First Steps on a Long Road

[WilliamPitt]

First Steps on a Long Road
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Friday 23 January 2009

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

- C.S. Lewis

So Bush is out and Obama is in and change has come, and you've probably read or heard this enough times already, so let's move on, because reality must sadly intrude.

Confronting every American citizen is the existence of three dominant factors which have become part of the nation's DNA over the course of the last century and a half. Each of these factors holds muscular sway over the doings of government and has a direct effect upon all our lives. None of them are going away any time soon, and that is fact.

One of these three is the existence of something called "corporate personhood," the legal theory established by a number of Supreme Court cases, including the 1886 Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which grants 14th Amendment rights to corporations. In essence, it is a legal shield that grants the same rights and privileges of citizenry enjoyed by you and me to faceless, on-paper corporate constructs. This has given rise to what can only be described as corporate super-citizens, entities with our rights but with the enormous financial ability to press, and indeed distort, those rights for their own purposes.

Another factor we currently endure is the lingering existence and aftereffect of the establishment of legalized political bribery, best represented by the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo. In short, due to decisions like the one in Buckley, the payment of millions of dollars to political parties and candidates amounts to "free speech." Combined with the existence of corporate personhood, the result was corporate super-citizens pressing their "rights" by purchasing politics wholesale. Corporations seeking the dismantling of media ownership rules, the deregulation of banking and financial strictures, and the denuding of environmental protections merely purchased enough politicians via "free speech" contributions, and they got what they wanted.

The third factor takes us all the way back to World War II, and is where the confluence of those first two factors truly came together to form a juggernaut that marks every part of our national landscape. In order to gear up for the kind of colossal manufacturing output required to defeat two massive military powers on opposite ends of the globe, President Roosevelt placed our national economy on a wartime footing. With the establishment of the Truman Doctrine to confront Soviet communism, and the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, America's wartime economic footing became a permanent thing that remains at the nucleus of our national economy to this day.

Put plainly, much of the health of the American economy today requires the permanent preparation for and fighting of wars. The corporate persons who profit from defense spending have made sure, by way of their "free speech" spending on pet politicians and acquirement of major media outlets, that nothing interferes with the financial processes of this arrangement. Their politicians and media spokesmen terrify the people with the golems of imminent national doom, the money rolls in, and the world gets more dangerous by the day.

These three legs are the tripod upon which our national reality currently stands, and not to put too fine a point on it, but President Barack Hussein Obama isn't going to put even a tiny dent in the way things are. No president can, not completely, and certainly not now. Fixing this self-destructive arrangement cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop, but will require the slow, steady, patient dedication of a lifetime ... along with victories in many more elections to come, of course.

That sounds terribly depressing, and it is, but there's also this...

The rest: http://www.truthout.org/012309R

[4 t 4]

1. You are right so depressing but I am

sure so true.

[madamesilverspurs]

2. A long road, indeed.

And it's littered with chunks of broken infrastructure, blighted with potholes, and ravaged by bandits wearing Armani suits. But it's the road we've got, and the outlaw CEOs and their congressional moles will fight us every inch of the way. Screw them! It's OUR damned road and they can just get the hell off of it. Just sayin'.

Now about that stem cell research -- is there any possible way to keep any Bush DNA from getting into that mix?

[Career Prole]

3. Good job, Will!

Glad I clicked out to read it all. :)

K & R :kick:

[bluestateboomer]

4. Everybody pick up a shovel.....

We have a lot of work to do digging ourselves out of our mess.

Thanks Will.

K&R:patriot:

[DinahMoeHum]

8. And if you don't have a shovel, use a teaspoon. . .

We can't wait for snowplows or bulldozers.

:bounce:

K'd, R'd, and bookmarked.

[BeFree]

5. Short version

Corporations that get money from the government for military expenditures can use that money to buy politicians to pass more money for military expenditures.

So, how do we fight?

Quit supporting bad corporations. Closely examine where your products come from and try not to purchase from those bad ones.

Keep voting in new government officials. Now that we have paper votes, it will once again work.

Which leaves us with the MIC - Military Industrial Complex - The "War is good for the economy" mindset.

No clue there except peace.

[Gregorian]

6. This is such a clear, broad perspective. Bravo!

You are so right on! And I don't mean that in a trivial way. I've spent my life looking at these "dominant facors", and how they affect us. And yet they are virtually off stage. Perhaps because they are so dominant.


