Big business has played a major role in the American people’s everyday life for a long time. American citizens are affected by their presence when they buy products or services from them. They are also affected if they live in the near vicinity of them, because they often provide economic support for the surrounding areas. However, recently, they have started effecting people’s everyday lives in a much different sense. Big businesses have regularly been overstepping their "boundaries" of the economic world into the arena of politics. For democracy, this can be a very dangerous prospect when businesses have more power than the citizens do in influencing politics. This issue is everyone’s concern, because it is everyone’s rights that are being abused in this unbalanced power struggle. However, this intrusion into the political realm has been self-perpetuating for years, and it is a process that can not easily be stopped.
American politics. The country, and your life, is run by it, but what is it really? The voice of the people? In essence, that is the basic idea of democracy. However, with influence from the media, politics has become an ongoing campaign; those freshly elected to office have to already begin planning how to gain sufficient capital to finance their bid for power when their term expires in four years. That is what it has really become, a bid for power.
To be successful in politics, you need to have a good idea, and then get it out into the world. I don’t care if you have a political concept that will eliminate all social problems, feed the hungry, reduce inner city poverty levels, and eliminate the national debt. If you don’t have a medium to transfer that idea to the mass public, you will never get anywhere. If you want to get elected, you need to utilize the mass media. You need to be on all the talk shows. Your ideas need to rain from the radio waves. Campaign posters and fliers need to be plastered on every building and telephone pole across voting America. This, of course, requires capital: money. There is a limited amount of ways to acquire capital.
People who share your ideas and values may make personal contributions to your campaign. However, the big money comes into play when the large enterprises open their checkbooks. You control Microsoft Corporation. There are two sides running for office, Side Big, and Side Small. Side Big supports deregulation of large businesses, and Side Small wants to cut down on the overgrowth of corporate monopolies. As Bill Gates, a plainly intelligent move would be to support the former of the two’s campaign. However, in today’s political arena, as a business move, that would be risky. Say Side Small takes the election. It is quite obvious that there would be a good chance that the great bush of Microsoft would be separated into many micro-Microsofts. How can a large company avoid such a fate?
To alleviate that risk, you then contribute to both sides’ campaign finance. Now if Side Small wins, they still owe you, and you can influence them by pressuring them to change their ideas of breaking apart monopolies, or at least have them keep their hedge clippers away from Microsoft. Let’s turn the tables.
You are a small business, struggling to make a profit year after year. You deal in computers. To you, Side Small sounds like the way to go. You make a contribution; as much as you can spare. However, when compared, your bid means nothing to Side Small when set next to Microsoft’s. Sorry folks, but Side Small has been bought out of their ideals.
So big businesses have learned to play both sides, and with their influence, "guide" politics in a way that benefits them. That only makes sense, right? Turn a profit by any means necessary, even if it means brain washing the populating to buy a product. Tom Frank feels somewhat this way in his essay "Dark Age: Why Johnny Can’t Dissent." Or is there more to it? "And as every aspect of American cultural production is brought safely into the fold, business texts crow proudly of the new technologies which promise to complete the circle for corporate domination. The delivery of such eagerly-awaited…will reorganize human relations generally around an indispensable corporate intermediary." (Frank, pg180) Are businesses positioning themselves so much in American life that American culture would come to a lurching halt if they denied their services?
The real question here is whether or not big businesses should have this kind of influence over our political structure and our everyday lives. Is there really a problem with that? There is a definite correlation between the economy and people’s everyday lives. It could be asserted that when the economy is doing well, then everything is doing well. If the economy is in a slump, then the despondency spills over onto everybody’s lives. If the economy is in control of our everyday lives already, then why not cut out the political middlemen? That could make the entire economical system more efficient. Politicians are always going to big businesses begging form cash, and consumers are always eagerly awaiting the next great advance in technology to make their lives better and happier. The Pentium 5! Faster wireless Internet access! With all these politicians muddying up the link between business and consumer, why not just take them out of the picture? Communism was as idea that a capitalist society’s working class would overthrow the government and everyone would be worriless and insanely happy. That didn’t work, so why now tip it the other way, with businesses overthrowing the government? What can’t big business provide you that the government can’t?
That example is extreme, but you may be asking, "Just how do the businesses fit in to the bigger picture?" Well, like the government’s judicial, executive, and legislative branches, exerting their checks and balances over each other, culture has a similar system. Some of the main components of culture are businesses and the media, the political system, and the masses. However, unlike the checks and balances shared by the branches of government, the branches of culture are not so equally matched.
