CEO for more than a year after the first 737 Max crash and after internal studies found that the jetliner posed an unacceptable risk of accident. It caused the deaths of 346 people.

Muilenburg raked in $30 million in 2018. He could walk away from Boeing with another $60 million.

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, of which Muilenburg is a director – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original) and not just their shareholders.

Rubbish. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

Another Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Some 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Meanwhile, GM’s stock has performed so well that Barra earned $22 million last year.

Another prominent Business Roundtable CEO who made the commitment to all his stakeholders is AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs with the billions the company received from the Trump tax cut.

Instead, AT&T has cut more than 30,000 jobs since the tax cut went into effect.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment to all his stakeholders, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $110 billion – makes in two hours. (Bezos’s nearly-completed D.C. mansion will have 2 elevators, 25 bathrooms, 11 bedrooms, and a movie theater.)

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. Culp raked in $15 million last year.

The list goes on. Just in time for the holidays, US Steel announced 1,545 layoffs at two plants in Michigan. Last year, five US Steel executives received an average compensation package of $4.8 million, a 53 percent increase over 2017.

Instead of a holiday bonus this year, Walmart offered its employees a 15 percent store discount. Oh, and did I say? Walmart saved $2.2 billion this year from the Trump tax cut.

The giant tax cut itself was a product of the Business Roundtable’s extensive lobbying, lubricated by its generous campaign donations. Several of its member corporations, including Amazon and General Motors, wound up paying no federal income taxes at all last year.

Not incidentally, the tax cut will result in less federal money for services on which Americans and their communities rely.

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before, in order to further boost record profits and unprecedented CEO pay.

Americans know this. In the most recent Pew survey, a record 73 percent of U.S. adults (including 62 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Republicans earning less than $30,000 a year) believe major corporations have too much power. And 65 percent believe they make too much profit.

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, making corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.

If the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws. Don’t hold your breath.

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the con it is.