The Buying of Government (The U.S. as an Exemplar)

How the wealthy uses every possible means to defend and expand their wealth and power: Part 4

Through the power of the purse, big business influences governmental and transnational entities such as the World Trade Organization to make decisions that are friendly to their businesses and whose effects often perpetuate chronic poverty and hunger. They accomplish their goals through numerous “legitimate” avenues, including advertising, campaign contributions, paid lobbyist, philanthropy, university endowments, the funding of scientific research, think tanks, and political organizations, the promise of jobs or threat of their loss, and having important members sit on boards of directors and serve on boards of trustees. These ways of spending their time and money can be thought of as perverse investments.

Since the business of business is to turn a profit, pure and simple, food companies will—like any other business—make boardroom decisions, spend their money on the above mentioned, and influence government policies in ways that are calculated to benefit their bottom line. Social well-being is not their concern, nor is it their legal obligation, in the United Sates, at least.[1] So, like the other large industries—oil, automobile, pharmaceutical, insurance, mining, etc.—food corporations have enjoyed a disproportionate influence in government and in our daily lives. Like other “interest groups,” the agricultural industry has bought the good will of politicians by stepping up its perverse investments to congressional and presidential campaigns. From $39 million during the 1992 election cycle, contributions steadily rose, hitting $62 million in 2000, $98 million in 2012, and $170 million in 2020. The harm done in the process to the poor and hungry is viewed as collateral damage, more a consequence of cost-benefit calculations or even sheer disinterest than real malice.

Lobbying Congress is another way big business effectively subverts the will of the people. Corporations with common interests pool their money together into lobbying firms whose sole business is to convince congresspeople with—as it is understood in that world—“all means necessary” to propose and pass legislation favorable to their clients. Through what the economist Simon Johnson calls “intellectual capture,” lobbyist flood congressional time and set the legislative agenda and the outcomes. In 2009, this persuasion business totaled eleven thousand lobbyists in the American capitol with ninety-thousand total staff. That’s over twenty lobbyist per congressperson and senator. Corporate expenditures in that year alone were $3.5 billion, or “$1.3 million for each hour Congress is in session.” Spending on lobbying has remained at that stratospheric level ever since.

None but the richest citizens have a similar power. Most of us do not have the money, time, or organizational structure to buy lobbyist, television spots, and loyalty through campaign contributions and lobbyist. In the battle for labeling “GMOs” on food products, for instance, business outspent consumer organizations forty to one between 2013 and 2015.

Successful businesspeople are savvy with their money. They do not repeatedly invest in anything, including political campaigns and lobbyists, unless there is a reliable return. And, indeed, the returns on politicians and lobbyists have been phenomenal—far more than the mere few cents on a dollar they can earn from sticking merely to business ventures. The Brazilian corporation JBS, for instance, spent some $7.7 million since 2007 lobbying the U.S. Congress and received more than $900 million in government meat contracts, as well as $78 million in government pork contracts and another $64 million in a Byzantine array of contracts and giveaways funded by various Trump tariff bailout payments and food assistance programs; that is, funded by American tax payers who work hard, dutifully pay their taxes, and have little-to-no idea where their money goes.

The buying of government by business is a shrewd investment serving their short-term fiscal interests. Business is gifted by Congress  (and sometimes itself writes) legislation that grants them subsidies, tax breaks, deregulations, biofuel mandates, drilling of public land, the continuity of externalities, invasions of sovereign countries, assassinations of heads of state, unacceptable demands at international forums such as in Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Durban, and trade agreements in international organizations such as the WTO and NAFTA 2.0 that sell out a nation’s citizens to transnational interests. Clearly, big money has become an obstacle to meaningful environmental, economic, and social policies designed to serve the long-term interests of the greater human and biospheric community.

Studies repeatedly find that in the United States legislation is “fairly responsive” to the interests of the wealthy and “virtually unrelated to the desires of low and middle income citizens.” So, for example, although numerous polls have consistently found that an astonishing 90 to 93 percent of Americans want products labeled for GMOs, for over twenty years not one bill for such labeling had found its way to the floor of the United States Congress. In the three years 2013 through 2015, as labeling advocates began gaining political ground in state houses, agriculture and food product companies and organizations spent some four hundred million dollars lobbying legislators and nearly two hundred million dollars fighting ballot initiatives for GMO labeling in various states. Contributing companies ranged from seed companies (Dow, Dupont, Syngenta, Monsanto) to those who sold cereal (Kellogg Co. and General Mills), sugar products (Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc.) and artificial sweeteners (Cargill). In contrast, pro-labeling organizations were able to muster a relatively anemic ten million dollars total.

Then, in another Pyrrhic victory for American democracy, President Obama signed a bill in July of 2016 requiring the labeling of some bioengineered foods. Many believe this triumph of legislation was enacted primarily to preempt state efforts, particularly those of Vermont, whose mandatory labeling laws were far stricter and more transparent and had gone into effect just weeks earlier. Indeed, the federal law nullified all state laws regarding GMOs and was a highly watered-down version of Vermont’s. The many provisos exempted animal products and, as it miraculously turned out, some 78 percent of all food products. And the options for labeling, as Elaine Watson writing for the Food Navigator noted, “lets companies use opaque workarounds like QR codes and call-in phone numbers to disclose their use of genetic engineering.” The QR, or Quick Reader, is that little computer-generated Rorschach of black squares on white background that can be found on most products. It is rendered decipherable only by being scanned with a smartphone or, for shoppers who are less tech-savvy, finding an imaging device in the store and—should it be operational—scanning the product. It may take a resolute shopper with plenty of time on their hands to determine which of their shopping items are labeled and then which contain GMOs.

By 2016 it no longer mattered, anyway. GMOs were firmly ensconced into our food system. In 1997, GMOs had made up only 17 percent of soybeans and 7 percent of corn grown in the United States. Hardly twenty years later, 94 percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn were GMOs, and somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all food products sold in the U.S. had genetically engineered ingredients. It must be noted that some few companies—Campbell Soup and Hershey— began to favor labeling and by 2016 were already voluntarily labeling some of their products, not for reasons of democracy or transparency, of course, but because the only products being labeled at the time were for non-GMO foods, implicitly messaging the public that GMOs were harmful.

None of this, by the way, is to pass judgement on GMOs, themselves. Within the scientific community, they are referred to as transgenic crops and bioengineered foods and are generally considered safe. The point here it that given that almost every American—whether out of enlightenment or ignorance—has been more cautious than scientists about transgenics and preferred the labeling of GMOs on their food and food products, political obstinacy on this matter underscores the power of food corporations to undermine democracy.

[1] The Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued that a corporation’s legal obligation is to provide a maximum return on investment to its shareholders. Privately-owned businesses, however, who do not have such legal obligations, are free to sacrifice profit for social welfare, if they so choose, although they would be at a competitive disadvantage to do so (Milton Friedman (1970, Sep 13). The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, The New York Times Magazine.