Corporations are not Persons: Stating the Obvious

 A New Civil Rights Movement:
Liberating Our Communities from Corporate Control A Pennsylvania Judge Holds That Corporations Are Not “Persons” Under the Pennsylvania Constitution
B y Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq., Executive Director
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Last week, a Pennsylvania county court gave this new movement a boost – declaring that corporations are not “persons” under the Pennsylvania Constitution, and therefore, that corporations cannot elevate their “private rights” above the rights of people.

[ . . . ]

In a landmark ruling, President Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas denied the corporation’s request on the basis that the Pennsylvania Constitution only protects the rights of people, not business entities.

In the ruling, Judge O’Dell-Seneca declared that “in the absence of state law, business entities are nothing.” If corporations could claim rights independent from people, she asserted, then “the chattel would become the co-equal to its owners, the servant on par with its masters, the agent the peer of its principals, and the legal fabrication superior to the law that created and sustains it.”

She further found that “the constitution vests in business entities no special rights that the laws of this Commonwealth cannot extinguish. In sum, [corporations] cannot assert [constitutional privacy] protections because they are not mentioned in its text.”

Judge O’Dell-Seneca cited sections of the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution in support of her contention that corporations were never intended to be constitutionally protected “persons.” She declared that “an even more dubious proposition is that the framers of the Constitution of 1776, given their egalitarian sympathies, would have concerned themselves with vesting, for the first time in history, indefeasible rights in such entities. . . that language extends only to natural persons.”

Finally, she tackled the very nature of corporations by declaring that “it is axiomatic that corporations, companies, and partnerships have no ‘spiritual nature,’ ‘feelings,’ ‘intellect,’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘thoughts,’ ‘emotions,’ or ‘sensations,’ because they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists. . . They cannot be ‘let alone’ by government, because businesses are but grapes, ripe upon the vine of the law, that the people of this Commonwealth raise, tend, and prune at their pleasure and need.”

—

Judge rules in newspapers’ favor in Hallowich-Range case
By Barbara Miller
observer-reporter.com

The natural gas companies “have failed to oppose (the) press’ motion to unseal the record under” case law,” O’Dell Seneca wrote.

Corporations, companies and partnership have no  spiritual nature, feelings,  intellect, beliefs, thoughts, emotions or
sensations because they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists … They cannot be ‘let alone’ by government because businesses are but  grapes, ripe upon the vine of the law, that the people of this  Commonwealth raise, tend and prune at their pleasure and need.

“Therefore, this court must grant those motions  and reverse (Pozonsky’s) Aug. 23, 2011, order, unless a higher authority forestalls the common law’s application.”

The decision became the responsibility of O’Dell Seneca after the state Superior Court said Pozonsky erred in ordering  that the Hallowich case “be sealed indefinitely in its entirety” without first holding a hearing. The appellate court sent the case back to  Washington County court in December, nearly six months after Pozonsky  resigned from the bench amid reports of a state grand jury  investigation.

“It was a scholarly opinion that weighed the  constitutional issues and came down on the side of the public’s right to know,” Fitch said of O’Dell Seneca’s 32-page opinion and order.

“After all, this is a taxpayer-funded court that exists to serve the public. Unless there is a serious privacy issue,  the presumption of openness applies and the record should be open to  both the public and the press,”  he continued.

O’Dell Seneca discussed the press’ and the  public’s right of access: “The press’ investigative role is itself a
constitutional and common law bulwark, safeguarding the courts from  lapsing into the clandestine abuse found in PA Childcare LLC, known as  the  Luzerne County Cash for Kids scandal,” Judge O’Dell Seneca wrote.

“It is not ‘mere curiosity’ as (the natural gas firms) contend.”

Ideologically Confused Partisans

I sometimes feel like I’m living in Bizarro America.

Al Gore is a veteran and a successful businessman. He is of Scots-Irish descent from the Upper South where he spent summers working on the family farm in Tennessee where they grew tobacco and raised cattle. Al Gore is boring, if anything, in his being a generally upstanding citizen. He is smart and accomplished. He has lived the American Dream, if you’re into that kind of thing.

