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.

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Dubai: Corporations as Supreme Being

If you had any doubt about the corruption that has infected the very bloodstream of American politics, look at today’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court said corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence the outcome of elections.

I’m gonna repeat my sad joke:  we are approaching the time when there will be “corporate creationists” so convinced of the divine status of the corporate life-form that they will deny vehemently that corporations evolved from human beings. Americans, we are the new monkeys.

At the root of the Court’s attack on popular democracy — and it is an attack, and it will promote if not guarantee rule by unaccountable corporate oligarchy — is the Court’s infamous 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision that said money equals speech. Left unaddressed in today’s decision — and others — is the absurdity of this formula. When money equals speech, outfits with more money have more speech. And that destroys the very principle of free speech.

Ask yourself this question. If you had to persuade your community about political opinion X, but corporations opposed your view, would you stand a chance knowing that their “political speech” was worth much more than your political speech? The answer is obvious. Mere people have been thrown on the scrap heap. The U.S. Supreme Court is lifting corporations to the top of the evolutionary ladder.

Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness.  Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.

I’m compelled to repeat something else:  I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.

I also share the view of the sanctity of the individual in a democracy. While many anachronistically worry about creeping socialism, it is the unrestrained power of unaccountable global corporatists that threatens individual rights with extinction.

The Supreme Court’s decision should be a wake-up call to America. The corruption has gone far enough. Democracy hangs in the balance. This is not hyperbole. This is a day that will live in infamy.

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• Conservatives and Independents Agree: Limit Corporate Political Spending
• When Foreigners Own America

Corporatism can be defined as the belief that corporate entities transcend ordinary humanity and must, therefore, be granted transcendent legal rights. In other words, we have created monsters with power over our lives that we cannot hold accountable through regulatory, legislative or judicial action. The usual justification goes something like: “The divine free market produced these corporate entities, as the fittest survived and flourished.” That’s an ideological fantasy, and a destructive one at that.

The “too big to fail” phenom America witnessed as the economic crisis deepened puts the lie to that claim, of course. It made it clear that the greatest threat to the free market is not government, it’s predatory, corporatist sharks who feed on the honest businessperson, the small mom-and-pop store, and, ultimately, the taxpayers.

All the things we value in a open, transparent and honest marketplace — opportunity, entrepreneurship, productivity, self-reliance, innovation — are stifled by corporatism. The corporatists have sold the line that it’s government that stands in the way of these values. Not true. What I’m trying to advance is a pro-business/anti-corporatism idea. We don’t need big government to get there, because I still believe Tom Paine was right when he said that the government that governs least governs best. But we do need to rid politics of corrupt corporatism, we do need open courts, we do need to restore accountability and responsibility in the political/corporate environment.

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Restrictions on health care availability are an effective form of social control. We often talk about this in terms of women’s health care. But too often lost in the health care debate is the broader truth:  health care is used as a weapon of control. In a certain sense, we can be healthy or we can be truly free. So much for Patrick Henry.

Just one of the bizarre ironies of the current debate is the libertarian view that universal health care threatens our freedom. If libertarian-minded Americans would open their eyes, they’d see that just the opposite is true. How many Americans remain in dead-end jobs for the health benefits, however meager they might be? How many entrepreneurs never launch their independent initiatives because they can’t risk the loss of health care?

What is going to become of the generation just now graduating from college? In recent years, tuition has been jacked up to levels requiring many students to borrow heavily for undergrad degrees. They will enter the workforce already in debt.  If the Senate’s insurance mandate becomes law, they will be forced to buy expensive health insurance from a black-hearted insurance industry that trades in suffering and death. The rich and powerful make sure today’s youth start their lives in debt to the company store.

The consequences are profound. Innovation is stifled as people are padlocked in their cubicles or enslaved to the fast-food registers or big box retail hells. Risk-taking is strangled. Class divisions become permanent caste divisions. The rich get richer because only they can afford to take the risks that produce more wealth. Well, that’s not quite true. With the population well under control, the rich have been largely successful in eliminating financial risk altogether. The Wall Street bailout and Congress’ subservience to the lords of insurance make that much clear.

Family heads work two or three jobs to keep up. Neither young nor old have time for effective political engagement. That’s the very point of the social/political control. Want health care? Better stay off the streets and away from the ballot box.

Some claim American productivity is growing, and that means workers are happily getting ahead. Horseshit, as we say hereabouts. New Deal 2.0, a project of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, put the lie to that claim:

The “productivity boom” idea is not new. But in the US, it as much a mirage as the money that drove the apparent boom. There was no productivity boom in the US in the last two decades of the 20th century; there was an import boom that came with productivity fallouts. What’s more, this boom was driven not by the spectacular growth of the American economy; it was driven by debt borrowed from the low-wage countries producing this wealth. The acceleration of productivity was accomplished by someone else doing the producing without getting proper credit for it.  It was called a “bubble” for a reason.

Meanwhile, US wages dropped. Outsourcing has not been the only factor driving US wages down: Even as average worker productivity within the US has surged, average hourly earnings have stagnated, while the nation’s economic elites have prospered with astronomical levels of incomes. The high-tech, information technology and financial services sectors operated on the model of low salaries and high stock options. Even for investors, the trend had been to favor equity appreciation over dividend income. Yet this flies in the face of a basic economic principle: Income is all, and economic growth without income is a fantasy.

I’ve been writing lately about how our politic debate is stuck in mid-20^th Century mud. Our valiant efforts at health care reform have been framed in terms familiar to the old politics:  liberals want a big government solution; conservatives want to protect individual freedom from government.

