People often speak of a "body politic". If the U.S. has such a thing, the Constitution is its genetic code; and the SCOTUS is the "proofreading" system that keeps the genome from accumulating deleterious mutations. To stretch the analogy further, as bodies age, they become prone to cancer, a genetic disease.
After 40 years of the war on cancer, scientists know a great detail about the tactical details of how cancer operates; but the nature and order of the originating mutations remain unclear. In the past few years, an old theory of cancer origins has been reconsidered in light of new experimental results. This theory of cancer "coincidentally" describes the behavior of the 1% versus the rest of America. That "coincidence" is the topic of this diary:
I suggest the (cancer) cell determines that the host’s body is flawed in relation to the environment; that to survive, this cell must withdraw from membership in the metazoan host, convert host biomass into cancer cell lineage expansion (i.e. to eat its host), escape externally by anatomic breaching, and emerge as a stream of semi-faithful iterations into the capricious outside world...
- Mark Vincent, Cancer: A de-repression of a default survival program common to all cells? (2011)
The first thing that came to my mind when I read of this theory was the infamous Powell Memo - a cry of ontological terror from a business elite that, horrors, was being forced to obey the laws of the society of America. The Powell Memo reads exactly like the "de-volution to single celled creatures" strategy (more on this below) that is the basic idea of the new theory of cancer origins:
what had become very apparent to the business community was that it was getting its clock cleaned. Used to having broad sway, employers faced a series of surprising defeats in the 1960s and early 1970s. As we have seen, these defeats continued unabated when Richard Nixon won the White House. Despite electoral setbacks, the liberalism of the Great Society had surprising political momentum. “From 1969 to 1972,” as the political scientist David Vogel summarizes in one of the best books on the political role of business, “virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period.” In particular, Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection.
In corporate circles, this pronounced and sustained shift was met with disbelief and then alarm. By 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell felt compelled to assert, in a memo that was to help galvanize business circles, that the “American economic system is under broad attack.”
Bill Moyers on the Powell Memo
Because it signaled the beginning of a major shift in American business culture, political power and law, the Powell memo essentially marks the beginning of the business community’s multi-decade collective takeover of the most important institutions of public opinion and democratic decision-making. At the very least, it is the first place where this broad agenda was compiled in one document.
That shift continues today, with corporate influence over policy and politics reaching unprecedented new dimensions. The decades-long drive to rethink legal doctrines and ultimately strike down the edifice of campaign finance laws – breaking radical new ground with the Roberts Court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission – continues apace.
Greenpeace on The Powell Memo
"Rethinking legal doctrine" - that is just another way of saying changing the law. And if you control the SCOTUS, of changing the Constitution. The increasingly pro-corporate SCOTUS has recently overthrown 100 years of campaign finance reform, and fifty years of voting rights protections. It illegally intervened in the 2000 Presidential Election with a completely arbitrary and unjustifiable decision. If this isn't a derangement of democracy, nothing is.
Vincent's new/old cancer theory identifies chromosomal derangement (as opposed to point mutations) as the generator of mutations that, by very rapid random evolution, lead to immortal cancer cells. The famous "p53" protein, early-on identified as a cancer-suppressor, is supposed to stop cells with deranged chromosomes from dividing. When a cell loses the gene for p53, bad genomes proliferate out of control - and they are tolerated. Many of them die stillborn, but eventually one wins the lottery and becomes a cancer.
In cancer, instability at all levels of genomic organization is accentuated, and the resulting ‘‘monstrosities’’ are tolerated, without apoptosis. Thus exists a ‘‘mutation generator’’, and a ‘‘mutation tolerator’’, permitting the grossest debasement of the genome...
This deconstruction of the metazoan phenotype by an emergent, destructive, autonomous parasite forces the conclusion that cancer cells, while ‘‘in the body’’, are no longer ‘‘of the body’’; and deserve a radically different taxonomy.
- Mark Vincent
To my mind, campaign finance law is the "p53" of democracy. These laws restrain the raw power of money to buy politicians, and through them judges and laws. One of the cases Powell was involved in caused a "mutation" in the First Amendment, a very bad mutation, which led eventually to Citizen's United:
This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's most notable court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections through independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.
- Wikipedia, Lewis Powell
It is no coincidence that the corporate cancer began in the era of huge carcinogenic insults to our governmental genome: the Vietnam War, the oil shocks, Watergate, the backlash against the Civil Rights movement. It is perfectly consistent that a lawyer for the tobacco industry, in its heyday of denying that cigarettes cause cancer, should be the author of the ur-document of corporate cancer. The Belotti decision began the march of the chromosomal derangement of democracy by big money, later objected to (but not reversed) under the slogan:
Corporations are not people; and money is not speech.