George W. Bush is a draft-dodger and a failed businessman, not to mention an alcoholic. He was born in New England to a political family of old wealth, but he pretended to be a good ol’ boy Southerner and a rancher. Even Bush’s Christianity always seemed like pretense. Everything about Bush seemed like pretense, even simple things like putting on a flight suit and declaring ‘Mission Accomplished!’.

Al Gore was an example of what conservatives idealize as a moral citizen, but they attacked him. Instead, conservatives supported George W. Bush who demonstrates the worst attributes of the ruling elite.

Now, conservatives claim Bush jr never was a real conservative. The last real conservative to be president, they claim, was Ronald Reagan.

However, Reagan was the president who chose to use deficit spending which created the permanent debt that later on both Bush presidents grew even larger. Also, Reagan was a part of the Hollywood elite, a union leader, passed the most liberal pro-choice abortion bill prior to Roe v. Wade, and was the first president to invite an openly gay couple to sleep over at the White House. Reagan’s sunny optimism and idealism was a straightforward expression of his liberal-mindedness. He was a former progressive who simply turned his progressivism toward realpolitik and became a neocon. There was nothing particularly conservative about him.

Before Reagan, Jimmy Carter was a Deep Southern Evangelical. He was an actual compassionate conservative, what Bush jr was always pretending to be. He was an old fashioned conservative of a conservationist bent, a type of conservative that used to be more common. It was Carter who was the first Evangelical president and he took his religion more seriously than any other recent president. His so-called malaise speech was all about America’s moral fiber and everything he said about America has turned out to be true.

Despite many perceived successes, Reagan was responsible for the permanent debt which is one of the greatest failings of any president in all of US history. Despite many perceived failings, Carter’s one great achievement was passing an EPA regulation to decrease lead in gasoline which is directly and positively correlated to the largest decrease in violent crime in US history and hence one of the greatest achievements of any president in all of US history.

I just don’t get what is conservative about Bush jr or Reagan nor what is praiseworthy about such ideology, whatever one wishes to call it. It’s equally confusing trying to figure out what liberalism means in all of this. The most liberal president in recent history may have been Reagan who supposedly hated liberalism. Obama is probably more of a conservative than Reagan. Conservative or liberal, there is plenty of cynical and confused, maybe even deceptive, rhetoric to spread equally around.

Libertarianism and Reactionary Conservatism

The Leopold and Loeb of Modern Libertarianism
By Corey Robin

“While the disparity between the free-wheeling philosophy of the market and the reality of coercive capitalism has long been known, the last four decades have sharpened it. Partly because of the rise of an aggressive defense of untrammeled markets in the name of liberty, partly because of the assault on the welfare state and social democracy. For some on the left, today’s disparity between libertarian theories of the market and the reality of capitalism proves that the idea of the free market is a simple ideological mystification. “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” takes a different tack: it tries to show that the practice is built into the theory, that it is not elided there but embraced.

“[ . . . ] the libertarian defense of the market—while often treated as a source of tension on the right because it conflicts with the conservative commitment to stability and tradition, virtue and glory—is in fact consistent with the right’s reactionary project of defending private hierarchies against democratic movements from below.“

—

I’d also recommend checking out another article in The Nation by Corey Robin:

Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom

Conservative-Minded Authoritarianism & Liberal-Minded Anarchism

Someone once made the argument to me that there was a particular bias in social science research. The argument was based on the anecdotal evidence of the research this person had come across I suppose by way of what was reported in the media and maybe the blogosphere. His observation was that researchers had focused their studies more on conservatism than liberalism.

It would be surprising if there weren’t any biases such as this or something similar. More social scientists and scientists in geneal identify as liberals than as conservatives (and I’m sure that even the conservatives in this field are relatively liberal-minded). It does make sense that liberals and the liberal-minded would be greatly curious about those so different from their own attitude and worldview, especially considering that liberal-mindedness strongly correlates to open-minded curiosity.

