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As powerful as Wall Street appears to be, its abuse of power has so eroded the economic, social, and environmental foundations of its own existence that its fate is sealed.
March 29, 2011 |
In an earlier day, our rulers were kings and emperors. Now they are corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers. Wall Street is Empire’s most recent stage. Its reign will mark the end of the tragic drama of a 5,000 year Era of Empire.
Imperial historians would have us believe that civilization, history, and human progress began with the consolidation of dominator power in the first great empires that emerged some 5,000 years ago. Much is made of their glorious accomplishments and heroic battles.
Rather less is said about the brutalization of the slaves who built the great monuments, the racism, the suppression of women, the conversion of free farmers into serfs or landless laborers, the carnage of the battles, the hopes and lives destroyed by wave after wave of invasion, the pillage and gratuitous devastation of the vanquished, and the lost creative potential.
Nor is there mention that most all the advances that make us truly human came before the Era of Empire—including the domestication of plants and animals, food storage, and the arts of dance, pottery, basket making, textile weaving, leather crafting, metallurgy, architecture, town planning, boat building, highway construction, and oral literature.
As the institutions of Empire took root, humans turned from a reverence for the generative power of life to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword. The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of often ruthless kings. Social pathology became the norm and society’s creative energy focused on perfecting the instruments of war and domination. Priority in the use of available resources went to military, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage.
Great civilizations were built and then swept away in successive waves of violence and destruction. War, trade, and debt served as weapons of the few to expropriate the means of livelihood of the many and reduce them to slavery or serfdom. Whole empires were subjected to the delusional hubris and debaucheries of psychopathic rulers.
The ideals of the American Revolution heralded the possibilities of a new era of equality and popular democratic rule, but it was a more modest beginning than we have been taught to believe. Once the former colonies gained their freedom from British rule and declared themselves the United States of America, their new leaders put aside the pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and enjoy a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and set about securing their own power.
The king was gone, but the Constitution they drafted with a promise to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for “We the People of the United States” effectively limited political participation to white male property owners and secured the return of escaped slaves to their designated owners. Colonial expansion followed soon after as the new nation expropriated by armed force all of the Native and Mexican lands between themselves and the distant Pacific Ocean.
Global expansion beyond U.S. territorial borders followed. The United States converted cooperative dictatorships into client states by giving their ruling classes a choice between aligning themselves with U.S. economic and political interests for a share in the booty or being eliminated by assassination, foreign-financed internal rebellion, or military invasion. Following World War II, when the classic forms of colonial rule became unacceptable, international debt became a favored instrument for forcing poorer nations to open to foreign corporate ownership and control.
Most of the economic, social, and environmental pathologies of our time—including sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction—originate in the institutions of Empire. The resulting exploitation has reached the limits that the social fabric and Earth’s natural systems will endure.
As powerful as Wall Street appears to be, its abuse of power has so eroded the economic, social, and environmental foundations of its own existence that its fate is sealed. We the People have a choice. We can allow Wall Street to maintain its grip until it brings down the whole of human civilization in irrevocable social and environmental collapse. Or we can take control of our future and replace the Wall Street economy with the values and institutions of a New Economy comprised of locally owned businesses devoted to serving their communities by investing in the use of local resources to produce real goods and services responsive to local needs.
Either way, Wall Street’s days are numbered. Ours need not be.
David Korten wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.
David Korten is a former economist with USAID, author of "When Corporations Rule the World," and an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.
No, this isn't going to be some anti-capitalist, internet crank rant. Not all psychopaths are running around stabbing people. Some are quite successful:
Despite increasing interest in psychopathy research, surprisingly little is known about the etiology of non-incarcerated, successful psychopaths. This review provides an analysis of current knowledge on the similarities and differences between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths derived from five population sources: community samples, individuals from employment agencies, college students, industrial psychopaths, and serial killers. An initial neurobiological model of successful and unsuccessful psychopathy is outlined. It is hypothesized that successful psychopaths have intact or enhanced neurobiological functioning that underlies their normal or even superior cognitive functioning, which in turn helps them to achieve their goals using more covert and nonviolent methods. In contrast, in unsuccessful, caught psychopaths, brain structural and functional impairments together with autonomic nervous system dysfunction are hypothesized to underlie cognitive and emotional deficits and more overt violent offending.
Source: "Successful and unsuccessful psychopaths: A neurobiological model" from Behavioral Sciences & the Law, Volume 28 Issue 2, Pages 194 - 210
So you may not want to piss off the shifty guy in the marketing department.
