[ Political corruption and the idea that corporations can be
people are the cancer at the core of our national crisis. ]
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THE MARCH TOWARDS US FASCISM BEGAN WITH THE CORPORATE HIJACKING OF
DEMOCRACY  
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Thom Hartmann
August 24, 2022
Common Dreams
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_ Political corruption and the idea that corporations can be people
are the cancer at the core of our national crisis. _

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) speaks during an event with Senate
Democrats to unveil a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens
United in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC., (Photo:
Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

 

_"AT BOTTOM, THE COURT'S__ opinion is thus a rejection of the common
sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent
corporations from undermining self-government since the founding , and
who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of
corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt._

_"It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American
democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would
have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in
politics."_—Justice John Paul Stevens's dissent in Citizens
United 

In 2010 the United States Supreme Court wrapped up their systematic
dismantling of representative democracy in America. Their job on
behalf of the morbidly rich donors who put them onto the Court is now
almost complete.

The symptoms are all around us:

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*Climate change is whacking the world in a way never before seen by
humans, and every political party in every developed country in the
world acknowledges it except one: the American GOP. Why? Because only
in America has a supreme court fully legalized political bribery and
Republicans are taking big bucks from the fossil fuel industry and
petrobillionaires.

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*Fully a third of voters polled
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ABC/Ipsos this month said they have no confidence that either party
can honestly deal with substantive problems like gun violence, taxes,
gas prices, and inflation (among others). While the "why"question
wasn't asked, it's easy to infer the answer: politicians in both
parties are on the take, or held back from meaningful action by a few
colleagues (like Sinema/Manchin) who are openly on the take.

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*Monopolistic consolidation of the American economy is so complete
that American consumers are being openly played as the world's
suckers. We pay more—often twice to ten times more—than the
citizens of any other developed country for everything from
pharmaceuticals to broadband to cell service. There was a time in
America when Congress did something about monopolies: that time is now
gone, as lawmakers are regularly bribed by the very corporations they
would have to pass laws to regulate.

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*In the 1970s the American middle class made up the majority of
Americans and average CEOs took home only about 30 times what their
workers did because any money they made beyond that was hit with a top
74% tax bracket. CEOs back then didn't have multiple mansions, private
jets, and megayachts. Many lived in the communities where their
businesses were located.

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*Today fewer than 45 percent
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us are in the Middle Class, one worker can no longer raise a family,
and the morbidly rich pay as little a 3% in income taxes while
many—like Trump—pay nothing at all for decades. This persists
because those very CEOs now pay off enough politicians to prevent
taxes from being raised to a historically reasonable level.

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*Gun violence now kills more American children than any other cause
and America is awash in weapons-of-war openly marketed to sexually
insecure young white men. We're the only developed country in the
world struggling with regular mass shootings, school shootings, and a
high frequency of police violence and homicide against civilians.

No other developed country in the world has these problems because no
other developed country in the world allows their gun industry and
some of their police unions to bribe their politicians.

In a shocking analysis on Substack
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Secretary Robert Reich documents how Congress—in the 200 years
before five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political
bribery—used to regulate corporate behavior. If Congress wanted more
products from muskets to computer chips made in America, or less
pollution from our cars, they'd pass a law increasing tariffs on
foreign guns and chips, and penalties on manufacturers whose products
pollute.

Now, instead of regulating business, Reich notes, Congress subsidizes
business. We gave the chip makers $50+ billion to move production here
with few strings attached; we passed out hundreds of billions to
subsidize green power.

Why the change from regulation to subsidy? Because instead of doing
what's best for America, Congress now does what's best for their
"donors."

Thanks to five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

America, in short, is now paralyzed by the big money corruption of our
political process. And that, in turn, is nearly 100 percent the fault
of corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court who, themselves, were
given their jobs by corrupt big-money players who wanted the Court to
make America more billionaire-friendly.

It's not like we weren't warned.

Back in 1910, former President Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech in
Osawatomie, Kansas telling Americans that if we didn't take on the
morbidly rich, they'd bring democracy to its knees.

"The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make
that promise good,"Roosevelt told
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crowd. "But it does not give the right of suffrage [voting] to any
corporation."

Corporations, in other words, are not people, Roosevelt said. It was
common sense back then, although, as Mitt Romney famously pointed out,
the Supreme Court has turned that on its head in the past decades.

As long as corporations were able to interfere in elections and throw
massive amount of money at candidates, Roosevelt told his crowd,
America would remain locked in a crisis of plutocracy.

The only answer, he said, is to "prohibit the use of corporate funds
directly or indirectly for political purposes,"and hold CEOs and
corporate officers "personally responsible when any corporation breaks
the law."

The federal government was neither taxing giant corporations, massive
inheritances, nor any other aspect of the lives of the morbidly rich,
and that failure, Roosevelt said:

"[H]as tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and
economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase
their power."

