Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute speech at Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, delivered 150 years ago today, during the country’s bitter civil
war, looks back to the founding principles of the American revolution and
forward to a democratic society for all.
How the ideals Lincoln
championed in the war against the slave-owning south were soon abandoned by his
successors and the new, unified American state, is lost among the events
marking his historic address.
Nevertheless, the American Revolution shook the modern world,
gave birth to the concept and practice of representative democracy, and was the
precursor to the great events in France in the following
decade.
Significantly, as the Reclaim Democracy
campaign points out, the colonists also freed themselves from control by
English corporations. The country’s founders retained a “healthy fear of
corporate power” and barred them from attempting to influence elections or
public policy. The campaign explains:
“For 100 years after the American Revolution, legislators
maintained tight control of the corporate chartering process…. Citizens
governed corporations by detailing operating conditions not just in charters
but also in state constitutions and state laws. Incorporated businesses were
prohibited from taking any action that legislators did not specifically allow. States
also limited corporate charters to a set number of years.”
Attempts to introduce the European model of shareholder
ownership and legal independence were thwarted for several decades. But the
corporations ignored the restrictions. “They converted the nation’s resources
and treasures into private fortunes, creating factory systems and company
towns. Political power began flowing to absentee owners, rather than
community-rooted enterprises.”
While Lincoln
was giving his address in honour of the dead Union soldiers, the world around
him was changing in more ways than he perhaps grasped. The Civil War had made
many corporations rich and they were openly buying people in Washington and state capitals. “During this
time, legislators were persuaded to give corporations limited liability,
decreased citizen authority over them, and extended durations of charters,”
says Reclaim Democracy.
So Lincoln ’s
declaration at the end of his oration that the end of the war would bring “government
of the people, by the people, for the people” was already being hollowed out by
corporate power.
Before long, the courts applied doctrines that placed the protection
of corporations and their property at the centre of constitutional law,
sidelining the citizen sovereignty that followed 1776.
Ironically, it was the 14th Amendment to the
constitution, adopted in 1868, and which protected the rights of freed slaves,
that was used to grant corporations “personhood”, giving them human rights.
Since then, the corporations have established unbridled power over the American
political process.
Back in 1961, president Dwight Eisenhower, himself a former
general, in his farewell address, warned against “the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex”, adding: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist.”
In the half century since, matters have deteriorated. What
the corporations want, they more or less get. Deregulation? No problem.
Bail-outs. Just a phone call away. More weapons production? Ring the Department
of Defence.
Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer with two million
employees, can remain staunchly anti-union, while suggesting its poorly-paid
workers donate
food to their impoverished colleagues! Monsanto has a free rein when it
comes to untested genetically-modified crops while a delayed government report
into fracking is over-reliant on data supplied by the industry itself.
Reclaim Democracy wants to end the power of the corporation
and restore the charter system that was established after 1776. In all honesty,
that will require a new American Revolution to achieve.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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