Now that I've said that... There is even more bad news. I would call it the fourth dominant factor. And it won't leave me, especially when talking about stimulus packages. We're depending upon some kind of growth, if I may call it that, in order for us to continue our lifestyles as they were. Chicago needs buses. The rail system needs fixing, along with just about every bridge in the nation. Roads crumbling. But we have a monster that we don't dare feed without pulling the rug out from under our own feed. Global warming. How on earth are we going to jump start a nation without combustion?

War spending and lobbying can be ended. And maybe the same can be said for global warming. But here is what I know to be a basic part of the solution to all of them. It is not a matter of "doing" so much as "not doing". And this is a concept that goes contrary to American methods of operation. We are rugged. And "not doing" isn't rugged at all. It's passive. And it almost certainly means a lower living standard.

Oh well.

[eridani]

7. Unfortunately correct. However, can we still afford to remain an empire?

Britain and the Soviet Union could not.

[ro1942]

9. a little socialism

boy was this article on the money. capitalism and more democracies aren't the answer to the problems facing the planet. this stimulus plan and the phony war on terror will make things worst. a little socialism is not a dirty word.

[WilliamPitt]

10. .

[Time for change]

11. Those are indeed three major obstacles to the well-being of our country

But maybe we can overcome them sooner than you think.

FDR's administration comes to mind. The unfortunate point about that is that it may have required the worst Depression in our history to enable the accomplishments of FDR's administration. If the American people are pushed too far, they will react.

That's one reason why I believe we desperately need to hold the Bush administration accountable for their crimes. I think that would go a long way towards the education of the American people, and could set the stage for radical change.

[OKDem08]

12. I still don't understand

how this concept of "corporate personhood" manifests itself. Can anyone explain?

[WilliamPitt]

13. I wrote this nearly five years ago. Does this answer your question?

That supremacy was achieved on May 10, 1886, with a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case titled County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394). The matter before the court turned on taxes and assessments which Santa Clara County believed it was owed by Southern Pacific Railroad. The court found for the railroad company, and enshrined the following words into the annals of American law:

"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does. The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
...This was the birth of corporate personhood, the idea that a corporation has the same rights and privileges as a single individual. From this point on, in the argument over how much power any single company or group of companies could gather, all bets were off. The court's decision in 1886 essentially created what could be described as super-citizens.

Kalle Lasn, in his book 'Culture Jam', describes it this way: "Considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution - that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates - had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it 'could not be supported by history, logic or reason.' One of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of democratic government."

By 1919, corporations employed more than 80% of the American workforce and produced most of America's wealth. Because they were so financially powerful, it became impossible to challenge their supremacy in court: Any challenger would be spent into the ground. Their ability to manipulate domestic and foreign policy via financial largesse to political leaders created a nation where virtually every decision purportedly made in the name of the people was, in fact, an extension of corporate desire.

In every way imaginable, a slow coup d'état had taken place in the United States. And war, as ever, increased their fortunes. In the aftermath of World War II, corporations were rolling in the profits earned through procurements from the federal government, exactly as they had during the Civil War. The difference between 1865 and 1946 was the personhood granted by the Santa Clara decision.

The power enjoyed by corporations after the war, augmented by the military ramp-up of the Cold War, motivated another American President to voice another warning. President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech on January 17, 1961, said:

"We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense without peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Eisenhower's warning went unheeded. Revenues from government procurements to fight the Cold War, along with several actual shooting wars in places like Korea and Vietnam, further strengthened corporate rule in America. Corporations merged, expanded, became stand-alone economies more powerful than many sovereign nations. During the administration of Ronald Reagan, which worked day and night to further deregulate the controls placed upon corporations, and which spent untold billions on further expanding the American military, what can only be described as total victory over democracy was achieved by the corporate powers-that-be.

- "Freedom, Incorporated" Monday 21 June 2004

===

P.S. the unfairness of corporate personhood also manifests itself in the judicial system. Corporations are usually established to shield the individual principals - the original partners who formed the interest - from civil and criminal litigation. But corporate personhood grants 14th Amendment rights to corporations, essentiually turning those corporations into citizens...but citizens who cannot be successfully sued, which thus protects the individuals who run the corporation.

[WilliamPitt]

14. Bump for the Monday crowd

:)