That slogan is the bedrock of a democratic America, a nation of human beings whose rights are collectively protected by a system of laws. The mutated monstrosity of a legal system in which we live today shows just how quickly Constitutional derangement leads to a primitive, selfish organization of society that barely resembles the multi-celled, division of labor of a healthy democratic industrial economy - the kind America
used to be.
There are clearly powerful corporate forces at work in America - forces that previously hid behind the phony slogan of "small government" - who want not to abolish government, but to abolish democracy.
"No Government" GOPers are really neo-Confederates
As the replacement of America's identity (i.e., laws) as a modern industrial state by the corporate cancer accelerates, primitive behaviors that were eliminated in a modern society reappear: racism, sexism, vigilanteism, extreme poverty, suppression of invention and critical thinking. These inflammatory behaviors only weaken the government's credibility more. (Indeed, inflammation is listed as one of the Six Hallmarks of Cancer by Robert Weinberg, an Nobel-prize winning cancer researcher.)
As predicted by Vincent's theory that cancer is a re-emergent set of primitive behaviors, we don't have to look far to find the organism whose behaviors are re-emerging:
The tradition that informs modern conservative thinking is the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition...The basic themes of this tradition are animus against government at all levels, states' right, a cult of firearms linked to a supposed right of armed insurrection...
The Republican right, then, does have a venerable and consistent theory of the Constituion. It just happens to be the Confederate Theory.
- Michael Lind, Up From Conservatism
Lind spells out the direct biological lineage between today's Southern ruling class and the brutal and ignorant aristocratic knights of the Middle Ages.
NOTE: This section is about the Southern ruling class, and the treasonous Confederacy, not about the poor Southern peasants who were (and are) just along to serve their aristocratic masters.
The Southern ruling class is not, and never has been, bourgeois. The wealthy families who for centuries have dominated politics and the economy in the South, from Virginia to Texas, have roots in Britain, not among the civic burghers but among the rural aristocracy. The "cavaliers" are the heirs of the medieval knights, not the medieval merchants.
Moving to the western hemisphere…these British aristocrats…created feudal systems without the reciprocal obligations to the rest of the society which, at least in theory, moderated the rapacity of feudal European aristocracies. These British-American planters…specialized in exploiting slave labor…
It is not an industrial capitalist mind-set at all, but the mentality of the Spanish conquistador, who dreamed of acquiring fabulous wealth by plundering precious metals rather than by patient effort.
The bourgeois ethic was defined from the beginning against the aristocratic ethic, the ethic of the European knights...The knights disdained labor; the burghers prized it. The knights spent their wealth recklessly; the burghers accumulated it...Just as alien as thrift and efficiency to the Southern aristocrat mind is the concept of invention.
- Michael Lind, Made in Texas
The end of the line for the corporate cancer is a truly medieval society:
The (common people)...never dreamed that they should be informed about great events, let alone have any voice in them. Their anonymity approached the absolute. So did their mute acceptance of it.
Any innovation was inconceivable; to suggest the possibility of one would have invited suspicion, and because the accused were guilty until they had proven themselves innocent... to be suspect was to be doomed.
- William Mancehster, A World Lit Only By Fire - The Medieval Mind and the Rennaisance
This is the world of Margaret Atwood's
A Handmaid's Tale; and that is where all this is headed, soon. Unless we cut out this metastasized corporate cancer; and the time until it overwhelms us is growing very short.
Everywhere corporatism triumphs, we see a reduction in research so more can be spent on shareholder profits or buying other corporations. Again, Vincent predicts this :
(Warburg) believed complex metazoa absolutely require oxidative phosphorylation, malignant transformation arising not from energy collapse, but because the fermentation energy economy is incompatible with sophisticated life forms and tissue specialization...
Warburg articulated ‘‘. . . when respiration disappears. . .the meaning of life disappears. . .what remains are growing machines. . .’’, which ‘‘. . . have lost all their bodily functions’.
(Note: "oxidative phosphorylation" is synonymous with respiration (vs primitive fermentation), and represents sophisticated and efficient use of energy)
- Mark Vincent
Corporations have been described as "externalization machines", that externalize their costs onto others while keeping profits for themselves. This is empty growth. Growth without development (i.e., specialization). This is the strategy of Conquistadors, not businessmen.
The corporate cancer genome organizes a competition for viable, but primitive, new ways of digesting its host, the United States. It seeks out sociopaths and gives them positions of power. The corporate genome has no problem with disobeying the law, looting, bleeding the middle class.
It is easy to see the near identity between neoliberal/libertarian/corporate rhetoric and the de-construction/hyper-proliferation strategy of cancer. So, I have total contempt for any bipartisanship, reaching out, or compromising with the corporate cancer. You don't cure cancer by reasoning with it; you cure it by exposing it to the immune system (hat tip to all the leakers), cutting it out, poisoning it, depriving it of food.
I hope I have not been too unclear here. Let me end with apologies to Cato:
Corporatism must be destroyed. (or it will destroy us).