Following on the recent Supreme Court decision striking down limits on corporate free speech, Murray Hill Incorporated is taking the next step: running for Congress (in Virginia’s 10th District).
Until now, corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.
The corporate candidate already has its own Web site, a Facebook page with 2,600 fans and an online ad on YouTube that has drawn more than 172,000 hits.
I’ ve been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.
As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that’s hardly any different from a Republican–as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there’s no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people–and that’s been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama’s no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now.
I thought that in the area of constitutional rights he would be better than he has been. That’s the greatest disappointment, because Obama went to Harvard Law School and is presumably dedicated to constitutional rights. But he becomes president, and he’s not making any significant step away from Bush policies. Sure, he keeps talking about closing Guantánamo, but he still treats the prisoners there as “suspected terrorists.” They have not been tried and have not been found guilty. So when Obama proposes taking people out of Guantánamo and putting them into other prisons, he’s not advancing the cause of constitutional rights very far. And then he’s gone into court arguing for preventive detention, and he’s continued the policy of sending suspects to countries where they very well may be tortured.
I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president–which means, in our time, a dangerous president–unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.
Back in graduate school (at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, many years ago), we studied the roots of capitalist instability: the various ways a monetary commodity-producing economy might (but not necessarily) generate imbalances and instabilities based on the normal workings of the system (i.e., endogenous factors, not, as in neoclassical theory—then as now—as a result only of exogenous “shocks”). We read Marx and Keynes as well as the work of Robert Clower, Hyman Minsky, and Axel Leijonhufvud.
Clearly, contemporary mainstream macroeconomists have never studied those traditions, or have chosen to ignore them. And now we are living through the consequences—in the discipline of economics and in the real world.
Now, Leijonhufvud has a new paper (pdf), “Macroeconomics and the Crisis: A Personal Appraisal,” in which he presents a history of the Neoclassical Synthesis, the New Classical attack, and the New Neoclassical Synthesis, as well as his view of how “relatively small shocks [can] cause a fragile system to crash.”
There is much that Leijonhufvud leaves out (especially the class dynamics of a capitalist monetary commodity-producing economy), nor do I share his goal (to enact policies that allow a return to “Moderation”), but I certainly agree with his conclusion:
theories that assume that the economy is a stable general equilibrium system, albeit beset with some frictions and imperfections, do not hold true in general and. . .we need a new paradigm of economic thought.
Apropos of yesterday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision striking down limits on corporate free speech, here is a history (written by David H. Gans and Douglas T. Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center) of the contested relationship among corporations, corporate personhood, and the Constitution. (Here are some additional resources on the problem of corporate personhood.)
from the very beginnings of our Nation, the constitutional protections available to living persons and corporations have been fundamentally different. While James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to protect the “great rights of mankind,” corporations did not have any right to exist, let alone the same fundamental rights as “We the People.” From the founding on, as Chief Justice Marshall explained, corporations were “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of law” and “possess[ing] only those properties which the charter of creation confer . . . . ” To be sure, corporations received a host of special privileges that enabled them to succeed in business and some limited constitutional protection for their property rights, but these corporate attributes subjected them to greater government regulation, not less.
The distinctions between citizens and corporations are most pronounced when it comes to elections. The Constitution protects the rights of citizens to vote through constitutional amendments that no one could reasonably read to protect corporations, and prevention of improper corporate influence over the electoral process has been a pillar of our democracy as far back as 1833, when President Andrew Jackson castigated the Bank of the United States for its political spending on elections. In 1907, Congress enacted the Tillman Act and wrote into federal law a sharp distinction between the campaign finance laws applicable to living persons and those applicable to corporations, with the latter strictly regulated to prevent corruption of the electoral process. That sharp distinction has been there ever since, repeatedly reaffirmed by Congress and upheld by the courts.
