The Monsanto Court and Corporatism

>

Sorry for the light posting for awhile. Lots of things to do, and lots of things on my mind.

 

I don’t have anything new to say right now about the “supreme” court’s anointment of Monsanto, but I’ll refer to what I already said.

 

One thing which occurs to me, as I read some stuff on this and see the confusion of liberals and radical-chicists, as well as those ostensibly concerned with food freedom, is that it’s another example of how no viewpoint other than total anti-corporatism is sufficient to understand the political world.

 

Thus, readers of this blog know that I predicted a unanimous pro-Monsanto decision. Similarly, almost everyone predicted wrongly that the corporate court would strike down Obama’s “health insurance” poll tax. But true anti-corporatists understood how essential it was to the corporate imperative that the commerce clause be extended in this totalitarian direction.

 

My point is that anti-corporatism demonstrates its superior predictive value, which in turn is evidence for its fundamental truth. It’s hard to see which competing world view, other than corporatism itself, accurately describes the state of civilization.

>

Bowman vs. Monsanto; Activist and Passive Corporatism, vs. Anti-Corporatism

>

There’s a lot of muddled talk about the Citizens United decision. In this post I’m not going to rehash the facts about the decision itself (in a nutshell: it’s further evidence that “campaign finance” reformism cannot work within a system which is indelibly dominated by finance, which should have always been common sense; by now to still call for it is intentional misdirection), but to reprise my distinction of judicial activist corporatism vs. more passive corporatism.

 

One of the most frequent muddlings of Citizens United is to call it a “5-4″ decision, and even to refer to the “five” bad guys. But in fact CU was a 9-0 pro-corporatist decision. The four so-called ”dissenters” objected only on narrow technical grounds. None of them objected on the grounds that there’s no such thing as corporate rights, or corporate personhood, let alone questioned whether formally enshrined corporations should exist at all. But these are the basic questions which have to be asked if one is to call corporatism as such into question. To not ask them is automatically to be pro-corporatist.

 

As for those technical grounds which distinguish passive from judicial activist corporatists, it’s only a matter of “the proper procedure”, for example if the legislature passed a law. Now, whether or not corporations should exist and whether or not they have a right to speech do not in fact have anything to do with “the law”. On the contrary, they’re fundamental questions of constitution, sovereignty, and of what kind of society people want to live in. But passive corporatists don’t care about such fundamental questions, since they’re content to inertially go with what the existing power distribution calls normative. They merely assuage their residual “conscience” by wanting the “proper forms” to be followed. (This process mentality is characteristic of liberals as a whole, though with Obama’s normalization of fascistically aggressive corporatism, liberals have been throwing down the mask and increasingly advocating direct might-makes-right aggression themselves.)

 

In the case of CU, the legislature had in fact passed a law which purported to reform campaign finance. This was the occasion for the passives to split from the activists. But absent such a law, it would never have occurred to any of them to put any limits on corporate speech.

 

This brings us to Bowman vs. Monsanto. Obviously no sane person expects Bowman to win, but I guess the idea was to at least get a discussion of seed patenting going. I haven’t seen any such discussion; on the contrary the few corporate media pieces I read were pro-Monsanto hatchet jobs which carefully steered clear of discussing any philosophical question at all (should patents on life exist? should patents exist at all?), and “discussed” even the narrow technical argument only in terms of ridicule. (This is yet further evidence that the tactic of compromising in order to “get one’s issue into the public discussion” doesn’t work. Not that Bowman’s action has this nature. He’s directly challenging Monsanto, and isn’t compromising anything himself. But we often see people proposing to compromise their projects and alleged principles in order to get this alleged discussion going. This is always the fatal step toward corruption, and usually indicates a desire to sell out.)

 

The corporate media coverage gives a clue to what kind of decision we can expect from the court. I won’t be surprised to see a 9-0 decision for Monsanto. The judicial activists are of course in the bag. As for the passive corporatists, the only possible hook they could hang their process hat would be “patent exhaustion”. But to apply that here would require them to go against the whole trend of the intellectual property regime. While this doctrine has been grandfathered in for some kinds of products, it’s explicitly ruled out for any new kind of product, especially GMO seeds. I don’t expect any passive corporatist to go against this trend. On the contrary, from them we can expect invitations to Congress to pass a law “clarifying” this.

 

More importantly, intellectual property is a pivotal foundation of corporate feudalism. “Campaign finance” offers some wiggle room, since the “elections” are fraudulent anyway. But the system depends upon the basic structural integrity of the IP regime. So even a passive corporatist will be loath to issue any ruling which could question or limit the foundation. (Compare how the FDA will sometimes ban specific additives, but went all in on GMOs as a genre from day one, and has never for a second questioned a single specific GMO. It’s because other kinds of additives can be economically isolated and are expendable, but the GMO genre is necessary for corporatism as such to keep expanding.)

 

(“On the merits”, of course, there’s no question whatsoever. The farmer exploited a “loophole” of functional negligence, but which has no “legal” basis. Monsanto has him dead to rights – he violated their patent. So if you believe in “intellectual property” at all, if you believe Monsanto’s patents have any legitimacy, then your decision is made for you.)

 

Meanwhile the duty of citizens is to reject the narrow process “discussion” and ruling and ask among themselves the basic questions – should intellectual property exist at all? Does it ever benefit anyone but the most powerful corporations? Would everyone else be much better off without it? And in particular, is not the patenting of life itself by far the worst in its effects? Isn’t it heading toward our literal enslavement? Is it not a moral abomination? Shouldn’t we abolish it completely?

 

Why do I write about the lawless court at all? To explain further why we should accord it no legitimacy, and see it as nothing but an alien, tyrannical imposition. The court is not part of human society, nor part of the constitutional convention which is already beginning, which shall finally ask and answer the fundamental questions confronting humanity today. As for the corporate state and its media, NGO, and academic appendages, they’re all in. They’ve embarked upon a war of total destruction, and they must achieve total victory or total defeat.

 
>

Under No Circumstances

>

Under no circumstances should anyone ever accept any “capitalism for me, anarchism for you” setup.

 

For example, governments and corporations are not “patriotic”. They regard the jobs and wealth of “their” people as infinitely offshorable. They have zero loyalty to any such notions. So why would anyone ever accept such propaganda from the system? And if you truly believe in patriotism, don’t you need to regard all the elites of the corporate state system as being traitors to the country?

 

Or the way system propaganda, like in the corporate media or with NGO front groups, tries to implant notions that the 99% could ever “owe” any morality to the system. But corporations are sociopathic in principle. They openly declare that their one and only imperative is profit. So why would anyone for a second entertain any notion that any of us could “owe” something like a “debt” to a corporation, as a matter of “morals”? Why would anyone ever reciprocate with anything other than the corporate Hobbesian mindset?

 

The fact is that it’s the elites of politics, economy, culture who made the conscious choice to completely destroy society and humanity itself, replacing it with a scorched earth free-fire zone of organized crime and psychopathic profiteering, with the formerly human victims slated to cannibalize themselves in a cesspool of cutthroat “competition”. It’s the elites who declared war on humanity. It’s the elites who want to turn the Earth itself into a cesspool of viciousness.

 

While we must strive with all our resurgent humanity to rebuild community among ourselves, toward those who would treat us as something less than human, toward the system and all who seek to ape it, we must reciprocate fully. We can start be rejecting in principle all morality, all authority, all legitimacy, where it comes to any system institution or meme.

 

Here’s one example: the “supreme court”, as a thing and as a meme. (In our context this overwrought term is appropriate, because the notion that something like a supreme court has any legitimacy, that its decisions have any objective existence and power, is indeed something injected into our psychology, like a physical pathogen, and intended to replicate itself through both contagion and heredity.) I see everywhere people who are generally skeptical of the system who are still prone to invest this court with some kind of objective existence and power. I saw one discussion about “when did the 90s end?”, with one commenter suggesting “Bush v. Gore”. He didn’t sound like he meant this symbolically. Rather, he seemed to think that a handful of scumbags calling itself a “supreme court” and issuing a proclamation intended to help a handful of thugs steal an election, somehow actually has more “legitimacy” than the same proclamation issued by a handful of scumbags on a street corner.

 

The truth, of course, is that just like Andy Jackson said, the SCOTUS has zero power to enforce anything, and depends completely on the executive’s thug arm. It’s nothing but a propaganda front for that might-makes-right arm. In the case of the 2000 election, to roll over and give up was 100% the unforced, voluntary choice of Gore and his sniveling supporters and voters. They made the infinitely shameful choice to surrender. No one but themselves is responsible even the slightest bit.

 

The same is true of any other decision. The SCOTUS does what its masters want it to do. Citizens United merely “legally” enshrined and intensified the existing vector of One Dollar = One Vote. It’s incoherent to accept the existing electoral regime but whine about CU as some kind of abuse. CU is perfectly mainstream jurisprudence and policy, agreed upon by liberals and conservatives. If you want to reject CU, you’d better start by rejecting Bellotti and Buckley, and the whole program of “elections” among contending factions of the 1%. But how typical of liberals to accept all that but whine about a trivial detail.

