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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-02-09
© 2010 Peter Belmont
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The Supreme Court, for ideological reasons rather than from a concept of the “original intent” of the framers, has recently ruled that corporations may “speak” on political topics without limit to how much they may spend for their very expensive “megaphones”.
This is so harmful to the US society that we should extirpate this “freedom of speech” entirely—root and branch—both as to lobbying and as to campaigning.
The reason is that—both by habit and by law—corporations are constrained to advance only their own (usually short-term) interests and are not permitted to consider the greater good of society.
However, their “speech” so overwhelms political debate that America is now ruled by a collection of wealthy industries, each seeking to enlarge its own slice of the communal “pie”, leaving no-one to look after any issue which falls outside these “slices”—and leaving no-one powerful enough to oppose any one of them.
There is a workable alternative. If the industries (as such) should fall silent—as I hope and recommend—their human owners, human shareholders, would still have a complete opportunity to “speak”. But the shareholders, being human beings, would have wide-ranging humane agendas and would not be so single-minded as the industries are.
Corporations are incorporated, under state laws, in order to carry out proper corporate purposes which are or should be stated. They are not allowed to act beyond these purposes. Actions beyond their purposes are illegal as “ultra vires”—beyond the powers. Whether by Constitutional amendment or otherwise the US should declare that “political speech” is “ultra vires” to any corporation as such unless such corporation is a PAC (Political Action Committee) organized purely to take political action and funded solely by contributions of human beings. In order that PACs should not become “fronts” for industries, there should be a limit of how much money any single human being may spend in a calendar year on all “political speech”.
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Corporations “speak” so loudly through their lobbyists and by means of “political campaigns” that the hopes and dreams and desires of (mere) (human) citizens are largely drowned out and the tendency of (these) citizens to attempt to affect their own governance is reduced, often eliminated entirely. That may be why many people do not even vote. They understand that whomever they elect will quickly become the servant of the corporate lobbyists and ignore the voters who elected her.
By law (and apparently also by practice, although corporations have been known to violate laws), a corporation is constrained not to spend corporate money or effort except to advance its own corporate goals.
When a corporation publishes “campaign” materials or hires lobbyists to “speak” to Congress, it may seek to create special-interest legislation (often the “ice-bergs” mentioned in my essay on governance or may seek to block legislation it opposes.
In doing this, the corporation is decidedly not representing its human owners (shareholders), much less the human citizenry as a whole. We have injured ourselves by allowing the corporations to seize the American system of governance to the extent they have.
Why do I say that the corporation does not “speak” for its shareholder? Surely this sounds ridiculous!
There is an easy-to-see reason. The shareholder may own shares in several corporations, corporations which would (if they chose to “speak”) take opposing sides on an issue. Neither corporation “speaks” for this shareholder. If one corporation elects not to “speak” at all, the shareholder is not represented.
Let’s look at an example.
Our shareholder may own shares in some not-yet bankrupt long-unionized US heavy industry and also own shares in a pharmaceutical giant.
Now, the not-yet bankrupt long-unionized US heavy industry might benefit from a publicly-funded health-care system (“Medicare for all”) paid for from general taxes because of the horrifically high costs this industry must bear for union-bargained employee and retiree health-care-insurance, which would provide a “level playing field” for competition with industries operating in Europe and Japan (assuming that such places have government-provided health-care). But (so far as I have heard) no US industrialist has publicly called for what some call “socialized medicine” or even called for regulation of the costs of pharmaceuticals. Even if such “socialized medicine” would be to the advantage of the industry, it refuses to speak for “ideological” reasons. A corporation is not required to “speak” in its own interest, merely not permitted to “speak” otherwise.
Meanwhile, our shareholder’s pharmaceutical industry has exercised its political “speech” to paralyze the health-care debate by preventing any consideration of one of the principal cost-cutting avenues available to Congress—a system of bargaining to reduce pharmaceutical costs to the American health-care system. (Europeans bargain and have much lower drug costs than we do in the US. In effect, Americans are subsidizing either the Europeans or BIG-PHARMA or both! Thank you Congress!)
Why is it that the heavy-industry does not speak up but the pharmaceutical industry does? Does it matter?
The fact is that the “silence” of the heavy-industry lobbyists and the very effective and noisy “speech” of the lobbyists from BIG-PHARMA have decided the issue in a manner which [1] cut the shareholders out of the discussion and, [2] in some cases defeated the real interests of the shareholders.
There is no part of the debates which do or should occupy Congress which ordinary (human) citizens cannot enter on their own behalves either as individuals or (more effectively, presumably) through single-issue PACs.
If a citizen—whether or not a shareholder, because shareholders should not have special rights in governance in preference to citizens generally—wants to protect BIG-PHARMA, let her give $5 to “I LOVE BIG-PHARMA PAC”. If another citizen wants cheaper pharmacy prices, let him give $5 to “LET’S HAVE CHEAP DRUGS PAC”.
Let the PAC’s (and the citizens) go to Washington and sit in the lobbies of the Congressmen.
And let the corporations conduct business according to the rules and regulations which governments may, from time to time, make for these businesses, but leave the management of the governing process to the citizens of the country so that we may once again have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
When I drive a car, I want it to go in the direction and at the speed which I indicate to that car through the steering wheel, gas pedal, and brakes. I would be very unhappy to have a car which said, “Sorry I do not merely carry out the business of transporting you, but I also decide what the rules of that business are. You are going where I want you to go, not where you want to go. You are going at the speed I choose for you, not at the speed you desire. Get used to it.”
The public “charters” corporations—allows their incorporators to bring them into business for the purposes of carrying out some business purpose. It is doubtful that the officially declared “business purpose” of any corporation explicitly lists the making of attempts to change the laws, statutes, rules, regulations, or administrative policies of any government by lobbying or political campaigning. Such actions properly belong to the owners of the corporation, not to the corporation itself. Government was clearly not
considered the (nearly exclusive) purview of corporations when out national and state governments were created.
It would be a simple matter for all state laws to be changed to declare that, “as a matter of public policy”, no corporation’s “corporate purpose” shall be deemed to include attempts to persuade legislatures, legislators, administrators or administrative agencies, judges (except by the tools of litigation), and all attempts by the corporation to do these things shall be illegal (as “ultra vires”—beyond its powers).
We do not expect state or federal governments to take this step at a time when their actions are so thoroughly controlled by corporations. A constitutional amendment may be necessary, and that too has quite a gauntlet to run. Good luck to us!
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