I turned to the Democratic Party when I reached voting age because of my natural distrust of authority. I still have a problem with authority, and I’m proud of it. This may surprise libertarians and tea partiers, who’ve been misled to think that Republicans are the champions of individual liberty.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision yesterday should make it clear to the most myopic conservative that individual liberty has never been what the corporatist right is about. Historically, progressives share the blame for being, well, bossy. Dating back to the 19th Century progressives, smitten with emerging social sciences and the potential of business management techniques in the public sphere, were authoritarian. Prohibition ring a bell?
Still, I believed progressives (and the political party they belonged too) represented the little people against the powerful. I grew up in the Civil Rights era. Of course, many Southerners think civil rights was the ultimate assault on individual liberty, their liberty to discriminate against others. This isn’t logical of course. Civil rights was all about individual liberty.
Anyway, today it is more obvious than ever that the real danger to freedom in America comes from the unaccountable, irresponsible and infinitely powerful authority that is the big, global corporation. Empowered now by a Supreme Court that’s handed them super-human rights and privileges, corporations can now trample individual initiative, take what they want from entrepreneurs, eliminate competition, and erase the adjective “popular” from in front of democracy — forever.
They can legally swamp our political sphere with their money. The can advertise at will to advance their candidates. Don’t fall for the idle thought that you are not persuaded by ads. You are. Everyone is. Follow the money. There’s a reason billions is spent on advertising. It changes our minds. Now corporations can change our minds whenever they want.
Do you have physician friends? Ask them privately what the corporatization of medicine has done to their practice. Do you have friends in the media? Ask them what the corporate consolidation of media has done to the ability to deliver fair, balanced and thorough news. Have you ever had to deal with a health insurance company? Ask yourself if their corporate and political power gives you confidence you can keep your children healthy.
Did you or anyone you know lose a small, town square business to Walmart in the last several decades? A small pharmacy to the big outlets? A bookstore? Did you go to work for a corporation after college out of a sense of responsibility to provide your family with long-term job security? Were you laid off in middle age with few or any prospects?
Have you been injured through a corporation’s negligence? Did you notice that your access to the justice system has been greatly restricted through the immoral fraud of so-called tort reform? Can you see it now as nothing but a move to make corporations less accountable than actual humans for harm they do to others?
Are you a musician who had a record company steal your royalties? And there was nothing you could do about it?
Well, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision — based on the ridiculous premise that corporations are persons, indeed, that they are super-persons — these difficulties are going to be multiplied a thousand times.
The battle we are in cannot be defined by the old categories. This is not an issue of Right versus Left, at least as those terms are defined by worn-out old cliches and beliefs. It is an issue of the individual versus unaccountable, irresponsible and infinitely powerful authority.
You are already sick of special interest corruption of politics. Well, that corruption has now been made legal by the court. Corporations are free to buy, to own, our government. You’ve heard it’s just a matter of free speech? Well, do you think you have the same power of speech as a corporation? No one does. The President doesn’t. Corporations can outspend and outshout a politician at any level, no matter how much that politician raises.
The Court’s ruling is the ultimate attack on free speech. It says money equals speech. And that means those with the most money have the most speech. In fact, big corporations have so much money that we have, relatively, none. Which means we have no speech, free or otherwise.
I hope DogCanyon readers will forward this modest and quickly written essay to their conservative friends and family. It’s time that we overcome some of our differences, based as they are on old categories and misleading spin from the powerful who gain their power by dividing us. We have a common enemy. It’s not the people within the corporations. Many of them are our neighbors, and in their better moments we know they mean us no harm. It is this transcendent creature called the Corporation that is fast becoming an enemy unlike any other humanity may have ever faced.
The corporatists are no champions of what we think of as capitalism. We think of it as an open and transparent market in which all comers have a fair shot. The corporatist eliminates the fair shot, stomps on individual enterprise, and destroys entrepreneurship. Soon, empowered by the Court, corporatists will, if left unchallenged, destroy what remains of popular democracy.
As the Rev. Gary Davis sang in “Samson and Delilah”:
If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way
I would tear this building down.