Why do I point the finger at corporate America? Because apparently there are a disproportionate amount of psychopaths there:
There is a very large literature on the important role of psychopathy in the criminal justice system. We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications, in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organizations. This has left us with only a few small-sample studies, anecdotes, and speculation. In this study, we had a unique opportunity to examine psychopathy and its correlates in a sample of 203 corporate professionals selected by their companies to participate in management development programs. The correlates included demographic and status variables, as well as in-house 360° assessments and performance ratings. The prevalence of psychopathic traits - as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R) and a Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL: SV) equivalent - was higher than that found in community samples. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that the underlying latent structure of psychopathy in our corporate sample was consistent with that model found in community and offender studies. Psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma/presentation style (creativity, good strategic thinking and communication skills) but negatively associated with ratings of responsibility/performance (being a team player, management skills, and overall accomplishments).
Source: "Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk" from Behavioral Sciences & the Law, Volume 28 Issue 2, Pages 174 - 193
In psychiatry there is a diagnostic entity variously known as psychopath, sociopath and antisocial personality disorder. The central feature of this disorder is the failure to develop any ethical standards of social behavior, The concept of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is foreign to the psychopath. That remarkable advice is replaced by "do unto others as it pleases you regardless of consequences." We do not know for sure the cause of such behavior, whether it is genetic in origin, the result of early developmental trauma, or a combination of the two. The outstanding feature is that the psychopath has a natural talent for using and exploiting others and does so with such skill that true motives remain concealed by ingratiating ways and apparent normality. At some point the bubble bursts and the victim awakens to the reality that they have been taken.
In a democratic society government is supposed to serve the needs of every member of that society. There are two models for such societies, Both involve capitalism. The social democratic societies, such as in Scandinavia, temper the profit motive so as to restrict the massive inequities and ensure that health, education, security and opportunity is available to all. They do this by a system of taxation that succeeds in narrowing the gap between the haves and the have-nots so that a significant proportion of the population is not in trouble.
In the United States where capitalism is given a much freer rein there is the possibility of the profit motive getting so out of hand that those on top are enriched at the expense of those left behind, That is "wild capitalism". The recent run of failures of formerly very profitable corporations are a prime example of that, and how painful it is for those who are ultimately victimized by it. Victimhood is the characteristic feature of psychopathy.
A corporation has been endowed with personhood by the Supreme Court. It is not a person but it is run by persons. If the ethical standards of those at the top fail to maintain a certain level of social responsibility, the result is the insidious onset of corporate psychopathic behavior. A few get very rich and the others wake up one day to find themselves abandoned by the institution they trusted. We now have to take into account the corporation as a psychopathic entity outfitting all prior attempts on the part of governmental regulating agencies to control its behavior. A reactionary government succumbing to corporate power colludes in this happening by weakening regulatory controls, In his book "The Corporation", Joel Bakan offers a thorough account of corporate psychopathy,
The damage in human terms resulting from psychopathic behavior, individual or corporate, leaves a destructive trail behind. The individual psychopath contaminates whatever circle he moves in. Corporate psychopathy contaminates the government which is responsible for setting certain ethical limits to corporate behavior. Excessive lobbying and financial largesse influences those who make the laws and those who have the responsibility for executing the laws.
The title of Hervey Cleckley's classic volume, "The Mask of Sanity," says it all. The psychopath is someone who seems comfortable with himself and his surroundings, often of superior intelligence, capable of turning on the charm said generally creating a positive impression. The problem is it's all fake. There is no genuine empathy, no sense of responsibility or concern for anyone but himself. We are no witnessing large scale corporate and political corruption being unmasked. Money churned out by corporate psychopathy has influenced legislative and executive functions to the point where the former has surrendered its unique power to declare war and the latter to begin a war based on falsehoods fed to the American public.
The analogy between the individual psychopath and the corporation behaving as a psychopathic entity is limited but frighteningly meaningful. I will discuss the analogy to the extent to which it conforms to the current diagnostic criteria of the American Psychiatric Association as noted in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV, 1994). The term psychopathy has been replaced by Antisocial Personality Disorder. The criteria will be noted in their relevance to the notion of corporate psychopathy.
The listing of the criteria is preceded by the following statement.
There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since the age of 15 years as indicated by three or more of the following: (criteria)
Comment: This, of course, does not literally apply to a corporation. Corporations do have a beginning with the incorporation followed by a growth period which then leads to a successful or unsuccessful maturity. The temptation to skirt the law may occur at any time. Early indications involve looking for loopholes in the law, setting up phoney offshore subsidiaries and courting political power to ease regulatory restrictions.