 

Similarly, the recent decision upholding the Obama Poll Tax is a perfectly consistent, normal decision, just as Obama’s tax is consistent, normal policy. (In both cases “normal” is referring to the corporate system’s vector.) How typical of the same conservatives who support the orgy of corporate welfare and corporate mandates everywhere else (how is the 10% ethanol mandate not a tax as well?) to cherry-pick an example like this and whine about what an abuse it is. How can you want the corporate state system, including a “health care” system based on private insurance monopolies, but not want the government to act as aggressively as necessary to force participation in that system (once such participation becomes necessary in order to maintain the system at all)?

 

The fact is that liberals and conservatives are both the same inertial coward and leech who is afraid of corporate power but also wants to free ride on it (thus the long since proven Big Lie of “trickle-down” is now the fundamental secular religion of both groups, along with electoralism itself). There’s also some intellectual laziness involved, a disinclination to even try to think beyond system brainwashing. The result is this craven, stupid acceptance of the “legitimacy” of the 1%, to the point that even those who want to reject its power tend to acknowledge its alleged authority. The cult of the “supreme court”, certainly the most obviously fraudulent “branch” of government by any objective measure (since it can’t even partake of the gutter legitimacy of Might Makes Right, which unfortunately is a legitimacy criterion to many), is a clear example of this.

 

One measure of our self-liberation shall be the extent to which we liberate our minds from the oppressor and casually think and talk of the fact that the SCOTUS has no legitimacy. This acceptance, once it becomes second nature, can then be expanded to encompass the rest of the corporate/state system.

>

Kangaroo Courts and the Health Racket Mandate (Reprise)

>

(This is an edited re-post of an earlier piece. I thought that in light of the looming “decision” on the health racket mandate by the supremely corporatist court, it might be useful to revisit the nature of this corporatist jurisprudence.)

 

A federal judge has given the first adverse ruling against one of the many lawsuits declaring Obama’s health racket Mandate unconstitutional. The ruling demonstrates the “logic” of a corporatist ideologue and how he views the Constitution. A corporatist assumes as the god-given order of things that the purpose of America is to be mined by powerful corporate interests. He then views the Constitution as purely instrumental toward this goal. As we’ll see, this judge views the artificial, ideologically fabricated and imposed “market” as sacrosanct and beyond the Constitution’s purview. He views the written Constitution, and by extension the sovereign people’s inherent constitution, as subordinate to the corporate imperative. This is the essence of corporatist ideology. It views sovereignty itself as reposing in corporations, not the people. The constitution is only the corporate constitution. The written Constitution is therefore the servant of corporations.

 

A judge like this might even try to argue that the fact that the Constitution never once mentions the word “corporation” is proof of his thesis that corporations are not below the Constitution, but above it. At any rate he’d argue that the absence of such specification gives him license to interpret things that way.

 

The human truth is the exact opposite. Society exists in the first place only of, by, and for human beings. Sovereignty reposes only in the people. The constitution can never be anything but of and for the political health of the people. The written Constitution can be legitimately interpreted only toward this human imperative. Corporations have no right to exist at all, and certainly have no right to act against the people. Wherever they do, any government has an affirmative obligation to smash them. Where it fails to do so, let alone where it actively supports corporate organized crime, it abandons all sovereignty, legitimacy, and authority. The people then have the right and obligation to repudiate the system, smash the criminals themselves, and redeem society on a human basis.

 

Let’s go to the case. The suit claims the health racket bailout in general, and in particular the racket Mandate, violates the Commerce Clause, the 5th and 10th amendments, the Free Exercise of religion*, and that it’s an unconstitutional tax. The decision rejects the demand for a preliminary injunction and throws the case out completely. The decision focuses on rejecting the Commerce claim, also rejects part of the tax claim, and declares it doesn’t need to reach another part.

 

In the so-called “factual background” the judge launches right into the propaganda. He intones:

 

The Health Care Reform Act seeks to reduce the number of uninsured Americans
and the escalating costs they impose on the health care system.
(p. 2)

 

and follows with a series of details. This is standard political fraud from the bench. As a matter of dogma, the judge is supposed to assume the legislature is a public servant and not a criminal cabal. So the court’s default is to aid and abet organized crime in the legislature. At the very least, even if the court is going to strike down an act (because of some ideological squabble among elites, not because the act is against the people), it still engages in this pretense of legislative good faith. That’s SCOTUS dogma going back a long way. (Anyone who follows the corporate media is familiar with the how it’s their established practice to report as fact the self-proclaimed intentions and mindset of elites, especially political elites. The courts have the same practice.)

 

Everywhere else judges are supposed to infer motives from actions. Why is that reversed here, and the dogmatically assumed motive is used tendentiously to interpret the action? It’s because here the system is functioning as an integrated machine. Elsewhere it’s the system against the people or individuals, so there the interpretive dynamic is reversed.

 

So here this judge proclaims that the Mandate is “integral to the legislative effort”, but everything he claims about what that effort is, and the constitutionality of the effort itself, is a lie. The Mandate is indeed integral to the effort, but the effort’s intention and goal is the opposite of Congressional and judicial lies. The effort isn’t to ensure better health care for more people at lower cost. A Congress which wanted to do that would’ve instituted Single Payer. Period.

 

The effort is to bail out the parasitic insurance rackets, who already have an institutionalized anti-competitive monopoly, by absolving them of having to compete with non-participation as well. That’s the one and only objective of Obamacare.

 

The decision moves quickly (p. 3) to bashing alleged deadbeats, the mythical free riders at the ER. But the entire premise of “the legislative effort” is to bail out a tremendous but politically powerful deadbeat and parasite, the insurance racket. So right at the outset we can see the judge’s bad faith. It’s not possible to be concerned about free riders but still support this deadbeat bailout bill. So on its face anyone who supports the bill (or finds it constitutional) but claims to be concerned about free riders is lying. Again, if Congress had been concerned about free riders, it would have enacted Single Payer instead of bailing out the insurance parasite. So on its face the judge’s entire rationale regarding the legislative intent is invalid.

 

We also have the moral fact that anyone amid a system based on organized corruption, legalized fraud, and massive robbery in the form of corporate welfare who would ever make a top-down anti-deadbeat argument must be a vile immoral criminal himself. It’s not possible to face such monumental system crime and still say the individual deadbeat is just as bad, or to bother with him at all. And then there’s the fact that the vast majority of individuals in that position are not deadbeats at all, but the victims of an aggressive kleptocracy which has mugged them into poverty.

 

As I said, this proves the judge is corrupt and acts in moral bad faith, so his “legal” reasoning must be judged from that point of view.

 

He has the haughty nerve to claim that it’s individuals, mugging victims who show up at the ER, who are “shifting costs onto third parties”. But the fact is that we the people ARE the victimized “third party” here, while the rackets and their bought politicians and judges are the only market “participants”, the only “stakeholders”, as their own flunkies would concede.

 

In a gesture of noblesse oblige the judge grants that the plaintiffs had standing to sue (p. 4). (But not before a lecture on the monetization of standing, how as far as the courts are concerned the only measure of citizenship is property, and the only measure of values or injury to those values is a monetary injury. This filthy doctrine must always be enforced. As usual, the first priority is to deny true citizen access to the law.)

 

The judge, as a petty crook aping a benevolent despot, magnanimously grants that a person without much money may already be feeling trepidation over the Mandate and acting accordingly, so standing is granted. The whole passage is sickening. The judge’s hypocritical, bloodless, wonkish, trickle-down “generosity” is even more repulsive than open, naked greed. How could any decent person even discuss this without outrage over the fact that those already suffering from the depredations of finance and insurance sector gangsters are, by the judge’s own admission*, to be made to suffer even more in order to pay yet further extortion to the most worthless and repellant criminals afflicting us today?

 

[*P. 8: "..the injury-in-fact in this case is the present financial pressure experienced by plaintiffs due to the requirements of the Individual Mandate."

 

This pressure is being put on by already-rich robbers who want to steal even more, and helping them commit this further robbery is the one and only intent and goal of this bill. That's the vision of "civilization" and "law" this judge seeks to uphold.]

 

We get to the Commerce Clause. Here’s the first time I’ve come across the Orwellian name for the Mandate: the “Shared Responsibility Payment” (p.11). Deciphering the totalitarian code: It’s the Full Responsibility of those who do all the work to hand over almost all they produce as extortion Payment to wealthy parasites who have and assume Zero Responsibility.

 

The judge is honest about this much: The Mandate is regulation of “inactivity, or a person’s mere existence within our Nation’s boundaries.” He admits it’s a poll tax.

 

The crux of plaintiffs’ argument is that the federal government has never attempted
to regulate inactivity, or a person’s mere existence within our Nation’s boundaries, under
the auspices of the Commerce Clause. It is plaintiffs’ position that if the Act is found
constitutional, the Commerce Clause would provide Congress with the authority to regulate
every aspect of our lives, including our choice to refrain from acting.
(p.11)

 

The decision says this case involves the third aspect of Interstate Commerce – “those activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.” Since that’s as vague as can be, and since by the reasoning here it can apply to literally anything the system wants it to, the judge confirms what we who oppose the Mandate always said. This Mandate is not only a crime in itself but a totalitarian precedent. If it goes through it can serve as the template for mandates to buy literally anything the system wants to force upon us.

