What broke Washington: Philip K. Howard, Esq., Unmasked

According to Philip Howard, a Washington lawyer who represents corporations and does their will, the ills being suffered by our society are due to too many laws and regulatory restraints. Howard has whined about this many places, but most recently in a Washington Post OpEd. This sounds a lot like what Republicans have been telling us for years. The American Legal Exchange Council (ALEC) has been conning Republican state legislatures into limiting the ability of the average citizen to sue a corporation which has harmed them. Republicans call this "tort reform". I call it, protecting corporations from the consequences of their own crimes.

Enraged citizens forced tobacco companies to put warning labels on their deadly products by suing corporations in court with class action suits. People dying of cancer on account of exposure to asbestos forced corporations to pay for their medical bills using class action suits. Drivers forced car makers to recall dangerously defective models by suing them in court. Now, citizens are suing coal and oil companies to stop them polluting the environment with mountaintop removal, fracking, and greenhouse gases.

These crimes have been huge and corporations would have gotten away with them but for laws that protect us. The conspiracy of energy moguls to keep spewing out greenhouse gases is the most deadly of all these crimes. Worldwide, millions of people are threatened by global warming, but the energy companies spend millions on propaganda trying to convince us that there is no problem here, and we should just move on. The problem affects the entire planet, of course, and we have nowhere to move on to.

Lawyer Howard does not attempt to hide his sympathies. He lists the plaintiff's bar as one of the culprits in What Broke Washington. The plaintiff's bar is what gives people the right to sue corporations when they lose a lung or break a leg due to some action of an irresponsible corporate executive. Without a plaintiff's bar, corporations can do as they please and let the public pay to clean up the mess later. Some people call this policy "libertarianism". I call it plutocracy, the rule of the many by the most wealthy.

Howard claims another problem is our huge deficit. Many others disagree. They say the deficit is not now nor ever has been a problem. We can pay it down slowly, when the economy is healthy, but we should never make budget cuts that affect the poor when the poor are already bearing the brunt of failed policies of the past. We should rather force the wealthiest 1% to disgorge their millions through a tax on wealth that they can well afford and that will not affect the other 99% of Americans.

Howard blames our failure to repair our aging roads and railroads on Obama and the economic stimulus act passed in 2009. The economic stimulus act budgeted a mere 3% for road repair. Somehow, Howard expects us to believe that the law itself is to blame, perhaps by magic. But it was politicians, Republicans and conservative Democrats, who cut infrastructure funds from that bill and concentrated on giving tax refunds. Tax refunds may be laudable, but they will never repair our potholes.

Lawyer Howard is trying a classic courtroom maneuver, getting his readers to ignore the real problem by pointing to smaller, inconsequential ones. Everyone knows (or should know by now) that what broke Washington is the influence of corporations and their money. Congress can't pass an energy bill, or an immigration bill, or a farm reform bill, or a tax reform bill, or an infrastructure repair bill, because conservative congressmen are too cowardly to vote against the lobbyists who fund their campaigns and send them on junkets to Abu Dhabi.

The solution to congressional deadlock is not to further weaken laws that protect the people from the powerful and irresponsible 1%. The solution is to elect congresspersons with brains and backbones who will pass laws necessary to resolve our problems. These congresspersons will necessarily represent the people and not the 1%. This is a meaningful goal, and not impossible. Lawyer Howard's suggestions would make the 1% happier and sink the rest of us deeper into the morass of plutocracy.

Howard has formed Common Good, a non-profit organization, to push these libertarian doctrines. On its home page, Common Good pretends to be a non-partisan reform coalition, with new ideas. On closer examination, these claims prove false. The Advisory Board includes some middle-of-the-road Republicans like Howard Baker and Jeb Bush. Otherwise, the Board is not a coalition at all, but a bunch of Republicans and corporate front groups like the Manhattan Institute and the Blackstone Group. The ideas Common Good espouses, as noted above, are not new and have been advocated by ALEC and the ultra-conservative American Tort Reform Association, since as early as 1986. I conclude that Common Good itself is a front group for medical corporations and legal firms that want to limit their liability while they continue to kill us.

There once was a liberal on the Common Good Advisory Board: George McGovern. He is still listed on their "about-us" page, but McGovern died in 2012. I don't blame Common Good for mentioning him, though. They want to preserve a semblance of bipartisanship that no longer exists.

