(The following is a special comment by David 2 as provided on the January 22nd broadcast of “American Heathen®” on ShockNet Radio.)
I want to take a minute or two to address something that came out this week in the Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that corporations were free and clear to spend as much money as they want to on political campaigns, essentially nullifying twenty years of campaign finance reform.
Not all reforms have been removed, of course. Corporations still cannot sponsor political action committees directly, but certainly big money has been able to work around that limitation ever since it was created.
Some people are shocked by this decision. Some people believe that the United States has now been bought and sold to big corporations. They are a little late in this assertion… by about two hundred years.
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following to Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania: “I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
In 1823, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, writing for the majority, declared that corporations – non-human entities – were afforded the same rights and privileges as individuals. This concept of an “artificial personhood” status was created by the courts four years previous, but in this particular judicial decision – Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet – here the actual legal assertion that declared corporations to be on the same status as human beings was officially made. A status that the government REFUSED to give to African Americans for a few more decades and to women for almost a century.
Precedence, my friends. If there is one thing that the justices of the Supreme Court are a sticker for – especially in a conservative-leaning court such as our current one – it is precedence above anything else. These justices would just as soon cut their own arms and legs off with a pocket knife than to break with precedence.
Indeed the power-grabs of corporations, the abuses and excesses that went hand-in-hand in the Industrial Revolution and in the Industrial Society that followed it, were allowed to go on because corporations were considered by the government to be on the same level – if not more so – as human beings.
But that still does not make it right. In fact it can be said that the course of freedom itself had been on the steady decline BECAUSE of that decision back in 1823, as well as its previous decision in 1819.
There are three elements needed for actual freedom in any society. The first element is choice. Humans make choices, both good and bad ones. Corporations, through its executives and associates, make choices as well. The second element is responsibility. Responsibility not only means punishment, but it also means rewards. Corporations have certainly shown that they too can reap the benefits of their decisions, but not so much the burdens of them.
But it is that third element that humans uniquely possess and that corporations, by their very nature, cannot. That element is INDIVIDUALITY. A corporation is NOT an individual entity. It is a collective. It is a combination of people, talent, and resources. You change any of those three things and you change the corporation. You cannot do the same to a human being, though. A corporation can be restructured and reorganized; it can be bought and sold over and over again. A human being is not supposed to be bought and sold, even though we did just that until 1865.
So what better way to dismantle freedom than to start with the premise that an inanimate collective entity has as many rights and privileges – if not more so because of their financial largesse – as an ordinary human being? That rights and privileges are mere luxuries that can be given and taken way at the discretion of government? After all, if government can interfere in the affairs of big corporations through various regulations, why not also do the same to human beings since they are – at least in the eyes of the government – on the same level?
In fact all of the fear-mongering being waged by people like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, namely the idea that the Republic is now DOOMED, fails to take into account that this particular problem goes back two hundred years to the time when private entities were given the kind of legal status that we categorically refused to give to certain other human beings.
The remedy, then, is not in passing more laws and more regulations that merely tiptoe around the matter. Even amending the Constitution, which a herculean task in and of itself, would not resolve the matter if it does not reassert this simple fact: that as long as we FAIL to recognize that freedom is an INDIVIDUAL concept, we will continue to make the mistake that non-human entities should be treated as no different than human beings, and thus give them a preference that we will consciously refuse to give to our neighbors.
By the way, there is one more aspect of corporations that individuals cannot do. Corporations are able to pass on their responsibilities to others. If they are hit with a fine or a fee or taxes – like the kind of fines, fees, or taxes that President Obama wants enacted – then they are allowed to pass the cost of that penalty down to their customer base as part of their overhead cost. In other words, WE, as INDIVIDUALS, are the ones that end up paying for the negative responsibilities of corporations.
Bear that in mind as you ponder whether or not corporations should be considered no different than human beings.
