De Toqueville's Warning

 This is a powerful prediction from the classic book, “Democracy in America” by Alexis De Toqueville. So much of what he warns about is that our commitment to equality might be used against us. Regulations and controls, such as those that have sprung up around the pandemic, will be accepted without question because of our thinking that it must be all right because everyone has to do it. 

"Thus, I think that the type of oppression threatening democracies will not be like anything there has been in the world before; our contemporaries would not be able to find any example of it in their memories. I, too, am having difficulty finding a word which will exactly convey the whole idea I have formed; the old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable. This is a new phenomenon which I must, therefore, attempt to define since I can find no name for it. 

I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest. His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself; if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be said to have lost his country. 

Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but is seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life? 

Thus, it reduces daily the value and frequency of the exercise of free choice; it restricts the activity of free will within a narrower range and gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all this, inclining them to tolerate all these things and often even to see them as a blessing. 

Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to is own liking, spreads its arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. It does not break men’s will but it does soften, bend, and control them; rarely does it force men to act but it constantly opposes what actions they perform; it does not destroy the start of anything but it stands in its way; it does not tyrannize but it inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.” 

 This quote is from “Democracy in America”, by Alexis De Toqueville, Pages 805-806 Penguin Classics, Penguin Putnam Books, New York, NY. 2003

End Corporate Personhood to Revive Conservatism

For the most part conservatives lose the cultural wars before a shot is even fired. Or to be more precise they lose the allegiance and support of almost all the young and idealistic folks who should be their natural allies in the noble cause of liberty. Conservatives lose this all important first engagement because they don’t offer a realistic, workable response to the problem of greed and runaway corporate abuse.

Anyone with half a brain can see that corporations are running amok in our society, with monopolies and near monopolistic oligarchies, crony capitalism and cozy corporate relationships with federal regulators that squeeze small entrepreneurs out of the market.

This misuse of the free enterprise system has resulted in the largest disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor in the history of the world. Compared to the wealth and power wielded by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the absolute monarchs of old Europe look like fair minded democrats. 

Then, to top it off, conservative “thinkers” offer up anemic and laughable attempts to dodge the issue, arguments like the extolling the benefits of “the invisible hand of the marketplace” (which is a true phenomenon) from Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, conveniently neglecting the fact that Smith was writing about a market of small, competitive merchants, not a market dominated by monopolies and near monopolies.

After their dodgy false arguments fail the defenders of our current corporate excess will throw the pretense of reason and logic out the window and boldly proclaim that greed is good. To which the proper response is that yes, greed is good; for the greedy. Just like cancer is good, for the cancer cells, but not so much for the entire body. In like manner, greed, which is the taking of more than is needed or deserved, is very lucrative for the greedy but not healthy for the economic community as a whole.

There is no mystery then about why most of the idealistic young people turn from the incoherence and phony rhetoric of modern conservative ideology and are instead attracted to the dubious charms of socialism. They sincerely want a future free from the obvious oppression of corporatism, even if it means they have to risk falling into another, possibly worse form of oppression in socialism.

This is all very frustrating to an enlightened, peace and justice seeking conservative, like, in all humility, me. One must presume that conservatives generally desire to conserve traditional American culture, if not actually returning to the good parts of our history, like strong communities and families, while leaving the bad parts like racism behind. However, these same conservatives seem to be completely unaware that American political culture originally provided a means by which communities could regulate corporations. We used to do this, through our state and local governments, in a way that gained the benefits of incorporation and preserved free market principles, yet kept the corporations accountable to community control, and therefore much less oppressive.

The way it was originally set up, corporations were chartered by the states (or even locally) and could be de-chartered by them without answering to federal authorities. Since they controlled the chartering process, states had a lot of regulations about how corporations could operate (More on that in a bit). That original structure was torn apart by a doubtful case from the US Supreme court in 1886, Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad (118 US 394) that simply declared that corporations are persons. This doctrine, which has no basis in the Constitution, amounts to one of the most egregious examples of judicial activism in history, the kind of judicial activism which conservatives usually oppose. Taking that doctrine that corporations are persons, and combining it with the Fourteenth Amendment’s stipulations that all persons must receive equal treatment under and protection by the laws effectively nullified the powers of the states to regulate corporations. Shortly after the 1886 ruling, as a direct consequence of it, we began to see the rise of interstate monopolies and corporate dominance of our society.

