PART TWO

Somebody stop the presses (they’re printing bullshit, anyways).

Your whole life sucks for no reason!

There’s literally, actually no basis of law that led to the fundamentally broken world you’re forced to birth your young into.  As a matter of fact, your entire existence was fucked royally sideways primarily by this man: 

That’s J.C. Bancroft Davis, but I like to call him, “you stupid fucking bastard.”

SFB, when I’m feeling cute. 

SFB here did quite a number on the future and–unconscionably–he did it on behalf of a railroad company I’m not entirely sure even exists anymore.  Good thing he wasn’t forty years later and working for GM.  As usual, I digress.

By now, I’m sure you’re shouting at the screen:  “WHAT DID HE DO?!?!”

(Just kidding; no one is reading this blog)

This SFB here created the entire American concept of corporate personhood, by himself, without consulting anyone else.  This man was not president or emperor or even ON THE SUPREME COURT.  This man–who completed his legal education only after having been once suspended, and likely only on the back of his auspicious lineage–completely altered the course of human history in his job as THE REPORTER FOR THE SUPREME COURT.  

Alright…I’m overselling it a little bit and I’ll calm down.  I’ll take a step back so we can dig into who we’re talking about here.  This fella’ has quite a pedigree.  Among the “Davis” family, this absolute mistake of nature was birthed into a dynasty with roots incestuously deep into the Whig Party, then the Federalist Party, and then the eventual Republican Party. Harvard and Yale educations have been frequent among them, and most had gone further on to law school. Some were in clubs at these schools such as the Fox Club at Harvard and one of the founding members of the Skull and Dagger secret society at Yale and Harvard shares this abjectly poisoned DNA.  Moreover, they’re directly connected by blood and by marriage to the Lodge clan, made famous by imperialist Son-of-a-Bitch, Henry Cabot Lodge.  There’s still one alive, to our collective chagrin, a George C. Lodge, who would still be inflicting this hereditary privilege upon us had he not lost a congressional election to the scion of another corrupt political dynasty, Edward Kennedy.  

So, with those congenital connections, it isn’t hard to see how this relatively inconsequential descendant of someone important would’ve floundered upwards into the corrupt administration of Ulysses S. Grant.  Grant’s administration, by the way, was so famously corrupt that it led to the rise of under secretaries in each federal department as his cronies and relatives punted and punted their jobs until someone subordinate had to be hired to do it for none of the glory.  From there, it was a quick wiggle-jaunt to get SFB into a role that would come to defy every indication that he was just another unexceptional nepo-baby and actually (arguably) the antichrist.  

In his role as Reporter for the Supreme Court, it was his unique responsibility to summarize the arguments and discussion held between justices while the court was in session.  You may wonder why this was an appointed position, and you’d be right to do so.  In the landmark case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), the Waite court said that corporations were people.  

Except they didn’t.  Read the decision.  Not one word intentionally communicated by a justice of this nation directly invokes this notion. It only appears in the LEGALLY NON-BINDING headnote added (very conveniently) by our friend SFB.  That headnote says:

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

That’s the editorial we, of course, because there’s never been any evidence to suggest this was anything more than a biased interpretation of pre-trial chatter.  Moreover, SFB had good reason to want the Waite court to resign themselves to this legal fiction:  Davis’s prior position as president of Newburgh and New York Railway probably made him conflicted to the point that his only interest would be selfish.  

And somehow our entire conception of the role of corporations in society was borne of a morally compromised idiot editorializing.  Mad yet?

How about if I told you that Justice Stephen Fields, whose railroad connections were manifest, plentiful, and profitable (and likely the justice whose fractiousness led to whatever discussion caused the smoking gun headnote)?  What if I told you he later flew flagrantly in the face of the rule of law and cited a headnote, which somehow had the bootstrapping effect of canonizing non-canon thought.  Angry now?

Okay, what if I told you that headnote and its subsequent corrupt invocation by Fields was the *ONLY LEGAL BASIS* for the standard of corporate personhood which allowed the Citizens United (2010) case to unrestrict and anonymize campaign donations from businesses?  The entire pitiful state of our ability to live fulfilling lives unbeholden to unexceptional white men and their fathers was sold wholeheartedly to things which pretend to be people and are implicitly not.  Imagine if it was an alien instead of your insurance provider.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers, anyone?