The Diagnostic Criteria
1. failure to conform to social norms with regard to lawful behavior as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
Comment: This is true for some psychopaths but not all. Many of them manage to live a long and parasitic life, never see a day in prison and die quietly of old age. Corrupt corporations reach positions of great power and they do this by going beyond social norms. They seek out loopholes in the law, incorporate offshore, curry favor with politicians, manipulate stock shares and engage in illegal accounting practices. In their drive for power and profit they pursue a path where when caught, those at the top still walk away with fabulous sums while the workers and the shareholders are left holding a very empty bag.
2. deceitfulness as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
Comment : Conning others speaks to the heart of psychopathy. Lying consciously or unconsciously is the instrument by means of which a psychopath establishes a beachhead with his prey. It comes packaged in various ways - charm, wit, good looks and cunning. His individual goal is money, love or power. Corrupt corporations are out for money and power and maneuver the agencies of government in pursuit of their goals. Love is an irrelevant emotion as this plays out.
3. impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
Comment: The Iraq War is a case in point when corporate psychopathy influences the political structure.
4. irritability and aggressiveness as indicated in repeated physical fights or assaults
Comment: This is characteristic of psychopaths who pursue a career in crime. There is aggression and fighting in the world of corporate psychopathy but this is acted out in the court to save or expand one's own turf.
5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others
Comment: Again the relevance of corporate psychopathy to the political structure has played a role in the Iraq war, a war that has resulted in the loss of thousands of lives.
6. reckless disregard for safety of self or others consistent with irresponsibility as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
Comment: When the word safety is used here in a more general sense, e.g. financial security, it is relevant to corporate psychopathy. Once greed takes over honesty goes out the window. Accounting becomes cover-up. Stock maneuvering enriches the executives at the expense of the workers and shareholders. When corrupt companies fail, workers lose.
7. lack of remorse as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another
Comment: The lack of genuine remorse is another basic feature of psychopathy. The corporation as an entity cannot feel remorse but the people who run it can, at least to some extent, in their personal lives and on rare occasions when the law catches up with them and confronts them with the tragic consequences of their actions. The fact that a corporation may have taken a psychopathic course does not mean that the individuals responsible are psychopaths, although there may be an occasional one among them. They are, however, in an emotionally compromising and awkward place. On the one hand, they have participated in the creation of a psychopathic entity that wreaks havoc on people and the environment. On the other hand, at home in their private lives they are no different than the rest of us except for their high lifestyle. The only residue of psychopathy in their personal lives is their enjoyment of ill-gotten gains. A more stark example of this is the emotional compartmentalization of the concentration camp guard who is very much the psychopath at his job and the family man at his home.
I have briefly sketched the extent to which the concept of corporate psychopathy fits into the current diagnostic criteria of anti-social personality. The diagnosis rests on meeting at least three of the criteria. I have developed the correspondence based on meeting six of the seven (1,2,3,5,6,7). The concept of corporate psychopathy fits snugly into these six.
The criteria as noted in the manual do not go far enough in capturing the essence of psychopathy, As R.D. Hare and others have pointed out, they are attuned to a certain segment of the criminal population and do not sufficiently emphasize the personality traits of the psychopath, traits which enable them to pursue a psychopathic way of` life quite well within the accepted bounds of society.
It is often the case that psychopaths are gifted with a natural talent for ingratiating themselves. They walk among us wearing "the Mask of Sanity". Impervious to genuine feeling, lacking in empathy they manage to get what they want from others and tragically on occasion manipulate an entire nation.
They are to be found at every level of the social strata including the professions, the business world and most unfortunately the political world as well, Corporate psychopathy is a plague that wreaks havoc on people, on the environment and on the moral status of the nation that tolerates it. Unlike genuine infectious disorders, a chronic phase precedes the acute one. It extends over the period when the corporation reaps extravagantly large profits. The acute phase is ushered in when the financial maneuverings can no longer keep the corporation afloat. It ends up in a trip to the morgue leaving precious little to salvage.
Corrupt corporations feed on money and power, The former comes in part from the U.S. Treasury and ultimately from the general public. To maintain this flow they seek power. The government is where the power is. Individual psychopaths rely on their personality and manipulativeness to get what they need from another person. Psychopathic corporations face a more complex task. They have to influence all three branches of our government, the legislative, the judiciary and the executive, to go along with survival tactics motivated by greed rather than the welfare of the public. Corporations have been in business a long time and have succeeded admirably. We have created a new generation of robber barons but this time they are playing for much higher stakes. The pathological fallout is no longer limited to our own borders. Their reach extends globally, involving us politically, environmentally and militarily with countries rich and poor. Illness knows no geographical limits.