Nonetheless, I doubt that curiosity is a zero sum game. A curious-minded person would probably be just as interested in liberalism as conservatism. Besides, most research I’ve seen in this area tends to simultaneously test for both sides of the political spectrum. I suspect it is rare research that would only study conservatism while entirely ignoring liberalism.

The bias I might see along these lines is more in the media reporting. The right-wing has caught the public imagination since the homegrown right-wing terrorism made itself violently known in the 1990s and especially since 9/11 brought the foreign right-wing terrorism to the attention of Americans. During the Cold War, the media focused on left-wingers while ignoring right-wingers. But the Cold War has been over for more than two decades now. With fundamentalist terrorism, Americans are learning new respect for Godlessness, despite its former association with the Communist Threat.

There is a more direct bias that is pertinent to the original hypothesis. Ever since the world wars, social scientists have been obsessed with authoritarianism. That was the era when right-wing fascism came to power. Many people escaped fascism by coming to America. The social scientists among these refugees were quite intently focused on understanding right-wing authoritarianism in the hopes of preventing its return.

There is good reason that authoritarianism has become associated with the right-wing and from there associated with conservatism. Indeed, there is a correlation in the American population between these three. The question is whether this correlation implies a causal link or is it merely an issue of historical conditions. At least for decades now, conservatism has attracted right-wing authoritarians into its ranks, seemingly as an intentional seeking of alliances by movement conservatives and GOP strategists, whether or not they fully appreciated the psychological profile of their allies. Some (e.g., Corey Robin) theorize that this is more than a temporary and circumstantial connection.

Here is the key point for me.

An authoritarian type can be either right-wing or left-wing; the reason for this is because right-wing and left-wing are more about ideology (and rhetoric) than psychology. An authoritarian type can be a conservative or anyone who is conservative-minded, the commonality of social conservatism being a reason political alliance are so easy to form. An authoritarian can even be a liberal, just as long as they are fairly conservative-minded or not too strongly liberal-minded in all ways. I’m fairly sure the one thing an authoritarian can’t be is liberal-minded, pretty much by the very definition of liberal-minded traits (which have a strong correlation to liberalism itself)

This is where its important to clarify a point. Liberalism correlates to liberal-mindedness and conservatism correlates to conservative-mindedness. However, there are still a significant number of conservative-minded liberals (and left-wingers) along with liberal-minded conservatives (and right-wingers).

Another clarification needs to be made. Fascist statists are right-wingers and communist statists are left-wingers. This is a distinction of ideology (specifically economic ideology), but there is no clear distinction when it comes to their personalities. Both kinds of radical ideologues tend to be authoritarian and, more significantly, conservative-minded. When looking at authoritarian states, including communism, the thing that stands out to me is they are against all forms of social liberalism and liberal-mindedness (and all that leans in that direction or is conducive towards it): social democracy, multiculturalism, feminism, gay rights, free speech, free press, free intellectual inquiry, free artistic expression, freedom to assemble and protest, etc etc.

This points toward the knot of confusion and so we can now disentangle the most interesting strand of bias. With my explanation so far, I hope it is beginning to be clarified why mainstream notions of liberalism aren’t an equivalent category to mainstream notions of conservatism. To nail it down, let me offer a little refresher on traits theory.

Traits exist on a spectrum with most people being closer to the midpoint than to the extremes. The typical person has some range of comfort and ability that might include to some extent both sides of the spectrum, although there will tend to be a natural resting point that an individual returns to. The extreme cases remain important for they demonstrate traits in their purest form.

Two separate traits correlate to liberalism and conservatism. Respectively, they are Openness and Conscientiousness. They are completely separate traits and so how an individual tests on one measure has no effect on how they test on the other. This can create the not unusual situation of a person measuring high on both the liberal-minded trait and the conservative-minded trait or else low on both.