 

The Supreme Court has expanded the reach of the Commerce Clause to reach
purely local, non-commercial activity, simply because it is an integral part of a broader
statutory scheme that permissibly regulates interstate commerce. Two cases, decided
sixty years apart, demonstrate the breadth of the Commerce power and the deference
accorded Congress’s judgments. (p. 12)

 

The decision discusses two highly disputed cases, Wickard v. Filburn and Gonzales v. Reich, as alleged precedents. With seeming lack of awareness of the ideological biases involved, in his own case and that of SCOTUS judges, he trumpets the striking down of anti-gun and anti-domestic violence laws as the SCOTUS philosophically “placing limits” on Congress.

 

Um, no. The judges on the court majorities simply support gun rights but don’t support marijuana rights, and don’t care about domestic violence. That’s the one and only difference which went into these decisions – how the subject of each case squared with their non-judicial ideology. The judicial ideology almost without exception is servant to the political ideology. Scalia’s anti-federalist vote in Gonzales was a spotlight example of how fraudulent his ideological pretensions are. He simply doesn’t like marijuana, period.

 

The decision admits the novelty of the case.

 

Plaintiffs in the present case focus on the common fact that each
of the regulations that survived Supreme Court scrutiny under the Commerce Clause
regulated an economic “activity,” as opposed to the “inactivity” they have demonstrated by
merely existing and not purchasing health care insurance. The Supreme Court has always
required an economic or commercial component in order to uphold an act under the
Commerce Clause. The Court has never needed to address the activity/inactivity
distinction advanced by plaintiffs because in every Commerce Clause case presented thus
far, there has been some sort of activity. (p.15)

 

To get around this the judge engages in what he himself calls “mental gymnastics”, and more fraudulent divination of Congressional intent.

 

Now we get to the core of obscenity:

 

The health care market is unlike other markets. No one can guarantee his or her
health, or ensure that he or she will never participate in the health care market. Indeed, the
opposite is nearly always true. The question is how participants in the health care market
pay for medical expenses – through insurance, or through an attempt to pay out of pocket
with a backstop of uncompensated care funded by third parties. This phenomenon of costshifting
is what makes the health care market unique.
(p. 16)

 

Think about that sentence, the two allegedly equivalent and interlinked propositions:

 

“No one can guarantee health..” That’s self-evident.

 

“…or ensure that he or she will never participate in the health care market.”

 

What? We could ensure we don’t have to participate in a criminal market by getting rid of it. We could, for example, institute Single Payer, which would cost far less, provide far more care far more efficiently, and would even solve that alleged individual free rider issue the likes of the judge claim to have such a fetish about. It would not be a moral affront to the people, as it would eradicate the free riding parasite rackets. We’d be free of their depredations and extortions.

 

But the decision depicts this “market” as a law of the universe. It would be hard to imagine a more grotesque example of begging the question. I don’t know if the conservative plaintiffs themselves care, but in the case of we who reject the Mandate on citizenship grounds, we reject any constitutional basis for the entire system based on private health “insurance”. We didn’t try to sue over it before (and of course we would have lacked “standing”), so long as we had the option of non-participation.

 

But now we’re going to have to sue against this Mandate. But when we declare* the Mandate unconstitutional, we’re saying that’s the most aggressive unconstitutional manifestation of an extra-constitutional, outlaw system.

 

[* And we as citizens do declare it so. We do not beg a court to do so for us. We demand that if the courts really do serve the people, they'll ratify what we the people already know and declare.

 

Since the prospect that these suits will do the trick is dubious, we need to start preparing for citizen disobedience and resistance.]

 

So the judge’s rationale is non-responsive. (The fact that “the health care market is unlike other markets” is also proof that private health insurance itself is a conceptual and moral absurdity.) Especially as he moves on to a series of flippant absurdities.

 

As inseparable and integral members of the health care services market, plaintiffs have made a choice regarding the method of payment for the services they expect to receive. The government makes the apropos analogy of paying by credit card rather than by check.
(p. 17)

 

We are NOT “members of this market”. This market is an alien assault being artificially inflicted upon us. The “market” has absolutely nothing to do with health care. The two are completely separable and separated. Paying by “..credit card or check…” – when of course the real issue centers on the fact that it’s a mugger demanding this payment in the first place.

 

Similarly, plaintiffs in this case are participants in the
health care services market. They are not outside the market. While plaintiffs describe the
Commerce Clause power as reaching economic activity, the government’s characterization
of the Commerce Clause reaching economic decisions is more accurate.

 

We are NOT “participants”. We ARE “outside the market”. We are disenfranchised, coercively indentured subjects of this “market”. Victims.

 

What level of depravity does it take for someone to not only ignore the one fact of the case, but to turn around and accuse the victim of that very crime? What can decent people do with a criminal like that?

 

Now he comes to his decision, and his ultimate lie:

 

The Act regulates a broader interstate market in health care services. This is not
a market created by Congress, it is one created by the fundamental need for health care
and the necessity of paying for such services received. The provision at issue addresses
cost-shifting in those markets and operates as an essential part of a comprehensive
regulatory scheme. The uninsured, like plaintiffs, benefit from the “guaranteed issue”
provision in the Act, which enables them to become insured even when they are already
sick. This benefit makes imposing the minimum coverage provision appropriate. (p. 18)

 

This is incontrovertibly a market created by Congress. On its face that’s a clear fact. The bill’s very purpose is to bail out the rackets who, even though they have an anti-trust exemption (another creation of Congress), and can therefore quash innovation and competition, are increasingly unable to compete with non-participation, which more and more Americans are rationally choosing, as is their constitutional right as citizens. The purpose of this bill is to eliminate this competition as well. The purpose of this decision is to eliminate our constitutional rights.

 

And once again, what we must always remember immediately, every time we hear anyone like this judge say a word about “shifting costs”, “third parties”, free riding, or any other “deadbeat” language, is the obscene fact that this “market” exists at all for one reason only. It’s to enable the parasitic extortions and extractions of this insurance racket which is indeed a third party to us all, which does nothing but shift costs to us all, free ride upon us all. That’s the one and only reason the bill exists at all. That’s the one and only reason this decision was made the way it was.

 

Every word of it is a crime against the Constitution, just like the bill itself. We are under the thumb of stateless, lawless, anti-sovereign predators. This Mandate is a major step forward for their criminal regime. As this incident makes clear, we cannot rely on the courts to help us uphold our constitution. We must do that ourselves.

>

>

Property and Raw Milk

>

Although the US system keeps claiming that a “right to property” is one of its fundamental values, in practice this is another class-based scam, just like every other “value”. Just like with everything else, an alleged right to property refers only to the property and prerogatives of the rich and big corporations. The property rights of the non-rich are cited only for propaganda purposes, but these are assaulted by Big Property on a daily basis.

 

This class war property doctrine was formally enshrined in the SCOTUS’ Kelo decision, and it’s been enhanced since then.

 

One battlefront most relevant for the food movement is the government’s War on Raw Milk on behalf of Big Dairy. (But see also the commerce clause issue, with Obama’s Stamp Mandate seeking to break new “constitutional” ground. This too is highly relevant for food, as I explain in those posts.)

 

A lawsuit by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) has already goaded the FDA into the following declaration of intent:

 

a. There is No Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food
b. There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health
c. There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract

 

Now an FTCLDF-assisted suit in Wisconsin has caused a judge to issue a ruling expressing the official elite view of property rights:

 

(1) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a dairy herd;

(2) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;

(3) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to board their cow at the farm of a farmer;

(4) The Zinniker Plaintiffs’ private contract does not fall outside the scope of the States’ police power;

(5) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice;

(6) DATCP [Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection] . . . had jurisdiction to regulate the Zinniker Plaintiffs’ conduct.

 

The judge was guided by the FDA’s declaration.

 

What this and the FDA’s brief (and I’m sure the examples could be multiplied) really mean is an admission that “property” is nothing but what the government says it is, that it’s an artificial creation of government, and that in practice government will always make property right enforcement a priority only where it comes to the property of big corporations and the rich. (Could you imagine any government bureaucracy or judge stating in principle that the rich don’t have absolute property rights? Even if by some aberration they were going to rule against the bigger interest, they’d do so on some far more narrow ground.)

 

Most of all, wherever there’s a clash of property rights the bigger dog will always win. That’s what Kelo was all about. It’s straight Might Makes Right.

 

We see how the very existence of property concentrations causes government to act ever more tyrannically, which is no surprise since the core function of government is to create and enforce propertarianism. Without government there would be no such thing as property, and without property we wouldn’t need government. (Once again we see the basic incoherence of the “small government” ideologues. “I want small government except for all the other things I want which have to mean big, aggressive government. So I really want big, aggressive government!”)

 

(But for the time being we can formulate a transitional doctrine to accompany our constitutionalism. The right view is that the Constitution must be interpreted strictly where it comes to government/corporate power, loosely where it comes to the power and liberty of the people. This is truly its Original Intent, as is made clear by the original philosophy of the American Revolution.