In case you didn’t know, here’s the 14th Amendment, emphasis mine:

AMENDMENT XIV

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

I’m sure those of you paying attention to the decline of Western Civilization have some familiarity with Section 2 and may even know that this was one of the Reconstruction Amendments designed to facilitate the rebirth of a nation following the Civil War.  What you may not know it does, however, occurs in the first five words.  

“All persons born or naturalized…”

In terms of legal analysis, this means the 14th amendment tells you what a person is.  At least legally.  The text of the amendment makes it clear that it is throwing the widest blanket possible across the broad spectrum of humanity.  The only two ways a person may begin to exist must then be considered in the drafting of the verbiage.  To be a person, and therefore relevant to this discussion, one must be capable of being born or naturalized.  Neither are even remotely possible for a corporation, and don’t hand me any metaphors about your “proud startup baby.”  Drown it in the bath and get back to me.  Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, if anything, should be held up as the primary example of the continued influence of enlightenment humanism on the thinkers, even some 100 years past the nation’s founding.  They believed that nothing was superior to that sentient spark some call the human soul.  That which diminishes it for the sake of order is antithetical to the rhetoric which birthed this nation and antithetical to life itself.  A railroad corporation that couldn’t even effectively manage its own finances, built its tracks with an abundance of “non-slave” slave labor, and apparently only had a talent for graft, stole your life out from under you decades before you, yourself, were born or naturalized.  

To further underscore the insanity of corporate personhood, let’s have another brief digression to establish a fundamental fact about the rule of law.  The basis for law and order is a transactional affair.  The completion of responsibilities results in the awarding of rights.  This arrangement can be implied, as in the voluntary act of NOT killing people allows you the personal freedom of not being incarcerated, or it can be explicit, like requiring registration for the draft.  In short, to be treated like a citizen (or else a person) one must act like a citizen.  Call me Kant, but you have an implicit duty not to be an asshole. Ask: If everyone did the thing you’re doing right now, would the Earth continue to spin on its axis?  No?  THEN STOP IT. 

Now, onto the thought experiment:

A big company discharges heated runoff into the river immediately behind its headquarters as an externalized cost of production.  This actually happens.  It’s why so many waterways in industrial zones have unseasonal algal blooms and fish kills.  The state of Iowa just killed all the fish in a 60 mile radius through similar offloading of externalities, for a pressing example.  The hypothetical part is this:  what if a child is swimming, absent-mindedly, and it scalded to death by the heat.  Terrible tragedy.  Awful accident.  Also 100% preventable.  In Criminal law that’s (paraphrasing) the basis for “Criminal Negligence” if not advancing to the level of “Recklessness.”  Criminal Negligence resulting in death is commonly referred to, by the way, as manslaughter.  

So we charge that company (the person) with manslaughter, correct?  

I bet that idea replaced manslaughter with man’s laughter in your head, because it’s preposterous.  How would we incarcerate it?  Which rights would we revoke for such a gross dereliction of personal responsibility?  An entity which is not a person under every aspect of the rule of law cannot be a person under any.  Mic drop.  

“So why do we uphold this?”

That’s the kind of question someone only asks if they wander in halfway through a movie.  We uphold it because the people empowered by it are also the ones impacting all the decision making.  Those undisclosed campaign donations, empowered solely by this impressive legal fiction, have installed a confused group of puppetted politicians who can do no work because they’re being pulled, as if by scared horses attached to their limbs, in countless, incongruous directions by entities which are in no way separate as a person from the soulless parasites who run them.  The era of the golden parachute is set to be replaced by the era of a legal albatross around everyone’s neck.  

The end result of this lunacy?  A spray tanned demagogue thinks the president is absolved of the legal ramifications of his morally (and financially) bankrupt decision making because, “that’s how Daddy’s company worked.”

And it’s all J.C. Bancroft Davis’ fault.  Stupid fucking bastard.  

The idea that a multinational corporation–with its boundless and immorally extracted resources, uncapped political influence, and single-minded pursuit of intangible and impossible infinite profit growth–should be treated as the legal equivalent of an individual citizen is a staggering, flummoxing, and wholly insane distortion of the principles of democracy and equality under the law.