I propose this as an explanation for why liberal-mindedness hasn’t been studied as fully. Most scientists, academics, college students, activists, politicians, journalists and reporters who identify as liberal probably don’t measure extremely high on Openness while also measuring low on Conscientiousness. It is true that most self-identified liberals measure relatively higher on the liberal-minded trait of Openness, but those who are highly motivated and self-disciplined enough to go to college, pursue politics and/or succeed in a professional career wouldn’t measure low on the conservative-minded trait of Conscientiousness.

Based on this, one would assume that, in respectable mainstream society, there would be a disproportionately small percentage of extreme liberals or even just people who are consistently liberal across all traits. This is predictable based on how Conscientiosness is described in the research literature. Conscientiousness is the single greatest indicator of social success (i.e., success by other people’s standards and according to the status quo). This would explain why professionally established and economically successful artists tend to have higher ratings on Conscientiousness, despite this conservative-minded trait being low among art students. I would speculate that there is a connection to why the most innovative and genius (i.e., unconventional) artists often remain poor and unknown in their own lifetimes.

In an outwardly success-oriented society, conservative-minded conscientiousness is given central priority. However, at the same time, it makes for a bias in all aspects of such a society, including research on psychological traits:

http://www.siop.org/tip/backissues/tipoct98/4collins.aspx

“Let it not be misunderstood, conscientiousness is recognizably an important predictor of performance and many other organizational outcomes (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Ones & Viswesvaran, 1996). But is it possible that this continued and concentrated focus on the validity of conscientiousness may overshadow other perhaps stronger personality predictors of job performance? Could it be that a plateau has been reached, and the time has come to move beyond conscientiousness in search of other predictor discoveries?”

Those who are extremely liberal-minded tend to have lots of social issues. Along with lacking success-orientation, they tend to be less healthy and more prone to becoming criminals (i.e., breaking laws and generally not being obedient and subservient). However, there being seen as criminals by society is the very same reason they are less likely to commit immoral acts that are the norm for a society or demanded by authority figures. So, high conscientious conservative-minded types are more likely to do horrific things and be successful at it, just as long as it meets standards of social approval. High conscientiousness, for example, will lead one to make sure the trains run efficiently in order to bring the enemies of the state to the concentration camps.

This is what irritates me. The conservative-minded project onto the liberal-minded their own conservative-minded predilections. The strongly liberal-minded will never make for good authoritarians. They may be losers who are alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, sexual deviants, etc. They may even be terrorists of the anarchistic variety. But they won’t be authoritarians or not very successful authoritarians.

The anarchism angle is what intrigues me most of all. That seems like the polar opposite of authoritarianism. Even conservatives seem to understand that. More than the over orderliness and oppression of authoritarians, what conservatives fear more than anything from liberals is that they will undermine conservative order by undermining moral authority and social hierarchy. Liberals will only ever be authoritarians to the degree they are or become conservative-minded.

I wish liberals would be criticized for their actual faults and weaknesses, instead of being blamed for what goes against their own nature. And to return to the original point of this post, I don’t know about researchers who are self-identified liberals, but I think it unfair to blame their supposed liberal-mindedness for their heavy focus on conservative-mindedness, assuming such a biased focus even exists. If anything, the conservative-mindedness (relatively higher conscientiousness) should be blamed for their having ignored the fullest and most extreme expressions of liberal-mindedness.

We’ve already had decades of extensive research on authoritarianism. Let us check out the polar opposite side of things. Definitely, I’d like to see some insightful research on anarchism.

