Monday, April 11, 2011
The Nineteenth-Century Eclipse of Democratic Governance by Capitalism. Part III: The Robber Barons
Posted by Find Insurance Online at 12:20 AMBy the end of the nineteenth century, a small group of “robber barons,” the captains of industry, had come to hold such tremendous power in the American republics that those captains of industry could influence government policy profoundly, even when they stood to gain financially. According to Brands, “Wealth had always conferred power, but never had a class of Americans been so wealthy as the great capitalists of the late nineteenth century, and never had such a small class wielded such incommensurate power.” (1) Such power was an inherent threat to the republic itself and its democratic foundation based on the equality of one citizen, one vote. The “great capitalists” could use their power, for example, to buy office holders of various stripes in order to evade governmental constraints and even profit by government policy and its largess.
Brands maintains, for instance, that “(i)n accomplishing its revolution, capitalism threatened to eclipse American democracy. . . . Rockefeller [for example] held whole regions hostage to his petroleum monopoly; he browbeat city governments, extorted favors from the states, and defied the federal government to rein him in.” (2) When the Ohio Supreme Court went after his company for restraint of trade in the early 1890s, for example, the monopolist simply converted the Standard companies into a giant trust. Even when facing the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court breaking up the Standard Oil Trust in 1913, each of the resulting companies had the same ownership as before. In fact, the managements of those companies continued to work in the same building in New York City! Rockefeller’s monopoly could even get around the U.S. Supreme Court, to say nothing of the impact in terms of favorable legislation from campaign contributions and bribes paid to elected representatives.
In the twentieth century, large American corporations had war-chests of funds to contribute to political campaigns and otherwise purchase media spots. The leverage of capitalists over government and democracy by that time can be summed up by Sen. Dick Durbin’s comment after Wall Street effectively killed an amendment that would have given judges the power to adjust the sub-prime mortgage terms for those facing foreclosures after the financial crisis of 2008. Durbin simply said, “The banking lobby owns Congress.” (3) That bankers could write (or sabotage) legislation bearing on themselves even in the wake of a financial crisis in which the banks were at least contributory negligent (e.g., liars loans) furnishes us with a stark indication of what has followed from the trajectory of capitalists over democracy that occurred in the nineteenth century.
Click to add a question or comment on the eclipse of democracy by the robber barons.
1. Henry W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010), p. 7.
2. Ibid. See also my chapters on John D. Rockefeller in Godliness and Greed. See also my related essay on the efficacy of religio-moral constraints on greed.
3. Ryan Grim, “Dick Durbin: Banks “Frankly Own the Place,” The Huffington Post. April 29, 2009. See also my essay on the banking lobby in Congress.
3. Ryan Grim, “Dick Durbin: Banks “Frankly Own the Place,” The Huffington Post. April 29, 2009. See also my essay on the banking lobby in Congress.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Search
0 comments:
Post a Comment