The Legislative Branch
The members of the Congress are prime targets for corporate bribery. Lobbying is one thing. Lobbying backed by generous financial contributions is another. Recent legislation, for example, designed to lower the cost of drugs does more to insure the continuing huge profits of the drug companies. To restrain corporate greed it would have been better to control drug prices than to leave many with the choice between feeding a family or buying needed drugs. Pharmaceutical companies do not only bribe legislators, they also find ways that amount to bribery to influence the physician's choice of drugs.
Legislators are also pressured to favor corporate power over the protection of the environment. We have failed to come to terms with global warming under pressure from the coal and oil industry. Our public lands, long a treasured heritage, are under siege by oil and gas interests, as are our forests by the lumber industry. Added to this is the need for more effective monitoring of the industrial pollution of air and water.
The Judiciary
Individual psychopaths are small-time pickpockets compared to the huge sums of money that corrupt corporations manage to remove from the pockets of each of us. The ultimate victim is the public at large. We buy what they are selling. The individual psychopath when he is caught in a criminal act goes to jail. The criminal corporation goes to court, and until recently most often civil court rather than criminal court. In the case of the former, fines are levied which may or may not have the desired effect (there are recidivists). Criminal offenders receive sentences not commensurate with the damage they have done. The complex nature of corporate crime makes it more difficult to litigate. Lower level officials are often the ones that are scapegoats. Finally, there are insufficient prosecutory resources to thoroughly handle every referral.
Individual psychopaths are untreatable. Nor do we know much about the prevention. The prognosis is not quite as bad in the case or corporate psychopathy. Some are so mortally wounded that sudden death occurs. For some a radical overhaul may be a successful treatment. Jail is simply an isolation word to temporarily prevent the illness from spreading. Prevention is the only approach to a cure. We know the causative virus is greed. An effective serum awaits the day when we succeed (if ever) in separating money from politics. We face the choice of closing our eyes to the very infectious nature of the virus and the plague it has produced, or radically rooting it out by seriously investing our resources in manufacturing that serum.
The government as it is now functioning is not in a position to prepare the services necessary to immunize the public. Each of us is faced with the task of creating our own antibodies by getting closer to an awareness of the extent to which we have been infected and do what is necessary to usher in wiser leaders,
The Executive Branch
We are profoundly ignorant of the etiology and prevention of psychopathy in the individual. This is not so in the case of corporate psychopathy. Deregulation, the money trail to power, and our materialistic concentration all pave the way to unmitigated greed. Legal penalties retard or stop the illness in individual cases of corporate psychopathy but do not get at the root of the problem. In the light of the legislative failure at prevention, our only hope resides in an executive branch that has insight into the scope and nature of the illness and the way both government and our lifestyle has contributed to its existence, Of the three branches of government, the executive can be the most important in initiating a program of prevention. The world knows the price that society has paid for leaders that are poseurs or "strong men". Finding the proper leader who could initiate a genuine effort at prevention is a daunting one. We need a leader who has the courage to look into a magic mirror that reveals all the ways these malignant organisms have worked their way into the avenues of government and into the lives of the citizenry it is there to protect. He or she would have to have the foresight and vision of our Founding Fathers, the honesty of Abe Lincoln and the capacity of a war president like F.D.F in keeping the country united instead of splitting it into two hostile factions.
Although the virus responsible for corporate psychopathy has been endemic at least since Theodore Roosevelt's time, it has now risen to epidemic proportions. We are dealing with a virus that ravages people and the environment and has caused a palpable degree of moral fallout. Robert Hare, in his book, Without Conscience, refers to this latter change as resulting in a "camouflage society." He cites the role of corporate power as fostering a cultural atmosphere "where egocentricity, lack of concern for others, superficiality, style over substance, being cool, manipulativeness and so forth are tolerated and even valued. Even more important is the reality that the ullman* linkage of corporate psychopathy to political power is a recipe for totalitarianism.
Our country is more divided along party lines than it has been in a long time. If we, the people, can come together in the recognition of this deepening illness in our midst, we can more effectively strive to eliminate it. Instead of a politically divided Supreme Court, we are in need of a Mayo Clinic of last resort. After all, doctors don't work along party lines in their efforts at healing.
Suppose I want to buy a used car, and imagine there’s no Cars.com or Craig’s List, and professional used car salesmen are the normal way to buy. So I go to a dealer ask him about maybe a 1998 Honda, thinking that’s what I can afford.
“Oh, no,” says the dealer. “That would be totally wrong for you. You need a 2009 Lexus.”
“But I can’t afford that. I’ve only got $4000.”
“Look. If you don’t get that Lexus, you could die. Or have a terrible accident. Or at the very least, you would have to stop driving after two or three years. Yes, it’s expensive. But this is your future we’re talking about.”
“Well, I guess you’re the expert. If I really need it, I’ll sign the papers and worry about paying for it later.”