—

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.795/abstract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-Humility_Facet_of_the_HEXACO_Model_of_Personality

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886910001182

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911005046

http://www.psycontent.com/content/r86104550w030g0l/

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.845/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224540903365364#.UY1v4Eqd6So

http://www2.uni-jena.de/svw/igc/SS_09/workshop%20Duckitt/supplementary%20readings/Duckitt%20&%20Sibley%20submitted.pdf

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2012-19403-001

http://www.jasoncollins.org/2011/06/the-evolution-of-conscientiousness/

http://www.academia.edu/153692/Evaluating_Five_Factor_Theory_and_social_investment_perspectives_on_personality_trait_development

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656611000997

Democracy, Education and Indoctrination

There are many challenges to a democracy, but education has to be one of the most important. Everything begins with education, specifically as it relates to enculturation and indoctrination. Here is an article from The Guardian that touches upon one aspect of this, although it isn’t as thorough as I’d prefer:

 The dark side of home schooling: creating soldiers for the culture war
The Christian home school subculture isn’t a children-first movement. Some former students are bravely speaking out
By Katherine Stewart

The point of the article is in the conclusion:

“The fundamentalist home schooling world also advocates an extraordinarily authoritarian view of the parental role. Corporal punishment is frequently encouraged. The effects are, again, often quite devastating. “People who experienced authoritarian parents tend to turn into adults with poor boundaries,” writes one pseudonymous HA blogger. “It’s an extremely unsatisfying and unsustainable way to live.”

“In America, we often take for granted that parents have an absolute right to decide how their children will be educated, but this leads us to overlook the fact that children have rights, too, and that we as a modern society are obligated to make sure that they get an education. Families should be allowed to pursue sensible homeschooling options, but current arrangements have allowed some families to replace education with fundamentalist indoctrination.

“As the appearance of HA reminds us, the damage done by this kind of false education falls not just on our society as a whole, but on the children who are pumped through the ideology machine. They are the traumatized veterans of our culture wars. We should listen to their stories, and support them as they find their way forward.”

This is put into context with a comment to the article and another comment responding to it:

StVitusGerulaitis  08 May 2013 12:16pm

the consequences of putting ideology over children include anxiety, depression, distrust of authority, and issues around sexuality.

“This is bad, but it’s not really necessary for a condemnation of the religious home schooling movement. After all, mainstream education can produce these effects too. It is enough that children are being lied to and deliberately manipulated for the purpose of engineering society.

“Should attendance at state approved schools be mandatory? It may be the only way to prevent this kind of brainwashing.

“Incidentally, why is the piece illustrated with a picture of a house in Cleveland?”

Paulson84  08 May 2013 3:21pm

“@LorddMUCK –

“Yeah, it’s those damn lefties in Kansas that are trying to get creationism pushed into science classes at public schools. And those lefties in Texas that are trying to rewrite the historical record to suggest the Founding Fathers didn’t envision a secular society. Oh, wait, it’s actually right wing lunatics trying to re-shape the educational curriculum in this country. That’s right.”

The problem isn’t homeschooling or any particular activity, rather particular tendencies that can undermine society in an infinite areas and in infinite ways. The same people who want to use homeschooling for indoctrination also want to use public schools for indoctrination. These are dangerous people. They are dangerous to democracy when they gain power and influence.

The danger with fundamentalism is complex. I don’t want to blame conservatives, but conservatives have become complicit with this problem by aligning themselves with fundamentalists and hence aligning themselves with right-wing authoritarians and social dominance types. This wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice made by movement conservatives and Republican elites. They made this Devil’s Bargain because it gained them immense power.

The bigger issue is that now we all have to deal with this problem. Indoctrination is a dangerous road to go down. It only takes a small group of well indoctrinated children to grow up to create a movement that could destroy democracy and take over the country. Before the masses can be indoctrinated, first a small vanguard must be indoctrinated. Indoctrination can never be taken lightly. It was a small movement in the beginning that took over Italy, Germany, Russia and China. Is our democracy strong enough to resist a totalitarian takeover? I doubt it.

I’m fine with homeschooling, but we better think twice before we let children be brainwashed. It doesn’t matter who is doing the brainwashing and for what purpose. It doesn’t matter if it is right-wing or left-wing, although we shouldn’t ignore the fact that this danger is at the moment coming from right-wing fundamentalists. We should consider carefully why this is the case.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903914

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12152-012-9155-7

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2012/03/arvan-follow-up-study-on-conservatism-and-dark-triad-personality-traits.html

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/3/prweb9255652.htm

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.1893/abstract

Unequal Democracy, Parties, and Class

Let me try my best to briefly offer some choice insights from Larry M. Bartel’s Unequal Democracy (with some slight commentary added by me).