The crowd roared with approval, and word traveled across the country.
Within a decade the Constitution was amended so we had both a federal
income tax on the morbidly rich, a corporate income tax, and an
inheritance tax.

America felt the result immediately.

During those first two decades of the 20th century, Democrats and
progressive Republicans put up barriers to corporations and that
generation's equivalent of billionaires from buying and owning
politicians.

The immediate result was the birth of the largest and fastest growing
middle-class in the history of the world.

Americans not only knew that Teddy Roosevelt was right; they saw the
evidence of growing oligarchy all around them and rejected it. Both
parties had become populist when it came to protecting democracy from
political bribery.

For the 200 years prior to Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme
Court and its later Citizens United decision, every American voter and
politician knew how money in politics could corrupt government.

As the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote in his only
book, Notes on Virginia
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"With money, we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get
money. … They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant
one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive
our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by
them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the
voices of the people, and make them pay the price.

"Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be
alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against
corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It
is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing
his teeth and claws after he shall have entered."

The teeth and claws of the morbidly rich are now deeply sunk into the
American body politic.

The question today is whether we can twist free of them and again
become a self-governing nation. Or if we're doomed to continue to
devolve into a full-blown oligarchy like Russia and Hungary did, where
all decisions are now made by oligarchs and a strongman leader
empowered by them, and election are just done for show and around
local issues.

We went through this cycle of seizing democracy back from corrupt
great wealth about 100 years ago. It was difficult last time and it
will be difficult this time.

But we're already in the midst of it: the Supreme Court has done what
they have done, and it has caused and enormous social, economic,
cultural, and political crisis—and even violence.

America has had an on-again, off-again relationship with political
corruption that goes all the way back to the early years of this
republic. Perhaps the highest level of corruption, outside of today,
happened in the late 1800s at the tail-end of the last Gilded Age.

One of the iconic stories from that era was that of William Clark, who
died in 1925 with a net worth in excess, in today's money, of $4
billion. He was one of the richest men of his day, perhaps second only
to John D. Rockefeller.

And in 1899, Clark's story helped propel an era of political cleanup
that reached its zenith with the presidency of progressive Republicans
(a species that no longer exists) Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard
Taft. 

Clark's scandal even led to the passage of the 17th Amendment, which
let the people of the various states decide who would be their U.S.
senators, instead of the state legislatures deciding, which was the
case from 1789 until 1913, when that amendment was ratified. 

By 1899, Clark owned pretty much every legislator of any consequence
in Montana, as well as all but one newspaper in the state. Controlling
both the news and the politicians, he figured they'd easily elect him
to be the next U.S. senator from Montana.

Congress later learned that he not only owned the legislators but,
several historians have suggested, stood outside the statehouse with a
pocket full of $1,000 bills (literally: those bills weren't taken out
of circulation until 1969 by Richard Nixon), each in a plain white
envelope, to hand out to every member who'd voted for him to become
one of Montana's two US senators.

When word reached Washington DC about the envelopes and the cash, the
US Senate began an investigation into Clark, who famously told friends
and aides, "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale." 

Mark Twain wrote of Clark:

"He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the
flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to
send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the
penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs." 

State Senator Fred Whiteside, who owned the only non-Clark-owned
newspaper in the state, the Kalispell Bee, led the big exposé of
Clark's bribery. Enough of Montana's state senators, however, took
Clark's money and ignored Whiteside's reporting to shut down the state
investigation.

The US Senate then launched an investigation in 1899 and, sure enough,
found out about Clark's envelopes and numerous other bribes and
emoluments he'd offered to state legislators, and refused to seat him.

To get around that, the following year Montana's governor—also in
Clark's pocket—appointed Clark to the US Senate seat he had
previously purchased; he then served a full eight-year term. 

Clark's story went national and became a rallying cry for
clean-government advocates like progressive Republican President
Theodore Roosevelt. It led to the passage of the 1907 Tillman Act
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providing for a year in prison for any corporate director, officer, or
agent who gave any money or thing of value to any candidate for
federal office on behalf of any corporation.  

Clark's story also informed the 1910 Corrupt Practices Act, also known
as The Publicity Act
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it required any political committee supporting candidates in more than
two states to publicly reveal their finances and donations.

In 1912, progressive Republican President Taft, after doubling the
number of corporations being broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act
over what President Theodore Roosevelt had done, championed the 17th
Amendment (direct election of senators, something some Republicans
today want to repeal
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Their singular goal was to prevent Clark's kind of corruption—rich
guys buying legislators—from ever happening again. 

Meanwhile, in Montana, while the Clark-corrupted state legislature was
fighting reforms the people were demanding, a state-wide wave of
citizens put a measure on the state ballot of 1912.

