Corporate Personhood and the Culture of Pathology

Morality Turned Upside Down

 by NOZOMI HAYASE

 With drone attacks, torture and drug money laundering, the interlocking network of the military-industrial complex and banking cartels continue the age-old Western pattern of colonization around the world. From Iraq to Afghanistan; from Lybia to Mali, bloody resource wars are camouflaged behind the fear-based rhetoric of ‘national security’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’.

Western societies are rapidly losing their moral center. The employment of reason in the majority of society now seems divorced from the basic capacity for empathy. Government war criminals walk free, while whistleblowers reporting their crimes are punished. Bankers who commit massive fraud are bailed out while taxpayers have their futures foreclosed. When a culture rewards selfish deeds and immunizes the criminal acts of its leaders, it skews the norm toward depravity. How has this happened? How is it that Western civilization has devolved into something like a global rouge state?

Michael Nagler, professor and peace activist once said, “There is something deeper than our culture (at the root of the problem) and that is our spiritual predisposition, which means who we think we are”. We have seen deeply embedded racism, growing exploitation and militarism and an explosion of the gap between the rich and poor. So many social problems that have manifested in the world throughout the last century seem to have radiated from a particular view of humanity.

The State of Power 2013 report reveals the concentration of wealth and power in the world. Fewer than 1% of the world’s transnational corporations, mostly banks, control 40% of global businesses. .001% of the population control assets worth $14.6 trillion — or over 20% of the world’s annual GDP. Corporate institutions, with a narrow mandate of maximizing profit at great human or environmental cost are the real governing forces in most countries, controlling health, safety, environment, monetary systems and food supplies. This is affecting all aspects of our lives.

We are born into a corporate state. Children as early as three are prey to corporate marketing. Education in America and abroad has become a dumbing-down of creativity and reduced to a simple vocational training. Critical thinking is discouraged and most schools just offer skills for serving the corporate work force. The corporate-consumer mindset has grown exponentially and has insidiously worked itself into the very fabric of life.

The first beginnings of this ever-increasing spread of corporate power can be traced back to a pivotal moment in US history, when a little known Supreme Court clerk made a notation from an off-hand comment of a Supreme Court Judge in 1886, which launched the legal fiction of corporate personhood. Economist and author, David Korten (2000) outlined this crucial turning point:

“In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. …Thus it was that a two-sentence [off hand] assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history”. (pp. 185-186)

With this ruling, corporations were granted the Constitutional rights of personhood under the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Ever since then, corporations and the men that serve them have successfully drawn the notion of “We the People” in a direction determined by corporate motives of ‘profit at any cost.’ By defining these entities as artificial persons (corporations are not actual human beings), no one can be held accountable for their actions. Yet, they are afforded the freedoms and protections that the Constitution guarantees for each person, while wielding enormous power and resources not available to any one person.

Please read the full article here:  http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/05/corporate-personhood-and-the-culture-of-pathology/.