 

Similarly, since “property” could only ever be valid if it referred to the rights of real people living and working within a community, so it follows that if we’re to recognize property rights at all our priority must be rights that involve constitutional liberties, rights that involve local/regional business and residence, rights that involve actual work and eating. Meanwhile the concentrated “property” of the alien rich shouldn’t be respected at all. Corporations, not being persons, can’t own property in the first place.)

 

The fact is that, just as smaller organizations and businesses would be better off if the corporate form didn’t exist at all, so we the non-rich people would be better off if propertarianism ceased to exist, and was instead replaced by useful possession rights on an autonomous and cooperative basis. As things are, small corporations will always exist only at the whim of big ones, and small property will exist only at the whim of big property. But if corporations and property ceased to exist, then big structures of every sort would cease to exist, while naturally-sized structures would prosper and flourish in freedom.

 

If someone’s coming at you with an automatic rifle and all you have is a Derringer, I suppose you’re “better off” than if you had nothing. But you’d be much better off if neither of you had any firearm.

Corporate Tribalism Part 1: Legal Corporatism As A Version of Racism

>

(This is a preliminary post to a series I’ll be writing soon. The series will be about our relocalization imperative vs. corporate kleptocracy’s will to impose a vicious new feudalism upon us. Thus from both points of view we are to become reindigenous. The choice is whether we can build our own new communities out of the ashes of the corporate wasteland, or whether we’re recolonized, exactly as tribes formerly were, but on a far worse basis. Classic indigenous people suffered the assault on what were usually still-intact communities. As of now we lack even that, and are slated to face the onslaught not just as tribesmen but as atomized tribesman lacking any context whatsoever.

 

The corporate attempt to substitute its own fraudulent values like consumerism and the “organization man”, as well as more exalted ideological notions of corporate communalism, for the true values and communities it has wiped out, is part of this attack.)

 

I’ve written previously about the backdoor way the SCOTUS enshrined corporate personhood as the “law of the land”. As I describe in that post, the court was surreptitious and cowardly in the way it decided Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.

 

On the other hand, the appeals court which previously decided the case for the railroads and against the people was more talkative.

 

It opens up with a dogmatic statement which already asserted what the case was supposed to decide:

 

The principle which justifies… a discrimination in assessment and taxation, where one of the owners is a railroad corporation and the other a natural person, would also sustain it where both owners are natural persons

 

Thus the court telegraphs that its goal in taking the case was to hijack the 14th amendment to the purpose of declaring corporations legal persons.

 

The decision proceeds to invert the entire purpose of the 14th. What was intended (see my post linked above for details) to constitutionally invalidate legal discrimination of human against human became licence for the law to discriminate on behalf of corporations against humans.

 

It would be a singular comment upon the weakness and character of our republican institutions if the valuation and consequent taxation of property could vary according as the owner is white, or black, or yellow, or old, or young, or male, or female… Strangely, indeed, would the law sound in case it read that in the assessment and taxation of property a deduction should be made for mortgages thereon if the property be owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or by young men; deducted if owned by landsmen, not deducted if owned by sailors; deducted if owned by married men, not deducted if owned by bachelors; deducted if owned by men doing business alone, not deducted if owned by men doing business in partnerships or other associations; deducted if owned by trading corporations, not deducted if owned by churches or universities; and so on, making a discrimination whenever there was any difference in the character or pursuit or condition of the owner. To levy taxes upon a valuation of property thus made is of the very essence of tyranny, and has never been done except by bad governments in evil times, exercising arbitrary and despotic power.

 

As Peter d’Errico comments in his analysis of the case,

 

The circuit court in Santa Clara did not avoid discussion of an underlying jurisprudence. Its opinion confidently presented corporate personality as a legitimate and necessary aspect of economic “leadership” in society, rather than as a form of economic domination as the Populists argued. The decision announced broad constitutional protection for corporate persons within a description of society as a system of market relations…

The court thus asserted, in a converse syllogism, that where law prohibits discrimination between human beings (“natural persons”), no discrimination may be made between human beings and corporations. The court’s justification for this proposition was set out in a series of hypothetical statements describing varieties of discrimination. The text moved from discrimination based on human characteristics to discrimination based on characteristics of human economic behavior to discrimination involving strictly economic categories…

Note the semantic structure of the opinion. The distinction between individual economic activity and the activity of economic organizations was smoothly elided. Differences of economic function were neatly equated with human differences. Signs of natural human difference—race, sex, age—were intertwined with signs denoting types of institutions and forms of business organization. In this way the doctrine of legal personality admitted no distinction between humans and human organizations, between biology and politics—one was included within the other. Human existence was subsumed in the abstract realm of political economy. This semantic movement reached its foreordained conclusion: the concept of human equality in the Fourteenth Amendment not only extended to the nonhuman but prohibited any distinction between human and nonhuman, between humans and corporations.

 

The court justified this by arguing trickle-down and Fuhrerprinzip logic.

 

the aggregate wealth of all the… companies engaged in business, or formed for religious, educational, or scientific purposes, amounts to billions upon billions of dollars… and furnishes employment, comforts, and luxuries to all classes, and thus promotes civilization and progress… the persons composing them—amounting in the aggregate to nearly half the entire population of the country.

 

Thus we arrive at the new vision for the 14th amendment:

 

With the adoption of the [Fourteenth] amendment the power of the state to oppress any one under any pretense or in any form was forever ended; and henceforth all persons within their jurisdiction could claim equal protection under the laws…. This protection attends every one everywhere, whatever be his position in society or his association with others, either for profit, improvement, or pleasure. It does not leave him because of any social or official position which he may hold, nor because he may belong to a political body, or to a religious society, or be a member of a commercial, manufacturing, or transportation company. It is the shield which the arm of our blessed government holds at all times over every one, man, woman, and child, in all its broad domain, wherever they may go and in whatever relations they may be placed.

 

The Orwellism of this is obvious, since we know the litigant and the “justices” wanted to empower corporations over humans. Rewriting this, translating it from Orwellian code, we have:

 

With the adoption of the amendment the power of the state to [protect] any one under any pretense or in any form [except in the form of property] was forever ended; and henceforth all persons within their jurisdiction could claim equal protection under the laws [insofar as they are property owners and/or profiteers]…. This protection attends [all property (but really big, concentrated property)] everywhere, whatever be his position in society or his association with others, either for profit, improvement, or pleasure. It does not leave [property] because of any social or official position which [it] may hold, nor because [it] may belong to a political body, or to a religious society, or be a member of a commercial, manufacturing, or transportation company. It is the shield which the arm of our blessed government holds at all times over [the sword of] every [large-scale property owner], in all its broad domain, wherever they may go and in whatever relations they may be placed [, and especially wherever it aggresses].

 

People are born free and are everywhere in chains. People are born human and are everywhere without rights. We’re now human only insofar as we’re members (i.e., propertarians) within a legal propertarian machine. This is a corporatist version of humanity as a mere legal definition, as Arendt discussed regarding formal State citizenship. This legalization of humanity is more insidious and even more deadly.

 

Personhood now only exists as a legalism, while practically the question is placed within the realm of Might Makes Right. One is a person only insofar as one is a de jure legal person, but one is a de facto legal person only insofar as one is a property owner. This is the extreme example of humanity existing to serve the law, rather than the law serving humanity. To be more clear, this is the law as flunkey of organized crime.

 

The intellectual movement here leads up to corporatism as the same kind of phenomenon as racism, and using what was supposed to be an anti-racist constitutional amendment as its vehicle. Racism includes discrimination based on race. If we look again at the quote above, we see how the court immediately confounds this with taxation of “property”, and proceeds to claim that discrimination based on economic function is the same thing as racial discrimination. (Never mind that taxing different actions differently isn’t “singular” or “strange” at all, and that all law discriminates in that sort of way. This fraudulent court knew that perfectly well, but had a different agenda here.)

 

Having equated economic entities, declared corporations “persons”, and invented this doctrine of total economic anti-discrimination, the court had implicitly rigged things to enable power, corporate prerogative, and the law itself to discriminate, as a practical matter, against human beings and on behalf of the profit prerogative. And so it has accelerated ever since.

 

This end was implicit and intentional because it’s common sense that if the law enshrines profiteering, including corporate profiteering, while disparaging all human claims, corporations will certainly come to dominate. That’s their purpose. Corporations wouldn’t exist if the rich and powerful didn’t expect to use them as vehicles of domination. Court decisions like these were meant to ensure this domination.

 

(Court decisions and legal philosophy shouldn’t mean much, and eventually they’ll mean nothing. But for now we’re mired in a corporate free-fore zone which has usurped the place of society, where the fraud simulation of “law” still dictates many of the violent actions of the State, and where all too many of the beleaguered masses still have faith in this fraudulent and criminal system. So perhaps it’s worthwhile to make a few statements on this legal front, however much we recognize its nothingness.)