Their ballot measure parroted the federal Tillman Act at the Montana
state level, outlawing corporations from giving any money of any sort
to Montana politicians. That same year, Texas and other states passed
similar legislation (the corrupt former Speaker of the US House, Tom
DeLay, R-Texas, was prosecuted under his state's version of that law
before the Supreme Court struck it down). 

Montana's anti-corruption law, along with many of those of numerous
other states, persisted until 2010, when former Justice Anthony
Kennedy, writing for the five-vote majority on the U.S. Supreme Court,
declared in the Citizens United decision that political corruption
didn't exist in the United States.

Kennedy, in what has to be one of the most absurd things ever penned
by a Supreme Court justice, wrote that he'd examined "more than
100,000 pages"of legal opinions and could not find:

"…any direct examples of votes being exchanged for … expenditures.
This confirms Buckley's reasoning that independent expenditures do
not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid
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quo corruption. In fact, there is only scant evidence that independent
expenditures even ingratiate. Ingratiation and access, in any event,
are not corruption."

The US Supreme Court, following on the 1976 Buckley case that grew
straight out of the Powell Memo and was written in part by Justice
Lewis Powell, turned the definitions of corruption upside down.

But that was just the beginning, as I lay out in The Hidden History
of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America
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That same year they decided Citizens United, the Court overturned the
Montana anti-corruption law in the 2010 American Tradition
Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock ruling, essentially saying that money
doesn't corrupt politicians.

This is particularly true, the five Republicans on the US Supreme
Court ruled, if that money comes from corporations that can "inform"us
about current issues, (literally the logic they cited in Citizens
United) or the morbidly rich who, presumably, must be people of the
highest possible integrity (and they pay great speaking fees to
Supreme Court justices). 

Now we've reached something close to peak corruption.  The 2018
midterm election saw $5.7 billion
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to elect candidates, and in a solid majority of cases the candidate
who spent the most money won. The 2020 election cost $14.4 billion
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Billionaires who were largely non-political two decades ago are now
making billion-dollar "investments"in politicians and political
movements, as we just saw with the $1.6 billion contribution to
Leonard Leo's group that I wrote about yesterday.  

Billions invested in bribing politicians sounds like a lot of money
(and to most of us it is!), but consider how just a few simple tax law
changes made during the Reagan administration have transferred fully
$50 trillion
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the American Middle Class to the top 1 percent.

Even at these nosebleed-levels of bribery buying politicians is still
the best investment a corporation or morbidly rich individual can
make.

Invest millions, make billions. Invest billions, make trillions. It's
as close to a guaranteed return-on-investment you can get, assuming
you have the kind of big money necessary to play the game.

This naked corruption of our political process should be the biggest
story in America today, but our corporate media has been among one of
the biggest beneficiaries of legalized government bribery.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act—largely written by the industry
itself—let a few rightwing billionaire families take over thousands
of radio stations, hundreds of television stations, a good chunk of
the nation's internet activity, and start multiple rightwing media
empires.

Rightwing and anti-union billionaires own some of our largest national
newspapers, and fully half of all local newspapers nationwide are
owned by a handful of billionaire-run hedge funds.

How does this end?

Viktor Orbán, when he first came to power, helped oligarchs close to
him take over the majority of that nation's media; now he easily wins
re-election, both because of rigged voting rules and gerrymandering,
but—most importantly—because there's no longer any meaningful
progressive media in Hungary.

Industry after industry in Hungary was taken over by Orbán's
rightwing and often openly Nazi cronies, just like in Putin's Russia,
so that even making anti-Orbán comments in public or on social media
can cause Hungarians to lose their jobs no matter how unrelated it may
seem to media or politics.

We're seeing similar, ominous signals coming out of American media:
CNN is the most recent concerning case.

While some members of the Democratic Party have been sold out for
quite a while (which is why Obamacare was a subsidy to insurance
companies, rather than regulation of the insurance market or an
expansion of Medicare: thanks, Joe Lieberman), that party is now
pretty much our nation's last hope.

You won't find a single Republican willing to acknowledge this
problem—even the never-Trumpers are in denial and just want to get
back to the regular gravy train—but Democratic politicians are now
regularly running in and winning elections around the issue of the
corruption of their Republican opposition.

There are many problems in today's America, from gun violence to
poverty and homelessness to a crisis of the Middle Class.

All, however, are problems of political corruption at their core. And
in almost every case, a solution to these problems is being blocked by
politicians being paid off in a fashion legalized by Republicans on
the Supreme Court.

And all began with a handful of Republicans on the US Supreme claiming
that corporations are persons and money is constitutionally-protected
free speech.

There are several approaches we could take to fix this, which I've
discussed in the past and will again in the future.

But, like President Teddy Roosevelt did back in the day, first we have
to establish a nationwide consensus that this is the crisis, the
cancer at the core of our democracy, that must be dealt with
immediately.

* Corporate Personhood
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* Citizens United
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* fascist threat
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