More Oppression Now
That huge business interests dominate the world is well-known.
Perhaps you have also heard that the main reason for this is because business entities have assumed the legal rights of living people. I will argue, at risk of being obvious and simplistic, that corporations do not deserve the rights of people because – they are not people!
All working Americans must understand how corporate personhood came to be and how it affects our daily lives before we can understand how to undo the damage it has done. To do that, we must collectively give a shit, which ain’t gonna happen. We then, most importantly, need a plan of action. That I don’t have either, but let me tell you why.
Framing the debate, establishing the language used in a winning argument, is key to active and purposeful involvement of individuals in their daily lives as citizens. What could be the language (terms, buzzwords, slogans) of an anti-corporate personhood movement?
To sink into our collective unconscious, or at least or public dialogue, new terminology must come into vogue, or popular usage. Maybe there could be a logo for non-corporate lifestyle. A universal symbol of individuality? No, there couldn’t be. No, that would be hypocrisy. The last thing we need is another branded lifestyle. We buy too much of our identity as it is.
Unfortunately, the problem of corporate personhood can best be solved by those who created it in the first place: The United States Supreme Court must formally define the word person as it appears in the 14th Amendment to mean human beings and not business entities.
All the questions I had about the legal history of this term were answered by William Meyers in a thorough article, placed in the public domain, called The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy.
In 1868 the 14th Amendment became law. Its purpose was freedom of the slaves and a guarantee of their rights of citizenship. Section 1 states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens… nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The word born is key terminology. It is not clear how a corporation is born (or naturalized), and this phrasing is the key to overturning the assumed definition of corporate personhood.
Justice Hugo Black, who sat on the Court at that time wrote, “This Amendment was proposed to protect weak and helpless human beings and we are now told it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of the state… Certainly a corporation cannot be naturalized and the term persons here is not broad enough to include corporations. [The 14th Amendment protects] the liberty of natural, not artificial persons.”
Justice Black recognized how a law designed to help the helpless was being appropriated to make the powerful even more invulnerable. He saw the hypocrisy that was brewing. The term artificial person is key to unlocking the corporate grip on our society.
For too long the emphasis has been on person rather than artificial, and this is unfortunate because our judges seem as bought and sold by corporate interests as the legislative and executive branches of our government currently are.
Call me a cynic, or worse, a conspiracy theorist, but I wondered how the concept of corporate personhood came about, and what harm such a precedent could really cause.
Meyers found that the harm of this legal contradiction is that “These rights in turn have been used by the corporations to corrupt the citizens, government, and legal system: to treat workers and small businesses as economic prey; and to destroy the environment we all depend on to sustain life itself.”
I don’t know how anyone who understands that statement can in good conscience feel that this current system is just, or even of benefit to them personally.
The court’s reluctance to hear argument on the definition of a person led to assumptions about what it is, and this silence has been improperly cited as a precedent ever since. After the Santa Clara decision another case, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), denied the protection of the 14th Amendment to the very group of people (former slaves and their descendants) for whom it was designed. The Supreme Court ruled that a man whose ancestry was as much as 7/8 free-white but one part slave could be forced to sit in a separate but equal section of a passenger train.
In effect this decision declared people with non-European ancestors to be non-persons without Constitutional rights, and in Minor v. Happersett (1874) the Supreme Court ruled that women were not persons for the purposes of the 14th Amendment.
These rulings were the law of the land until such blatant contradiction was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education. That helped minority rights, but corporate rights never slowed. In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) the US Supreme Court declared that corporate persons have the same free rights as natural persons and could spend unlimited sums of money speaking.
This is an obscene misuse of the law and democratic ideals. The individuals within a corporation should have the rights of citizens, but the business itself is not a natural person and therefore should have no special legal status.
Apparently, a long line of theorists and activists have also seen the glaring problem in this legal loophole. Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate, in an open letter to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, asked “is there a rationale for relying on a rogue headnote, not reflective at all of the content of the Court’s actual decision, as establishing precedent on a critical matter of constitutional law?”
Justice Scalia, a once powerful and influential member of the Roberts Court, declined to answer before he died in 2016, and is likely to be replaced by an even more corporately minded justice by soon-to-be President Donald Trump. Scalia’s silence and the corporate voice that will soon replace it has been and will be a victory for irresponsible and unaccountable activity on a global scale. Human labor and natural resources are already casualties.
The Court must be made to speak on this issue, the definition of a person in the US Constitution.
But with that personhood debate comes the definition of life, and with it end of life issues, beginning of life issues, marriage issues, and immigration issues; enough to effectively derail any meaningful discussion by the corporate media. Rights of the unborn, animal rights, and robot rights can’t be far behind. I fear the situation will only get dramatically, if not irreversibly, worse under the Trump administration.
Bernie says we have to overturn the Citizens United ruling, and that would be wonderful/impossible, but the problem goes much further back than that 2010 case about campaign finance. Small business cannot compete with mega-conglomerates, and as jobs are outsourced to third world countries with little to no worker rights, our manufacturing positions at home disappear so that chain stores like Wal-Mart can sell cheap goods, and we come to ironically rely on the cheap goods that put us out of work in the first place (everybody knows this).
The purpose of corporate personhood is to give big business mega-conglomerates access to the individual civil rights provided in the United States Constitution, but corporate entities were not what the framers had in mind when they ratified the Bill of Rights.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in 1816, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance the laws of our country.” Jefferson knew that that business needs to play by the rules of its charter, not those of universal human rights.
McDonalds and Wal-Mart are not people. They do not qualify, merit, or deserve the rights of flesh and blood people. When I speak, I am judged by the content of my character. When corporations speak, they are judged by the content of their wallet.
Corporations cannot testify in court, because an artificial entity cannot take an oath. Corporations cannot be put in prison or executed, because they don’t physically exist. By giving big business the privileges of citizenship, with none of the personal responsibility that comes with it, we have created a super citizen, which makes you and me, second class citizens at best.
Meyers explains the big picture, “Corporate personhood allows the wealthiest citizens to use corporations to control the government and use it as an intermediary to impose their will upon the people.” These corporations will use their legal influence and vast capital to capture the global market, controlling not only product, but labor and resources on a global scale. These business entities will not need to answer to the laws of anywhere they operate because they will belong to none of them, and yet control their economies.
Robespierre had plans for a situation like this, involving mass executions of rich people. The overworked and tired masses escape their economic situations through distractions provided by the very corporations that created the situation.
Short of eating the rich, as the French Revolution prophesied, may I suggest taking an old t-shirt and with a dark marker write “more oppression now” on it. Then, at least, you would have done something.
We do not need global mega conglomerates to survive; in fact, serving their interests seems to be the root of two very serious problems; depleted resources and a crisis of self-ownership. Corporate consolidation of power is not an American or capitalist ideal. It destroys independent business and freedom of choice.
Making corporations play by the rules would be presented as a redistribution of wealth in the corporate owned media, and my family would vote against their own interest yet again. When free speech comes with a price tag, my voice cannot compete with the corporate voice of Comcast or Viacom, and it never will so long as we are seen by the law as equal persons.
With the majority of Justices as corporate shills who would rule against us, this hypocrisy would be revealed to society at large. Perhaps then a movement for a constitutional amendment defining personhood could begin and the walls would begin to crumble. But I doubt it.
Perhaps the real victory was not in the courts so many years ago, but in our minds as we grew up; that we are so uninterested in the things that control us, because we gave up the fight so long ago.
No. I do not want fries with that.