Of course this conversation would be insane. The seller can’t decide what the buyer pays for. That would be the ultimate sellers’ market, in which prices would spiral endlessly upward, and everyone would be driving around in much more car than they needed or could afford. Soon, many buyers would go bankrupt and stop driving entirely, and the system of car-based transportation would collapse. Besides, nobody would allow a car salesman’s opinion to override their own in the first place.
But substitute “doctor” for “car dealer” and “treatment” for “Lexus,” and you have the exact situation that exists in American medicine now. The sellers – physicians, hospitals, drug companies, medical equipment makers – tell the buyers – us and our insurance providers – what we need. We can say no, but the professionals are the experts. They know far more than we do. (Or at least we think they do.) Sometimes they bully and threaten (“You could die!”) So the sellers have more input into the final purchase decision than the buyers do. And as a result, costs are spiraling upward, people are being over-treated and going bankrupt, and the system is collapsing.
Markets are good for things like cars. The buyer looks for what he wants. When he finds something close, the seller makes an offer and the buyer decides whether the price is acceptable. Eventually they agree on a price, or they don’t, in which case there’s no sale.
But healthcare is completely different. The sellers are in control. They’re steering purchase decisions. With or without “health care reform,” it makes no difference. Prices will keep going up; unnecessary services will keep proliferating. Individuals, companies, and governments will continue to be bankrupted. Millions will be denied care for lack of funding. And free market advocates will keep saying the market is the answer to our healthcare crisis.
Our society can decide that everyone is entitled to appropriate medical care, or not. But we can’t provide care to any except the very rich under this topsy-turvy anti-system. Costs will continue to spiral if sellers set the prices and make the purchasing decisions. Eventually we will run out of money, and eventually came about twenty years ago in the US. We’ve been paying medical bills on credit ever since.
A sellers’ market can’t control costs. Instead, costs should be controlled, as they are in Europe, with rational, evidence-based decisions on what treatments are effective and affordable, and what they should cost. Of course, such a system will be open to corruption and abuse, but, unlike the present system, at least we would have a chance to do things rationally.
Alternatively, we can deny care to ever-larger sections of the population who can’t pay the escalating prices. Either way, we should stop pretending that the ultimate seller’s market will fix itself. It can’t.
The legal rights of the...defendant, Loan Company, although it be a corporation, soulless and speechless, rise as high in the scales of law and justice as those of the most obscure and poverty-stricken subject of the state.
- Excerpt from the judge’s ruling in Brannan v. Schartzer, 25 Ohio Dec. 491 (1915)
While corporations can live forever, exist in several different places at the same time, change their identities at will, and even chop off parts of themselves or sprout new parts, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, according to its reporter, had said that they are “persons” under the Constitution, with constitutional rights and protections as accorded to human beings. Once given this key, corporations began to assert the powers that came with their newfound rights.
First Amendment. Claiming the First Amendment right of all “persons” to free speech, corporate lawsuits against the government successfully struck down laws that prevented corporations from lobbying or giving money to politicians and political candidates.1
Fourth Amendment. Earlier laws had said that a corporation had to open all its records and facilities to our governments as a condition of being chartered. But now, claiming the Fourth Amendment right of privacy, corporate lawsuits successfully struck down such laws. In later years they also sued to block Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws allowing for surprise safety inspections of the workplace and stopped Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inspections of chemical factories.2
Fourteenth Amendment: Claiming Fourteenth Amendment protection against discrimination (granting persons equal protection), the J. C. Penney chain store successfully sued the state of Florida, ending a law designed to help small, local business by charging chain stores a higher business license fee than that for locally owned stores.3
This chapter is part of an exclusive Truthout series from Thom Hartmann, America's No. 1 progressive radio host and bestselling author of 21 books. We are publishing weekly installments of the bestseller, "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' - and How You Can Fight Back." Please join us as Hartmann explores the evolution of corporate personhood, gaining insight into the nature of democracy. To read more chapters, click here.
Women Ask, “Can I Be a ‘Person,’ Too?”
Interestingly, during the era of the Santa Clara decision granting corporations the full protections of persons under the Constitution, two other groups also brought cases to the Supreme Court, asking for similar protections. The first group was women. This was a movement with a fascinating history, its roots in the American Revolution itself.
In March 1776 thirty-two-year-old Abigail Adams sat at her writing table in her home in Braintree, Massachusetts, a small town a few hours’ ride south of Boston. The war between the American colonists and their opponents—the governors and the soldiers of the East India Company and its British protectors—had been going on for about a year. A small group of the colonists gathered in Philadelphia to edit Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence for the new nation they were certain was about to be born, and Abigail’s husband, John Adams, was among the men editing that document.