 

We can turn this rightside up. While biology cannot be forever denied in order to serve politics, we can, if the criminals insist, make politics serve biology. Only real biological persons exist, period. Corporations, property, money, concentrated wealth, are purely fictive. We can start out by refusing to recognize their legitimacy on any level, or their existence other than as brute power facts. This can help achieve inner clarity, from which we can then build a new vision and plan for human redemption.

The Latest SCOTUS Assault: Lochner’s Back (AT&T vs. Concepcion)

>

Just over a month ago I wrote: 

We’ll soon find out what’s the latest from the SCOTUS on unconscionable contracts of adhesion, extortionate ”contracts” forced upon us through the coercion of monopoly and artificially created economic hardship. These strong-arm contracts are increasingly popular, and are imposed anywhere the corporations attain the position of dominance which enables them. In theory such contracts, just like gambling, are supposed to be unenforceable, uncontracts. But here too the SCOTUS has usually served as the corporate goon. The Lochner era was based upon the legalization of “contract” extortion, and although the court nominally abandoned this doctrine in 1937, in practice courts almost always still find such contracts valid. In the case of AT&T vs. Concepcion, AT&T’s thefts were so outrageous that the lower courts found the contracts it imposed, forestalling its victims to combine to sue as a class, to be unconscionable. But this will be the SCOTUS’ big chance to restore Lochner as official court doctrine. 

And so it has been. The corporatist SCOTUS released its decision in AT&T vs. Concepcion on Wednesday, finding that mandatory arbitration clauses forbidding class action suits on behalf of vast numbers of consumers each defrauded for small amounts are valid contracts. (Decision PDF here.) This reverses lower court rulings which correctly found that these are unconscionable contracts of adhesion, meaning that they are coerced upon a weak party by a much stronger party, and are therefore invalid.

 

Earlier I wrote a longer post on this case. Here’s an excerpt, to give the basics of the issue. 

The gist of the case, AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, is that AT&T systematically committed flat out fraud and theft by tacking bogus charges onto bills. The goal was to cover up for these by slathering the contracts in fine print boilerplate jargon, forcing the customer, as a condition of the contract, to agree to “arbitration” in any dispute, and make the thefts small enough that the customer either wouldn’t notice or would consider it too much of a hassle to pursue a refund. And by keeping the victims informationally isolated from one another, AT&T hoped the thefts would all look like mistakes which at worst warranted crediting the customer’s account, not felonies which warrant punitive damages as well as prison sentences for company cadres.

There’s a lot here which shouldn’t be able to happen, according to the capitalist textbooks. According to capitalist ideology, a competitor should come along and take all of AT&T’s business by offering better service. This competitor will allegedly offer clear contracts, no fine print, which don’t require the customer to surrender his constitutional rights as the condition of the contract. (The contract should always be absolutely clear, as a matter of market efficiency. Anyone who makes the contract opaque is simply hindering the market, not behaving as a legitimate capitalist, and will hurt himself in the competitive marketplace. The ideology says so.) This hypothetical competitor will also be so good as to not, um, steal. The contracts which surrender the right to sue are clearly invalid, as they are unconscionable contracts of adhesion. Meanwhile a conscientious government, conscientiously enforcing a conscientious law, will see that the victim gets his day in court and will vigorously prosecute the wrongdoer. The system will be vindicated!

Of course, in reality the opposite happens. In reality the telecom sector matured, congealed, and calcified. It concentrated into a stagnant oligopoly with full government assistance. All the oligopolists collude to impose the same opaque, unconstitutional adhesion contracts upon the prostrate customer. The government encourages them to do this. No competitor is likely to arise. The government helps set up the insurmountable barriers to entry. There is no competition. “Competition” is just another Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” term – “You don’t like the contract? Go to the competition!”

There is no competition. In almost every sector, a few oligopolists have a stranglehold, and they collude to impose this grip with no escape, no alternative. The government does all it can to help them attain this death grip. Capitalism is a failure and a fraud. 

The telecom sector, like almost all others, is by now an oligopoly where a handful of corporations completely dominate the market. They then present a united front in forcing these contracts upon customers. This has become standard practice over the last ten years. So it’s absurd to claim that the customer has any market recourse. The arbitration clause, coercing him into surrendering his constitutional rights, is forced upon him. Nor is there much of a non-participation option. It’s increasingly difficult to function in this country, at work and socially, without a cell phone. The telecoms have done all they can to craft government policy to bring about this condition.

 

So the telecoms have done all they can to force us to use cell phones in the first place, and then they directly force us to sign mandatory arbitration clauses. This is doubly a coercion, and it’s doubly a lie to claim the customer has any choice. So the arbitration clause is obviously unconscionable, if that legal term is to have any meaning at all.

 

This meaninglessness is exactly what the activist corporatists* on the SCOTUS want. Writing for the majority, Scalia says: 

“The dissent claims that class proceedings are necessary to prosecute small-dollar claims that might otherwise slip through the legal system,” Scalia wrote. “But states cannot require a procedure that is inconsistent with the FAA, even if it is desirable for unrelated reasons.”

“The overarching purpose of the FAA,” Scalia wrote, “is to ensure the enforcement of arbitration agreements according to their terms so as to facilitate streamlined proceedings. Requiring the availability of classwide arbitration interferes with fundamental attributes of arbitration and thus creates a scheme inconsistent with the FAA.” 

This is an historical lie. The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) was originally intended to apply only to agreements between sophisticated market players. Even leaving aside the unconscionable adhesion fact, the FAA was never intended to work between powerful sophisticated players and individual citizens. Once again we see the fraudulence of Scalia’s alleged “originalism” principle, how it applies only where it would bring about the results he wants. Elsewhere he happily drops it and decides directly counter to it.

 

Also, how depraved is the notion that if the law as allegedly constituted would bring about a result outrageous to human decency (as this decision certainly is), the court must nevertheless comply. Yet that’s what Scalia says in that quote.

 

This is doubly a lie. By law courts aren’t supposed to be slaves to the alleged letter of the law where the result would outrage the conscience. Courts have broad leeway to take equity and human decency into account. And this doctrine of compliance with outrage also contradicts the American Revolution’s fundamental principle of constitution, that the forms of the law are valid only insofar as they uphold basic the verities of human community like life, liberty, and justice. Arbitration coercion, not to mention the initial vast systematic fraud, assaults these. Therefore even if the FAA demanded the upholding of this coercion, which it does not, that would simply mean the FAA is unconstitutional.

 

Scalia lies about the goal of the act, and about the goal of the decision. The decision simply wants to help facilitate organized crime. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

In this case the crime, very common among telecoms, is the systematic theft of small amounts from vast numbers of victims. But as I said in the excerpt above, the broad goal is to reinstate the Lochner regime, where no one has any protection at all from coercion in the form of unconscionable “contracts” which impose every kind of extortion, penalty, humiliation, and stripping of all of our Constitutional rights. The corporatists hate the Constitution, and have long dreamed of destroying it. Through mechanisms like this, they’re making steady progress. An entity like the SCOTUS is nothing but their factotum.

 

The people need to realize that the SCOTUS has abdicated and is completely illegitimate. No citizen owes it reverence or obedience. On the contrary we have a citizen responsibility to reject and resist it.

 

Of course AT&T is spewing the standard Orwellian lies about how arbitration is “good for consumers”. But as the author of the business piece linked above, certainly no bomb-throwing radical, says, if that’s true, then why does it have to be forced upon them? Why isn’t it just an option? We know the answer.

 

*We must reject all the nonsense we’ll be seeing about this being a bad decision by the 5-4 “majority”. The entire court is corporatist, and these 5-4 decisions (Citizens United was another) do not pit corporatists against citizen advocates, but only the judicial activists against the more passive corporatists. It’s only a technical squabble among anti-democratic ideologues who broadly agree on the corporate assault.

Corporatism is Legalized Crime

 

As Ted Nace points out early in his survey of corporatism, Gangs of America, the worst crimes of corporations seldom involve technical breaking of the law or the personal evil of corporate executives, but the pattern of destructive anti-social activity which corporatism (and its corrupted system of “law”) enshrines in principle as normal and normative. Corporatism is in fact the ideology and practice of formally enshrined organized crime.

 

The banks recently crashed the real economy, and permanent joblessness (including the waste of life termed “underemployment”) creeps toward and over 20% according to the measure. This destruction of the basis of our lives is a calculated, intentional corporate-dictated policy. Today we see quarter after quarter of corporations reporting record levels of “profit”, building up record cash hoards, and their executives personally looting these corporate hoards in the form of “bonuses”. All this even though the original stated purpose of the Bailout was to get liquidity circulating again. Today, not only does the government tolerate what’s obviously fraudulent accounting, disaster profiteering, and the obstinate refusal of corporate elites to live up to the terms of the Bailout. (I include all corporate sectors among the bailed out, since the bankster and government allegation was that all sectors would perish unless the TBTF banks were bailed out, and no other sector dissented from this, because they all expected the Bailout to trickle down to at least their own stock prices and exec comp.)

 

Not only does it do this, but it proclaims that this “jobless recovery” is in fact the real recovery they intended all along. Thus we have the same history as in Iraq: The initial rationale is proven to have been a Big Lie. The government then starts inventing new rationales ad hoc, temporarily proclaiming victory according to each, until forced by reality to move on to the next, further attenuated rationale and metric.

