There is a battle going on. It is an old battle that has been getting sneakier and sneakier as the corporate elite tries to desperately hold onto the tools that assist in their greed.
1) Historic Context
This battle was present during the US Civil War. Many Americans have been indoctrinated in school to believe the prime reason for the Civil War was to abolish slavery. It wasn’t. The prime reason for the Civil War was that the Industrial giants in the north were expanding and the Plantation owners in the south were getting suffocated in the competition. The plantation owners failed to see that the freedoms they sought were in contradiction with their blatant racism and embrace of slavery.
The teaching of the Civil War allowed the Industrial north to use the political propaganda of abolishing slavery to support their goals. The Industrial north had already been utilizing slavery in the modern capitalist way before the Civil War. New immigrants were the cheap labor that Big Business used to build up American wealth after slavery was finally abolished.
Not only did the US Civil War bring an end to one form of slavery to be substituted with a more capitalist form of slavery, but the granting of the 14th Amendment where the rights of Personhood were introduced to supposedly support newly freed slaves, somehow through legal loopholes the Industrial corporations gained the right to Personhood for their business ventures.
The loopholes of the 14th Amendment gave Corporations limited liability. The wealthy elite now had the opportunity to take grave risks in pursuing profits, natural resources, and expanding nationally and internationally without ever having to be accountable for their acts.
At the same time, while the Industrial elites were gaining power on a progressive scale, due to the agreements between President Lincoln and his successors, compromises were made with the southern states. These compromises allowed States to have power in their local laws and legal agreements. This gave rise to Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow Laws became a step backwards for freedom and human rights. It allowed States, which formally had slavery, to continue to segregate, racially discriminate, brutally enforce their mandates, and commit crimes against Black Americans with limited liability to those who committed violent acts to uphold Jim Crow.
The 13th Amendment allowed loopholes that stripped prisoners of their legal rights returning a high level of unjust imprisonments of Black Americans to nearly slave level standards. While at the same time the 14th Amendment loopholes gave civil rights to Corporations. The evolution of social treatment was a betrayal of human rights, social-responsibility to one’s neighbors, and illogical.
Social exclusion of portions of the population were addressed under Jim Crow Laws, which allowed individual States to carry out their own reforms without federal involvement. However, on a parallel social evolution, the US government’s movement toward granting corporate elite gains began to boom with the Sherman Antitrust Laws.
The Sherman Antitrust Laws were a precursor to 20th Century Corporate Capitalism’s creation of the World Trade Organization. While States could form their own laws, they could not create monopolies in individual states. Legally they could not favor their own local business over a national industry. The Sherman Act gave the bigger larger National industries the opportunity to spread their business throughout each State without states favoring their local industrial development.
On one hand Jim Crow and the other hand Sherman Antitrust; the Post-Civil War period allowed big industry to rise and dominate while allowing racist unjust practices for local states to continue to have some sense of domination over portions of their own population.
The first half of the 20th Century allowed corporate power to rise at the hands of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Melons, the Fords, and a small slew of other robber barons. Coming out on top after World War II, gave these industries the rest of the world to dominate for the next century. At the same time, the inspiration from previous revolutions inspired people all over the world to fight for their own human dignity and civil rights.
The complex development of social rights and economic rights were continually sending mixed messages. The mix message of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt allowed the largest industries to present the illusion that they were breaking up into smaller industries, but were still controlled largely by the same hands that controlled them before: i.e. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which is today Exxon and Mobil et al. These big businesses had grown at rates unimagined while at the same time the worst economic depression was occurring.
Then after World War II with the intentionally separate creation of the United Nations to deal with social rights, and the IMF and World Bank, with the eventual creation of the World Trade Organization, to deal with economic interests. Our world today is still prey due to the separation of social and economic development from the World War II era.
Corporate Power hit a new high with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s Neoliberal economic plans. Now corporations with limited liability could spread across the globe at a faster rate and with limited government interference. The Neoliberal Economic plan hit an even faster pace when the Cold War officially ended, and under Bill Clinton, corporate power hit its peak. Globalization allowed all corners of the planet to come under dominance of corporate interests.
2) Today’s Tactics
I started writing this essay thinking that I was going to discuss this week’s two current developments of SOPA and the surprise movement of Senators now leaning towards legalizing Gay Marriage. Most of the topics mentioned in the previous section are relevant to the issues: Economics, Human Rights, and historic similarities.
The freedom of human dignity and the freedom of information are at the center stage. Surrounding both is the corporate interest.