To better understand our situation, let’s examine why our society chose to allow incorporation to begin with. The easiest way I know to explain it (since I am not a corporate lawyer) is to focus on what is known as LLC, or Limited Liability Corporations. Say, for instance, someone in 1850 wanted to be involved in financing a railroad. This is a good thing for society, as it enables people and goods to move more rapidly, for greater distances and at less cost than by using horse based transportation. However, the liability that might attach to a railroad, such as if a train would derail in an urban area with great loss of both life and property, caused folks with a lot of money, the kind of folks who could finance a railroad and gain those benefits for society, to shy away from such investments because a single accident could cost them their entire fortunes.

Enter the LLC. With a Limited Liability Corporation, the investors are liable only for the amount they have invested, not for their entire personal fortunes. This makes it to where some of those rich folks will invest in the railroad, and consequently it gets built. Sure, they make a lot of money, but the entire society benefits, so some legitimate profit is not denied or resented. That is why we as a nation chose to allow incorporation.

Further, back before 1886, the states had some very creative ways of regulating corporations. Some states required open books, so the legislature could keep tabs on what they were doing. In some states one person was not allowed to sit on the board of more than one corporation. Corporations could not own shares in other corporations, and in many states, corporations were not allowed to lobby the state legislature or contribute money to political causes. These and other creative regulations, along with the ever looming threat that outraging public opinion might provoke the political response of de-chartering any particular corporation, worked to reduce corporate greed and attenuate corporate abuse.

All that would be needed to go back to that healthier mode of corporate existence would be to revoke the doctrine of corporate personhood. Since it was established by a simple court based proclamation, and not something like a constitutional amendment, we could revoke corporate personhood simply by passing a law through congress and getting a presidential signature. Admittedly, it might be a little more complex than that, since we have entered in to so many international trade agreements, but if we decide to make this change, we can get it done relatively quickly.

Many so called conservatives will object that we can’t have the government intervening in the free market like that. Puhleez! That is the kind of incoherent babble that has brought this republic to the brink of collapse. The simple irrefutable fact is that allowing businesses to incorporate is an example of government intervening in the free market to begin with. With corporate personhood the government intervenes in the free market, enabling the creation of these beings, these artificial beasts, and then just lets them loose on the landscape, to maraud and exploit the people and the planet.

In the book, “The Gangs of America”, (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2003) Ted Nace writes,
“”Sociologists call the 1897-1903 period ‘the corporate revolution’. But we have seen the real corporate revolution took place over a longer period, roughly from 1850 -1900. During this revolution, larger corporations did not merely come to dominate the American economy. More significantly, the legal structure defining the corporation as an institution was fundamentally altered. A century earlier, the framers of the American system of government had attempted to devise a ‘containment vessel’ for corporate power: the state issued charter. Now that system was completely disassembled and replaced with another whose goals were the exact opposite- as though the steel bars that had formed a cage were melted down, recycled, and used to create a suit of protective armor instead. Rather than protect democracy from corporate power, the legal system increasingly shielded corporations from legislative power.”

By revoking corporate personhood, we would metaphorically be melting the metal from that shield down, and recycling it again, to once again build an effective containment vessel for that beneficial corporate power. To go back to the previous metaphor, after the government aided in the creation of these beasts, instead of allowing them to run wild over the landscape, ending corporate personhood would ensure they would be put on a strong short leash, and the control of that leash would be put in the hands of our communities.

The political philosophy behind revoking corporate personhood is simple, valid, and hard to argue against. In the first place, incorporation is a privilege granted by the community, through the power of government, to groups or individuals because they run or propose enterprises which will benefit the community. If the people of the community come to see that some enterprise is not benefiting the community, they can rightly demand that the legislature, the representatives of the people of the communities, either enact new regulations to control that enterprise, or revoke its charter.

In a post corporate personhood nation, corporate abuses, such as greed and profiteering, paying too low of wages and charging too high of prices, environmental and social abuse, monopolistic practices, and the like could be met with strong community responses, We could match those creative corporate policies of exploitation with creative regulatory plans of our own, and this time we wouldn’t have to play the game of “Big Brother May I “with the federal courts to get their permission to do so. The creativity of the corporations could be matched and checkmated by the human creativity in our communities. This would put the relationship of corporations to communities back on a more even keel, a healthier basis.