 

So we have Sodom-like corporate profiteering as the real economy continues to deteriorate, indeed in inverse proportion to the rising calls for “austerity”, that public amenities and civil society need to be gutted because there’s not enough existing wealth to support them.

 

Corporate profiteering and personal looting by executives, vs. austerity. This ratio is a direct metric of organized crime. It’s nothing but monumental, capital crime. Corporatism is the system of command economy, and trickle-down is ideology meant to justify it. But corporatism is nothing but robbery, and trickle-down nothing but the verbal part of fraud. Advocacy of it abets capital robbery. This incriminates both Washington gangs, the entire MSM, most of academia, and conservatism and liberalism as a whole.

 

In a formula:

 

Capitalism = corporatism and trickle-down = organized crime.

 

This is not a new kind of corporate behavior. Privateering, the formal charter to commit crimes, goes back to the 16th century, the dawn of the corporate form. Corporations were envisioned in the first place to help enable “violent crime grafted onto trade”, as Nace put it. The very term “free trade” originally referred directly to freedom from the law. Or as Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, legalized gangsters sought to use politics to regulate their bloodshed. The British East India Company’s violent lawlessness is exactly mirrored today in the form every sort of corporate thuggery and the way corporate crimes are generally considered above and outside the law. Blackwater, explicitly declared above the law and granted a charter to literally perpetrate massacres, is merely the distillation of the way every large corporation is empowered to act, and the way they usually do act. Indeed, in principle this is the way they are required to act according to the core principle that profit-seeking is the only acceptable value. (The question of what kind of sick society would ever have enshrined such a sociopathic form in the first place I’ll leave for another time. But I’ll say here that the very existence of profit-seeking corporations reflects a self-loathing and self-destructiveness on the part of civilization itself.)

 

Today’s “free trade” has exactly the same criminal nature, but the term has been sanitized to refer to an economic theory rather than a legal concept of chartered outlawry.

 

Today it’s true in a precise sense that corporations are formally legalized criminal organizations. Take for example the repeal of the bucket laws, which used to recognize gambling as gambling whether done over dice in a back alley or stocks on an exchange. A bank couldn’t ask the state to enforce a wager any more than a two-bit hood. But these sane laws started being repealed in the 1980s. The process culminated in the CFMA in 2000. Now what was naturally unproductive antisocial gambling was legalized as a “contract”. The result was massively bloated bank profits and hideous distortions of the economy, climaxing in the crash of the real economy. (This is the intended culmination of financialization itself.) The crash was then used as the pretext for the Bailout and austerity. This entire process was premeditated and had its origin in the legalization of what are naturally outlawed acts. The massive conspiracy, dating back to the 90s, to fraudulently induce mortgages was enabled by this original legalization. And the rest of the crimes were piggybacked on these.

 

This is both the most extremely destructive and the most typical of the formal legalizations of organized crime which are bound up in the corporate form. While many of the subsequent crimes may still technically be illegal, they were enabled by the underlying legalization of gambling. (And once the government has been corrupted enough, even existing laws are no longer enforced, as we see every day. This is simply the de facto legalization of corporate crime.)

 

Yet today most people fail to see this. The magnitude of the crime, and the government imprimatur accorded it, is such that it becomes hard to register. Pro-corporate propaganda and indoctrination reinforce this self-obfuscation. This is what Hitler intended with his doctrine of the Big Lie. (This same magnitude of crime enabled by the hijacked law and corrupted polity also renders it impossible for the existing system of law to rein such crimes back in and impose any deserved justice. When the day comes that the people finally take back their country from such criminals, nothing short of a Nuremburg-level proceeding is sufficient to the task of justice.)

 

So we have a regime where responsibility for every crime, the robbery of trillions, international murder, slavery, the ravaging of the environment, conspiracies against plant genomes, and anything else profitable, are either directly legalized at the corporate behest or else laundered through the corporate form and dissolved.

 

All this is within the prescribed use of corporations. These are not “abuses”.

 

Here’s another example. Corporations serve as the underlying for the stock market. The stock market has a fraudulent basis in the first place, since only the first offering actually raises capital. The rest is just the same legalized gambling. It has never been anything but socially and economically destructive. And by what reality-based measure does stock price reflect value at all? Yet once you enshrine it as the most important measure of value, control fraud becomes ideologically justified. From there the next step is to change the law and/or regulation itself. Again, organized crime becomes legalized.

 

One of the ways the law gets changed is through pro-corporate SCOTUS decisions, like the recent one striking down most of the enforcement potential* of the “honest services” law, which was a modest attempt to retain some criminal liability for the most egregious executive fraud. This is just one example of how corporate power has corrupted our institutions, that even in the rare cases where the legislative branch tries to do part of its job, the judiciary blocks it.

 

[*In my previous corporatism post I referred to the double standard of law and jurisprudence enshrined by the SCOTUS where it comes to corporate speech. Corporate speech "rights" are interpreted extremely loosely, while at the same moment, in the same cases, corruption is interpreted with extreme pedantry. If there's not a physical sack with a dollar sign drawn on it, it's not corruption.

 

The SCOTUS just applied this same strict standard of "corruption" in the honest services case, declaring that the law is constitutional only where applied to explicit kickbacks and such. Obviously, this is meant to gut the law in practice, since today's corruption is generally more sophisticated than that. But SCOTUS jurisprudence is designed to let all implicit corruption elude accountability.]

 

We’ll soon find out what’s the latest from the SCOTUS on unconscionable contracts of adhesion, extortionate ”contracts” forced upon us through the coercion of monopoly and artificially created economic hardship. These strong-arm contracts are increasingly popular, and are imposed anywhere the corporations attain the position of dominance which enables them. In theory such contracts, just like gambling, are supposed to be unenforceable, uncontracts. But here too the SCOTUS has usually served as the corporate goon. The Lochner era was based upon the legalization of “contract” extortion, and although the court nominally abandoned this doctrine in 1937, in practice courts almost always still find such contracts valid. In the case of AT&T vs. Concepcion, AT&T’s thefts were so outrageous that the lower courts found the contracts it imposed, forestalling its victims to combine to sue as a class, to be unconscionable. But this will be the SCOTUS’ big chance to restore Lochner as official court doctrine. 

 

Meanwhile government contractors, starting with the weapons rackets, are implicitly encouraged to bilk the taxpayer out of billions. By now it’s not conventional corruption but systematic corporatist robbery, with the DoD and other agencies as bagmen. Robert Gates once explicitly told an audience of weapons racketeers that where it comes to the military Obama’s top priority is an ever-escalating Pentagon budget as such, as a value in its own right.

 

Those are just a few examples of systematic corruption, i.e. organized crime. The term kleptocracy should be understood in a profound way. Corporatism comprises a new paradigm of criminal practices, and the pro-corporate mindset is a characteristic, immutable criminal mindset. It’s not just a set of criminal actions, but an indelible criminal essence. It’s the mindset that we can no longer exist at all without being totally controlled by corporations, having all we produce monopolized and stolen by corporations, and submitting at every moment to corporate imperatives even in our very thoughts. The elites, for obvious reasons, believe this themselves. The system they’ve set up is dedicated to enforcing this corporate totalitarianism from the top down. The corporations themselves have no purpose at all except to preserve and intensify this kleptocracy, and to keep stealing.

 

But we know that we don’t need corporations to have a vibrant, productive economy. We know we’d be far more productive without them. Without them we would restore our prosperity, our communities, our social morality, and our democracy. The only thing in the way of our redeeming our humanity and saving our lives and freedom are a few gangsters, organized as big corporations. The corporate form is what enables this in the first place. Let’s abolish it. 

Corporations Are Anti-Democratic

 

Lewis Powell’s 1971 strategy memo for a renewed corporate assault on democracy included the call for corporations to subvert the polity by using their wealth to become the dominant political speakers themselves. The plan was to directly buy the government, which would then destroy democracy and politics from above.

 

But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

As unwelcome as it may be to the Chamber, it should consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.

 

The tried and true weapon of corporate constitutional “rights” would be helpful here.

 

Neglected Opportunity in the Courts
American business and the enterprise system have been affected as much by the courts as by the executive and legislative branches of government. Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change…….

This is a vast area of opportunity for the Chamber, if it is willing to undertake the role of spokesman for American business and if, in turn, business is willing to provide the funds.

As with respect to scholars and speakers, the Chamber would need a highly competent staff of lawyers. In special situations it should be authorized to engage, to appear as counsel amicus in the Supreme Court, lawyers of national standing and reputation. The greatest care should be exercised in selecting the cases in which to participate, or the suits to institute. But the opportunity merits the necessary effort.