The politicians have power to make the rules that the people and businesses must follow, but they can only do this if they are elected by the masses. To get elected, the politicians rely on big businesses supporting their campaigns. So even though the politicians can potentially regulate the businesses, to achieve that power, they must first get the businesses’ aid. So, the businesses have more power the politicians than the people have.
The businesses provide goods for the people. To businesses, the masses could be described as little dollar signs; just more opportunities to make money. The businesses have the power over the people. The masses rely on them to provide them goods to purchase. If the businesses happen to do something to something that the certain people in the masses don’t like of approve of, they have the ability to protest or boycott. These small groups have varying degrees of success, but their actual gains toward their goals, many times, come up short of perfection. The businesses have the upper hand in this battle as well.
Then where do the people stand? This is a democracy, right? Where do the people have their say in the running of the country? By whom they elect, supposedly. But the politicians who are in office already owe the businesses that helped them get there. Politics has become so complicated that the average person doesn’t know what is actually going on behind the scenes. And the politicians and the businesses don’t want people to know this. To convey what they are doing, politicians have even come up with their own "language," something Orwell discussed in "Politics and the English language." "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." (Orwell, pg370) Politicians cover up their acts behind a barrier of words. "Anonymous corporate donors have subsidized their need for campaign finance," instead of, "Yeah, McDonald’s bought us our way into office. Oh, by the way, we’re lowering health standards on imported beef…" However, many times, there is no discussion about these "deals" at all, and the politicians do things to try and keep it from the public. This sort of shady dealing has integrated itself so deeply into politics, it has become entrenched into political culture.
Today’s culture as we know it has settled into a trend of having the businesses dictating policy to the politicians and the politicians in turn dictating to the masses, where the we, the people, have little discourse against either of them. Even if the politician agrees with the public, there isn’t much that they can do against businesses, for they rely on them to get elected. Big businesses have too much power over the political system. If this trend continues at the rate it has been going over the past decades, then big businesses may merge and then hold a monopoly over the entire political system from buying all the politicians into office.
A valid counter argument could possibly consist of "Not all politicians take money from big businesses." This may be correct, but businesses know this as well. They know that politicians need money to become elected and corporate sponsorships do make gathering that capital much easier. Basically, if a politician doesn’t take money from a corporation, that business will have even more incentive to support that politician’s opponent, regardless of the candidate’s position on issues affecting their company. If a business can buy a politician, any one will do. This, in turn, gives politicians incentives to take the money. If they don’t take it, their opposition will, and that would be a daft move to make. It is better to be in power with big business influences than not in power at all… However, the purpose of this essay is not to give big corporations a bad rap.
Do any people in the business world have ambitions of ruling the economy? Possibly. What about ruling the nation? Not any realistic entrepreneur of today. However, it has been a trend that businesses have slowly gained more and more power in these aspects, things that they have never before traditionally been able to influence as strongly, or at all. These big businesses tactics can be related somewhat to Darwin’s "Survival of the Fittest" theory. Big businesses are just trying to move themselves to be in the best economic position possible, which is perfectly understandable. However, their means of achieving this is something to give attention to, for it may pose social and cultural problems in the future. As the phrase goes, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely;" if big businesses aren’t stopped, they may soon have the unhealthy control that was discussed earlier.
Since the politicians don’t have the power to stop this "takeover," how can this possible future to be averted? With the people standing up to the biggest problem of all: their own ignorance of the workings of politics and the world around them. Only when people actively participate and keep informed of what is happening, will a true democratic society emerge. This is the responsibility of everyone as citizens to reassert the American public back into the balance of power, by keeping informed.
This will have to be done by people individually, because nobody else is going to tell us how to do it. Robert McChesney knows that businesses and the media have a monopoly on information, "Today some seven or eight firms dominate the U.S. media system, owning all the major film studios, music companies, TV networks, cable TV channels, and much, much else." (McChesney , pg341) and they are not going to give up their power willingly.
Is that to say that big businesses need to be cut out of the loop, broken down into small pieces, and kept under strict regulation? Definitely not. This goes against American values of capitalism and the free market. Plus, that would cause the economy to take a sever blow to its foundation. Simply, the most efficient way to keep big businesses from influencing politics is to impose stricter regulation on political campaign finance and the ability for large companies to donate insane amounts of money to them. This would take big businesses influence out the political playing field and not affect the businesses in any earth-shattering way. Also, since the regulations would apply to all parties in government, then it would make all politicians play by the same rules, thus not affecting their campaigns in any unfair way.
Businesses are good and our economy and country would not run without their existence. However, they are businesses, not political interest groups. Keep the businesses from buying political power, and the balance that was intended by the founders of America will be restored between the politicians and the people.
