[Warning to readers--only peripherally about tax]
In January of 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (S Ct 2010), a bare majority of Justices on the Supreme Court decided that corporations have free speech rights that permit them to actively fund support or opposition of particular candidates in election campaigns. Those activist right-wing Justices--Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy--are rewriting the rules governing sustainable democracy in favor of corporate enterprises (and their managers and owners) and against ordinary Americans. Corporatism, in the Citizens United case, gained ground. We the People lost.
Now, the Court has taken additional cases regarding corporations' rights as "persons" under the Constitution. None of this fits with the historic view of corporations; none of it fits with any notion of a democratic state in which the people have a say. See Liptak & Willson, Supreme Court Takes Cases on Corporate Rights, New York Times (Sept. 28, 2010) (indicating that the Supreme Court will decide whether corporations have privacy rights for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act, among other cases). And businesses will likely be even more encouraged to claim citizen's rights under the Constitution against the government agencies that are acting in individual citizens' interests by trying to crack down on them. For an example of a business that avidly pursues such claims, see, e.g., U.S. Sues POM Maker, Wall STreet Journal, Sept 28, 2010, at B10 or Wyatt, Regulators Call Health Claims in Pom Juice Ads Deceptive, New York Times (Sept. 27, 2010) or Gawker, Pom Truth, Sept. 17, 2010 (regarding a business that produces a pomegranate juice product has resisted the FTC's crackdown on its ads about the health benefits of the product, claiming violation of its first amendment rights).
Corporatism furthers the agenda of those on the right: it fits smoothly within the four pillars of reaganomics to "deregulate, privatize, militarize, and cut taxes." Although the agenda is sold with the mantra of "small government", Republicans in control do not reduce the size of any government programs except those that are of extraordinary benefit to ordinary Americans. Accordingly, these four programmatic targets (to repeat--reducing regulation, moving public services from the public sector to profit-making private enterprise, increasing funding for and uses of the military, and all the time cutting taxes) have one purpose--to elevate the benefits to, and influence of, the wealthiest corporate owners and managers and to cut back or repeal the programs established by progressive Democrats from Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt that provide a safety net for ordinary Americans.
For the last few decades the hymn of right-wing think tank anti-safety net propaganda has crescendoed with falsehoods and misrepresentations at every turn, like a Pied Piper leading ordinary Americans to vote against their own long-term interests. Interests of the wealthy are treated as long-standing US values by emphasizing "family" and "property rights" and de-emphasizing the series of entitlements for the wealthy (such as corporate rights to merge and renounce long-term pension promises while laying off employees and paying managers more) that have been gradually eroding the economic security of ordinary Americans. Safety net programs, however, are consistently depicted as unmerited "entitlements" that take away from people of property and the very people that benefit from them are trained to salivate with anger that tax monies are being used to support social safety nets that protect our most vulnerable of citizens (including in one way or another, at one time or another, most of the not-rich) from the kinds of nightmares that happened regularly before Social Security and Medicare were established. The right-wing propaganda has a quiver of misleading arrows--that Social Security is bankrupt; that Social Security won't be there for you when you are old, so why should you support it in your working years; that Social Security is a huge part of the deficit and the only recourse to save the American economy is to cut benefits, etc. These are either just plain wrong (Social Security is not bankrupt) or inflammatory (turning young people against Social Security creates an us (the young) versus them (the elderly) mentality that contributes to the hateful divisiveness that destroys the social unity necessary to a sustainable democracy) or distorting (the deficit is due primarily to the Bush tax cuts --$4 trillion cost over 10 years--the Bush preemptive war policy and the lingering military costs of two detrimental wars--likely $6 trillion or more, according to Stiglitz's analysis, when all is said and done--and the Reagonomics-induced financial meltdown and Great Recession (uncertain costs, but could reach multiple trillions in US funds and certain 8 million or more jobless Americans and millions of homeless Americans who have no recourse to bankruptcy modification of their home loans). Corporate enterprise is painted as doing its best to create a vibrant US economy with jobs for all, but the facts are that corporations avoid paying taxes even when they have significant economic profits, that they move their assets to foreign countries tax free, that they cut jobs in the US so they can hire cheap workers with no benefits abroad. Unions are depicted as the source of all evil--but the facts are sharply different. Unions are the only way that employees have a chance to push for a share in the productivity gains that they have contributed to business. One of the primary reasons that corporate owners and managers have been able to retain all of those productivity gains and have left workers' wages stagnant is that workers have no power. The corporatist agenda includes decimating union strength and making it as difficult as possible for workers to form a union. My personal anecdote of talking to Wal-Mart workers about the way the Wal-Mart bosses discriminated against any employee with an interest in unions and prevented employees from learning about the benefits of unionization while threatening them in regular meetings with dire futures if they were to form a union is just the tip of the iceberg--one need only look at the anti-union sentiment spewed on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, echoed by the idiotic tea party supporters at rallies that demonstrate they are merely dancing to the corporate Pied Piper's tune.
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