This legal fiction is not an accident or a neutral feature of our system – it is a deliberate construct designed to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of ordinary people, the world we live in, and the general appreciation for human decency as our paramount mission. By granting corporations the same rights and protections as individuals, while completely shielding the morally bankrupt who lead them from many of the responsibilities and constraints that *real* individuals face, our legal system has created a profoundly uneven playing field that tilts ever more steeply toward the interests of capital over labor.  Capital, by the way, equates to absolutely zero in a system where a fiat currency is backed exclusively by a cascading series of privately controlled debts.  

The result is a society in which the voices and needs of ordinary people are increasingly drowned out by the outsized influence of corporate power. From the corrupting influence of money in politics to the erosion of worker protections and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the dominance of corporate interests has led to a hollowing out of the middle class and a sense of powerlessness and disenfranchisement among large swaths of the population.  And *SOMEHOW* people stand in line and risk (justified) outrage as they hand away their life to THE badly-groomed, poorly-raised, impossibly coiffured scion of this horrific and impossible system.  

However, our baleful ex-president is not indicative of a new phenomenon, nor is he its originator – it is the latest iteration of a long history of exploitation and dispossession, from the plantations of the antebellum South to the sharecropping system that replaced slavery, to the hundred years of letting immigrants build our world and Klansmen legislate their lives to nothing.  The current era of globalization and outsourcing was supposed to open up competition to its most democratic state, and all it has done is increased shareholder value and the rate of stock buybacks.  The system is sick, and the current buffoon and his terrified pack of mindless followers are merely a tumor restricting the essential blood flow of justice to all people.  

While the methods may nominally change, the underlying dynamic remains the same – a system that privileges the interests of the few over the many, and that treats human beings as little more than inputs to be exploited for profit.  Profit which (AGAIN, FOR THE CHEAP SEATS) means literally nothing when the universal debt burden across the geopolitical spectrum has 100% of the world constantly in arrears with one another.  Profit value which does not trickle anywhere, despite the creation of actual worth being exclusively the purview of those “menial” workers deprived a living wage so people like miserable shitbag Steve Huffman can deface free speech, quash ‘free’ competition, rely solely on free labor, and *STILL* award himself a totally fictional 193 Million Dollars in compensation.  Like J.C. Bancroft Davis, that’s one massive SBF.  

To challenge this system and build a more just and equitable society, we need to fundamentally rethink the relationship between corporations and people. Primarily, we need to recognize that corporations are not people, and that their rights and privileges must be subordinate to the needs and well-being of actual human beings.  I don’t have any fucking clue why that’s so hard to understand.  If your workers all go home, you do not have a corporation.  How in the hell can we create a country “for the people, of the people, and by the people,” and then sell it immediately to the ethically handicapped who fail to separate the entity from the creatures which comprise said entity.  Paradoxically, they missed the trees for the forest and therefore didn’t notice when that forest became four or five unnecessarily large trees.  Where then is the shade in which the forest dwellers are to live?  It’s such an incredible failure of anything resembling logic that I am almost frothing at the mouth as I hammer these keys and feel the walls of my cubicle threatening to bludgeon me to death. 

There will be a radical restructuring of our legal and political institutions, or there will be an end to things; an incredible bang followed by a long, miserable whimper into nothingness.  Ensuring that the voices and interests of ordinary people are not just heard, but prioritized and protected, is the only means by which progress can be achieved.  It will require a renewed commitment to the values of democracy, equality, and solidarity, and a willingness to challenge the entrenched power of corporate interests, as well as the general understanding of how corporations are antithetical to anything resembling “freedom”–whether of the market or otherwise.  

Only by reclaiming the idea of personhood as a fundamentally human attribute, rather than a legal fiction to be exploited by the wealthy and powerful, can we hope to build a society in which the dignity and worth of every individual is truly respected and upheld.

From Hell, 

–The Strangest

(P.S. To James Bopp, Jr., to Steve Huffman, and to J.C. Bancroft Davis–I’ll be over at the unwed mother spitroast with Hitler and Joseph Smith when you get down here.  Wear sunscreen.  It’s a scorcher.)