Moyers: Why 'We The People' Must Triumph Over Corporate Power
December 11, 2011 |
Photo Credit: PBS
(Editor's note: The following is the foreword to Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It, by Jeffrey Clements, a new book from Berrett-Koehler Publishers.)
Rarely
have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative
members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to
secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve
of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where
political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of
wealth. It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic
stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos,
corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the
United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches of the fifty states.
The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as
living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling
of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to
slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war
and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation
before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws.
God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United,
but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more
swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter. Citizens United
is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from
the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a
fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent
of the powerful and privileged. Public institutions, laws, and
regulations, as well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs that aimed to
protect the common good and helped create America’s iconic middle class,
would become increasingly vulnerable. The Nobel Laureate economist
Robert Solow succinctly summed up the results: “The redistribution of
wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.”
In the wake of Citizens United, popular resistance is all that
can prevent the richest economic interests in the country from buying
the democratic process lock, stock, and barrel.
America has a long record of conflict with corporations. Wealth
acquired under capitalism is in and of itself no enemy to democracy, but
wealth armed with political power — power to choke off opportunities
for others to rise, power to subvert public purposes and deny public
needs — is a proven danger to the “general welfare” proclaimed in the
Preamble to the Constitution as one of the justifications for America’s
existence.
In its founding era, Alexander Hamilton created a financial system
for our infant republic that mixed subsidies, tariffs, and a central
bank to establish a viable economy and sound public credit. James
Madison and Thomas Jefferson warned Americans to beware of the political
ambitions of that system’s managerial class. Madison feared that the
“spirit of speculation” would lead to “a government operating by corrupt
influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of
public duty.” Jefferson hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the
aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge
our government to a trial of strength and [to] bid defiance to the laws
of our country.” Radical ideas? Class warfare? The voters didn’t think
so. In 1800, they made Jefferson the third president and then reelected
him, and in 1808 they put Madison in the White House for the next eight
years.
Andrew Jackson, the overwhelming people’s choice of 1828, vetoed
the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States in the summer
of 1832. Twenty percent of its stock was government-owned; the rest was
held by private investors, some of them foreigners and all of them
wealthy. Jackson argued that the bank’s official connections and size
gave it unfair advantages over local competition. In his veto message,
he said: “[This act] seems to be predicated on the erroneous idea that
the present stockholders have a prescriptive right not only to the favor
but to the bounty of Government. ... It is to be regretted that the
rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish
purposes.” Four months later, Jackson was easily reelected in a
decisive victory over plutocracy.
The predators roared back in the Gilded Age that followed the Civil
War. Corruption born of the lust for money produced what one historian
described as “the morals of a gashouse gang.” Judges, state legislators,
the parties that selected them and the editors who supported them were
purchased as easily as ale at the local pub. Lobbyists roamed the halls
of Congress proffering gifts of cash, railroad passes, and fancy
entertainments. The U.S. Senate became a “millionaires’ club.” With
government on the auction block, the notion of the “general welfare”
wound up on the trash heap; grotesque inequality and poverty festered
under the gilding. Sound familiar?
Then came a judicial earthquake. In 1886, a conservative Supreme
Court conferred the divine gift of life on the Southern Pacific Railroad
and by extension to all other corporations. The railroad was declared
to be a “person,” protected by the recently enacted Fourteenth
Amendment, which said that no person should be deprived of “life,
liberty or property without due process of law.” Never mind that the
amendment was enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves who were now
U.S. citizens. Never mind that a corporation possessed neither a body
to be kicked nor a soul to be damned (or saved!). The Court decided that
it had the same rights of “personhood” as a walking, talking citizen
and was entitled to enjoy every liberty protected by the Constitution
that flesh-and-blood individuals could claim, even though it did not
share their disadvantage of being mortal. It could move where it chose,
buy any kind of property it chose, and select its directors and
stockholders from anywhere it chose. Welcome to unregulated
multinational conglomerates, although unforeseen at the time. Welcome to
tax shelters, at home and offshore, and to subsidies galore, paid for
by the taxes of unsuspecting working people. Corporations were endowed
with the rights of “personhood” but exempted from the responsibilities
of citizenship.
That’s the doctrine picked up and dusted off by the John Roberts Court in its ruling on Citizens United.
Ignoring a century of modifying precedent, the court gave our corporate
sovereigns a “sky’s the limit” right to pour money into political
campaigns for the purpose of influencing the outcome. And to do so
without public disclosure. We might as well say farewell to the very
idea of fair play. Farewell, too, to representative government “of, by,
and for the people.”
Unless.
Unless “We, the People” — flesh-and-blood humans, outraged at the selling off of our government — fight back.
