Will business supplant government?
It’s evident that big businesses have quite a bit of control of Congress through giving money, directly or indirectly, to members of the House and the Senate. Some Representatives and Senators resist, but the great majority are happy to take the money because they intend to earn it by the way they vote.
With the globalization of business, business becomes even more powerful because a globalized business is no longer dependent on any one country and can play one country against another (just as businesses in the US play one state against another when opening a new plant: they place the plant where the state government subsidies are greatest).
Of course, governments have the force of arms (police and military) on their side, but nowadays companies also have mercenary troops that they can field—Blackwater (now Xe) has mercenaries serving corporations in African countries, for example.
So as we look at the next hundred years or so, will governments find themselves displaced by and subordinate to big businesses? I would hope not, because governments are in theory (and, in the US, explicitly in the Constitution) supposed to govern to benefit the public welfare:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In contrast, businesses have only one purpose: to grow revenues and profits. Not only is the public welfare beside the point, minimizing costs (in order to maximize profits) often requires the business to take steps that undermine the public welfare—e.g., through dumping toxic wastes into the ground, water, and/or air. Businesses will continue such practices until forced to stop. With the control of state and federal government that businesses already enjoy, stopping such practices can require decades—and in the meantime, businesses continue to enrich themselves and undermine the public welfare.
I got to thinking about this when reading Daniel Schulman’s article in Mother Jones titled “Is Blackwater Too Big To Fail?”:
Erik Prince’s security enterprise has a division for pretty much everything. Need planes or choppers? See Aviation Worldwide or Presidential Airways. A compliment of Colombian mercs? Greystone at your service. For-hire spooks? Total Intelligence Solutions—emphasis on total—is standing by. And for the super-double-secret covert work—the kind that the CIA keeps even Congress in the dark about—Prince has a division for that too. According to the New York Times, it’s called Blackwater Select.
Building on its scoop that the company played a role in the CIA’s abandoned program to assassinate Al Qaeda operatives, the Times reports today that this secret division also plays a part in the agency’s predator drone program:
The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.
The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq.
You’d think that after repeated controversies Prince’s government clients would tire of the enduring PR nightmare and cut their ties. But they won’t, because they can’t. By many, the company is viewed as indispensable. This didn’t happen by accident. It’s long been Prince’s business model. “Make yourself indispensable to the client, and you’ll always have work,” Prince is quoted as saying in Suzanne Simons’ new book, Master of War.
Certainly the company didn’t rise up from its modest origins to become a contracting behemoth without a lot of help. That is, if the company is indispensable, that’s largely because we made it that way. The more jobs the government contracts out to Blackwater (and other industry players), the more the government loses the internal capacity to do them itself. Think of it this way: Blackwater operators were originally trained by the government to carry out the drone work. If the government decides it wants to assume this role again one day, will its personnel need to be trained by Blackwater? …
