HOME
DV NEWS
SERVICE ARCHIVE SUBMISSIONS/CONTACT ABOUT DV
Has
the American Enterprise Institute
Lost
Contact with Reality?
by
Ralph Nader
June
14, 2003
The
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has a problem. It is loaded with corporate
money, full of rich fellowships for Washington, D.C. influence peddlers,
masquerading as conservatives, who wallow in plush offices figuring out how to
assure that big corporations rule the U.S. and the rest of the world.
During
the past twenty-two years, the AEI, their nearby corporate patrons, their
allied trade associations and corporate "think tanks" have, in
effect, taken over the executive branch, the Congress and promoted the
judgeships of right-wing corporate lawyers demanding another salary increase.
The
Clinton administration hardly slowed their stride. In fact one high official of
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told me that they loved the Clinton government.
Why not, under Clinton they got corporate-managed trade called NAFTA and WTO,
laws furthering media, telecommunications, agribusiness, banking, brokerage and
insurance industry concentration, weak to nonexistent regulation, a chronic
softness on corporate crimes against pensioners and small investors, and a
pathetically indifferent consumer and labor policy - to name a few surrenders.
What's
left to do? How does the AEI keep its corporate supremacists writing those big
checks? How to avoid institutional ennui? Why, go after the liberal or
progressive non-governmental associations (NGO's). Describe them as a collage
of Goliaths running an all-points wrecking machine over government and
business. Open a theater of the absurd.
On
Wednesday, June 11, 2003 the AEI held such a forum on what to do about this
burgeoning civic menace, as they contrive it. Speaker after speaker weighed in
with their strained fulminations.
The
room was full, of course, with AEI partisans nodding in agreement. These are
the affluent ones who cavil against living wages by janitors who clean their
offices, farm workers who harvest their food and hospital workers who care for
their parents. These are the fully health-insured comforted ones who assail
pleas for universal health insurance for over 45 million American children and
adults and those who have contempt for the environmental groups that care about
stopping toxic polluters in poorer areas of the country, while living in
shrubbered suburbs far from the incinerators and waste dumps.
Here
was speaker, Jon Entine of Miami University, describing "capitalism's
trojan horse: reasonable people should be concerned about the growing influence
of the social investment community, and its emerging partnership with NGOs,
most of which share a knee jerk demonization of corporations and free markets.
Its leaders are products of the activist community, yet they are different and
more dangerous."
Whoa!
Trying to persuade shareholders to press for more corporate responsibility, in
the midst of a corporate crime wave by the managers, is somehow subversive in
his mind. How dare the social investment community advise its clients about
corporate misbehavior and urge the owners (shareholders) to exercise more
control over their own companies.
Nothing
quite captures AEI's intent better than the official AEI statement announcing
the conference. Some of its words bear quoting:
"NGOs
have created their own rules and regulations and demanded that governments and
corporations abide by those rules. Many nations' legal systems encourage NGOs
to use the courts - or the specter of the courts - to compel compliance."
"Politicians
and corporate ledgers are often forced to respond to the NGO media machine, and
the resources of taxpayers and shareholders are used in support of ends they
did not intend to sanction. The extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in
liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of
constitutional democracies, as well as the effectiveness of credible
NGOs."
Has
AEI lost contact with reality? This is what democracy is all about -
advocating, petitioning, suing, lobbying and urging power centers like
government and business to do better. AEI has its own positions, together with
its corporate allies doing all this and much more with corporate campaign cash
and economic power ultimatums. Somehow, citizen groups, that have no
governmental power - either in fact or by purchase - have become a threat to
"constitutional democracies." Has the AEI read our nation's Bill of
Rights? What they are condemning, with vague, ironic regulatory nostrums
proposed against dissenting citizen groups, is democracy itself. What the
AEIstas prefer is plutocracy.
These
corporate think tanks have spent too much time talking to themselves in too
comfortable sinecures. They are afflicted by what George Will called
"pitiless abstractions" (in a column against anti-air bag interests).
They need to visit factories, foundries, mines, hospitals, prisons, slums,
trailer parks and small farms for some sensitivity training.
Maybe
alleviating their chronic empirical starvation will tap some residual humanity
that places people before corporations. They might remember that two hundred
years ago, the early corporations in New England were chartered by state
legislatures to be our servants, not our masters.
For
more elaboration by the dreaded NGOs, see www.actagainstwar.org/dc and www.citizenworks.org.
Ralph Nader is America’s
leading consumer advocate. He is the founder of numerous public interest groups
including Public Citizen, and has twice
run for President as a Green Party candidate. His
latest book is Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for
President (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)