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发帖数: 4418 | 1 http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20100124.htm
The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy
Noam Chomsky
chomsky.info, January 24, 2010
(abridged version published in In These Times, February 2, 2010)
January 21, 2010 will go down as a dark day in the history of American
democracy, and its decline. The editors of the New York Times did not
exaggerate when they wrote that the Supreme Court decision that day "strikes
at the heart of democracy" by having "paved the way for corporations to use
their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected
officials into doing their bidding" -- more explicitly, for permitting
corporate managers to do so, since current laws permit them to spend
shareholder money without consent.
Nor does Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for
Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law, exaggerate when he writes that this
exercise of the radical judicial activism that the rightwing claims to
deplore "matches or exceeds Bush v. Gore in ideological or partisan
overreaching by the court. In that case, the court reached into the
political process to hand the election to one candidate. Today it reached
into the political process to hand unprecedented power to corporations."
The Court was split, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called "
conservative") joined by Justice Kennedy in a 5-4 decision. Chief Justice
Roberts selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow
grounds, and maneuvered the Court into using it for a far-reaching decision
that overturned precedents going back a century that restrict corporate
contributions to federal campaigns.
In effect, the decision permits corporate managers to buy elections directly
, instead of using more complex indirect means, though it is likely that to
avoid negative publicity they will choose to do so through trade
organizations. It is well-known that corporate campaign contributions,
sometimes packaged in complex ways, are a major factor determining the
outcome of elections. This alone is a significant factor in policy decisions
, reinforced by the enormous power of corporate lobbies, greatly enhanced by
the Court's decision, and other conditions imposed by the very small sector
of the population that dominates the economy.
A very successful predictor of government policy over a long period is
political economist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of politics," which
interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power
coalesce to invest to control the state. The means for undermining
democracy are sure to be enhanced by the Court's dagger blow at the heart of
functioning democracy.
Some legislative remedies are being proposed, for example requiring managers
to consult with shareholders. At best, that would be a minor limit on the
corporate takeover of the political system, given the very high
concentration of ownership by extreme wealth and other corporate
institutions. Furthermore any legislation would have been difficult to pass
even without this new weapon provided by the Court to unaccountable private
concentrations of power. The same holds, even more strongly, for a
Constitutional amendment that Waldman and others think might be necessary to
restore at least the limited democracy that prevailed before the decision.
In his dissent, Justice Stevens acknowledged that "we have long since held
that corporations are covered by the First Amendment." That traces back to
the time when the 1907 Tillman act banned corporate contributions, the
precedent overturned by the Court. In the early 20th century, legal
theorists and courts came to adopt and implement the Court's 1886 (Santa
Clara) principle that these "collectivist legal entities" have the same
rights as persons of flesh and blood, an attack on classical liberalism that
was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives as "a menace
to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American
States as popular governments" (Christopher Tiedeman). In later years these
rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled
"free trade agreements."
The conception of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power
from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that "the powers
of the board of directors ... are identical with the powers of the
corporation." Furthermore, the courts determined that these state-
established "natural entities" must restrict themselves to pursuit of profit
and market share, though the courts did advise corporations to support
charitable and educational causes, or an "aroused public" might take away
the privileges granted to them by state power.
As corporate personhood and managerial independence were becoming
established in law, the control of corporations over the economy was so vast
that Woodrow Wilson described "a very different America from the old, ...
no longer a scene of individual enterprise ... individual opportunity and
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