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Abigail had a specific concern. With pen in hand, she carefully considered her words. Assuring her husband of her love and concern for his well-being, she then shifted to the topic of the documents being drafted, asking John to be sure to “remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than [were] your ancestors.”4
Abigail knew that the men drafting the Declaration and other documents leading to a new republic would explicitly define and extol the rights of men, but not of women, and she and several other well-bred women were lobbying for the Constitution to refer instead to persons, people, humans, or “men and women.” Her words are well-preserved, and her husband later became president of the United States, so her story is better known than those of most of her peers.
By late April, Abigail had received a response from John, but it wasn’t what she was hoping for. “Depend upon it,” the future president wrote to his wife, “[that] we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”
Furious, Abigail wrote back to her husband, saying, “If perticular [sic] care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion...”
All of Abigail’s efforts were ultimately for nothing. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced on June 7, 1776, a resolution that the colonies be free and independent states governed solely by free men, based on a document written by Thomas Jefferson and edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Adams played a strong role in the heated debate over the following month, which concluded with a vote to adopt the gender-specific language of Lee’s resolution on July 2, 1776. Congress formalized it two days later as the Declaration of Independence.
Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and the other men of the assembly explicitly demanded rights for male citizens—and not for female citizens—when they crafted the Declaration. “Men” was not a generic reference to humans; the authors meant humans of the male gender. They wrote: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...”
The men had won. Among the earliest laws of the Colonies were several legislating that men had power over women:5
A married woman was not allowed to make out a will because she was not allowed to own land or legally control anything else worthy of willing to another person.
Any property a woman brought into the marriage became her husband’s at the moment of marriage, and would revert to her only if he died and she did not remarry. But even then, she would get only one-third of her husband’s property, and what third that was and how she could use it were determined by a male, court-appointed executor, who would supervise for the rest of her life (or until she remarried) how she used the third of her husband’s estate she “inherited.”
When a widow died, the executor would either take the property for himself or decide to whom it would pass; the woman had no say in the matter because she had no right to sign a will. Women could not sue in a court of law except under the same weak procedures allowed for the mentally ill and children, supervised by men.
If the man of a family household died, the executor would decide who would raise the wife’s children and in what religion. She had no right to make those decisions and no say in such matters. If the woman was poor, it was a virtual certainty that her children would be taken from her.
It was impossible in the new United States of America for a married woman to have legal responsibility for her children, control of her own property, own slaves, buy or sell land, or even obtain an ordinary license.
Women Work for, Then Against, the Fourteenth Amendment
After the American Revolution, educated women picked up Abigail Adams’s chant and began to quietly foment her “rebellion.” They wrote poems and seemingly innocuous letters to the editors of newspapers, speaking indirectly about their demands for equal rights. Word spread. By the early 1800s, women’s voices were getting louder, and many were demanding an amendment to the Constitution to give equal rights to women or prohibit discrimination against women.
But women didn’t gain any legislative successes until 1868, and that turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. It was the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, which guaranteed due process of law to all “persons.” Oddly, when it was being drafted in 1866, suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had argued strongly against it because it was the first time the word male was used in the Constitution or any constitutional amendments.
The Fourteenth Amendment has two provisions, one guaranteeing due process of law to all persons and the other defining how lines would be drawn to decide how representation was to be apportioned in the House of Representatives. Section 2 includes the phrase “the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens.”
Stanton wrote in 1866, “If the word ‘male’ be inserted [in this amendment] it will take a century to get it out again.”6
Despite Stanton’s objections to its sexually discriminatory language, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed and ratified by enough states to become law. And Stanton was off in her prediction by only two years: the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required equal pay for women and men and prohibited discrimination against women by any company with more than twenty-four employees.
Women Test the Fourteenth Amendment
In an attempt to test the Fourteenth Amendment, Susan B. Anthony went to her local polling station and cast a vote on November 1, 1872. Justifying her vote on the grounds of the Fourteenth Amendment, on November 12 Anthony wrote, “All persons are citizens—and no state shall deny or abridge the citizen rights...”
Six days later, however, she was arrested for voting illegally. The judge, noting that she was female, refused to allow her to testify, dismissed the jury, and found her guilty. Lacking the resources available to huge corporations, she was unable to repeatedly carry her cause to the Supreme Court as the railroads customarily did, and that judge’s decision stood.
One year later, in the 1873 Bradwell v. Illinois decision, the Supreme Court ruled that women were not entitled to the full protection of persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote the Court’s concurring opinion, which minced no words: “The family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. So firmly fixed was this sentiment in the founders of the common law that it became a maxim of that system of jurisprudence that a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head and representative in the social state...”
