The World’s Most Powerful Corporation

In USA Today, Michael Medved paints a surprising yet illuminating picture:

What’s the most powerful, arrogant and dangerous corporation in the world?

BP, the much reviled energy company, isn’t even close: With just 80,000 employees, it boasts a mere fraction of the more than 4 million workers and contractors that the biggest, baddest corporation commands. The investment bankers at Goldman Sachs enjoy enormous influence and prodigious profits, but their gross revenue in 2009 of $51.6 billion was dwarfed by a far more formidable operation that took in more than $2.1 trillion.

No corporation on the planet comes close to the United States government in sheer magnitude, or unimaginable, unprecedented power. The nation’s top 100 corporations combined still fall far short of the behemoth in Washington, D.C., which conducts extensive operations in agriculture, weapons production, medical care, housing, real estate, education, mail delivery, policing, resource development, banking, the arts, security services, food provision, transportation and much, much more. Within five years, federal spending will consume 25% of every dollar generated by the private economy.

Every American feels the dramatic, relentless growth of federal power, but a dwindling minority — less than one-quarter, according to pollsters — wants Washington to do even more.

Most citizens recognize that government does play a necessary and useful role in our lives: We rely on federal highways, for instance, enjoy national parks, and feel grateful for inspections that keep our drugs and food supply relatively safe. Nevertheless, an emerging consensus suggests that bureaucrats already command more than enough resources — financially and legally — to allow them to perform the tasks that matter most to the public.

Constant craving

In part, the sharply reduced support for the Obama administration stems from the impression that an unpopular craving for ever-increasing intervention in the private sector constitutes its driving passion. This push for centralized power reflects the traditional populist faith that only idealistic bureaucrats in Washington can wield sufficient clout to protect the vulnerable public from the depredations of private business interests. The president tells the people that their only hope for dealing with unscrupulous oil companies, insurance firms and bankers is to rely on the federal government to defend them. He regularly attacks leading companies, suggesting that he will work against their interests and rein in their profits and growth.

This line falls flat with most people for two reasons. First, they understand enough about business to realize that any crackdown that damages major firms won’t help to fuel a recovery. Hitting struggling corporations with more taxes, regulation, lawsuits and rhetorical abuse can hardly assist them in their all-important mission of job creation.

Moreover, Obama fails to recognize what Matt Bai properly designates as “an underlying shift in the meaning of American populism.”In an insightful New York Timescolumn, Bai suggests that ” today’s only viable brand of populism” shuns ancient tropes about “the struggling worker vs. his corporate master. It is about the individual vs. the institution — not only business, but also government and large media and elite universities, too.”

This new brand of populism, crystallized most forcefully by the “Tea Party” movement, doesn’t see government as the necessary counterweight to business excesses, but rather views “business and government as part of an interdependent system,” blaming that fearsome combination for most of the nation’s ills. Fearful Americans don’t trust business to serve the national interest, but they trust government even less. As Bai notes, they focus on the federal deficit “not because it presents an imminent crisis of its own, necessarily, but because it signifies a kind of institutional recklessness, a disconnectedness from the reality of daily life.”

The public also understands that such recklessness, such unsustainable spending, would bring individuals or small businesses to rapid financial ruin; only the largest corporations, and the federal government itself, can get away with long-standing patterns of irresponsibility. The contrast raises the painful issue of double standards: the application of different rules for the people and the powerful (a designation that includes both governmental and corporate elites).

Little recourse

Of course, government carelessness threatens the populace even more fundamentally than corporate malfeasance. If you want to boycott a major company, you can make the choice do so — even if that choice requires sacrifices of money and convenience. If you want to boycott government, however, and refuse to do business with Washington, the feds may ultimately imprison you — for non-payment of taxes or an array of other charges.

When big companies disregard the interests of the general public, the members of the public still get the final decision on their level of involvement with any private enterprise. The government alone possesses authority to force every citizen to cooperate, and to bend to its will.

When Tea Party enthusiasts talk about “taking our country back,” they dream of a mass movement that can enforce a new sense of accountability on powerful private companies as well as the Washington-based monstrosity that constitutes the most abusive, rapidly metastasizing and out-of-control corporation of them all.

Posted in: Politics