Kochistan: the libertarian fantasies of the Koch brothers

This is the decade of libertarianism. Two billionaires, Charles and David Koch, are spending vast fortunes to convince Americans that we can have a utopian society if we embrace libertarian ideals and elect Republicans to office. The Kochs have been successful to a great degree. Several states have elected Republican legislatures intent on turning back progressive programs from the last century.

Right now, residents of those states are seeing some of the results of this rejection of progressive ideas. New Jersey has reduced taxes and lost so much revenue that its bond rating has been reduced six times, meaning that the state will have to pay more and more interest on money it has already borrowed. Other states have reduced the ability of unions to organize, the ability of women to obtain birth control and abortions, and the ability of lower income people to vote.

So far, so good. The Kochs have succeeded in bringing politicians to their banner. But that is the easy part, after all. Politicians are available to be bought, and the Kochs have more money than God. The hard part will be to convince the populace that the libertarian utopia is a place they would like to live in. Fortunately, we have a genius who once lived in that utopia and described it for us. His name is Charles Dickens.

Dickens lived in England when industrialists had everything their own way. They expelled peasants from their land so it could be used to raise sheep—wool was the commodity that brought wealth to England in those days. The peasants, now without farms to work, migrated to the cities, which became the nightmarish place so well described in such books as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and Little Dorrit. What were the institutions that made this place a hell for so many of its inhabitants?

First off, there was no birth control, which Republicans seem intent on outlawing. So there were plenty of orphans. The industrialists could use these orphans as factory workers, for there were no laws against child labor. Some orphans were cared for in orphanages, operated for profit, which created the kind of hunger described so vividly in Oliver Twist:

[the proprietors] established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.

Here you see the libertarian nature of the orphanage, or the workhouse, for they were the same place. No one is compelled to enter the place. Each person has the option of starving in the streets or starving in the workhouses.

Another institution of the libertarian utopia is the debtor's prison. A person who cannot pay a debt must be sent to prison, where they sit until the debt is repaid, or the rest of their lives, if it is not. There were thousands upon thousands of unemployed workers in England. The factories automated production so that only a few workers could do work that previously had kept many employed.

Here again we see the beauty of the free market at work. People who cannot find gainful employment are thrown back upon their own devices. The children became petty thieves and were hanged for it. The men became soldiers or criminals, although there was little difference between the two professions in those days. Soldiers relied on loot to supplement their wages. It was a kind of legal robbery.

Poor women had a harder life, of course. There were many more women than men, so marriage was not an option for perhaps 750,000 women in Dickens's England. Single women could become servants for the wealthy or prostitutes. Here again we see the operation of the market place, which libertarians place above any governmental program. Women were free to sell their services on the open market. They did what they had to do to survive.

Dickens's libertarian utopia can better be described by what it lacked. There was no social security to provide retirement income for the elderly. There was no medical care for the poor, since only the middle class could afford doctors. There was no unemployment insurance. If you couldn't find a job, you were once again thrown into the marketplace: You could commit a crime or starve to death.

There was one safety valve for the poor in Dickens's England. The poor could emigrate to America or Australia or South Africa. Millions of poor people did just that. But there would be no safety valve in Koch's libertarian utopia. The poor could beg in the streets or starve.

Rather than listen to the blandishments of libertarian apologists like Rand Paul or Charles Koch, we should ask ourselves if we would like to live in the libertarian utopia of Kochistan. It's a great place if you're wealthy, but hell if you are not.

David Koch wants you to elect Rand Paul president

Rand Paul will be the Republican candidate for president in 2016. He is well-known, partly because of his father's notoriety. People have a generally good opinion of him. His public statements are frequently rational  and appeal to libertarians on the right and the left. Most importantly, the Koch Brothers, billionaire backers of regressive candidates and causes, claim to be libertarians and will be eager to back a candidate who also claims to be libertarian.

Libertarian politics are not a new idea. Nearly 300 years ago, philosophers and politicians in Europe began preaching that the government oppresses the individual. In order to be truly free, they argued, an individual must be free from any governmental coercion whatsoever. Libertarians of that time advocated freedom from the church as well as the state, since in Europe church and state were often one and the same.

