Supreme Injustice: Corporate Power and the Democracy Deficit

“Free” speech just became prohibitively expensive. Who can compete with giant, often multinational corporations with endless cash? It’s fairly commonly recognized that Washington is already bought and paid for – dating back to the era of the Robber Barons, the Senate was known as the “Millionaires’ Club” – but the most lethal consequence of this decision will be felt at the local level. It’s a cage match between David and Goliath without a slingshot.

The only good thing that can be said about the Supremes’ arrogance of power is that it strips any veil of pretense about who’s in charge here in the United Corporations of America. As one wag once put it, “Power corrupts, and absolute power – is really neat.”

Perhaps all the kind of work we’ve been highlighting at Bioneers since 1995 - when Richard Grossman first began raising the issue of revoking corporate charters and then founded what became the Democracy Schools now operated by Tom Linzey and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund - is ready for prime time. At the ground level across the country, communities are starting to rise up to reject corporate rights that supersede human rights and to legally affirm the rights of nature. That work reached an apex in 2009 with the Ecuadorian Constitution, the first national constitution to recognize the rights of nature.

It’s mightily ironic that the “tea-baggers” are railing against government at a time when government is in great measure of a handmaiden of corporations. Their energy would be better directed behind the curtain. In fact, to be true to American history and tradition, they might want to revisit the Boston Tea Party, that kick-off event of the American Revolution. That popular insurrection in Boston Harbor wasn’t in fact targeted against the British Crown. It was a direct action against the East India Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations. Seeking a tea monopoly, the British company had managed to get the Crown - whose royalty and government were stockholders - to exempt it from a tax on the tea it sold in the American Colonies, thus throttling any competition from all the local merchants. The Tea Party was a rebellion against the free-trade NAFTA of its day. Our republic was born out of a struggle against corporate empire. And today we’ve reached the logical conclusion of that juggernaut: a corporate state in a rapidly declining empire.

George Soros calls this kind of devolution the “morbidification of First Principles.” We’ve become what we opposed.  Of course, you might ask who is “we?” There is a notable democracy deficit, in Noam Chomsky’s phrase, a gaping disconnect between the popular will and public policy. “More than ever,” reports the New York Times, “Americans do not trust business or the people who run it. [The public] believes that executives are bent on destroying the environment, cooking the books and lining their own pockets.” A recent Roper poll showed that 72 percent of respondents felt that wrongdoing was widespread in industry. A whopping 90 percent told a Harris poll that big companies had too much influence on government.

Maybe all this has a little something to do with another inconvenient truth: our nation’s gaping wealth gap. For the first time since the Labor Department began crunching the numbers, the top fifth of the population devoured over half the American pie of annual income, and owns 83 percent of all stock. The top one percent owns over half of that. Meanwhile, since 2000, median income has fallen almost six percent.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the stupid economy.

Perhaps public discontent is heating up because - while the planet writhes with paroxysms of global warming - Exxon Mobil posted the highest corporate profits in the history of civilization last year. The other oil giants were hot on their heels. Interior Department whistleblowers simultaneously revealed how the oiligarchy was systematically hustling the public treasury out of royalties worth hundreds of millions of dollars, at the very moment the government is running the highest deficit ever recorded.

While the government claims to export democracy abroad, we seem to be losing it at home, notably when it conflicts with corporate interests.

But make no mistake. The policies of the corporate state have seldom stood in such sharp opposition to the ostensible will of the American people.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes contrasted the people’s budget against the government’s budget. The most dramatic differences the public wanted were these: deep cuts in defense spending; a significant reallocation toward deficit reduction; and increases in spending on social programs. By far the biggest percentage increase the public wanted was for conserving and developing renewable energy. Apart from universal health care, energy independence and getting off oil are the public’s single highest priority.

As for those famous “moral values” voters, one Zogby poll probed how the American people prioritize our country’s “most urgent moral crisis.” Twice as high as any other concerns were: greed and materialism at 33 percent; and poverty and economic justice at 31 percent.

Numerous polls show the democracy deficit is also pitting public policy against the public regarding: the government’s handling of Katrina; election reform; pre-emptive war; state torture; and indefinite detentions without trial.

So why are the very special interests winning?

Because they’re special. Corporations have far more rights than people, as well as the clout to enforce them. And of course nature has no rights – it’s just property.

At the heart of the matter is the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. The idea that a corporation is not a person may seem like a big “duh,” but the law says otherwise.

In actuality, of course, corporations are a legal “fiction.” Unlike a person, a corporation is not made of flesh and blood. It does not die a natural death. It has no feelings or heart or relatives, or conscience. Above all, it serves as a paper shield against liability for the real people who own it – a defense against being a person.

Yet under U.S. laws of commerce, corporations are treated as “persons with standing.” They enjoy the same legal human rights described in the Bill of Rights - and many flesh-and-bone regular citizens find our rights systematically overridden by corporate rights.

The legal decision that awarded corporations the right of personhood surfaced in an 1886 Supreme Court case. Or did it?

The ruling never actually mentions corporate personhood or anything close to it. It turns out that a wily court clerk added a “headnote” - which is supposed to be an objective executive summary of the decision – but this one proved to be an exercise in creative writing. That hallucinatory headnote is the joker in the deck upon which more than a century of subsequent law has enabled corporations to become the dominant institution of our age.

At the time of that fateful headnote, the tradition of anti-corporate resistance was indelibly engrained in American history. From our country’s inception, the struggle between corporations and democracy has been a central through line in the quest for a free republic.

Just as the Boston Tea Party was waged to resist the NAFTA of its day against the world’s first multinational, the Founding Fathers were acutely aware of the looming danger of corporate power as it was inexorably displacing enfeebled, archaic monarchies.

As Thom Hartmann recounts in his book Unequal Protection, Thomas Jefferson called for a provision in the Bill of Rights to safeguard “freedom of commerce from monopolies.” He wrote this: “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 the country.”

Abraham Lincoln feared for the republic at the close of the Civil War. He said: “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of our country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.”

Or, as the infamous railroad robber baron Collis Huntington put it, “Anything’s that’s not nailed down is mine, and anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.” That’s a mighty fine generic corporate mission statement, eh?

This year at the Bioneers Conference, we’ll keep highlighting the most powerfully innovative work across the country to overturn corporate rule, including the movement for a 28^th Amendment to the Constitution to revoke corporate personhood and movement to recognize the rights of nature.

Improbable as it may sound, we’ve done this kind of thing before in American history. In the 1800s, abolitionists successfully took up the cause of freedom from slavery. It took a grievous Civil War to guarantee the rights of African Americans in the Constitution. The suffragists fought for women’s rights in the streets and the courts for 100 years before women won the Constitutional right to vote in 1920. 

In his 2003 book, “Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice,” South African environmental attorney Cormac Cullinan asserts that human beings are actually equal members of a planet-wide community that includes the ecosystems that make all life possible. Without clean water, clean air, healthy soil, fertile habitats and sufficient wildlife, every member of the Earth community suffers, including us.

Cullinan advocates for a new body of law to counter the commodification and corporatization of nature. Its first priority is to protect the ecological community in which we live, and citizens can stand on their behalf and give voice to the voiceless.

At the 2009 Bioneers Conference, Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund invoked Dr. Suess’ famous book “The Lorax.” “Who will speak for the trees?” intones the Lorax?

Indeed, who will speak for the trees? Please join us at Bioneers 2010 to speak for the trees - for the web of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and for the consent of the governed in a 21^st century Declaration of Interdependence.