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By LL (registered) - website | Posted August 18, 2009 at 16:39:11
I don't think banning corporate donations will be sufficient to stop the CLASS control of municipal politics. We call them the "developers" but it's actually a wider group of people that sociologist G. William Domhoff more aptly calls the "growth coalition":
see sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/local.html
Whatever you call them, they can easily sidestep the ban on their corporations and use another institution they control. For example, they can easily put election money in the name of friends or employees and their family members. Or, they can set up "charitable" or other "non-profit" institutions. The most you can do is cause them a pain in the ass (which I don't object to).
Then there's the problem that the local media capitalists are part of the growth coalition. And behind all this is the more anonymous pressures of "macro-economics" - for example, the use of cities by the more high level ruling class as a space for building and destroying surplus capital.
see David Harvey:
davidharvey.org youtube.com/watch?v=tr1Cj1QzdCY
There is an anti-democratic political problem with corporations. But this is merely an articulation of a much older problem of class control. You're never going to efface this without direct action and grassroots organization.
I still see some of the urban progressivism as just nibbling around the edges of the urban progress. Good work though.
LL believes that the problems of the city reflect deeper social contradictions
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