Above all, these early libertarians advocated freedom from oppression by an aristocracy. The aristocracy in Europe held hereditary positions and wealth. The common people could not get those things in the ordinary course of events. Therefore, libertarians like Thomas Paine argued for the abolition of aristocracy and a government that would be responsive to the people.

Times change. We do have a hereditary aristocracy now in this country. The children of the rich eat better food, wear better clothes, go to better schools, and live a better life than the children of the poor. This aristocratic system is far from the one that patriots like Paine sought to install when they called for a rebellion against England. The Americans abolished hereditary titles, but they did not establish a system that guaranteed equal access to wealth for all.

Libertarians like Thomas Paine rebelled not only against the government, but also against church and the wealthy. Libertarians like Paul would like us to forget that. They consider the government alone to be the enemy of the individual, not the social structure that supports the government. In recent years, the government has become the strongest support for the poor and elderly. Cutting government programs frequently means taking bread away from poor children and comfort away from the elderly and infirm.

Rand Paul advocates freedom, but only in a general sense. He never explains what freedoms he endorses and what may be the end result of these freedoms. He has said that a private business should have the freedom to refuse service to a minority member. The end result of this freedom would be a restitution of the segregation laws that kept black Americans from enjoying their constitutional rights for more than a century.

Paul says he is proud to be a Republican because Republicans in Kentucky abolished the Jim Crow system there. Those Republicans may have done so, but starting in 1964 the Democrats in the South began changing allegiance to the Republican party. The map of the electoral votes shows that the states that were solidly Democratic in the 1950s are solidly Republican now.

Paul and his fellow Republicans would like the rest of us to forget that the federal government provides solace to millions and prevents the wealthy from riding rough-shod over the disadvantaged. Paul will likely be the Republican candidate for president in 2016. His presidency will further deepen the divisions that beset the country. Paul has no solutions to offer for healing these divisions. Instead, he offers slogans, half-truths, and an inflexible philosophy.

Rand Paul advocates segregation, Paul Ryan advocates decimation.

Adherents of libertarian philosophies enjoy wide-spread popularity these days. Their views coincide generally with American ideals. Patrick Henry summed up his animus against the British crown in 1775 by saying, "Give me liberty or give me death." America's schoolchildren conclude each pledge to the flag with the words, "With liberty and justice for all."

As much as Americans idealize liberty, they seldom offer a realistic definition of the word, which means many things to different people. So Rand Paul, a self-identifying libertarian, has stated that liberty means the freedom to refuse service to African Americans at lunch counters and hotels. This comment has endeared him to the crypto-racists of the Republican heartland. I call them crypto-racists because they refuse to admit their own obvious racism and steadfastly maintain, contrary to all available evidence, that white racism no longer exists.

Rand Paul's extreme views place him in the forefront of Republican presidential hopefuls, largely because billionaire David Koch is an ardent libertarian. Koch is likely to spend $100 million or more of his vast fortune to insure the election of a libertarian Republican president. For David and his brother Charles, liberty means the freedom to pollute the environment and endanger the future of the planet by denying the influence of humans—especially himself—on global warming.

Paul Ryan, another Republican politician with libertarian ideals, has attacked the federal government for giving lunch money to disadvantaged children. He says this practice feeds their bodies but starves their souls. The soul, however, cannot be separated from the body except by death.  Whatever benefit a child may gain from refusing a subsidized lunch will be destroyed by malnutrition and ultimate starvation.

Here the philosophy of libertarianism jumps the tracks and starts gnawing at the roots of our democracy. Ryan is apparently applying the views of Patrick Henry, since he unequivocally states that a child would be better off dead than enslaved by free food from the government. Ryan does not betray an iota of satire here, as did Jonathan Swift when he proposed a similar solution to the problem of poverty. He is deadly serious when he advocates helping poor children by refusing them food.

Wealthy businessmen have been the core of Republican power since the party's inception. Their philosophy has always been that whatever is good for business is good for the USA. The Kochs have added a new wrinkle to this self-serving attitude, for they maintain that whatever is good for the Kochs is good for the world. They express this belief repeatedly, by their public pronouncements and their secret donations to organizations and candidates that happily envisage the death of civilization rather than pay an extra dime to protect the environment.