It’s been done before. As my friend and longtime colleague, the
historian Bernard Weisberger, wrote recently, the Supreme Court remained
a procorporate conservative fortress for the next fifty years after the
Southern Pacific decision. Decade after decade it struck down laws
aimed to share power with the citizenry and to promote “the general
welfare.” In 1895, it declared unconstitutional a measure providing for
an income tax and gutted the Sherman Antitrust Act by finding a loophole
for a sugar trust. In 1905, it killed a New York state law limiting
working hours. In 1917, it did likewise to a prohibition against child
labor. In 1923, it wiped out another law that set minimum wages for
women. In 1935 and 1936, it struck down early New Deal recovery acts.
But in the face of such discouragement, embattled citizens refused
to give up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist
William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed
recasting, that the government had fallen into the hands of
self-seekers, that a new relationship should be established between the
haves and the have-nots.” Not content merely to wring their hands and
cry “Woe is us,” everyday citizens researched the issues, organized
public events to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches,
petitioned and canvassed, marched and exhorted. They would elect the
twentieth-century governments that restored “the general welfare” as a
pillar of American democracy, setting in place legally ordained minimum
wages, maximum working hours, child labor laws, workmen’s safety and
compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security and
Medicare, and rules to promote competitive rather than monopolistic
financial and business markets.
The social contract that emerged from these victories is part and
parcel of the “general welfare” to which the Founders had dedicated our
Constitution. The corporate and political right seeks now to weaken and
ultimately destroy it. Thanks to their ideological kin on the Supreme
Court, they can attack the social contract using their abundant
resources of wealth funneled — clandestinely — into political campaigns.
During the fall elections of 2010, the first after the Citizens United
decision, corporate front groups spent $126 million while hiding the
identities of the donors, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The
United States Chamber of Commerce, which touts itself as a “main street”
grass-roots organization, draws most of its funds from about a hundred
businesses, including such “main street” sources as BP, Exxon-Mobil,
JPMorgan Chase, Massey Coal, Pfizer, Shell, Aetna, and Alcoa. The ink
was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the Chamber
organized a covertly funded front and fired volley after volley of
missiles, in the form of political ads, into the 2010 campaigns,
eventually spending approximately $75 million. Another corporate cover
group — the Americans Action Network — spent over $26 million of
undisclosed corporate money in six Senate races and 28 House of
Representative elections. And “Crossroads GPS” seized on Citizens United
to raise and spend at least $17 million that NBC News said came from “a
small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private
equity moguls,” all determined to water down the financial reforms
designed to avoid a collapse of the financial system that their own
greed and reckless speculation had helped bring on. As I write in the
summer of 2011, the New York Times reports that efforts to
thwart serious reforms are succeeding. The populist editor Jim Hightower
concludes that today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy “have simply
elevated money itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash as the
real coin of political power. The more you spend on politics, the bigger
your voice is in government, making the vast vaults of billionaires and
corporations far superior to the voices of mere voters.”
Against such odds, discouragement comes easily. But if the
generations before us had given up, slaves would be waiting on our
tables and picking our crops, women would be turned back at the voting
booths, and it would be a crime for workers to organize. Like our
forebears, we will not fix the broken promise of America — the promise
of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all our citizens,
not just the powerful and privileged — if we throw in the proverbial
towel. Surrendering to plutocracy is not an option. Confronting a moment
in our history that is much like the one Lincoln faced — when “we can
nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope on earth” — we must fight
back against the forces that are pouring dirty money into the political
system, turning it into a sewer.
How to fight back is the message of this book.
Jeffrey Clements saw corporate behavior up close during two stints as
assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, litigating against the
tobacco industry, enforcing fair trade practices, and leading more than
one hundred attorneys and staff responsible for consumer and
environmental protection, antitrust practices, and the oversight of
health care, insurance, and financial services. He came away from the
experience repeating to himself this indelible truth: “Corporations are
not people.” Try it yourself: “Corporations are not people.” Again:
“Corporations are not people.” You are now ready to join what Clements
believes is the most promising way to counter Citizens United: a
campaign for a constitutional amendment affirming that free speech and
democracy are for people and that corporations are not people.
Impossible? Not at all, says Clements. We have already amended the
Constitution twenty-seven times. Amendment campaigns are how we have
always made the promise of equality and liberty more real. Difficult? Of
course; as Frederick Douglass taught us, power concedes nothing without
a struggle. To contend with power, Clements and his colleague John
Bonifaz founded Free Speech for People, a nationwide nonpartisan effort to overturn Citizens United
and corporate rights doctrines that unduly leverage corporate economic
power into political power. What Clements calls the People’s Rights
Amendment could be our best hope to save the “great American
experiment.”
To find out why, read on, and as you read, keep in mind the words
of Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, who a century ago stood up to the
mighty combines of wealth and power that were buying up our government
and called on Americans of all persuasions to join him in opposing the
“naked robbery” of the public’s trust:
It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue;
it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not
resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the
whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our
civilization itself cannot endure.
Bill Moyers is the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.
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