I turned to the Democratic Party when I reached voting age because of my natural distrust of authority. I still have a problem with authority, and I’m proud of it. This may surprise libertarians and tea partiers, who’ve been misled to think that Republicans are the champions of individual liberty.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision yesterday should make it clear to the most myopic conservative that individual liberty has never been what the corporatist right is about. Historically, progressives share the blame for being, well, bossy. Dating back to the 19th Century progressives, smitten with emerging social sciences and the potential of business management techniques in the public sphere, were authoritarian. Prohibition ring a bell?
Still, I believed progressives (and the political party they belonged too) represented the little people against the powerful. I grew up in the Civil Rights era. Of course, many Southerners think civil rights was the ultimate assault on individual liberty, their liberty to discriminate against others. This isn’t logical of course. Civil rights was all about individual liberty.
Anyway, today it is more obvious than ever that the real danger to freedom in America comes from the unaccountable, irresponsible and infinitely powerful authority that is the big, global corporation. Empowered now by a Supreme Court that’s handed them super-human rights and privileges, corporations can now trample individual initiative, take what they want from entrepreneurs, eliminate competition, and erase the adjective “popular” from in front of democracy — forever.
They can legally swamp our political sphere with their money. The can advertise at will to advance their candidates. Don’t fall for the idle thought that you are not persuaded by ads. You are. Everyone is. Follow the money. There’s a reason billions is spent on advertising. It changes our minds. Now corporations can change our minds whenever they want.
Do you have physician friends? Ask them privately what the corporatization of medicine has done to their practice. Do you have friends in the media? Ask them what the corporate consolidation of media has done to the ability to deliver fair, balanced and thorough news. Have you ever had to deal with a health insurance company? Ask yourself if their corporate and political power gives you confidence you can keep your children healthy.
Did you or anyone you know lose a small, town square business to Walmart in the last several decades? A small pharmacy to the big outlets? A bookstore? Did you go to work for a corporation after college out of a sense of responsibility to provide your family with long-term job security? Were you laid off in middle age with few or any prospects?
Have you been injured through a corporation’s negligence? Did you notice that your access to the justice system has been greatly restricted through the immoral fraud of so-called tort reform? Can you see it now as nothing but a move to make corporations less accountable than actual humans for harm they do to others?
Are you a musician who had a record company steal your royalties? And there was nothing you could do about it?
Well, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision — based on the ridiculous premise that corporations are persons, indeed, that they are super-persons — these difficulties are going to be multiplied a thousand times.
The battle we are in cannot be defined by the old categories. This is not an issue of Right versus Left, at least as those terms are defined by worn-out old cliches and beliefs. It is an issue of the individual versus unaccountable, irresponsible and infinitely powerful authority.
You are already sick of special interest corruption of politics. Well, that corruption has now been made legal by the court. Corporations are free to buy, to own, our government. You’ve heard it’s just a matter of free speech? Well, do you think you have the same power of speech as a corporation? No one does. The President doesn’t. Corporations can outspend and outshout a politician at any level, no matter how much that politician raises.
The Court’s ruling is the ultimate attack on free speech. It says money equals speech. And that means those with the most money have the most speech. In fact, big corporations have so much money that we have, relatively, none. Which means we have no speech, free or otherwise.
I hope DogCanyon readers will forward this modest and quickly written essay to their conservative friends and family. It’s time that we overcome some of our differences, based as they are on old categories and misleading spin from the powerful who gain their power by dividing us. We have a common enemy. It’s not the people within the corporations. Many of them are our neighbors, and in their better moments we know they mean us no harm. It is this transcendent creature called the Corporation that is fast becoming an enemy unlike any other humanity may have ever faced.
The corporatists are no champions of what we think of as capitalism. We think of it as an open and transparent market in which all comers have a fair shot. The corporatist eliminates the fair shot, stomps on individual enterprise, and destroys entrepreneurship. Soon, empowered by the Court, corporatists will, if left unchallenged, destroy what remains of popular democracy.
As the Rev. Gary Davis sang in “Samson and Delilah”:
If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way
I would tear this building down.
Thank you, Glenn for putting together that list in one place of the litany of betrayals we have suffered as a people at corporate hands. I think you are onto something when you denude corporations of their people within and depict them as that something that is more than the sum of its parts, its people. It is the element of greed that has achieved a personification, a life of its own, through this belief that the corporation is equivalent to a person. If you are reading these posts, take Glenn up on his invitation to spread his essay further, on your facebook account, for example…
That’s a great line, Reba, “Greed has now been personified. It’s been given the status of personhood.” Well said.