While we’re stuck in the old politics, the corporatists have consolidated real power.  A corporatist believes that corporations transcend democratic institutions, safeguards, the public will, checks and balances. He aims for rule by corporation, unfettered by any regulations, voter reprisals or legal accountability. So-called tort reform was about ending public accountability for corporate wrongdoing…

…This fundamental issue — the issue we should be discussing — has been raised recently by three progressive writers:  Ed Kilgore in The New Republic, Glenn Greenwald in Salon, Jeffrey Feldman at Daily Kos.

Individualistic or libertarian-minded Americans should be with us in the health care debate. They’re not, because we haven’t made the right case to them. It’s corporatism that threatens their freedoms. We don’t want big government. We just want unaccountable, global economic powers to get their boot-heels off our throats. With real health care reform, reform that eliminated the economic, social and political control of our lives by a bloodthirsty health care industry, we could breathe again like Patrick Henry.

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Even progressives who want to move on are stuck in old habits. Defending against anachronistic right wing attacks, they too are acting in a costume drama or period piece. The message legacy of the 20th Century is dangerously out of date.  The Right blames big government for everything.  The Left, always on the defensive, fights off accusations of socialism and communism — failed 19th Century models about as relevant as the telegraph. I’ve never met a serious socialist or communist. Any still around are made of straw.

While we’re stuck in the old politics, the corporatists have consolidated real power.  A corporatist believes that corporations transcend democratic institutions, safeguards, the public will, checks and balances. He aims for rule by corporation, unfettered by any regulations, voter reprisals or legal accountability. So-called tort reform was about ending public accountability for corporate wrongdoing.

It’s the corporatist who is the real enemy of a free, transparent and open market. I’m a fan of the profit motive, I’m aware of the efficiencies big companies can maintain, efficiencies that improve our quality of life. I am opposed to their absolute political power. People deserve financial reward for risk and accomplishment. Corporatism eliminates its risk, however. Banks’ unregulated and dangerous lending practices caused the Great Recession. Taxpayers were then made to cover their losses. That’s corporatism.

The health insurance industry — an industry that produces nothing of value; it earns all of its profits from the denial of coverage, care and benefits — is the poster child of corporatism. Those corporations that do deliver actual goods or services — the energy industry, for instance — come to believe that the good they do means they are good and blessed to the bone no matter what negative consequences they produce as well. They are so good they, and not an elected government, should be in charge.

This is a blind ideology, of course, and it is how good people — people who care for their families and neighbors — can do bad things, like poison the environment and resent any effort to clean it up.

This fundamental issue — the issue we should be discussing — has been raised recently by three progressive writers:  Ed Kilgore in The New Republic, Glenn Greenwald in Salon, Jeffrey Feldman at Daily Kos. Here’s Greenwald on the corporatist merger of government and big business:

In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists.  Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state’s armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded.  Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations.  At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable.

Jeffrey Feldman says this:

In our politics, very loud participants in the debate do not agree with this basic idea.  There are currents of conservative thought extending all the way back to the founding of the republic that argue against the power of government over private land holders, and slaveholders, and monopoly holders–and shareholders. These currents have found their expression in a politics of the right in this country that has and still does call for the dismantling of our government in order to advance a specific alternative:  an America in which the constitution forbids government to encompass private business.

Feldman recommends democratic capitalism with a constitutional separation of private corporations and the state, by that he means the government shouldn’t be swallowed by or become the mere servant of unaccountable corporatists. We are at that point today.

The trouble is, stuck in old, worn-out, 19th and 20th Century arguments, neither the Left nor the Right respond appropriately to the current political and economic circumstances. Tea Party libertarians are manipulated by the corporatists into fretting about big government without ever seeing the loss of political and economic freedom that a pure corporatist takeover would mean. The Center-Left likes to coddle the corporatists. That’s how health care reform has become a big giveaway to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Those further to the Left cannot seem to escape last century’s baggage. They see the dangers of corporatism, but they seem wedded to big government as the solution.

There are other solutions, solutions that can whittle the size of government and regain control of unaccountable corporatists. We could start with serious campaign reform, something beyond the stupid, stop-gap reforms from do-gooders who think bureaucratized campaign and lobbying reporting requirements will get the job done.

We need publicly financed campaigns at all levels, and absolute limits on campaign spending. If we are going to limit corporatist power, we’ve got to eliminate the source of that power:  their purchase, through campaign contributions, of the government.

We’ve got to re-open the courthouses and make corporations accountable and responsible for their actions. Tort reform was a great con, and everybody knows it. It was simply another move by the corporatists to escape all accountability, at the ballot box or the courthouse.

There are some things better done by all of us working together through what should be a universal, cooperative enterprise called government. Security is a big, good, catch-all term for what we should keep out of the hands of the corporatists. That means the military, police and fire protection, economic and consumer protections, and yes, health care.

I have great admiration for the economic wildcatters and pioneers of our past. Capitalism will work to benefit all if we will recognize that it’s the corporatist predators — not mythical socialist unicorns — who threaten it.

But to even start this discussion we’ve got to escape the dumb language of the past. It’s a fool’s game, and we’d better quit it. It’s going to take some time. Progressive candidates in 2010 can and should campaign against corruption. And corporatism is simply corruption by another name. They should stump for significant campaign reform and an end to corporate ownership of government. In other words, we can begin the real fight.

Progressives can take back the populist flag, and show enraged Americans that we’re on their side. But final victory is a long way off, and we should recognize that. Asking candidates to go all the way with us before the opinion environment is seeded — before what Feldman calls a consciousness change takes place– would not be productive. We can, however, begin.

Related Articles:

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• A Socialist Primer: Rick Perry, Health Care & the Governor’s Race
• The Hollow Men: GOP Now Attacks What It Once Proposed in Health Care
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