What’s more, the power states would have to de-charter corporations that had outraged public opinion would be of immeasurable benefit. Once such de-chartering had happened once or twice, both the public and the corporate owners would feel and understand that new power. Decision makers in the corporations would know that there was a line that must not be crossed, but no one would know precisely where that line was drawn. The happy result would be to motivate the corporations to be much more self policing when it came to possibly abusive schemes.

Erin Brockovitch, she of movie and lawsuits against corporations fame, was once heard in an interview stating that she knew some corporate executives who agreed with her concern about the environment, but that in the boardrooms they never voice those concerns because in that room their only role is to increase shareholder value.

 In a post corporate personhood world, those same executives would find their voices in the corporate boardrooms, because the corporations would be self policing, not knowing how far they could go before crossing that line of community outrage. Thus in a post personhood corporate boardroom concerns about community well being, which would include worker, community and environmental well being, might always relate to shareholder value and would always, therefore, be on the table. The idealistic executives might not win every debate, but their idealistic concerns would always get a hearing.

That then is the way things would tend to go in a post corporate personhood economy. If we conservatives would embrace this change, we would find that it would yield a prosperous economy that was much more beneficial to our workers, our families, our communities and our planet.  Plus, it would attract a lot of idealistic young people to the conservative cause, empowering us to win a lot more elections

What’s more, and the most important point at this time, by taking on the challenge of ending corporate personhood and returning this nation to the economic system it was founded with, we would be holding up a shining example of the blessings of traditional American liberty for the consideration of a new generation of Americans. Additionally, by freeing conservatism from the chains of big business in this way, the entire agenda of Local Community Moral Self Government would start to make a lot more sense to all of us, greatly increasing the likelihood that we can actually re-found our republic on the basis of LCMSG.

Taming Social Media

The federal Supreme Court has taken up the issue of how big social media companies, such as Tik Toc, X, and Facebook might be regulated.   As it is, these social media companies have become so big, with so much influence over society, with so many people participating on them, and getting their news from them, that the idea of regulating them like some kind of public utility is gaining some traction.  Consequently, this issue is being mis-framed as a question of how the government might use its power to force big social media to be better corporate citizens and use their information power in a way that is more beneficial to society.  There is a much better way to address this issue, getting a handle on big social media, which doesn't involve government monitoring, or in any way regulating, content.

The first thing we must do to tame social media is to examine the basic compact, usually implied but not openly stated, between individual social media users, and the companies that provide the platforms.  That basic agreement is that the companies allow people, provided by the company at little or no cost, the ability for the individuals to learn information, interact with other people, and simply to share in the social and cultural life of the world.  To gain these benefits the individual user implicitly agrees to allow their personal data to be used by the companies.

So far so good.  Over the years, however, the social media giants have decided to modify this basic agreement, and have allowed their platforms to become abusive and, increasingly, they engage in both subtle and overt forms of censorship. This can be a serious problem.

 

Consider the case of someone running a business using a Facebook site that is then suspended from Facebook for posting something that offends someone else.  Whether the offense was intentional or not is of no matter to the social media company, so in short order business owner is suspended from Facebook, the business suffers as a result, and it might even be driven to bankruptcy. 

Or take the case of someone like James Woods who uses social media to promote a cultural/ political point of view. In the course of a random X(twitter) war, he posts something that offends some hitherto unknown core value of the twitter “community” and loses his platform and voice in public affairs for the time of suspension.

Both these kinds of cases and multitudes of minor variations on the same themes (such as shadow banning) cry out for some form of legislative relief. However, we must tread carefully here because the quick and easy response of empowering the government to regulate content on the internet is a cure that would be worse than the disease. The Supreme Court would be wise to rule against such laws, like the Texas and Florida laws that they have accepted on appeal. Instead, we should wisely use government to establish a framework that provides civil empowerment to individuals in relation to the social media giants and doesn’t entail the government controlling any of the content online.