1) One of the biggest points of the book is that the lower income class, as defined as the bottom third, has never turned away from the Democratic Party. They haven’t even lost the white lower income class across the country, only in the South. They haven’t even lost the lower income class in the South, just poor whites.

Actually, Democrats are supported by the majority of eligible voters. The problem is that generations of disenfranchisement allows Republicans to control the South with only a minority by using voter purges, long polling lines, etc. This simple truth seems even lost on Bartels.

2) There is good reason the lower income class votes Democrat. Research shows that society is better for most people under Democratic administrations and Democratic majorities in Congress. Economic inequality and poverty goes down. homicide and suicide rates go down, and on and on. Bartels shows that even the rich do better with Democrats. This is based on long-term data and so appears to be strongly compelling.

3) There is a weird phenomena related to class and ideology. The lower class tends to be more socially conservative while also being more fiscally liberal. And the upper class tends to be more socially liberal while also being more fiscally conservative. The middle class, unsurprisingly, is in the middle somewhere. What is enticing about this is that, if anything, the correlation between fiscal and social ideologies, whether liberal or conservative, is a negative correlation.

4) The problem with politicians isn’t that they pander to the lower class. If anything, the problem is that they don’t pander to the lower class. Other data even shows that most politicians are clueless about the average American. As for the below average American, fuggetaboutit.

Let the Dissection of the Tea Party Corpse Begin

I’ve only skimmed this, but it looks worthy of a deeper study. It apparently is the first large-scale political science survey of the Tea Party. It’s published in The American Prospect and written by Abby Rapoport.

Three New Facts about the Tea Party

For a movement that’s helped to reshape the Republican Party—and by extension, reshape American politics—we know shockingly little about the people who make up the Tea Party. While some in the GOP once hoped to co-opt the movement, it’s increasingly unclear which group—the Tea Party or establishment Republicans—is running the show. Politicians have largely relied on conjecture and assumption to determine the positions and priorities of Tea Party activists.

Until now. The results of the first political science survey of Tea Party activists show that the constituency isn’t going away any time soon—and Republicans hoping the activists will begin to moderate their stances should prepare for disappointment. Based out of the College of William and Mary, the report surveyed more than 11,000 members of FreedomWorks, one of the largest and most influential Tea Party groups. The political scientists also relied on a separate survey of registered voters through the YouGov firm to compare those who identified with the Tea Party movement to those Republicans who did not. (Disclosure: The political scientist leading the survey was my father, Ronald Rapoport, with whom I worked in writing this piece.)

For the first time, we can now look at what a huge sample of Tea Party activists believe, as well as examine how those who identify with the Tea Party differ from their establishment GOP counterparts. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the study:

[read more]

Flawed Scientific Research

Here is an article I recommend:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
By David H. Freedman

As a seeker of knowledge, this touches upon a major problem. Science is necessary as the closest thing we have to a fair arbiter of truth. I’m not a naive person and I know science can get manipulated and scientists are prone to biases like any other person. Science is based on noble Enlightenment ideals. When functioning well, it is an example of how a democratic process is implemented to achieve tangible results. When not functioning well (and without ethics to guide it), that is a whole other scenario. Anyone can use science to any end.

Medical science is particularly problematic. So much of medicine has been proven to be placebo. Besides issues of ethics, it’s not even clear how much research even achieves tangible results. To pull back the curtain on the Wizards of Medicine is to take some of the magic away from the placebo effect, the most powerful tool doctors have.

I was wondering about the details for science overall. Are there certain areas of medical research that are more reliable? Are there certain other scientific fields that are more reliable? Are there certain scientific research institutions or peer-reviewed journals that are more reliable? I’m always looking for the exceptions to the rule.

