Review of Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
Thom Hartmann
Rodale, 360 pp
This book is most useful as a history of corporate ascendance from the Dutch trading companies of the Sixteenth Century to the current age of Globalism.
According to the author, a major milestone along this lamentable way was the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are "persons" entitled to equal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment (which carved in stone the abolition of slavery). Thom Hartmann offers evidence that the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific RR decision was not intended to grant personhood to corporations, but reported erroneously as granting such by a court reporter, possibly with railroad interests. Another theory has it that the Fourteenth Amendment itself was drafted with the word "persons" as part of a railroad (the 800-pound gorillas of the 1800s) conspiracy to extend equal protection to corporations.
Useful and interesting as it is, Unequal Protection is only half as thick as it should be. There is much more to the story, much more that is not told because of the author's lack of scope. Something of a Vermont tree-hugger, he is--and this is not to say that there are many who could do better--the product of the modern, secular society created by the business interests that he is chivvying out.
For example, he probably doesn't realize that corporations were born of the Reformation. Under Christendom, there were no limited liability corporations, or the slavery or exploitation or mortal competition they brought. The power of the Catholic Church (and then the nobility) had to be broken first before slavery could be reintroduced to European civilization.
With the Catholic Church expelled from the game, the field was cleared of absolute truth and morality and open to the pragmatic pursuit of profit.
Hartman surely thinks that the broken shackles of religion are a good thing, but the Catholic Church is today--when there is movement to add animals and trees to the list of "persons"--the only institution that offers any developed concept of what a person is.
We also find in this volume the notion that the U.S. has strayed from its founding principles. (Returning to them, of course, the solution to the corporate problem.). The trouble here is: the U.S. is a commercial republic, born of the same spirit that brought about the Dutch trading companies--indeed Holland itself--and a British government that closed the Port of Boston because small traders didn't want to fall to a tea monopoly.
To substantiate this, I need point only to the powers granted to Congress by the Constitution. Most of them--concerning patents, regulating commerce etc., have to do with business. There is a provision protecting contracts, one of the reasons we don't have a real recognized right to life, in that we have to get other people to agree to let us have a livelihood in order to live. There is also authorization for granting Letters of Marque which are licenses to steal from other countries' citizens. The state of affairs today is not the result of aberration but the inevitable outcome of the 1787 "Miracle in Philadelphia."
Unequal Protection doesn't cover the full extent of contemporary corporate ravaging. The privatization of prisons is unmasked as a means of exploiting cheap prison labor, but nothing is said about the public schools which are now nothing more than marketing tools for fashions and ritalin.
Finally of interest here is Hartmann's assertion that no one is responsible for--as I would put it--civilization now being gravely threatened by corporate permeation. This, again, is a modern mind speaking. Oh, yes! There are people responsible! They are the genus professional managers. They are not the few Bill Gateses or Rupert Murdochs, but the millions of assistant vice presidents, executive directors, CFO's, ,marketing managers etc. More and more the goal of these people is to loot as much as they can in a couple years from an organization and move on to the next with no regard for the quality of product/services and certainly with no regard for other employees.
These people not only work in widget-making. They also have their hands on education, on healthcare, on culture, on science. They have even been given some keys to the Catholic Church. So much of our lives now depends on born-and-bred profiteers who don't care if it all comes crashing down on us as long as they get their bonuses. If you don't pray, I would start doing so if I were you.
Copyright © 2004 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.