Eugene author Alan Cohen discusses his latest book, ‘Hijacked’

Presenter: The new book from Eugene author Alan Cohen came out this week. The title is “Hijacked.” It describes, in detail, exactly how corporations gutted American democracy, replacing it with oligarchy and autocracy. And it has a subtitle. Alan Cohen:

Alan Cohen (Author, Hijacked): ‘Hijacked: How Deregulated Large Corporations with the Collusion of the RNC and DNC Have Absconded With Equality, Democracy, and Freedom and How to Get Them Back.’ 

So how I got started was, there were polls that showed that the average American seemed to think that the corporations were their friends, that large corporations were providing good services, and that they’re basically very happy with the way things were functioning.

And I became concerned that the changes that have taken place over the last 50 years were really initiated by and successfully developed by the corporations. They had decided to make a transition.

The National Association of Manufacturers started being concerned about how the average American thought of business in general as early as the 1910s. And they spent lots of time and money working to basically get across the idea that government was bad and business was good.

We’ve watched a transition of the management of most of our activities from the government to big business. And along with that, a transfer of funds from the poor people to the rich people.

And I think we’ve lost the federal system that functioned properly, where 70% of the population felt that the government was functioning in the proper way in the ’70s, and now less than 20% do. And that transition is what I’m really interested in reversing.

President Nixon appointed four Supreme Court justices. That transitioned from the Warren Court, a court more focused on government of, by, and for the people, and became, again, a conservative court.

Slowly and steadily, it’s moved further and further to the conservative side so that you see almost all the decisions made are in favor of corporations. It’s in the labor union area. It’s in the education area. Obviously the voting area, the Voting Rights Act, all of these decisions are part of the process.

But when you look at who chose the people that Nixon appointed—and appointed by Republicans ever since—it’s been pretty much people that were chosen by the corporations. And when I say the corporations, what I mean is the places that corporations come together and make their decisions.

The prime one is the Chamber of Commerce. There’s the Business Roundtable, and there are all the think tanks and they basically work together to define what they want to see happen in any given administration. And whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican, each of them has been carefully chosen to represent them.

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are completely sold. And they cannot do things that the corporations don’t want them to without losing the funding, which would mean that they wouldn’t be able to run their candidates.

Effectively, what I want is competition. That’s what’s missing. A group of people are saying to us that competition encourages this, that, and the other thing, and then they build systems that don’t involve that. They build systems that are monopolistic.

And so three or four companies, all of whom basically interact with each other and recognize each other’s territories, sort of like the Mafia, they manage the whole system, whether it’s food or it’s medicine or you name it.

But what you see is that the corporations cut corners where that doesn’t help. You know, they will decrease, for instance, the visit times for doctors to 10 or 15 minutes instead of 20 or 30 minutes. And the difference is they get a lot more people seen. But they miss a lot of things that would have been captured otherwise. 

You see the demotivation here locally, Optum having bought the Oregon Medical Group and the doctors left because they were so unhappy. And I think that when you look at what’s happening in medicine, you realize that making money doesn’t solve medical problems. When you have a health problem, there’s no way to monetize that.

To me, there’s that question of: ‘What does government do best and what do businesses do best?’ So you can look at this and say, maybe the government ought to be at least managing the process and defining what can be done.

It sounds like I’m thinking of the corporations as evil. I don’t really think that. I really think that the people running the corporations have zero choice. They have to try to make money, and so they have to do the things that they do. They have to bring in enough money to make their 10% or 20% a year. And that’s how they stay in business, and that’s how a CEO, for instance, keeps his job. 

So, they’re not going to be bothered about environmental issues. They can’t. That’s the way we’ve built our society.

This is when we accepted the idea that the only thing that corporations were responsible to do was make money. They were supposed to be also focused on what happens in society, what we used to call stakeholders, the society at large. So in other words, the community. But no more.

And that change to our society’s culture has really created the problem that I see. Most of it really has to do with deregulation.

The term deregulation, it’s a nice, sort of euphemism. It basically means there are no laws. I mean, if you took away the laws for drivers, the highway would get to be a dangerous place. If you took away the laws for theft and murder, it would get very messy, too.

We really did that. That’s what deregulation is. You’re taking away any legal management of these organizations. Now it’s not complete, but it is enough that they basically now do control so much. It gave too much leeway and all we need to do is tighten that up. 

Deregulation can be reversed in a number of ways, and the way government is supposed to work is, people argue those things out. And so that’s what we really want to have happen. We want to have people discuss what’s the best way to approach this, in real time, when they are actually representing us again.

You need to have candidates who are willing to do what the people ask of them. And you need to have money out of politics really, to get (media) coverage without money.

And so choosing candidates, for instance, one process that I think is useful is to look for whistleblowers. These are people who have shown that they were of, by, and for the people and have had difficulty getting jobs as a result. There’s a kind of a really win-win situation there.

You know, right now there are people throughout the country pretty much, I would guess about 75% of the people in the country are busy fighting for something. You have organizations to protect dolphins and butterflies and bees and you name it. There have got to be hundreds of thousands of different environmental organizations, protecting animals, protecting the water, and protecting the air. And it’s gigantic amount of time, energy, and money being put into these things.

And of course, they’re fighting the corporations.

So I think you have to have an alternative party that doesn’t take money from the rich people. It has to be therefore independent. It seems to me that that’s the only solution. 

The alternative party that I think is best is a party at the moment called ‘We the People.’ The reason I think it’s best because it’s the only one that really is functioning bottom-up rather than top-down.

Most of the parties, even the Green Party, the Working Families Party, insiders run the show, they’ll vote among themselves about which candidate to take, which policies to choose, that sort of thing.

And so it seems to me that what we want is a bottom-up party. And that’s kind of how this has been structured. And the biggest problem any of these parties face is the ways in which Democratic and Republican parties can define the rules in such a way as to keep anybody from threatening any of their important races.

Pretty much what an individual wants will not be represented unless the corporations also want that. And most of the things that both want have already been addressed.

What that means is that when people want a single-payer health plan, for instance, they don’t get a single-payer health plan because that’s something corporations wouldn’t tolerate. It’s the same thing with free public college education, gun control, they don’t get passed because it’s not in the interests of the corporations to have this happen.

And when the people are ignored by the people that they have elected, you’ve lost a democracy. They call it oligarchy when it’s the rich people running the show.

And so facing these things, you have to learn how to organize locally and try to build confidence. And I think that’s what can be done.

Presenter: That is Eugene author Alan Cohen, talking about his new book ‘Hijacked,’ released this week.

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