Democracy for the few (chap. 15), Michael Parenti

Résumé du document

Michael Parenti is a professor of political science at several American universities. He has a PhD in political science from Yale University. He is known for being a progressive activist and a provocative thinker. As such, he wrote numerous books that focused on the American nation, the role of USA in the world and the power of money. The relation between democracy and the economic power - which is particularly present in his book Democracy for the few also belongs to his favourite themes.
Michael Parenti's major objective in this excerpt is to point out the fact that we have to consider the tasks of the bureaucracy as political ones. His purpose is hence to investigate the politico-administrative world of the United States of America, showing to what extent and how exactly the administrative departments and agencies are situated on the center of a network of power and contradictory interests.

Extraits

[...] The writer achieves rightly to synthesize some bias the people can have towards the bureaucracy in the following sentence: political process does not end with the passage of a bill but continues with equal or even greater intensity at the administrative level albeit in more covert fashion”. The author goes on in his fight against prejudice arguing that it is purely false to believe that bureaucracy is inefficient by nature. His point is to prove that some things are done and even well done whereas others are merely ignored. This is not the work of luck or hazard. [...]

[...] In fact: “there exists, then, unbeknownst to most Americans, a large number of decision-makers who are with the government but not within it, who exercise public authority without having to answer to the public and who determine official policy while considering their first interest and obligation to be their private businesses”. It is the case for example of the Port Authority of New York, who is responsible for the bridges, tunnels and the airports that are between New York City and New Jersey. Although it is a “public corporation”, it is a business that generates profit thanks to the initial investment of the tax- payers who get nothing in return, because the profits distributed as tax-free returns to private investors”. [...]

[...] First they have few funds at their disposal. Second they don't have a great political weight so that they can be removed quite easily on behalf of the corporate executives who have especially the biggest ones close relations with representatives, heads of departments or even with the “president himself”. As a consequence of that, they role is a great deal diminished by these influences, so that they are to some extent forced to cooperate with the industry, though there has been some cases of rough fights led against the companies. [...]

[...] Their influence explains for example why a “modestly funded” social program will be much difficult to be applied than an innovative weapons-system. In fact, the administrators work on both programs with the same energy, skills and material resource. Historically they already made wonderful things like sending a man on the moon or leading ‘great wars'. Nevertheless, they are not directly guilty for these differences in the applications. Eventually Michael Parenti comes back to the agencies meant to regulate economy, showing how they fail. [...]

[...] Their job, consisting of regulating the market on behalf of the consumers' interest, becomes consequently harder, if not impossible. Having this said, it seems to me that Parenti's analysis lacks of moderation and rigour insofar as it presents a very simplistic and perhaps biased view of the world of the “politics of bureaucracy”, so that it sometimes seemed to me that I was dealing with a sort of conspiracy theory. It sometimes did recall me of Domhoff's way of thinking, and could in any case been classified as a populist political scientist. [...]