The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy
By Noam Chomsky February 3, 2010
Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.
On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections--a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.
The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.
To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling "strikes at the heart of democracy" by having "paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding."
The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called "conservative") joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.
Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.
Political economist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of politics" is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.
The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.
The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that "we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment"--the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.
In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court's 1886 decision that corporations--these "collectivist legal entities"--have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.
This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as "a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments."
Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that "the powers of the board of directors "are identical with the powers of the corporation." In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled "free trade agreements." Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business ("national treatment")--quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek "national treatment" in New York, or even minimal human rights.
A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which "comparatively small groups of men," corporate managers, "wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country," becoming "rivals of the government itself."
In reality, these "small groups" increasingly have become government's masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.
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