“We, the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Roberts

Kennedy

Not according to the 2010 US Supreme Court under Justice John Roberts. In its 5-4 decision “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” written by Justice Kennedy, the court asserted for the first time in human history that corporations have the same freedom of speech as people, and that their political contributions were a form of constitutionally protected “speech.”

We, the corporations…

So according to the Roberts court, the preamble to the US Constitution should have read, either:

“We, the corporations of the United States…”

…or…

“We, the people of the corporate United States…”

How in the world did this nation manage to get from people power in the 18th century to corporate power in the 21st? In three ways: political money, runaway capitalism, and public acquiescence. The result of this triple-whammy has been the corporate takeover of our nation and its core principles. The very notion that ours is a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” — as Lincoln proclaim it — has now been judicially (and officially) demolished by the Roberts court.

In this blog post, I’m going to let the eloquence of much wiser people help to take you, the reader, down the path of our political history, from the present Roberts court back to the founders of our country, and of our Constitution…

Stevens

In “Citizens United,” the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, noted that:

The Court’s ruling ‘threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.’ The dissent also argued that the majority ‘changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.’

Stevens concluded his dissent with:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Why would five Supreme Court justices rule in such a way as to twist the very notion of personhood into a corporate pretzel? Because their views of constitutional principles have been influenced, over the years, by corporate power and political alliances in a multiplicity of ways, both big and small. This effect on the judicial branch of government is also precisely what’s happened to our legislative and administrative branches. And it’s also precisely what’s happened to “We, the people.”

Burger

The Burger Court

Thirty-four years earlier, the Burger Court laid the foundation for official corporate electioneering. In Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), the Supreme Court upheld a federal law which set limits on campaign contributions, but ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, and struck down portions of the law. The court also ruled that candidates can give unlimited amounts of money to their own campaigns. This unprecedented finding that “money equals speech” was based on the 1886 Waite court ruling that was interpreted as “corporations = Persons” (below), set the stage for the 2010 Roberts court finding that “corporations are people.”

Corporations, unlike people, are limited in their legal and financial liabilities. Therefor, from the earliest days of our republic, it was widely understood that corporations had the potential to become very powerful.

The Eisenhower Era

Eisenhower

In Republican President Eisenhower’s famous 1960 farewell speech, he warned of the dangers of the emerging “military-industrial complex”:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; 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 militaryindustrial 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 with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The New Deal Era

FDR

In his famous “rendezvous with Desitiny” speech, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:

In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy – from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people. And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution – all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free. For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital – all undreamed of by the Fathers – the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The Bull Moose Era

Teddy Roosevelt

In an earlier generation, FDR’s fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, warned on separate occasions:

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures. But there is another harm; and it is evident that we should try to do away with that. The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them wherever need of such control is shown… [Applause] The immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, control of some sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts owe allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign’s orders may be enforced. In my opinion, this sovereign must be the National Government.

The Civil War Era

Lincoln

In a 1864 letter to Col. William F. Elkins, President Abraham Lincoln wrote:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
… corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the 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.

Lincoln also said:

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.

Abe Lincoln was precient in his 1864 letter, because…

[A U.S.] Supreme Court ruling in 1886 … arguably set the stage for the full-scale development of the culture of capitalism, by handing to corporations the right to use their economic power in a way they never had before. Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Court ruled that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution, and consequently has the same rights and protection extended to persons by the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. Thus corporations were given the same ‘rights’ to influence the government in their own interests as were extended to individual citizens, paving the way for corporations to use their wealth to dominate public thought and discourse. The debates in the United States in the 1990s over campaign finance reform, in which corporate bodies can “donate” millions of dollars to political candidates stem from this ruling although rarely if ever is that mentioned. Thus, corporations, as “persons,” were free to lobby legislatures, use the mass media, establish educational institutions such as many business schools founded by corporate leaders in the early twentieth century, found charitable organizations to convince the public of their lofty intent, and in general construct an image that they believed would be in their best interests. All of this in the interest of ‘free speech.’

— Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.100 (Bold Emphasis Added)

Waite

In actuality, the Supreme Court ruled no such thing in 1886.

The ‘corporations are persons’ ruling was a fiction created by the court’s reporter. He simply wrote the words into the headnote of the decision. The words contradict what the court actually said. There is, in fact, in the US National Archives a note by the Supreme Court Chief Justice of the time explicitly informing the reporter that the court had not ruled on corporate personhood in the Santa Clara case.

— Thom Hartmann, Dinosaur War, The Ecologist, December/January 2002 Issue

Nevertheless, because the ruling was widely interpreted to mean that ‘corporations are persons,’ it was the beginning of the end for Lincoln’s government “of the people…” As Allyn and Bacon note above, this history is never mentioned in contemporary discourse or mainstream journalism. The Whig/Replublican dominated Waite Court of the Lincoln era turned personhood (and thus citizenship) on its head with this ruling, and set the stage for the gradual takeover of representative government by monied interests that Eisenhower warned about in 1960, and that we endure today.

The Revolutionary Era

Smith

Even the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, in his famous 1776 book Wealth of Nations (the “bible” of capitalism), was critical of some aspects of corporate activity.

Smith saw corporations as working to evade the laws of the market, trying to interfere with prices and controlling trade, etc.



The Founders

According to Rick Ungar, writing on The Policy Page for True/Slant:

The reality is that the Founding Fathers didn’t think very much of corporations or, for that matter, any of the organized moneyed interests that played so large a role in the decision to revolt against Mother England.

Clearly, the Founders did not think much of these [British] corporate entities and the corruption they produced in parliament. Still, it never occurred to the Founding Fathers to directly address corporations in America when they wrote the Constitution. While we can only speculate, it is not hard to understand why this would be the case. The Constitution speaks to control of government by the people…for the people…and of the people. Why would it even occur to the Founders that a corporation would ever be perceived as one of ‘the people’? History makes clear that they viewed these entities as forces that preyed on people (see The Boston Tea Party.) Indeed, but for a legal determination made in a perverse Supreme Court holding in 1886, who would rationally see a legal entity as a person? Is a trust a ‘person’? Does it eat, breathe, etc.?

Back in the early days of the nation, most states had rules on the books making any political contribution by a corporation a criminal offense.

Jefferson

John Nichols, writing for The Nation,, wrote:

Jefferson’s distrust of concentrated and consolidated power was such that he left a legacy for any and every dissenter against the state. But Jefferson did not stop there.

He was, as well, a relentless critic of the monopolizing of economic power by banks, corporations and those who put their faith in what the third president referred to as “the selfish spirit of commerce (that) knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

Jefferson might not have wanted a lot of government, but he wanted enough government to assert the sovereignty of citizens over corporations. To his view, nothing was more important to the health of the republic.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the government at defiance.

Back to the future…

So this struggle to protect our nation and its government from corporate and other monied interests has plagued us from the start, and will continue to plague us as long as we allow unbridled capitalism to define our values, corrupt our politics, and control our society. We, the people, are guilty of permitting this by our acquiescence, and by the naiveté of many who buy into the pablum that “greed is good” because it makes possible “the American dream” of personal wealth, power, and fame. By buying into this philosophy, we leave behind our values of the common good as enshrined in the Constitution, and we embrace the values of power and self-interest — the very antithesis of that document.