Firstly, desperate attempts to avoid losing Corporate Personhood certain businesses are supporting Gay Marriage, not because of moral intent, but to evade their own conduct. In the last few days, headlines of multiple media sources noted that Microsoft, Nike and a list of other major corporations are joining in their support for Washington State Marriage Equality. Several Senators with friends in high corporate places have also recently given their spontaneous support for single-sex marriage laws: i.e. Jim Kastama and Glenn Anderson.
The reason that these corporations and their friends in the senate are joining in the support of Gay Rights, which is in itself an important progressive drive for human rights, is that with the loopholes of the 14th Amendment granting corporations personhood, acknowledging the agreements between individuals regardless of their gender and whether they are living, breathing entities, a corporation can fight for its right to exist.
“Sometimes doing the wrong thing is right,” but Big Business should not demoralize the Human Rights’ campaign to grant freedom of Gay Rights, by twisting Amendments for Corporate gain. Americans praise President Lincoln for his involvements in the Civil War to end slavery, but we must remember that the US did not fight the Civil War because of slavery, but because of the influence of powerful industrial elites protecting their economic interests.
Evading social responsibility for larger gains through the tool of granting an additional freedom for a minority helps the minority, but still the question of motivation leads fuel for nurturing human dignity. Avoiding the genuine education and nurture of acceptance, with ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’, will be an ill accomplishment. Even after the Civil War ended and Black Americans were granted freedom of personhood, it took nearly a hundred more years for the government to address brutal education and social policies. We, as activists, do not want another written agreement that won’t go beyond the paper’s ink. Actual change involves commitments and accountability.
Secondly, the power of information is a significant tool. Who controls the information has been a base for any hegemony historically. With the corporate elite in the US having significant power of information over the public domain for so long the fear of Internet freedom is a danger to their monopoly. With the Internet giving nearly unlimited freedom for innovation and sharing of information regardless of property rights scares the hegemony big time.
2011 was a key year for Internet freedom of information sharing. During major protests globally in Egypt, Chile, Greece, riots in the UK, Occupy protests in New York City, Oakland and countless other growing locations. The power structure of most governments is in danger. Unlike during the 1920’s and 1960’s, when organizing was out on the streets and in a public place, today through social networking we can share information and organize within record time; and when police or the military could use manipulative unsuppressed violence, today with the technology of the Internet, digital cameras, and cell phones provide evidence that can be recorded on the spot. The world can learn about injustice faster and visually without having to get their information from a corporate media source that controls the same corporate controlled government.
The SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, is in part highly an act of corporate control of passing information. However, it is a double-tongued snake, because it is also highly about trade related intellectual property rights. If the Internet can be controlled in the US, this means it will be easier for US corporations to control information globally. Whenever a song is shared, a book is quoted, a movie is clipped, a politician is caught with his foot in his mouth, this information if it is controlled by the corporate governance would force people to pay for every second, pixel, or image that gets shared between people.
This historically is a long ideological battle between hegemony and public rights. Before the World Trade Organization allowed the most powerful corporations from the most powerful countries to manipulate trade, ironically, the original Boston Tea-Party were revolutionary activists who did not want to submit to the British control. The idea of "Taxation without Representation" paralleled the necessity for the public to voice the need to overcome false power. When the US claimed Independence it insisted that the public ignore the international trade agreements that the British put forth in order to develop.
However, how ironic that it was the US corporate elite that pushed for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948 and would become the World Trade Organization, which is the significant suppressor of international development in younger nations for the past half century. Yet though Corporations have been protected with Personhood, they seem to continue to evade paying taxes. The largest corporations continually ignore their taxation commitments: "Representation without the need for Taxation".
Is the current online freedom of information debate a classic battle between capitalism and socialism, or is it a battle between corporate power and public power? The famous anarchist philosopher Joseph Proudhon continually referred to ‘Property as Theft.’ When an artist releases his/her work to the world is it now everyone’s? Bob Dylan has been caught plagiarizing younger, known artists. Picasso used images he acquired from African masks. Rock n’ Roll initially took from Blues and Jazz beats. It is contradictory at times that the property rights restrictions of the powerful and the freedoms they seek to control the public domain are not true to their own actions, for example: the entire notion of bio-piracy, when large powerful pharmaceutical companies go to developing nations, they gather up plants and traditional medicines, and then copyright the material for financial sales. Afterwards they attempt to stop indigenous groups from using their cultural practices.
Who controls the information? Is it time to Jolt the System and remind those in power that people are people too not just corporations?
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