I would think fields involving greater wealth, power and prestige would have the greatest potential for bias and corruption. The medical field has all three of these to a massive degree, but not all other fields share these qualities and forces. The social sciences also would have the countervailing force of researchers in those fields being more expert in the study of human bias, along with less involvement of wealth, power and prestige (relative to the medical field). Plus, the social sciences is the one field that has been the most careful in dealing with the placebo effect and other problems by using such checks as double-blinds.

The scary part in this is that medical science is the one field that most directly deals with human life. Mistakes made there can have massive consequences, especially when false data is taken as the basis for practices used by doctors. The medical field needs to take more seriously what the social scientists have known for decades. Also, the medical field has got to deal with the corporate funding problem because there will be no push for reform as long as the corporate agenda is what researchers are becoming increasingly dependent upon. I don’t mind someone profiting from creating real solutions to real problems, but in many cases that isn’t what is happening.

This is definitely food for thought.

Southern Pre-Capitalism (& Anti-Capitalism)

I was this past week reading from The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese.

Several chapters caught my attention, but it will be long before I read more from it. The book is massive and very dense. I wasn’t planning on reading it at all for the time being, until I checked out some of the chapter titles, one of which is Chapter 21 – Between Individualism and Corporatism: From the Reformation to the War for Southern Independence,  pp. 649-679.

Corporatism is being used in a different way than most people are used to from discussions of politics and economics. The authors are speaking in terms of earlier American society. Corporations as we now know them didn’t exist in centuries past. The pre-capitalist tendencies of Southern society led them to hold onto this earlier corporatism.

A slave plantation wasn’t just a or even primarily a business. It was a social order and a way of life. Many plantation owners didn’t even have any capital (i.e., fungible wealth) for they were entirely invested in their land and slaves (i.e, non-fungible wealth) and this wealth was inherited. This life of inheritance was inseparable from indebtedness, both monetary indebtedness and social indebtedness.

—

It’s easy for us to judge slaveholders as the bad guys. They are certainly worthy of our criticism.

The arguments against slavery were well known since before the American Revolution. Abolitionism was a major force that led up to the revolution. Slaveholders like Jefferson and Washington had plenty of opportunity during their lifetimes to free their slaves and both spoke of doing so, but neither did so. Nonetheless, there was a case of a slaveholder who freed  around 500 slaves. The problem is freeing all your slaves suddenly made you relatively poor.

For most slaveholders, though, it was a very complex issue. Ending slavery meant the collapse of their entire society. They envisioned total chaos and horrific violence. I’m sure there was some guilty conscience involved. However, they weren’t entirely wrong. The end of slavery did end the world as they knew it.

The authors attempt to show that not everything about that society was bad. The South was a pre-capitalist society and Southerners were among the strongest critics of capitalism. They genuinely believed a different way of organizing society was possible. It’s ironic that they criticized capitalism because they saw it as enslaving whites which indicates they knew slavery was a bad thing. It’s equally ironic that the South has since so unquestioningly embraced the laissez-faire capitalism of their Civil War enemy and in doing so forsaken their own traditional values.

This pre-capitalist view of Southern society fascinates me.

—

I did some web searches on Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. They made for an unique couple.

Earlier in their lives, Eugene was a Marxist and Elizabeth was a feminist. Later, they both became strongly conservative. I’m not sure either ever entirely denounced those labels following their right-ward shift. I get the sense that he simply became a Marxist conservative, probably from formerly being a conservative Marxist. He certainly was anti-capitalist or mistrusting of it which is why he became attracted to Southern traditionalism as he understood it. I’m less clear about Elizabeth’s beliefs other than her shifting toward the Catholic version of traditional family values.