Corporations had full legal existence and the constitutional rights of persons, but women could derive these rights only through their husbands. They didn’t even exist as legal entities separate from their husbands. And the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t apply to them, even though the amendment explicitly said “persons.”
Women didn’t get the vote until 1920, and the Equal Rights Amendment that says, simply and entirely, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” has been introduced into Congress every year since 1923 but has never passed, blocked in every case by male legislators.
Freed Slaves Ask, “Can I Be a ‘Person,’ Too?”
The second group to petition the Supreme Court to be recognized as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment were the people for whom it was passed: freed slaves and their descendants. But ten years after giving corporations full rights of personhood, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that any person more than “1⁄8th Negro” was not legally entitled to full interactions with white “persons.”
Justice Henry B. Brown delivered the near-unanimous (one dissenter) opinion of the Court, which established nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, saying, “Gauged by this standard we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.”7
Court reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis, in the headnote he wrote as commentary to the Plessy v. Ferguson case, said that the case had come about when Plessy, “being a passenger between two stations within the State of Louisiana, was assigned by the officers of the [railroad] company to the coach used for the race to which he belonged, but he insisted upon going into a coach used by the race to which he did not belong.”
Davis then quotes the Fourteenth Amendment and says afterward, “The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”
This institutionalization of segregation by the 1896 Plessy case prompted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to note in 1938, “Of the cases in this Court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.”8
Notes:
1. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978).
2. Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc., 436 U.S. 307 (1978).
6. Quoted in Sharada Rath, Women in Public Administration of the American States: A Study of their Administrative Values (New Delhi: M.D. Publications, 1998), 41.
8. Connecticut General Co. v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938).
Thom Hartmann is America's No. 1 progressive radio host, as well as the New York Times bestselling, four-time Project Censored Award-winning author of 21 books in print, in 17 languages on 5 continents.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc. Truthout has obtained exclusive rights to reprint this content. It may not be reproduced, and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.
The small companies and public didn't have a chance in the early rounds. Now it's down to a few formidable corporate teams, the Cheat 16:
- General Electric made $10.3 billion in 2009, but received a $1.1 billion tax rebate.
- Forbes said about Bank of America in 2010: "How did they not pay any taxes on $4.4 billion in income?"
- Oil giant Exxon made a $45 billion profit in 2009, but paid no taxes in the United States.
- Citigroup had 4 quarters of billion-dollar profits in 2010, but paid no taxes.
- Wells Fargo made $12 billion but purchased Wachovia Bank to claim a $19 billion tax credit.
- Hewlett Packard's U.S. income tax rate was 4.3% in 2008 and 2.3% in 2009.
- Verizon's 10.5% tax rate, according to Forbes, is due to its partnership with Vodafone, the primary target in UK Uncut's protests against tax evaders.
- Chevron's tax rate was 1% in 2008.
- Boeing, which just won a $30 billion contract to build 179 airborne tankers, got $124 million back from the taxpayers in 2010.
- Over the past 5 years Amazon made $3.5 billion and paid taxes at the rate of 4.3%.
- Carnival Cruise Lines paid 1% in taxes on its $11.5 billion profit over the past 5 years.
- Koch Industries is not publicly traded, so their antics are kept private. But they benefit from taxpayer subsidies in ranching and logging.
- In 2008 CorporateWatch said Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp paid "astoundingly low taxes" because of tax havens.
- Google "cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years by shifting its money around foreign countries.
- Merck, the second-largest drugmaker in the U.S., last year brought more than $9 billion from abroad without paying any U.S. tax.
- Pfizer, the largest drugmaker in the U.S., erased $10 billion in taxes with an "accounting treatment."
All the above has been documented by US Uncut Chicago members on PayUpNow.org .
Who's projected for the Final Frauding Four?
Best Defense: Google uses a game plan called a "Double Irish Defense," which moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Best Offense: GE's 2010 SEC 10-K tax filing boldly states: "At December 31, 2010, $94 billion of earnings have been indefinitely reinvested outside the United States...we do not intend to repatriate these earnings.."
Most Steals: Citigroup: 427 tax haven subsidiaries
Best Trash talk: A General Electric spokeswoman: “G.E. pays many other taxes including payroll taxes on the wages of our employees, property taxes, sales and use and value added taxes."
Most game-ending bailouts: Bank of America received $45 Billion in tax payer bailout funds in 2008 and 2009. In 2009 the company earned a pretax income of $4.4 billion, but claimed a $1.9 Billion tax benefit from the government.
Teams with the most reserves: General Electric: $77 billion Google: $24 billion That's 2 companies holding $101 billion that could be invested in jobs.
Tax Haven Tourney Champion? GE is the Duke of Tax Avoidance.