 Legislation along these lines would require the social media companies to prominently display links to their community standards and or terms of service, and would also require statements regarding their political/ cultural profiles and biases. Such statements must be in clear and concise language. Then any users could examine those standards and stances before joining, and decide if that platform was for them. The law could also require that any changes to the company’s standards, terms, or profile be posted to all users before going into effect, so users would always know where they stand and aren’t subject to surprise ambush.  Additionally, any suspension of service must, along with the notice that service has been suspended, provide clear definitions of which community standards are being referred to, and how exactly the post violated them.

Then, if a social media company violates their own standards by, for example, claiming to be politically neutral and yet it is found that they suspended someone from full use of their site because of political bias, even though the individual did not violate any stated guidelines, the company can be held liable for breach of contract and sued for damages in civil court. If, in their profile statement they admitted to a political bias they couldn’t be sued for holding to it, but if they claimed neutrality and then exhibited bias, they could be sued. An additional caveat to the law is that the algorithms these social media companies use to direct content, shares, likes, etc would have to be rendered legally transparent, and open to at least judicial, if not public, review. This would deal with secret shadow banning of individuals. That way, the individual user could get what they agreed to, a free and fair forum for exchanging ideas.

So if a social media company basically defrauds me about how I can use their services, I can sue them? “Good” some might say, but “So what? Big media would still control our data, taking our expressions of community and family, compiling them, and selling them to other corporations so as to exploit us.” True, we, or at least our personal data, might still be at the mercy of big media with us having not much choice in the matter. That is where another part of the law to empower us against big media comes in.

 There would be a three fold aspect to this part of the law. First of all, it would require the social media companies to have a “withdraw from platform” button, easily accessed with just one click from the user’s homepage. If you have ever tried to quit from Facebook, you might know how daunting that task can be, and that is simply not right. We shouldn’t allow corporations to treat citizens like mice walking into a trap.

 So leaving Facebook, or X, or snapchat or whatever should be easy, just one click on a prominent link on the home page, a pull down menu, and “withdraw from platform” a clickable choice from there. There could be some few dialogue boxes from that point, password required so that only the person who owns the account can withdraw and that kind of thing.

The next part of the proposed law would be where we, the people would gain some serious leverage in our  relationship with big social media. The second aspect of the law relating to withdrawing from a platform is that when you decide to leave one of them, all your data goes with you, never to be used by that company again (unless you go back to them in the future). When you leave, your contacts, links, history and everything is erased from their memory. In this way, the companies would have a lot to lose by losing users, thus the users would gain a lot of leverage in the relationship.  This would be fairly easy to enforce too.  Simply note when someone withdraws, and then a week or so later get that social media company to provide a data list that the recently withdrawn person had been on.  Say, housewives in Denver.  If that persons name appears on the new data readout, the social media company should be massively fined for once again, breach of contract.

The third aspect of this second part of the proposed law is that when you leave one of the social media platforms you are allowed to take your data (contacts, links, history, artwork, webpages, etc) with you, and to download it to some other platform if you so desire. In other words, the government can mandate that such data be made portable. This would provide for portability of our data, allowing us users to keep our work and efforts, some from over the course of many years, for our own benefit. Ensuring in this way that we individuals wouldn’t effectively get punished when we move our social media presence to another platform.  This would once again empower the individual in relation to the social media giants.

The governments, both state and especially national, have clear authority to enact these kinds of laws.  Given the unequal power relationship that big social media companies have to individual users, there is an obvious need for the government to step in and protect the individuals against the ravages and abuses of big social media.  Or to be more precise, the government can properly and safely use its legitimate powers to ensure individuals have their own powers to do the job of keeping these companies in line.

The government can accomplish this good by enacting just a few laws.  First of all require that all terms of service, are clear, concise, and reciprocal. Yes, the companies can suspend or cancel accounts that violate them, but individuals can sue the company for violating them as well.  Second, the law should require that all algorithms be rendered transparent and understandable in plain language, so that individuals can decide for themselves if they are willing to go along with any restrictions that have been placed on their point of view.  Third, the law can and should mandate that people can easily resign from any social media platform,  and take all their data (and their work) with them when they go.  

Laws like these will almost certainly pass any judicial scrutiny, since they in no way violate any constitutional stricture (they actually fit into, unlike many laws which have falsely been claimed to, the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce).  The companies would not have their content controlled and would still enjoy their exemptions from libel and slander laws.  The big change would come once the people have these powers at their fingertips.  We, the people would  then be able to whip those companies into proper working order in a very short time.