And, it really is important for folks to communicate with everyone they know about this. I think they’ll discover that many will agree when told about it, even conservatives. Even teapartiers.
Our coporatist government, run by corporatist legacy parties, just got a great big gift. I think from the corporatist faction of the Supreme Court.
I’ll use this essay to continue efforts to talk with people of all political persuasions. I’ll use you line, Reba, “Greed has now been personified.” I’ll use everything I can find — I hesitate to employ the over-used “We the people” phrase, but “we” are what we have to depend on, if “we” are going to take on the corporatists.
i’m doin it. thanks glenn. you are right on the money, as they say.
Terrific. Scary as this is, it’s an opportunity, too. A big one. And it’s an opportunity all of us can help take advantage of.
At the risk of making it seem like we’re just writing back and forth to each other on our respective blogposts today, I want to bring up another bird since you took off on that in my post. I’ve been searching for a myth, a parable, a symbol, something to create a graphic interface for the anticorporatist movement. Greek mythology: Midas. No, he actually WAS a man, and the point, as you made it, is that the corporations have outgrown the humans who hosted them in a malevolent way, so the symbol has to be unhuman, maybe HAL from 2001. Or maybe the Raven, who represented greed in European and Native American cultures. The Raven is never full, and wins contests of wit with all of the other animals by either destroying and eating them or driving them off and securing their food. Yeah, that might work. A simple, horrible image. Now all we need is money to promote it–oh yeah, that brings us back to the beginning, they have all the money.
Consider it done — thanks for helping me articulate my argument!!!
Oh, my gosh. Walking outside at dusk in Austin it comes to me. Grackles! The grackles of greed!
Well put, Glenn.
Why bother with elections anymore? Just have auctions.
One thing I disagree with is the idea that the corporations are “infinitely powerful.” Maybe it’s my mathematics background that makes me say that, but I do believe that, bad as the Supreme Court decision is (and it definitely is bad), we cannot give up. Corporations are finite “beings,” and they are not monolithic.
Actually, I started to take “infinitely” out. But, relative to the power of real folk, infinite captures it in a way “absolute” doesn’t. I admit to mathematical incorrectness. Poetic license and all that.
As to the whether corporations are “finite ‘beings,’” an interesting note. In an exchange last evening with a constitutional expert who is more or less supportive of the decision, I was informed that corporations were, constitutionally, “persons” when it comes to matters such as free speech, but “not persons” when it comes to matters such as imprisonment. To which I responded, “Aha, corporations are Schrodinger’s Cats!” The are both alive and not alive. Finite? I suppose, but I sure won’t live long enough to prove it so.
Despite what the Supremes have to say, corporations are NOT persons. They behave the way they do because that is what they have been programmed to do — their prime directive is to return value to their stockholders. To demonize them is analogous to the demonization of the wolf, whose bent is to attack the sheep and other helpless livestock. The wolf is not a devil; it is doing what it is genetically programmed to do. The difference is that, unlike the wolf, corporations are OUR creation. We can change these creatures so that their motivations are completely different from what they are today. And yet we don’t, in part because their power has taken over the very institutions that created them, the very instituions that are most at hand in order to effect change. This is our dilemma. I see no solution available from within our current political institutions, but I do observe that if the US government ceases to exist, so do all US corporations. Is that what we must resort to?
Charlotte, you are absolutely right that “corporations are OUR creations” and that we can change them. But I’m not sure about the quote above. I think corporations generally behave in ways that maximize the return value to their executives. Actually, shareholders and the rest of society are both getting screwed by the people who run corporations – which is something to think about as we mobilize in response.
While it’s certainly true that are political institutions are failing, for the most part regular Americans simply haven’t engaged the issue of corporate power. My guess is that if we do, our institutions will perform better in response to our demands. Quiescence, more than institutional inertia, is the problem.
“Grackles of greed” – Reba
Having just come in from chasing, yet again, flocks of grackles from an area of newly planted seeds, I’m particularly strong in my approval of that symbol.
” … I sure won’t live long enough to prove it so.” – Glenn
Me either, damn it.
Plutocracy 5
Democracy 4
Impeach them. Now.