Corporate power has sidelined Lincoln's vision

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.

Lincoln harked back to 1776, when American colonists threw off the yoke of the British crown, wrote their own constitution and proclaimed themselves independent. The president claimed that it was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, although the original constitution did not stretch to Afro-Americans or women. 

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 14^th 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

Iron fist of the US state comes down hard in Boston

The reaction to the Boston marathon attack reveals a dangerous degeneration at the very heart of the US state, from president Barack Obama downwards. In truth, if you want to know what martial law looks like in the 21st century, what happened in Boston says it all.

Immediately after the explosions, a gross state attack on rights and civil liberties began in the same city where the citizens took up a revolutionary struggle against British colonial rule in the late 18th century in the famous "Tea Party" revolt. 

Heavy armoured vehicles, soldiers, the FBI, local and state police turned the city into an armed fortress in the hunt for just two men. This was a blatant attempt by a nervous state machine to intimidate a whole city.

After some wavering, Obama pronounced the Boston marathon bombings as a “terror attack”. But the truth is, it is still not clear if the Chechen-American brothers involved were actually part of any wider network. The elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was politically motivated, but any connections with al-Qaeda have yet to be shown.

Whatever the case, the reaction by the American state and its agencies demonstrates its abject failure to protect its citizens on almost every front. The reaction to the bombings showed disarray within the security forces combined with massive infringements of the rights of Bostonians. The facts include:

• The FBI received warnings from Russian intelligence about the brothers and interviewed the family in 2011. Nothing followed. This “security lapse” appears serious enough to fuel rumours that the FBI or the CIA may have been using one of the brothers as a double agent.
• An “unbelievable over-reaction” in the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, leading to a state of siege being imposed by the Boston police. One million people were ordered to stay home and lock their doors, even after the police knew that Dzhokhar was a 19-year-old on the run. The Boston public transport and Amtrak rail services to New York were closed down.
• Despite the huge deployment of every SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team and paramilitary vehicle from surrounding New England states descending on Boston, it was a home owner who found the second bomber. “There was no cause and effect relationship between the state show of power and the apprehension of the suspect,” rights campaigner Tom Mullen, writing in the Washington Times has noted.
• The refusal to read the remaining suspect his legal rights (known in the US as Miranda) on grounds that he represents a “public danger” – even though he is critically ill and handcuffed to his hospital bed is being widely criticised by the American Civil Liberties Union, Slate website and many others rights organisations. As they point out, the “public danger” exception from the right to the fifth amendment (to keep silent) does not remotely apply to this situation.
• Adding to the crimes and misdemeanours of the state were the actions of some amateur detectives on social media sites like Reddit and 4chan which led to some media accusing perfectly innocent bystanders.

Mullen asks: “How did we get here? 238 years to the day, the inhabitants of the very same city started a war and seceded from their union over a mere infantry brigade attempting to disarm them. Now they cheer those who violate their rights much worse than the British ever did.” 

Well, events in Boston deepen a process under way for some time. The American revolution of 1776 has come full circle. Representative democracy invented by the Founding Fathers has given way to a corporatocracy, where economic and financial power have fused with politics. This realignment is, naturally, enforced by vicious state power at home and abroad. Time to renew the American Revolution.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

US voters vent their anger

Barack Obama’s historic and clear-cut victory in yesterday’s US presidential election is the result of a mass mobilisation of people and energy by his campaign that will prove all but impossible to contain within the narrow confines of the American political system.

Obama has articulated and unleashed a popular fury against a degenerate system of government based on back-room deals done in Washington with lobbyists representing powerful corporations. His appeal for change united classes and races against the corrupt, undemocratic status quo, winning overwhelming majorities of young voters, new voters, women, blacks and Latinos. It enabled Obama to overcome the country’s racial divides and become the first Afro-American president.

He built an extensive grass-roots movement, using the Internet in new ways to reach people across the country. This movement in turn galvanised voters to turn out in record numbers on election day. Obama created a formidable machine that the Republican Party could not hope to match.

Yet the principal issue cited by voters - the economy - is one that Obama and the Democratic Party will almost certainly be overwhelmed by. Before the collapse of the US financial system in September, which led to the $700 billion bail-out for the banks, Republican candidate John McCain was edging ahead in the polls.

Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other institutions. After that American people who are losing their jobs, pensions, homes and healthcare, turned to Obama to put things right.

Several things stand in Obama’s way. The US economy is in meltdown as a global slump on a far greater scale than the one that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash takes on a momentum of its own. This will be exacerbated by further earthquakes in the financial system as the era of fantasy finance comes to a crashing end.

Finally, the Democratic Party is a capitalist party. Half of Obama’s $630 million in campaign funds came from corporate sources. Challenging the ultimate status quo – capitalism itself – is not considered an option, even though the profit system is demonstrably showing itself as unsustainable in every conceivable way. Fixing American capitalism is what Obama aims to do, bring workers and capitalists together; it is a doomed project.

Obama’s other project – to renew people’s faith in a political system and constitution that has fallen into deep disrepute – will be thwarted if Obama is unable to deliver. People’s expectations and aspirations are clearly sky high, leaving them with a long way to fall.

A period of history has to come a shattering end with the ousting of the Republicans from the White House. The Bush-Cheney regime personified the greed and the lust for power that was corporate-driven globalisation. Their Project for a New American Century (PNAC) led to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the “war on terror”, which only encouraged would-be Jihadis everywhere and authoritarian rule at home. The crash of 2008 it what finally destroyed the ideological underpinning of this most reactionary of projects and propelled Obama to the White House.

A popular movement against the status quo is now on the march in America and it will encourage others around the world. What Obama has demonstrated is that it is possible to mobilise hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people if they feel they have a leadership to trust and be inspired by. In his acceptance speech, Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, where he talked of “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Fulfilling that aspiration means going beyond the US Constitution’s current framework. Obama has started something that others will have to finish. The failed PNAC will have to be followed by the Project for a New American Revolution.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor