Less Government Home
Opinion 1 - Alan Brinkley
Opinion 2 -
NEW DEMOCRAT OPPOSITION
Opinion 3 - David Bornstein
Opinion 4 - Harv Teitelbaum
Opinion 1 -from The Assault on Government
By Alan Brinkley
Some of the practical consequences of crippling the federal government
are not difficult to imagine. Critics of Washington like to argue that
the state governments, with their more imaginative leaders and greater
proximity to their citizens, will do a better job of administering important
programs than the federal government has done. In some cases, that will
no doubt be true. Society needs vigorous and effective government at every
level, and the growing competence, energy, and imagination of many state
and local governments in recent years is one of the heartening developments
of our time. But the principal concern of many state governments in recent
years has been competing with other states to attract jobs. Only national
standards can prevent that competition from escalating into an assault
on environmental regulations, health and safety protections for workers,
the rights of trade unions, and basic social services to the poor. Devolution
of power will produce a vicious competitive battle for jobs that will drive
down standards of safety, health, and public services everywhere.
At the heart of the present debate over government is the question of where power should lie in a democratic society. Conservatives like to claim that they are returning power to the people themselves, a promise that resonates with one of America's oldest and most powerful political traditions: populism. This is a superficially appealing message. But it bears little relationship to the actual history of populism or to the realities of our own time. The populists of the late nineteenth century, and many of their twentieth century heirs, were skeptical of all centralized power. They were suspicious of government, to be sure. But they were primarily concerned about powerful private institutions such as banks, railroads, and corporations. And they recognized that for individuals and communities to retain any real power in modern society, they would need the help of an energetic government to counter the power of these private interests.
The great private interests that shape our era are far more numerous and far more powerful than those the original populists decried: the corporate world, banking and finance, trade associations and lobbying groups, political consultants, the legal profession, unions, media empires, and others. None of them has much accountability to individual citizens. Because virtually all of them are national or international in scope, state and local governments cannot effectively monitor or regulate them by themselves. Disempowering the federal government will remove the only effective check against the large organizations that dominate modern life. It will leave individuals with even less control over their own fates. It will betray the very populist impulse it ostensibly serves.
Critics of government are certainly correct that our political institutions are too often inefficient and corrupt, and that they are insufficiently accountable to the public. Politics in modern America is frustrating and alienating, and it badly needs change. But giving up on politics * dismantling government institutions and relying instead on the market or on relatively weak local governments * is not the route to more democracy. It is the route to less.
Opinion
2 - NEW DEMOCRAT OPPOSITION (Canada)
AG Report Shows That Privatization Makes Government Less
Accountable
Detailed Audit of Private Registries Turns Up Myriad of Problems
"The most striking aspect of the Auditor General’s Annual Report on
government finances is how the
Alberta government is becoming less accountable for the use of public
dollars as a result of
privatization and contracting out," said Pam Barrett, Leader of the
Alberta New Democrats.
The Auditor General’s 1997-98 Annual Report provided numerous examples
of such accountability
failures. "A fundamental problem with delivering government services
through privatized entities is
the fact that the Auditor General does not audit their books but is
left to only monitoring the contracts
they have with government departments," Barrett emphasized. The privatized
entities are also not
subject to freedom of information and protection of personal privacy,
unlike all public bodies in the
province.
"I find it very revealing that when a more detailed audit of the privatized
registries was done a myriad
of problems were uncovered," noted Barrett. "These problems include
the unauthorized sale of personal
information, completely inadequate staff training, and lack of monitoring
of private registry agents,"
she added.
"Registries deal with personal information about Albertans. It’s time
to admit that Steve West’s folly in
privatizing these vital services in 1993 was a big mistake, and have
the service once again delivered by
well-trained public servants directly accountable to a government Minister,"
said Barrett.
John Kolkman
The Barefoot Bank With Cheek
The Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh, which
makes small
loans to some of the poorest people on
earth, has become a
model for economic developers all over the
world
BUSES and trucks barrel down Mirpur Road, in
Dhaka, Bangladesh, blasting their horns and
leaving trails of black smoke to settle on rickshaws
and oxcarts. By the side of the road a high brick
wall encircles four buildings in a compound, one of
which is dominated by a tropical garden that opens
to the sky. On many afternoons rain falls into the
garden, and at their desks accountants can pause to
listen to the sound of water slapping leaves. This is
the head office of a bank that does its work in the
countryside.
Thousands of visitors have traveled to Bangladesh
to learn from this bank, and many arrive carrying
tape recorders and note pads. When they enter the
office, they find no receptionist, no carpets, no
elevators, and few telephones. The rooms are
equipped with ceiling fans, manual typewriters,
paperweights, and stacks of ledgers. Only the
computer room, on the fifth floor, is
air-conditioned. Here programmers monitor
operations and prepare reports, which they love to
fill with wild-looking graphs depicting their
organization's growth. The graphs all look basically
the same: like ski hills, rising slowly at first, and
then shooting up at impossibly steep angles toward
the sky.
For two decades the Grameen ("Village") Bank has
been extending small loans for self-employment
purposes to some of the poorest people on
earth--landless women in Bangladesh--and its
financial performance has never been stronger. The
bank's founder, the Bangladeshi economist
Muhammad Yunus, continues to win international
honors--the 1992 King Baudouin Development
Prize, the 1993 CARE Humanitarian Award for
Development, the 1994 World Food Prize--but his
bank is hardly a one-man show. Grameen's loans
are administered by more than 10,000 university
and high school graduates scattered throughout
Bangladesh--no small organizational feat in a
country notorious for corruption and
mismanagement, a country that since its birth, in
1971, has absorbed more than $25 billion in foreign
aid and seen the majority of its citizens grow
poorer.
The Grameen Bank, once dubbed the "barefoot
bank," can no longer be described in quaint
terms. With more than 1,050 branch offices that
serve 35,000 villages and two million customers,
94 percent of them women, Grameen is the largest
rural lender in Bangladesh, and the proportion of its
loans that are repaid, 97 percent, is comparable to
the repayment rate at Chase Manhattan Bank. Last
year, after eighteen years of making small loans,
Grameen had disbursed more than $1 billion; at the
present rate the bank will cross the $2 billion mark
sometime next year. "It's like McDonald's," Yunus
says. "People know the quality of our service. Our
job at head office is to make sure it doesn't
deteriorate in any corner of the country."
Given that Grameen's banking system is based on
trust and mutual accountability, that is quite a task.
To qualify for a loan, a villager must demonstrate
that her family assets fall below the bank's
threshold. She will not be required to put up
collateral; instead she must join a five-member
group and a forty-member center and attend a
meeting every week, and she must assume
responsibility for the loans of her group's members.
This is crucial, because it is the group--not the
bank--that initially evaluates loan proposals.
Defaulters spoil things for everybody else, so group
members choose their partners wisely. If all five
repay their loans promptly, each is guaranteed
access to credit for the rest of her life--or as long as
she elects to remain a customer. In this fashion
Grameen is faithful to the Latin from which "credit"
derives: credere --"to believe."
"The myth that credit is the privilege of a few
fortunate people needs to be exploded," Yunus
explains. "You look at the tiniest village, and the
tiniest person in that village: a very capable person,
a very intelligent person. You have only to create
the proper environment to support these people so
that they can change their own lives."
Pure idealism? Well, yes. Nonetheless, these words
come from a man who has designed a bank that
forces its borrowers to save money for
emergencies, provides them with benefits in the
event of death, and is in the process of instituting a
village-based health-care and insurance program,
which will be self-financing. Today, against the
backdrop of two and a half decades of often-wasted
international aid, Grameen's entrepreneurial
approach stands out as singularly effective and
sustainable. Up to 1994 the bank had revolved its
loan capital more than five times. Along the way it
helped millions of villagers to move from one or
two meals a day to three, from one or two sets of
clothing to three or four. Grameen members have
borrowed money to pay for their children's
education, to buy medicine, to build houses, to
accumulate assets for old age, and--like the peddler
Oirashibala Dhor--to pay for their daughters'
weddings....
With support from the Bangladesh Bank, the Ford
Foundation, and the International Fund for
Agricultural Development (IFAD), an aid
organization created by the United Nations,
Grameen was by 1983 an independent bank
operating eighty-six branches and serving 58,000
clients. As it grew popular enough to surmount
religious opposition, the bank began providing
loans almost exclusively to women. "When a
woman brings in income," Yunus explains, "the
immediate beneficiaries are her children."
The following year, after years of development
washouts, foreign donors began taking Yunus very
seriously. In 1984-1985 IFAD, Ford, and the
governments of Norway and Sweden stepped in
with $38 million in low-cost loans. By 1988
Grameen had 501 branches and 490,000 borrowers.
In 1989 Canada and Germany joined the team of
donors, and the bank received an additional $87
million. In 1992 Grameen opened its thousandth
branch office. It also raised credit ceilings and
introduced various new kinds of loans intended to
boost revenues. In the past three years
disbursements have soared to $40 million a
month, with only a marginal increase in staff.
Grameen has moved, as one manager puts it, "from
Mach one to Mach two."
TYPICALLY, Americans are reluctant to look to
other countries for help with their social problems.
Think of health care. However, as the current
political debate rages over how big government
should be, Grameen's experiences are more relevant
to the United States than ever before. The Grameen
Bank has received praise from U.S. commentators
and policymakers on both the left and the right.
Being Bangladeshi, it has the advantage of being
seen as a perennial underdog. And, no doubt, the
bank speaks to something at the core of the
American ideal: what Ralph Waldo Emerson called
"the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of
self-reliance."
Grameen is a political chameleon: it has the ability
to affirm beliefs that both conservatives and liberals
hold dear. From the right Grameen can be seen as
an entrepreneurial institution that makes the case
for less government; from the left it appears to be
an enlightened social-welfare program that argues
for the value of government involvement. Some see
Grameen as an example of reinvented government.
Muhammad Yunus disagrees. He sees his bank as
an example of reinvented capitalism. In fact, he
calls it a "socially conscious capitalist enterprise."
Our Constitution only addresses the relationships between government and citizens. This presupposes a simple societal duality of state and populace. Is it possible that this function, the power of government, is being appropriated by another institution in society increasingly outside the rule of the Constitution?
Nowhere in the Constitution is the word “capitalism” mentioned; nor the word “corporation”. Yet we’ve come to believe that democracy and capitalism are complementary, if not synonymous. But while a democracy is characterized by “one person, one vote”, in corporations it’s “one dollar, one vote”. And while the aim of democracy is equality, the corporation aims toward monopoly. Many, especially commercial interests, believe that by introducing capitalism into repressive regimes, we are “sowing the seeds” of democracy. But capitalism has done quite well in places like China and Singapore, without significant movement toward democratic practices. Clearly democracy and capitalism are not synonymous, and often have conflicting motivations and goals. As these conflicts arise, which system is determining their resolution?
There is a notion that if power is removed from government, this power will simply dissipate or somehow return by default to “the people”. This is the rationale, the “hook”, behind the political promise of downsizing and reducing big, intrusive government. But letting go of the steering wheel doesn’t turn the car around. If we reduce or eliminate the power to regulate commercial and corporate activities, the result is not more freedom or less intrusion. Those regulatory functions and activities remain. They merely revert by default back to the commercial interests themselves.
Corporations, abetted by judicial rulings equating money with free speech, have acquired rights and powers originally reserved for either the state or the populace. These “super-citizens” have likewise, through relentless legal maneuvering and contractual innovation, turned their holdings and properties into sovereign states outside the reach of the Constitution. Our activities and behavior, public and private, are increasingly governed by workplace rules, business contracts and the self-serving regulations for conduct on commercial property.
The societal duality is increasingly one of corporation and citizen rather than state and citizen. Or, put another way, the corporation is becoming the state, albeit one unchecked by the Constitution, and we have become its subjects.
Why has this not been part of the public debate? The function of promoting awareness and knowledge of this appropriation of power has itself fallen into the hands of the corporations, through corporate-owned media. Instead of illuminating this trend, media perpetuates the illusion of democracy and protects cash flow by trumpeting mostly government scandal and abuse, while muzzling information that could be disquieting to sponsors or interfere with our government-by-the-rich campaign advertising system.
The power to realize, expose and change the gradual takeover of democracy
by unchecked capitalism exists. Unless we retake the steering wheel,
corporate interests will be driving our society.
"I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our
moneyed corporations,
which dare already to challenge
our government
to a trial of strength and bid defiance to
the laws of
our country." --Thomas Jefferson, 1816.