Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

by Robert B. Reich

As I will explain, the biggest political divide in America in years to come will not be between the Republican and Democratic parties. It will be between the complex of large corporations, Wall Street banks, and the very rich that has fixed the economic and political game to their liking, and the vast majority who, as a result, find themselves in a fix.

In order to have a “free market,” decisions must be made about • PROPERTY: what can be owned • MONOPOLY: what degree of market power is permissible • CONTRACT: what can be bought and sold, and on what terms • BANKRUPTCY: what happens when purchasers can’t pay up • ENFORCEMENT: how to make sure no one cheats on any of these rules

In 2010, a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations are people under the First Amendment, entitled to freedom of speech. Therefore, said the court, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (commonly referred to as the McCain-Feingold Act), which had limited spending by corporations on political advertisements, violated the Constitution and was no longer the law of the land.

Another consequence has been to reduce the freedoms of ordinary working people in the workplace.

It is illegal for Americans to shop at foreign pharmacies for cheaper versions of the same drugs sold in the United States, either branded or generic. In 2012, Congress authorized U.S. Customs to destroy any such medications. The ostensible reason is to protect the public from dangerous counterfeit drugs. But for at least a decade before then, during which time tens of millions of prescriptions were filled over the Internet, no case was reported of Americans having been harmed by medications bought online from a foreign pharmacy. The real reason for the ban is to protect the profits of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, which lobbied intensely for it.

Most of those old copyrights are now scheduled to expire in 2023. It

Monsanto, the giant biotech corporation, owns the key genetic traits in more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States and 80 percent of the corn.

The employees of Goldman Sachs were Obama’s leading source of campaign donations from a single corporate workforce.

We are now in a new gilded age of wealth and power similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. The political effects of concentrated economic power are no less important now than they were then, and the failure of modern antitrust to address them is surely related to the exercise of that power itself. In this new gilded age, we should remind ourselves of a central guiding purpose of America’s original antitrust law and use it no less boldly.