Chapter One American Democracy Works, and Corporations Fight Back

In 1838, a quarter century before he became the nation’s sixteenth president, a twenty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln stepped up to speak at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. He spoke about what was to become the cause of his life: the preservation of that great American contribution to the human story, government of, for, and by the people. He insisted that the success or failure of the American experiment was up to us. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Lincoln’s generation of Americans, and every generation since, has faced daunting questions of whether “destruction be our lot,” and we certainly have our share today. Most people can point to a host of complex and related reasons for rising anxiety about our future. Global and national environmental crises seem relentless and increasingly related to energy, economic, military, and food crises. Our unsustainable debt and budgets—national, state, local, family, personal—seem beyond control, reflecting an economy that has not generated significant wage growth in a generation. We have been locked in faraway wars for more than a decade, at war in one form or another for a half century. Despite our victory over totalitarian communism, we spend more on our military than all other countries combined. We, the descendants of republicans with great suspicion about standing armies, now maintain a costly military empire across more than one hundred countries and a sprawling secret government that collects the communications data of everyone. Many Americans now doubt that we are, in fact, a government of the people and no longer believe that our democracy and government are working.

We can point to an array of causes, and we can point fingers at one another, but a taproot of many of these related problems is our collective failure to do what generations of Americans before us did: choose to take responsibility as citizens to manage hyperconcentrations of political power among the largest corporations and the wealthiest few. We have lost sight of the implications in a republic of the extreme wealth and power of transnational corporations. The agenda of the largest corporations and those who control them is not the agenda of the American family and the American community. Yet the corporate agenda is now dominant at home and across the world.