 

Powell himself was soon on the SCOTUS, leading an ecumenical (conservative and liberal) charge to empower corporate rule. The big modern breakthrough was Buckley v. Valeo (1976), which said, in a nutshell, money = speech, for constitutional purposes. There we’re already at the end of any democratic or political principle. It’s on the same ideological wavelength as Lochner (by definition a contract is 100% voluntary, and there’s no such thing as economic coercion) and Law and Economics (law should directly calculate what would be in the interest of the biggest property-holder and support him). There can be no debate with a proposition like “money = speech”; it’s the direct enshrinement of corruption, bribery, extortion. The ideology I sketched in this paragraph is nothing but the ideology of kleptocracy in the most literal sense. (I discussed in an earlier post how by definition corporate speech has to seek political corruption. If it didn’t, it would be a dereliction of the duty of corporate management to shareholders.)

 

(If one wanted to say that as long as concentrated wealth exists it would be somehow “unfair” or at any rate unworkable to not give it special rights, then the answer must be to dissolve the wealth concentrations. But it’s absurd and malign to say that because Might exists, it has to be declared Right in principle. So long as Might has the prerogative of its strength, it will do what it wants. But that’s no reason for human beings to submit in their souls and collaborate to the extent of calling it anything but criminality. If the system was too corrupt and cowardly to condemn corporate power and the power of concentrated wealth as crime, then that means we must include the system in the condemnation. The anti-democratic work of the SCOTUS simply proves the SCOTUS has no legitimacy.)

 

As usual the SCOTUS moved incrementally. Buckley applied to human candidates buying elections for themselves. Two years later in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti the court extended political speech rights to corporations. Soon there would be a menagerie of cases refining this fraudulent corporate speech right, always in the corporation’s favor.

 

How did the SCOTUS justify legalizing corruption? Is this strict or loose jurisprudence? Activist or passive? The answer is that it’s all of these at the same time, by design. The SCOTUS set up a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose double standard for its interpretations. As Ted Nace describes (chapter 13, p. 185):

 

These decisions placed two serious obstacles in the path of campaign
finance reform. First, the Court interpreted very broadly the connection
between corporate political spending and free speech, thus
setting a high constitutional bar in front of any efforts to restrict political
spending. Second, the Court interpreted very narrowly the issue of
corruption, making it difficult for reformers to use systemic corruption
(as opposed to direct favor trading or quid pro quo corruption). Together,
these two obstacles have drastically narrowed the ability of state
and federal legislatures to deal with the overwhelming influence of
corporate money in the political process.

 

Just as with the original whack-a-mole of justifications for corporate rights in themselves, so with the newly invented corporate speech right, and “speech = money” in general, the corrupt courts had to keep dodging and weaving and spinning and distorting in order to prop up a jurisprudential rationale at all, while they had to keep issuing often mutually contradictory decisions. Thus the proclaimed First Amendment rationale in Bellotti was to maximize the amount of speech available to the public. (I’ll leave aside for now how empowering money directly contradicts this rationale, but I discussed it further in my post on constitution and process liberalism.)

 

But it wasn’t long before the predictable result was in: Corporate money was drowning out non-corporate speech. Now some locales enacted regulations intended to maximize speech (the court’s own rationale) by piggybacking it on corporate speech. For example, the California Public Utilities Commission required the monopoly utility to include conservation materials with its bills. A clear cut case of leveling the speech playing field and increasing the amount of information available to the public, right?

 

But now it was the corporation who balked at speech. Suddenly maximizing speech was bad. The SCOTUS was eager to please. In Pacific Gas and Electric v. Public Utilities Commission (1986) it invented a brand new corporate right, “negative free speech”. The corporation cannot be ”forced” to associate with speech of which it disapproves, even where it exercises a monopoly, even where that monopoly has been explicitly enshrined by government. The court found that a corporation, alleged bearer of First Amendment rights insofar as those rights serve to maximize speech, can deploy the same right to stifle speech wherever it chooses. Suddenly, without warning, maximizing speech was no longer the court’s rationale.

 

If there’s to be negative free speech, isn’t the prior speech right that of democracy itself? The formula should run: A law or rule restricting corporate speech = democracy not wishing to be associated with predatory corporate speech.

 

So what was the new SCOTUS rationale? Although not formally elucidated, it boils down to: Corporate management decides (Nace 200) what level and kind of speech the public should receive. The courts should validate these decisions, and state legislatures must not interfere with them. (Citizens United extended this to the federal government.) We see again the Law and Economics style of calculus, the refined neo-Lochnerism.

 

With this radical anti-democratic, anti-political result, we see the culmination of two major threads of the corporate coup going back to the postbellum 19th century: The extension of corporate rights (redistributing power from democracy to corporations) and the shift of power from shareholders to management within the corporation.

 

As Nace put it (p. 202)

 

Like a myopic Dr. Frankenstein, the Court had worked piecemeal
and haphazardly, grafting a finger here, an eyebrow there, until the result
was a full-fledged legal super-person. Yet only sporadically, in dissents
interspersed across the decades, was there an explicit recognition
that the cumulative impact of its decisions was to tie the hands of legislative
bodies seeking to control corporate power. In general, the Justices
displayed no awareness that the Supreme Court’s creation of a corporate
bill of rights amounted to an immense transfer of power from democratic
institutions to private ones. The process was not driven by any
overarching theoryto this day, the Court has yet to lay out any consistent
rationale to support its creation of the corporate bill of rights. On
the contrary, the process has been muddled and blurry, a perfect illustration
of the Orwellian ability of large, unaccountable institutions to bend
even ordinary language into a tool to serve their own needsthe gravitational
force exerted by power. Far from laying orderly tracks, that
force of power seemed to operate between the cracks of reason, leaving
in its wake only muddled, blurry traces.

 

And as we saw in discussing the reality of the “transparent veil” concept, this “corporation” is nothing but a gang of regular people, convened to commit crimes, and receiving a special charter to do so with impunity.

 

Clearly, for Powell and the SCOTUS, and for all corporatists, the right decision and result is by definition the pro-corporate one, and then they invent an ad hoc rationale for it.

 

We anti-corporatists, on the other hand, are always consistent in our correct appeal to the authority of:

 

1. Common sense and the simple morality of democratic principles.

 

2. The actual history of the American Revolution.

 

3. The text of the Constitution.

 

4. The empirical evidence of all subsequent history.

 

The enemy has nothing to back them up but their criminal greed. 

 

This combination of the monstrous concentration of sociopathic corporate power in itself, with a government which has worked assiduously to abdicate its own claim to embody sovereignty in favor of becoming corporate bagman and hired goon, has brought our politics to endangerment of becoming extinguished forever. It will be the death of democracy unless we fight back with a new vision for a redeemed and expanded democracy. This is the affirmative need.

 

On the negative side, we must abolish corporations, which are inherently anti-democratic and anti-political, and a clear and present danger to democratic institutions in practice and in principle.

Corporations Are Anti-Sovereign

 

The real civil war began during what we call the Civil War, which was only a part of the vastly bigger whole. The real winners of the Civil War were those who used it to win their first big victories in the more ponderous civil war which is only today reaching its climax. These winners were the corporations, and their victories included the mutually reinforcing and procyclical arrogation of pseudo-constitutional “rights” (through rogue courts), unlimited powers, and absolution from practically all responsibility (through courts and state legislatures).

 

This corporatist onslaught has been, since its beginning, anti-sovereign. What is sovereignty? It is the inherent right and prerogative of a civilized people to rule itself, and dictate all the forms and conditions of the institutions it sets up to carry out this rule. This right is postulated, since we know all other derivations of right are fraudulent. One must, in principle, either accept democratic sovereignty or oppose civilization itself. It follows that legitimate power can exist only insofar as it’s deployed through a sovereign form. Any power exercised by any other entity is simply brute state-of-nature force. Such an entity is nothing but a bandit gang operating out of a cave in a swamp, no matter how much it embellishes itself with fraudulent ideology and the trappings of pseudo-authority.

 

In principle, a profit-seeking corporation – sociopathic and anti-democratic by definition and in practice – is an affront to sovereignty. A government which fails to restrain such corporations, which on the contrary sees its role as to empower and aggrandize them, is not bestowing sovereign legitimacy upon them. On the contrary, it’s abdicating any sovereign legitimacy it may have had itself. So the crisis of corporate legitimacy always forces a crisis of government legitimacy as well. (This is in addition to all the other reasons we have to reject this kleptocracy’s legitimacy.)

 

Corporate ideologues have tried to turn this order upside down. They used 19th century theories of organicism and the Natural Entity, along with intentionally sowed confusion between corporate personhood (a technical legal/constitutional status) and corporate personality, the broader ideology regarding who or what juridically exists in the first place. Using these they tried to assert that corporate sovereignty was actually prior to government sovereignty, which would not only forestall government’s right to limit the essence and actions of corporations, but would justify the corporatist bagman-and-goon theory of government.

 

This is absurd on its face and really just calls into question the legitimacy of the state as well, rather than conjuring legitimacy for the corporation. Since sovereignty reposes in the people, only the state could possibly be the legitimate form of this sovereignty. (I’m not saying it ever is legitimate in practice; I’m saying only it could ever be legitimate in principle.) By definition an institution which embodies sovereignty must encompass all the people within the sovereign body (which we can take to mean, a logical area defined by geography, nationality, or some such elemental measure; for now it often also means the existing technical boundaries of countries, however arbitrary these usually are) as citizens, and it must do so toward the goal of their human well-being.