I can see what is appealing in the traditionally conservative Southern worldview as presented by these scholars. There is that element of corporatism which I think is the same thing as what I’ve been calling classical conservatism, but there is also that lost conservative tradition from earlier centuries that was highly critical of capitalism. Classical conservatives valued social order over all else. The paired values of capitalism and individualism was the line in the sand beyond which classical conservatism could not go. That line, however, was crossed which is why modern conservatives tend to be classical liberals instead.

In my web searches, I found some articles that are neutral and some from both sides of the political spectrum. I like to look at the diverse perspectives on two people who had diverse and non-standard ideological tendencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Fox-Genovese

http://reason.com/archives/2007/01/09/the-evolution-of-an-antifemini

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/severing-ties-that-bind-women-family/#more-438

http://www.wf-f.org/04-3-Feminism.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_D._Genovese#Shift_to_the_right

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/108044/radical-right-wing-the-legacy-eugene-genovese#

http://networks.h-net.org/node/512/reviews/774/harvey-genovese-and-fox-genovese-mind-master-class-history-and-faith

http://thehuffingtonriposte.blogspot.com/2011/11/it-takes-one-or-former-one-to-know-one.html

https://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=57

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/10/003-conservatisms-in-conflict-49

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/001-the-remaking-of-a-marxist-35

http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue23/lichte23.htm

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-conservative-mind

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/eugene-genovese-and-dissent

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/2974

The Complicity of Mainstream Politics and Media

Sandra Day O’Connor has been in the news about her stated doubts about the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision. I don’t feel like offering an analysis of something that has already been analyzed to death. The facts are obvious, if one cares to look.

I’ll simply point out three issues.

First, there is the recount issue. The recount was stopped by the Supreme Court, but that was just one problem among many. Even Gore wasn’t demanding a full recount nor did he fight the Supreme Court decision. What did Gore gain by taking a dive?

Studies show a state-wide full recount would have shown Gore to be the winner of Florida and so the winner of the presidential election. The popular vote doesn’t necessarily win elections because of how our system operates. Nonetheless, Gore won the popular vote both in Florida and across the nation.

I say this as someone who voted for Nader and generally can’t stand the Democratic Party, Gore included. It is ultimately Gore’s fault. If he had demanded a full recount, he’d at least not be complicit in the undermining of American democracy.

Second, the media played a massive role in the entire incident.

The MSM called it for Gore which probably impacted those who were deciding at the last minute whether to vote or not. More importantly, like Gore, the MSM didn’t do much to challenge the belief that Bush won. They often pushed hard for the assumption that a full recount wouldn’t have mattered.

This all demonstrates the corruption and/or failure of the entire system. Complicity in the stolen election involved the MSM along with both parties, the Supreme Court, Congress and the local Florida officials. Such a massive failure of the system won’t recover easily. When democracy fails in a democracy, what is the next step? When a democracy demonstrates it has become a Banana Republic, what then? Revolution?

Third, a Harris poll done back in 2000 gave some very surprising results.

The first question was: “If everyone who tried to vote in Florida had their votes counted for the candidate who they thought they were voting for — with no misleading  ballots and infallible voting machines — who do you think would have  won the election, George W. Bush or Al Gore?” Only 40% thought Bush would have won and 49% thought Gore would have won. Even more bizarre, almost 25%(1 in 5) Republicans either thought Gore won or chose ‘Not sure/Refused’ as their answer; and of that 25%, there were specifically 11% (more than 1 in 10) Republicans who thought Gore won.

If that poll wasn’t just a fluke, the results are amazing. The very careful wording of the question might be a key element. The question made clear that it was asking in terms of democracy actually functioning and in terms of a state-wide full recount.

—

http://prospect.org/article/thanks-nothing-sandra-day-oconnor

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2000/12/24/the-truth-behind-the-pillars.html

http://www.alternet.org/justice-sandra-day-oconnor-maybe-bush-v-gore-wasnt-best-decision

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/who-won-the-election-who-cares/

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/kausfiles_special/2001/11/update_hotrecount_docs.single.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0127-01.htm

http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=181

http://imai.princeton.edu/research/ballots.html

http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2post.htm