For most of our Nation’s history, Supreme Court doctrine comported with our Constitution’s text and history. But beginning in 1886, the Supreme Court began to engineer a change. In Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Court’s court reporter wrote into the opinion’s head-notes a statement made by the Chief Justice during oral argument that the Constitution protects corporations as persons. In the decades that followed, the Lochner-era Supreme Court relied on this fabricated precedent, giving corporations constitutional rights and demanding that corporations be treated equally with living persons. This disastrous departure from constitutional first principles proved to be short-lived. Beginning in 1937, virtually every aspect of the Lochner era’s protection of corporate constitutional rights was repudiated, with the Court ultimately declaring in 1973 that the idea of equal rights for corporations was “a relic of a bygone era.”
Today, much of the Supreme Court’s doctrine about corporations gets the Constitution’s text and history right. For the last thirty years, the Court has regularly affirmed that corporations do not have the same right to participate in the political process as individuals do, and that the integrity of our political system would suffer if corporations could take advantage of the special privileges they receive to succeed in the economic marketplace to help elect candidates willing to do their bidding. These cases, now on the chopping block in Citizens United, are hardly outliers. The Court’s Fourth Amendment doctrine has consistently recognized that corporations do not have the same Fourth Amendment rights as individuals do, reasoning that “[f]avors from government often carry with them an enhanced measure of regulation.” Since the early 20th Century, the Court has held that corporations are not protected under the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause. Having accepted special privileges from the government, a corporation cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment to keep the government in the dark about criminal acts committed using those special privileges.
This interpretation clearly explains why corporations and living persons do not have the same First Amendment rights, why Congress may limit corporate spending on elections, and why the Court’s most recent decision lets “a capitalist joker” back in.
A life-sized bronze monument of four Haitian soldiers that stands six feet tall atop a granite pillar in Savannah’s Franklin Square honoring Haiti’s contribution to U.S. independence.
In September-October 1779, a force of some 500 free black Haitians, the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, joined American colonists and French troops in a battle to drive back British troops in Savannah, Georgia. [more here]
As we watch from afar and donate what we can (I have chosen to give to Partners in Health), we also need to think about why Haiti is so vulnerable to such a disaster. And for that we need the help of historians, like Alex von Tunzelmann, who, according to the Guardian, is currently writing a book on Haiti, Cuban, and the Dominican Republic.
Last year, she published a short and accessible article in the Times. It’s a good start for anyone who wants to understand the historical roots of the current situation.
“I think the Haitian people have been made to suffer by God,” Wilbert, a teacher, tells me, “but the time will come soon when we will be rewarded with Heaven.”
History tells a different story. The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.
For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.
It’s that history of slavery, colonialism, U.S. occupation, and, more recently, Haiti’s role as sweatshop of the Caribbean that has created a situation in which “children eat mud,” tens of thousands die from an earthquake, and many more are suffering in its aftermath.
Haiti’s vulnerability to the recent earthquake, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean (here for a longer list), are socially and historically created not natural. That’s what Tracy Kidder clearly explains:
while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And the history of Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters — to floods and famine and disease as well as to this terrible earthquake — is long and complex, but the essence of it seems clear enough.
Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the satanic slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)
So, we need to get beyond the astonishment (another in a long line of disasters to hit Haiti. . .) and blaming the victims (because, long ago, they made a “pact with the devil“) and understand the social and historical reasons why
before the earthquake, there were no warnings, in part because scientists had largely ignored Haiti and other underdeveloped countries where seismic hazards are high (in favor of studying the risks in California, Japan, and other relatively well-off parts of the world), and
after the earthquake hit—in a highly unequal, bloated urban center—buildings tumbled, an untold number of people died, and many more will be victims for years to come.
That’s the real lesson of Haiti, New Orleans, the 2004 tsunami, and many such “natural” disasters around the world.
P.S. Tyler Cowen’s list of possible reasons of why Haiti is so poor, which includes such gems as “Haiti was a French colony in the first place and French colonies do less well” (a list which, to his credit, he doesn’t find very satisfactory), couldn’t be a worse way to go about attempting to find answers.
