Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys-legally enacted game-playing-agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.-- Buckminster Fuller, The Grunch of Giants
William Rivers Pitt has written a brilliant and chilling summary detailing how, in spite of the grave and appropriate mistrust that early Americans had of corporate power, corporations (with the help of the 1886 Supreme Court decision granting that corporations are persons) become supercitizens, whose enormous financial resources and resulting ability to manipulate policy has resulted in a government overwhelmingly aimed at serving their interests, rather than ours.
Here's a quick summary. For the first 100 years or so of U.S. independence, and reflecting the U.S. experience of large British corporations (such as the British East India Company) as the henchmen for British rule, U.S. corporations were appropriately regulated and easily dismantled if they became a threat to the public trust. Then came the Civil War, which allowed the profits and power of corporations to mushroom. This power enabled corporations to buy legislatures and courts, and soon thereafter the Corporate Supercitizen was born, when corporations seized upon the 14th amendment to the Constitution (which was intended to ensure the rights of freed slaves to legal due process) as a means of gaining legal recognition as persons.
With the carte blanche this protection allowed, the power and influence of corporations exploded, in an effective coup d'état. WWII and the impending Cold War led to the entrenchment of corporate power, and its further insinuation into government, via the permanent Military-Industrial Complex, which Eisenhower identified as a threat to democratic sovereignty in his 1961 farewell address. Thanks to the Cold War, along with Korea and Vietnam (and by this time, it becomes hard to see whether wars are driving corporate power, or vice versa) and the concomitant untold billions spent on expanding the U.S. military, coupled with the rampant deregulation of corporations initiated during Reagan's administration and which continues apace today, "what can only be described as total victory over democracy was achieved by the corporate powers-that-be"---a victory that the never-ending 'War on Terror' in place will serve to solidify, in perpetuity, as the U.S. becomes a government run of, by, and for Corporate Supercitizens.
This is scary stuff, and rings very true as one---perhaps the most----foundational driving problematic in the calculus of U.S. economics, politics, and culture. Pitt tells us that sixty years after the personhood decision, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded that it 'could not be supported by history, logic or reason.' This decision needs to be overturned; else it is very unclear how lasting reforms in any other area (corporate consolidation of and influence on media, lack of healthcare and other appropriate human services, an end to universal war, the need for campaign reform, etc.) will ever be accomplished.
I am going to make this one of my main activism issues. I hope you will join me. ReclaimDemocracy.org looks like a good place to start.
