Then-retired President Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival what today would be considered a blistering attack on corporate power:
"Those seeking profits," he wrote, "were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. " I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom."
Corporate power has always been influential in America, but five "conservatives" on the Supreme Court elevated it to a near-Mussolini level in their Citizens United decision, opening the door for the GOP to embrace an Americanized version of Mussolini's idea:
- The "conservatives" on the Court first ruled that billionaires buying politicians was "free speech" instead of "bribery" (Buckley 1976 and Citizens United 2010).
- They then unleashed corporate power, ruling that corporations are "persons" with "rights" under the Bill of Rights, including the "free speech" and "assembly" rights to "petition the government" and financially support politicians (Bellotti 1978 and Citizens United 2010).
Yes, as Mitt Romney famously said, "Corporations are people, my friend." All because a handful of lifetime-appointed right-wingers on the Supreme Court decided it would help their wealthy patrons.
In Justice John Paul Stevens' dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out how absurd this reasoning was: corporations in their modern form didn't even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787.
"All general business corporation statutes appear to date from well after 1800," Stevens pointed out to his conservative colleagues on the Court. "The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. " [T]hey are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."
As if he were looking at today's corporations that daily tell Congress what to pass and what to block, Stevens added:
"Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation."
When Ronald Reagan came into office and began America's turn toward neoliberal oligarchy there wasn't a single billionaire in America because, in part, the top 74% income tax rate prevented that kind of wealth accumulation. Regardless of inflation since then, in 1980 nobody controlled a fortune on the order of American oligarchs like Bezos or Musk do today.
Instead, wealth flowed to working people, producing in the 1940-1980 era the richest and broadest middle class in world history.
Similarly, as Lee Drutman documents for The Atlantic, before the Supreme Court got into the act corporations generally avoided participating in politics beyond routine PR.
"[V]ery few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s," he writes. "To the extent that businesses did lobby in the 1950s and 1960s (typically through associations), they were clumsy and ineffective."
Today lobbyists spend over $3 billion a year buying and selling votes and legislation, which has destroyed Americans' faith in government and brought us to this crisis.
Thanks to five "conservatives" on the Supreme Court, we are now well down the road to a final "merging of state and business leadership."
At the same time, as Chauncey DeVega brilliantly noted at Salon:
Domestic terrorism experts have also warned that right-wing extremists and paramilitary groups are organizing on the local and state level to intimidate, harass and target "liberals," Black and brown people, Muslims, Jews, immigrant communities and others deemed to be their enemies.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
