The hypocrisy of business and media elites
The silence is deafening to Kevin McCarthy's latest act of corruption
NOTE: An audio recording of this essay is available behind the paywall.
On Thursday, Axios reported a stunning act of political corruption. The corruption was a direct threat against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce made by House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy. His threat is blatant thuggery. It constitutes a grotesque abuse of power. Leader McCarthy demanded that Chamber president and CEO Suzanne Clark be fired. He promised retaliation if the Chamber of Commerce did not submit to his threat. The Washington, DC, access media ignored the threat, while the business leaders who comprise the Chamber executive board have assumed a posture of flaccid opposition and tepid defiance.
This is more than a threat aimed at Ms. Clark and the Chamber. It is aimed at the American free enterprise system at a conceptual level. It marks the opening of another vector of attack against America by an extremist element that is no longer distinguishable between its conspiratorial, paranoid, cynical, ideological and violent factions. A man who believes he is soon to be Speaker of the House just proclaimed his whims inseparable from the power of his office, and thus the state. He is either committing a fascistic act of thuggery or embracing fascism ideologically by asserting state dominion over private enterprise. Both the thuggery of the tactics and the assertion of the power are textbook acts of fascism. Fascists believe the economy should serve the state.
The American free enterprise system rejects this. Free market American capitalism has made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of civilization. It has lifted millions of people from poverty to prosperity all over the world. The current crisis in American capitalism is deeply rooted in the collapse of the American middle class, and the rise of an elite and elitist taker class that seems incapable of understanding the philosophy of the locust is ultimately self-defeating. The American economy is sustained by a great amalgam of entrepreneurs, inventors, dreamers, stock exchanges, labor unions, private ownership and public corporations. It is the most complex economic system that has ever existed.
US companies — both big and small, across the whole of the country — are members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber represents every conceivable sector of the American economy. It is a world famous, important and essential American institution. It is a symbol of freedom, free enterprise, opportunity, social mobility, peace and prosperity.
It has a job and a mission. It represents the interests of American business. American business is really the tens and tens of millions of American workers and shareholders who sustain the free enterprise system. Within this vast and interconnected economy there will be disagreements between stakeholders, and specifically between owners and labor. That is healthy and necessary. A free economy requires that tension. Its absence is indicative of only one thing: state control. The collapse of free enterprise means that the state imposes from the top down, controls from the top down, decides from the top down, punishes from the top down and negotiates, listens and compromises with no one. It creates human misery and death. Always.
What Kevin McCarthy has done is assert the power to pick the person who sits across the table from him when he faces the American business community or else. The right to petition the government is elemental. McCarthy has grotesquely, corruptly and illegally asserted that he will use the power of the state to punish vast swaths of America over his dislike of the person the business community had every right to select as the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The McCarthy threat is an existential one. It is a grotesque abuse of power — a sign of imminent danger to both American democracy and the American free enterprise system.