When I was in law school, I took an elective course to fill out my second to last semester. The course I chose was corporate law. My presence here in DailyKos should speak for itself with regard to my very liberal bias, and thereby my disdain for corporations. Before going in to law school, I already had my reservations and hatreds of corporations — especially the corporatization of the mainstream media. I knew they were corrupt. I knew they were slanted towards conservatives and the RNC. But oh my god...
I had no idea just how deep the iceberg really went, before going through Corporate Law.
In an earlier journal I wrote about how the way true “law” functions in the United States is that it must be officiated (written down) and manifestly enforced. This means a law has to be penned to paper and enforced against the will of any naysayers — by force if need be. This is what we were ostensibly taught in law school, and this concept has more or less become the legal “culture” of American society.
“You can lecture me on morals and traditions all you please, but unless you’re going to put a gun to my head, I will do as I fucking please,” is the general theme. It is a cultural shift away from the “ancien régime” of old Europe where people would just do as they were told because it was “part of the natural order to listen to God and your superiors (nobility and the King)” on pain of death. We replaced the ancien régime in America with the Constitution and voting — “if neither stop me, I am going to do what I want.” This is where corporate law enters the scene.
Corporations are bound only, as a matter of law, by their “articles of incorporation.” An article of incorporation is a contractual oath sworn by the up-and-coming corporation, put to paper in the state where the corporation is founded (incorporated). All articles of incorporation include are (in the grand scheme of things) trivialities such as: how many shares of stock the corporation will have, how many officers the corporation will have, how voting within the corporation by shareholders will be conducted, and etc. — things like that. Legally, this is the only way a corporation can get into existential trouble (i.e. where a state file lawsuits to shut a corporation down). --- Brief sidenote ---Corporations are still bound by criminal law. A corporation cannot sanction the murder of a whistleblower, or engage in things like fraud (more on this later)
Do you know what articles of incorporation are missing? Mission statements where they outline what sort of a corporation they will be, or by what moral code they will adhere to. Nonexistent. Know why? A corporation, no matter what it is, exists only for monetary profit. The corporation exists for the express purpose of creating monetary profit for itself and its shareholders, and their entire structures are organized around this singular purpose.
When I was learning about corporate law in law school, as if what I said was not bad enough, my professor started to paint a picture that I had never envisioned before. Firstly, as already mentioned, corporations only exist for the sake of monetary profit (from a legal standpoint). Additionally, corporations are structured based on the vote of its shareholders. Shareholders get to vote on who the officers of the corporation are, and so the officers of the corporation are beholden to the shareholders to do what the shareholders want or risk being fired/replaced. And what do the shareholders want? Money! They want profits! They want the good life.
Now what does this sound analogous to? A country! In practice, a corporation is a country unto itself — capable of determining its own standards for operation, its own laws, its leaders, and its own culture (imagine Samsung vs Apple). Your interests do not matter to a corporation — a corporation looks out only for itself, for what is the most profitable.
It used to be that a corporation was forced to adhere to the public benefit (i.e. they were not allowed to influence democratic elections for their own benefit), but the Supreme Court changed this legal standard in Citizens United v FEC (2010). In that case, the SCOTUS proclaimed that corporations were functionally “individual citizens,” entitled to all the private rights therein. As such, corporations are now free to use their wealth and power to influence any aspect of the world they please for the sake of their own monetary benefit. After all, it is legal for an individual to express their political opinions, and what better way to express how you feel than with money??
So we have it institutionalized in law that corporate entities are allowed to operate as they please within society, like they are individual people, while they are multi-billion (sometimes trillion) dollar organizations that solely exist to be money-making mini-countries.
“I don’t like your democracy, so I’ll make my own!”
This is why the media is so screwed up. Nearly all of media, and 100% of mainstream media, is corporatized. They do not care about morals. They do not care if they are threatening democracy by hurting the DNC to Trump’s delight. They do not care if they trigger nuclear war. They only care if you buy their product — the news.
Now… this is where things get truly frightening. Have you ever heard people say “fiction is fun but history is boring?”
I don’t like to sensationalize or use hyperbole, but this James Bond villain demonstrates the legal reality of corporatized media too well:
Now, this Bond villain is just plain evil — kind of for comic effect. I am not saying that the people in media are evil, nor even the corporatists above them per se (some are, but not as a rule). However, what I am saying is that the practice of allowing a corporate entity to throw its weight and power around in society solely for the sake of profit is evil. It is too tempting — too profitable to give corporations the leeway to do whatever they please to make a quick buck.
Just observe how FOX News has capitalized off of fabricating news for decades at the cost of our democracy. Other corporate news entities may have condemned FOX News occasionally on the air, but their actions speak louder. Just observe the headlines of all the major news sources in the US and you will see what I mean. Trump is insane? Old news. MAGAists are trying to overthrow the country? Everyone knows that already. Oh, but say Biden (the Republic’s last shot at preventing another Trump administration) is in cognitive decline? Gold mine!
“There is no news like bad news.”
I will not agree with you, however, if you submit to doom and gloom on this subject. Aside from the knuckle draggers in the RNC (the MAGAists), when is the last time you can say you witnessed somebody watch the news with anything less than a jaundiced eye? In this capitalist society, we the American people have grown brilliantly efficient at noticing when someone is trying to sell us something. I would be willing to bet that you could detect whether or not a piece of media was an advertisement within 3 seconds before then clicking away (I should have put stocks into adblocking companies 15 years ago — I’d be rich… sigh).
This disdain has started to be reflected in corporatist media profit margins. FOX News has been able to stay afloat because it has a fanatical base that will never leave its side and has been propped up by rich conservative billionaires. Yet even so, Fox Corp’s reported debt is $8.13 billion (companiesmarketcap.com/....). Now too, when other media corporations are attempting to copy FOX and fabricate the news (Democrats this, Biden that), they are also starting to show diminishing returns. CNN, for example, brought in about $1.25 billion 2021. CNN comparatively brought home $750 million in 2022, and CNN’s earnings are only dropping. This is while CNN and its parent company (Warner Bros — Discovery) are $50 billion dollars in debt (nypost.com/...). This is why CNN tried to have its Trump Town Hall last year and tried to host the 2024 Presidential Debates. “FOX is making money, and we NEED MONEY! Copy FOX!”
People outside of the cult recognize when someone is trying sell off a scam product.
The solution, in my opinion, is the ballot box — as with everything else. Vote Blue, and then get on your representative’s back to force them to overturn Citizen United v FEC (either by reforming the Court or by creating new amendments).
Bring corporations back down to reality where they can be held accountable for their actions by the people. In the meantime, I would not worry too much about the damage they are attempting to make worse — no one is really watching or listening. People outside of the cult recognize when someone is trying sell off a scam product.