 

A profit-seeking corporation, on the contrary, is dedicated only to profit and property, and recognizes as its equivalent of “citizen” only those who own property and/or are engaged in profit-seeking behavior. Therefore, by definition it cannot be sovereign, only anti-sovereign.

 

The corporation also runs afoul of what was classically called the solecism of sovereignty. This was also called the fallacy of imperium in imperio, “sovereignty over sovereigns”. What it means is that sovereignty can never be divided against itself; this is a conceptual absurdity and can only bring chaos in practice. During the American Revolution the British and their loyalists accused the colonists of this fallacy, when the colonists tried to claim that the King but not Parliament was sovereign over them. (That was prior to declaring complete independence.)

 

It’s easy to see that the British were wrong, since there was no logical reason King or Parliament could be sovereign or should exercise any power at all over people on the other side of the world who were economically self-sufficient. (The colonists were therefore wrong as well so long as they tried to figure out concepts which could justify flouting Parliamentary authority but still recognize British sovereignty at all. Finally they accepted the absurdity of this and declared independence.)

 

But it certainly is true that a corporation asserting rights against its creator (the government, and indeed the people themselves) is a logical impossibility. (It’s the same if government claims “rights” against the people. We can see how backwards most of the language and concept of the Constitution are.) In the original SCOTUS case which first claimed to discover corporate Constitutional rights, Dartmouth vs. Woodward, John Marshall still admitted that a corporation was “an artificial being…existing only in contemplation of law”, but he proceeded to find that a 1769 dictate from King George himself had sovereign authority, and that a corporation could now argue this sovereign right against the government. This is a clear example of the solecism. But thanks to that case the corporation could now claim incorporation itself as a “property right”. (Too bad nobody had ever put through a revolution to purge the notion that George had sovereignty to dictate to us. Oh, wait….)

 

(Before proceeding, I’ll mention that in Federalist 20, in the course of arguing for a strong federal government which would act directly upon individuals without any mediation of the states (this was argued by the “anti-federalists” to be a usurpation of state authority), Madison declared that the real violation of state sovereignty would be if the federal government were to undertake “a legislation for communities as contradistinguished from individuals”, that is if it held states collectively responsible for individual violations of federal law. He said this would constitute the real solecism, the real “sovereignty over sovereigns”.

 

But transposing this to corporate charters, since the state government generates this alien corporation and this corporate form of “sovereignty”, formally enshrines it as a collective sociopath, isn’t this “legislation for communities”? Technically the government places the corporation outside of sovereignty and then invites it to treat the sovereign people as a prey.)

 

The inadequacy of recognizing corporations as being artificial, created by government and dependent upon it, while still trying to argue their “right” was obvious, and ideologues were soon looking for new rationales. The theory of a corporation as a transparent veil between the government and society on one hand, and management and shareholders on the other, held that the corporation is really nothing more than these persons themselves, with a mere veil subtly obscuring their countenance. This had practical use for trying to justify the doubling of rights and shedding of responsibilities for corporate cadres, since the corporation was then held to be indistinguishable from the actual persons making it up. Yet because they were corporatists they were also supposed to get double the rights and license to run risks and commit crimes with personal impunity.

 

But this theory as well could give no reason why these groups of people, transparently veiled or not, should be able to claim special rights and privileges at the expense of government and society. Indeed, by highlighting how a corporation is nothing but a gang of flesh-and-blood criminals who have unaccountably received a special charter to assault the society and the body politic, the theory called attention to questions like: Why should we allow corporations to exist at all? And it underlined the fact of their anti-sovereign nature.

 

How can anything other than the people themselves and any government they constitute be considered to have an unlimited lifespan? And how can any individual be officially placed above/outside the law by being granted the special license of limited liability? (This is most characteristic of corporations, but it’s spread to government officials as well, who are now granted all sorts of immunities beyond the most basic ones listed in the Constitution. I think it’s obvious that any immunity not strictly written into the Constitution is invalid.) The very concept of corporate chartering is a basic democratic government function, so any government relinquishment of this power by granting general incorporation, “for any purpose” incorporation, infinite lifespan, removing restrictions on activities, ownership, mobility, size, etc., are abdications of sovereignty.

 

Given the conceptual problems with this “transparent veil”, how it cannot justify anything but only tendentiously describe it, ideology moved on to the Natural Entity theory, derived from the ”organicism” of German liberal* theory, which I mentioned above. This upside down mirror image of the real nature of corporations could be convincing to those who wanted to be convinced. In practice, it was grafted to Social Darwinism and used to justify the most barbarous notions of Might Makes Right. As enshrined in the Lochner case, the theory simply asserted that corporations had a prior sovereignty claim vs. government in principle, so that government action to restrict corporate contracts was by definition invalid. With its interfusion of Social Darwinism it asserted that profiteering was by definition the highest human activity. Putting them together, ideologues and supportive judges found that government, and by extension democratic society, had no authority to restrict profit-seeking activity, however destructive of society or democracy.

 

[* How cute that the same conservatives who are so quick to pounce on any suggestion that American constitutional law should ever pay attention to the laws and theories of "foreigners" derived one of their most cherished ideological tropes from 19th century European liberals, of all things.]

 

The main problem with this as a theory of Constitutional jurisprudence is that it was obviously unconstitutional. If the Constitution had intended any of these radical propositions, it would have said so. But on the contrary, it implicitly denigrates corporations as such and rejects organicism by recognizing only the federal government, states, and the people. (If we really wanted to enshrine corporatism we’d have to rewrite the Constitution including a new Bill of Rights defining the rights of corporations and the rights of people vis corporations. The fact that no corporatist wants to do this proves their bad faith and tyrannical intent. They know democracy would never embrace such a plan, so they stick with their anti-constitutional coup. But the facts remain facts: Under this Constitution, corporatism is illegitimate. If democracy really wanted to constitutionally meld government and corporations into this quasi-command economy, that economy would have to be Constitutionalized.)

 

(Again, where’s our stalwart Constitutional “originalists” on this one? Out to lunch with their corporate pals, where else?)

 

Eventually jurisprudence would reject proclamations of any particular theory of corporate sovereignty or rights, and simply proceed in an ad hoc manner, justifying pro-corporate findings in any convenient way. But the underlying anti-sovereign ideology remained. The main trend of 20th century legal personhood theory continued to define a legal person as anything which seeks profit and owns property. (A more recent manifestation is law and economics, which without any further fuss would simply perform an economic cost-benefit analysis and then apply the law based upon how it maximizes the benefit for the propertarian. This is also the basis of the “reasonable person” standard which denies the existence of coercive capitalism and from there finds any victim of it to have been “unreasonable” and therefore actually his own victim, from the law’s point of view. A typical example is if your boss orders you to do something unsafe, and you’ll be fired if you refuse. If under that duress you comply and are injured and file suit, a Law and Economics judge would deny the existence of the economic coercion, decree that a “reasonable person” would have refused the order, and find you the victim of your own reckless unreasonability. This is nothing but a resurrection of Lochner but with a new spin.) 

 

Today we confront the ultimate totalitarian manifestation of this ideology and the institutions based upon it, globalization. The “free trade” treaties like NAFTA, “the law of the land” according to the Constitution, comprise a global anti-constitution. Their only content enshrines corporate license and prerogative at a level far above national governments and laws. Democracy and civil society have no place at all in this system. The “treaties”, written by multinational corporations, peddled by corrupted bagman/goon governments, and forced upon all other countries, are nothing but laundry lists of anti-sovereign usurpation and incitements to governments to set up administrative “free trade zones”, designed after the Nazi General Government of Poland, whose secession from law and civil society are then to be extended to encompass the entire “country”. At that point sovereignty would be completely obliterated and replaced by direct corporate rule.

 

The provisions are set up to encourage corporations or their goon government proxies to file lawsuits against any manifestation of sovereignty or democracy anywhere which could hinder the profit-seeking imperative, which is the only one recognized by the globalization structure. (The same imperative which is the only one recognized by the “legal personality” regime.) The suits are heard by unelected, unaccountable secret tribunals staffed, as are the globalization cadres themselves, by corporatists who come in through the revolving door. Suits have been filed against the US, Canada, Mexico, and many other governments. The very threat of such suits has a stifling effect on democracy.

 

While the WTO is relatively backward in having governments sue other governments on behalf of corporations, lateral agreements like NAFTA are more advanced in having the corporation directly sue the offending democracy. If it was deranged to allow domestic corporations to sue for rights against the government that created them, how anti-sovereign is it to allow alien corporations to sue a government? Perhaps the most telling fact is that under NAFTA and similar “treaties”, an alien corporation actually has more rights against a sovereign people than a purely domestic one not involved in global commerce and therefore not eligible for the powers of the Treaty.

 

This perversion of sovereignty is the terminal manifestation of how so-called foreign policy has always been the mechanism by which anti-democratic and anti-federalist subversion has been innovated “elsewhere” and then brought home to subvert domestic democracy. In the next post I’ll discuss the corporate assault on democracy and politics itself more thoroughly.