Corporations can buy unfair favors from government…because government has unfair favors to sell.
Big Government is the problem.
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Tag: corporations
Corporations cannot and do not tax, conscript, and kill under claim of legal authority to do so.
Only governments do that.
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Outraged progressives…writing regulations…that only rich corporations can afford to follow!
Progressives: useful enablers of corporate power for over 100 years!
Don’t believe it? Check out the writings of the esteemed leftist historian Gabriel Kolko…
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Building a mega-state to fight corporate power…
…is like giving yourself AIDS to fight the flu.
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Celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta Libertatum this week, I noted how a document intended to serve the very upper classes, by limiting each others’ powers, led to liberty for all.
The Nation, on the other hand, used it to excoriate the Citizens United ruling.
“Magna Carta reminds us that no man is above the law,” wrote John Nichols on Monday. “But it should not be imagined that Magna Carta established democracy, or anything akin to it.”
Of course the Magna Carta did not establish democracy. No one said it did. And neither Britain nor America has pure democracy, if you define it . . . in Nichols fashion. What is he driving at?
If we respect the notion that the rule of law must apply to all . . . then surely it must apply to corporations.
And, surely, the best celebration of those premises in the United States must be the extension of the movement to amend the US Constitution to declare that corporations are not people, money is not speech, and citizens and their elected representatives have the authority to organize elections — and systems of governance — where our votes matter more than their dollars.
Sure, Mr. Nichols, corporations shouldn’t be above the law. But they shouldn’t be below it, either. And in America we have rights to free speech and press. Those rights “surely . . . must apply to corporations.”
Let’s increase the liberating powers of democracy: open up ballot access, de-privilege incumbents, count votes in a non-mere-plurality-wins fashion.
But let’s not throw out equal rights under the law, even in the name of democracy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Van Jones, the president’s controversial former green jobs czar, must have been struck by lightning yesterday en route to taping ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
Discussing President Obama’s new “My Brother’s Keeper” program to “build pathways to success” for at-risk “children of color,” Van Jones embraced a notion of corporate personhood far beyond anything previously expressed . . . well, by anyone.
First, Jones advanced the new Obama initiative as just another bailout: “Listen, everybody else . . . got in trouble in America. Wall Street got in trouble; we were there for them. The auto industry got in trouble; we were there for the auto industry. You got a whole generation of young kids who are clearly in trouble.”
A bailout isn’t a dad, though.
And functioning fathers are “essential,” argued Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Noting that fatherless kids are 20 times more likely to go to prison and nine times more likely to drop out of school, she applauded the president’s statement that “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”
MacDonald also highlighted that a whopping 73 percent of black children are now born to single mothers, and that three decades of social programs “haven’t made much difference.”
“Do you think you need anybody to tell us how terrible this is?” Van Jones, who is black, pointedly asked Mac Donald. “We work on it every day. We need corporate America to step up.”
Jones wants corporations to be fathers to our children? That’s taking personhood for corporations too far.
And asking too little of men.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.