What Daniel Little concludes about the so-called Brenner Debate just as easily applies to the earlier debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism occasioned by Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism:
in hindsight, it appears that a lot of the energy in the debates stemmed from the false presupposition that it should be possible to identify a single master factor that explained these large changes in economic development. But this no longer seems supportable. Rather, historians are now much more willing to recognize the plurality of causes at work and the geographical differentiation that is inherent in almost every large historical process.
However, Little fails to distinguish between discursive and causal priority. Focusing on the class dynamics of the transition from feudalism to capitalism—a characteristic of Marxian approaches—does not mean that class is taken to be the essential cause of that transition. What it does mean is that Marxists choose to focus on class, among the infinite number of changes that made up that long transition from one way of organizing society to another, in order to produce a class analysis of that transition. Giving discursive priority to class does not, though, mean attributing to the class dimensions of society a causal priority.
What the participants in the debate—including Robert Brenner, M. M. Postan, and Douglass North—share is the idea that one or another factor can and should be identified as the ultimate cause of the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.
In my view, what distinguishes a Marxist approach is both an analytical focus on class and a conception of the historical process as complex and contradictory, thus neither predictable nor reducible to a single cause.
Christmas was invented in the nineteenth century, in New York City. Christmas more or less as we know it today—and quite different from what it was before. It was a battle and a small group of very wealthy, conservative New Yorkers, including Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore, won.
That’s what Stephen Nissenbaum argues in his 1997 book, The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Christmas That Shows How It Was Transformed from an Unruly Carnival Season into the Quintessential American Family Holiday.
In an agricultural setting the Christmas season arrived just when intense harvesting was finished, freshly slaughtered meat was widely available (as it was not through the rest of the year) and the year’s supply of beer and wine was ready for consumption. For several weeks in December gentle folks and commoners alike indulged in food, alcohol, and sex with an intensity that was proscribed throughout the rest of the year. A key feature of this “season of misrule” involved a sanctioned “social inversion” in which peasants could demand entry into the homes of the rich in order to solicit gifts of food and drink. Essential to Nissenbaum’s broader argument is that it was the poor who initiated this exchange, the poor who demanded it as a right. . .
While elites sanctioned and participated in this Christmas revelry for centuries, by the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century they began to fear and try to suppress it. Industrialization suffered no slackening of work in the winter, and in an urban setting roving bands of angry, drunken young proletarians seemed more of a direct threat to established interests than had their peasant ancestors.
What you can see happening between 1810 and 1830, is the invention of a tradition. A new kind of Christmas is created, complete with its own mythical figure – Santa Claus. It takes place in the house, and does not involve opening the doors if you are rich. On the one hand this is a new development, because it excludes the outside world. On the other hand, by centering the holiday on children, in a structural way it replicated old patterns: people in authority still give gifts to their inferiors; not along the lines of class but within the family. In the 19th century, children would have knocked around with the servants, and really belonged on the bottom of the social scale. There is a duplication of the old structure, no longer rich to poor, but still powerful to powerless. Psychologically this seems to have satisfied the old need without the threat of opening your doors.
That’s how a new set of Christmas traditions—a new set of class-oriented traditions—was invented in the United States.
Howard Zinn, the author of The People’s History of the United States andVoices of a People’s History of the United States (as well as the play Marx in Soho) has teamed up with the History Channel and a host of celebrities (including Matt Damon) to produce a new documentary, The People Speak, which will shown on 13 December at 8 pm.
HISTORY will also partner with nonprofit organization VOICES OF A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES to develop enhanced, co-branded curriculums for a countrywide educational initiative. In addition, HISTORY will support this outreach with national on-air campaigns and live webcasting to further generate awareness.
Reinforcing that History is Made Every Day, the network will engage in a wide-ranging, interstitial branding campaign, producing at least 24 shorts surrounding the concept of democracy for viral, VOD and online dissemination.
Zinn and Studs Terkel (1912-2008), each in their own way, have done more than anyone else to produce a people’s history of the United States.