Paul Buchheit is a faculty member in the School for New Learning at DePaul University, author of UsAgainstGreed.org and RappingHistory.org, and the editor of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
A few days over a year ago, or to be more precise on January 21, 2010, the US Supreme Court handed over what little was left of this nation’s pretensions to democracy on a silver platter to the Big Banks and the US Chamber of Commerce. The case was titled Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission and the Court’s decision removed all limits on corporate campaign contributions. Elections are now a sham proceeding at every level US government. The vast majority of the American people who no longer participate in the electoral charade are the smartest among us. The willfully ignorant and delusional still cling desperately to their faux-alternative Democratic politician or their Tea Party Republican politician with the tin-foil hat.
The Big Banks are running the show. Not the banks, there are 956 of those operating in the US and 950 of them lost money last year. Its the Big Banks headed by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and the six of those made so much money last year that the banking industry as a whole turned a handsome profit. Goldman Sachs, the top campaign contributor to Barack Obama, decided that he rather than John McCain would take over for George W. Bush in January 2009 and also dictated that there would be essentially no changes in the direction of the United States. And the transformation has been seamless.
The Big Banks count on their partners in the US Chamber of Commerce to share the load of governance. The Chamber’s far-right wing embodied by the Koch brothers has generated the Tea Party, the working class shock troops that are necessary if fascism, a term that describes the corporate-state, is to actually function in the US. And the Chamber launders the money of the Chinese, German, Japanese, Indian, Saudi and other foreign corporate entities seeking to advance their interests in the US political arena. After demonstrating the extent of their control in the elections of 2010, Chamber President Thomas Donohue assured a nervous and shellacked-feeling Barack Obama that he would be allowed a second term in the role he enjoys so, President of the United States. “The chamber has not, does not and will not participate in presidential politics,” Donohue told reporters. “And it is not our intention to participate in any activity to weaken the president for his re-election. We are not seeking any activity that would limit the president’s ability to advance his own re-election.” Obama then genuflected to the bosses, bringing JP Morgan Chase’s William J. Daley and General Electric’s Jeff Immelt into his Administration.
Just who are the corporate “people” whose free speech rights the US Supreme Court established in the Citizens United Decision and who are now unleashed to do as they please. Let’s look at some snapshots from the Chamber’s Annual Picnic last year.
Over there in pavilion eight, why it’s the murders of Nataline Sarkisyan and thousands of other Americans who must go without basic life-saving medical care for the sake of CIGNA HealthCare profits. And look in the next pavilion over the murders of 29 mineworkers at the Upper Big Branch Mine in southern West Virginia, Massey Energy Co., when basic safety concerns were set aside for profits sake. There in three pavilions in close proximity, the criminal corporate syndicate of BP, Halliburton and Transocean that executed the crime of the century beginning with the murders of 11 oil workers on the Deepwater Horizon and ending with the poisoning death of the Gulf of Mexico. Not far away, the five corporate media giants, Newscorp (Fox), Time Warner (CNN), General Electric and Comcast (NBC, MSNBC), Disney (ABC) and Viacom (CBS and MTV), that helped the Obama Administration bury the crime in a massive PR blitz.
And there were the Chambers foreign guests in happier times, like the fellows from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), who were happily operating their General Electric designed nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi despite warnings, according to Wikileaks, from the International Atomic Energy Commission and even US diplomats that the flaunting of safety concerns invited catastrophe. But ignoring the warnings was good for business so the catastrophe is upon us all multiplied to the tenth power. The world’s third largest economy is mortally wounded and it is not out of the question that Japan is now destroyed and will have to be evacuated. The only hope for Japan rests on the shoulders of TEPCO workers who are volunteering for suicide missions against the ongoing nuclear reactor meltdowns to give their working class brothers and sisters the chance to survive into a civilized future, the chance to deal with those corporate ghouls who profited from cutting corners and falsifying reports.
Then Saudi Aramco was there too. The state owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia stands watch over the heart of global capitalism. Who knew then that in a few months they would send their troops in the guise of the Gulf Cooperation Council into neighboring Bahrain in a vain attempt to hold back the revolutionary human tsunami sweeping across the Middle East. Soon Saudi oil will be as difficult to extract as Libyan oil is now and then?
Well then the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission will be placed where it belongs in history–on the compost heap of American’s backyard food gardens.
equivalent
- was higher than that found in community samples. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that the underlying latent structure of psychopathy in our corporate sample was consistent with that model found in community and offender studies. Psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma/presentation style (creativity, good strategic thinking and communication skills) but negatively associated with ratings of responsibility/performance (being a team player, management skills, and overall accomplishments).
