And You Thought Political Reform Was A New Idea…

OK, here’s your civics quiz for the week. Who said the following?

“It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form … they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations … Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions … In the interests of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations … The nation should … also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business.”

Still stumped? Well, the same person said this:

“The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them whenever need of such control is shown …”

All right, while you are thinking about whom may have uttered the foregoing, who said this?

“… Our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks today … The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.”

President Theodore Roosevelt made all of those discerning remarks over a 100 years ago when he was battling the big corporations (“trusts), which were attempting to gain monopolistic control over various sectors of our economy. Folks back then called it “trust busting” when Roosevelt used the Sherman Act to break up the illegal monopolies.

History tells us that the last time somebody actually successfully brought Big Oil to heel, was Teddy Roosevelt. At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the ol’ Roughrider rode roughshod over John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil antitrust case that defined — for a while anyway — just how big and powerful one company should be. Since then, anti-trust action has become a quaint, nearly extinct governmental power seldom exercised to prevent the rigging of the marketplace. After all, the global marketplace requires global-sized “competitors.” And Globalism finds Republicans and Democrats joined at the hip in their rabid support for a new world order where workers, small business operators, and the middle class are all listed on the economic extinction list.

At one time, anti-trust legislation and enforcement was one of the main planks in the platforms of both political parties.

Isn’t it amazing, just a hundred years ago we had people in public office who understood how government should work. TR was a Republican, his cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a Democrat. They both set this country back on course in perilous economic times. It can be argued that Teddy and FDR saved capitalism from self-destruction. The former broke up the monopolies that were strangling the country’s life breath; the latter glued back together the shattered pieces of a country depressed in spirit and economy, and later would lead the nation to victory in a world war.

One of my boyhood idols was, and is, Bill Bradley, a celebrated collegiate and professional basketball player and former Rhodes scholar, who once had been hailed as an emerging star in the Democratic Party who twice ran for President.

First elected to the Senate in 1978, he emerged as the leader on a major issue only a few times—most notably in shaping the 1986 tax reform bill. In his first two terms, he tended to focus on one issue at a time—whether it was tax policy or relations with the former Soviet Union. After almost losing his seat in 1990, however, he broadened his strategy to encompass more issues—most notably race relations and the economic troubles of the middle class and the poor.

In 1996, he denounced politics in America as” broken”, then announced he would step down at the end of his third term in 1997.

“We live in a time when, on a basic level, politics is broken,” Bradley explained. “In growing numbers, people have lost faith in the political process and don’t see how it can help their threatened circumstances.”

He went onto say, “The political debate has settled into two familiar ruts. The Republicans are infatuated with the ‘magic’ of the private sector and reflexively criticize government as the enemy of freedom, and the Democrats distrust the market, preach government as the answer to our problems and prefer the bureaucrat they know to the consumer they can’t control.”

It kind of makes you both sad and angry that politics are now so broke.

Maybe what is needed today is not a reform of government.

Maybe all we need to do is to return to a government that was reformed a long time ago.

(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)