A Total Perversion

With the long-awaited end of the calamitous Bush years Americans woke up in 2009 to a black man in the White House and the shocking realization that their government was a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. With the Bull at the Courtroom door in the form of Citizens United vs the FEC they discovered their legal rights had been officially rendered subservient to big business and corporate interests.

Many are still left wondering just how this all came about. The Tea Party aims it ire at Washington convinced more than ever that 'big' government spending was the dark black threat to Liberty. Meanwhile Progressives castigate the ever-conciliatory President as Appeaser-in-Chief in between venting their rage at the DLC Blue Dogs. But the destruction of American democracy did not begin with Obama, or the Roberts court, nor did its great unraveling start with the Corporate-crafted Powell Doctrine or with Buckley vs Valeo in 1976 when the Court declared money the equal of speech. It began the moment after the North was deemed victorious and with the Union safely preserved the public stood mutely by while their fellow citizens they had fought to set free were returned to peonage and virtual slavery.

At the very moment when the alarm should have been raised (after all, were not those in the slave-free states also fighting for freedom and against tyranny) the Capital Interest, seeing the apathy towards the 14th and 15th amendments, used those very provisions meant to safeguard the rights, privileges and immunities of American citizens to agitate for corporate personhood, and against the public prerogative.

The late Justice Hugo Black observed, that by manipulating the 14th Amendment corporations had found an ingenious way to to resist state authority and taxation. With the rise of post-Civil War Jim Crow and its new era of structural oppression, the 14th amendment was allowed to drift from its foundational principle and become a shield for unbridled corporate wealth.

Atty Doug Hammerstrom lays it out plainly:

While very few people were turning their attention and energy to bringing former slaves into society - indeed, far more energy was being put into NOT bringing them into society—corporations were using a great deal of their wealth to hire lawyers to advance their interests in the courts. The Fourteenth Amendment offered an opportunity to advance corporate interests, and the corporate attorneys set out to exploit it.

Of the 150 cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment heard by the Supreme Court up to the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 that established the legal standing of “separate but equal,” 15 involved blacks and 135 involved business entities. The scope of the Fourteenth Amendment to secure the political rights of former slaves was so restricted by the Supreme Court that blacks won only one case. The expansive view of the Fourteenth Amendment that comes down to Constitutional Law classes today is the result of corporations using the Fourteenth Amendment as a shield against regulation. Ultimately the Plessy decision left Jim Crow laws, state laws discriminating against blacks, in place because of doctrines developed in those corporate shield cases….

In the 13 years before 1912, 409 due process opinions were handed down. From 1886-1912 two cases restrained or annulled State action involving Negroes, and 39 cases restrained or annulled State action against corporations.

While the corporations were triumphant in wielding the Fourteenth Amendment as a shield against democratic control, blacks were abandoned by the Supreme Court. Not only was the law not used to protect their Constitutional rights, the law was used affirmatively to degrade them.

The great irony here is that these corporate victories represent the very same interests that led our early patriots to fight a war for democracy. Even after the Revolution had succeeded, America's citizens and legislators took careful charge of the chartering process. The men and women opposing King George III knew to fear the power of large corporations. As pamphleteer Thomas Earle wrote:

"Chartered privileges are a burthen, under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery."

Thanks to America's disdainful ignorance if not outright antagonism towards her exploited minorities (that's their problem not mine) and her perverted grasp of history we have finally lost what our forefathers fought for and won.

A Corporate Thanksgiving

As reported in the NYTimes corporate profits for the last fiscal quarter were the highest (before factoring in inflation) in U.S. history. While America's workers see their future crumble under the weight of joblessness and debt, the lords of Wall Street can hardly contain their glee. As the WSJ coyly describes it: the record bonuses being lavished on managers demonstrate Wall Street's "knack for finding a way to churn out profits and prop up pay levels despite uneasy markets, mounting regulation and mistrust by many Americans."

In the past when we spoke of two Americas the discussion centered on race and its intersection with poverty. No more. America's chickens or should I say turkeys have finally come home to roost. Having worked tirelessly since the end of post Civil War Reconstruction to keep black, white and brown labor at each others' throats our scions of Wall Street are callously setting about destroying what remains of the country's middle-class. We are evolving towards a system where the corporation replaces the old plantation: the haves get to govern as barons and the slaves are forever the have-nots.

Roasting the Middle Class Goose

The top 1 percent has been able to see their incomes rise almost twenty-fold over the past thirty years by playing each class of worker against the other, all with the encouragement of our own government. As a result we have the unconscionable spectacle of U.S. banks using taxpayer money to pay themselves massive bonuses while laying off American workers to hire temporary foreign replacements on the cheap.

"An investigation by the Associated Press revealed that major U.S. banks brought in foreign workers for high paying jobs while laying off American workers at the same time. The investigation revealed that a dozen banks requested visas for 21,800 foreign workers over a six-year span."--

(Now picture 21,800 mortgages sliced and diced and parceled out into Collateral Debt Obligations going belly-up. That's what our grifter class declares as smart money.)

As for those good blue collar jobs, thanks to his manipulated failure to make common cause with the black brown and red, the pale working stiff is getting the same shaft his "white trash' ancestors did when their wages were kept meager because of slavery.

In her excellent book "The New Jim Crow" Michelle Alexander explains how thanks to the policies of the government elite African Americans have been systematically kept apart and economically weak. She describes how the so-called 'War on Drugs' replaced the insidious control of race segregation. But the benefit of mass incarceration of the dark-skinned working poor goes even further towards enriching the investor class.

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."

As the writer sums up in El Diario-La Prensa: the rich have a lot to be thankful for. Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work designed for Third World labor. Now we know why Wall Street is so content to sell out the country and give us the bird.