Saving Our Democracy
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I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
                                                                                                         — Thomas Jefferson 1816

by Jim Tarbell

Time has come to separate corporations and state. As Marjorie Kelly points out in her seminal book The Divine Right of Capital, the democracy revolutions ended the divine right of kings, but they never vanquished the divine right of capital. The rich owners of capital use corporations, the supreme form of capital aggregation, to hold the same sway over public policy that divine-right Popes and priests held over Europe for centuries: sending soldiers off to war; impugning non-believers; and controlling a huge percentage of the wealth and power. 

The wealthy class asserts their political sway through their: 
  • Overwhelming financial contributions to political campaigns;
  • Lobbying and supporting pro-corporate public policy makers;
  • Corporate-funded, non-profit think tanks that develop public policies beneficial to the wealthy, to the detriment of the common good;
  • Revolving door between corporations and senior policy-making positions, which has reached a peak in the current administration with almost every member of the cabinet and the President himself a corporate owner, executive or lobbyist; and
  • War on democracy declaring that corporate money spent on campaigns is free speech and can not be regulated, which has been embraced by their Supreme Court appointees. 
Depredations of the corporate overlords have left us with a deteriorating climate system, a highly polluted planet, depleting resources, continual war, and both economic and social inequality. The global majority are wage slaves, street vendors, or part of the vast army of unemployed that keeps corporate costs down. 

So how do we implement a separation of corporations and state? 
  • We start out by getting money out of politics.
  • We institute publicly-financed elections where all qualified candidates receive an appropriate sum of government money to carry on their campaigns. 
  • We revert back to the era when the petition clause of the US Constitution that gives people the right to redress the government for grievances meant living humans complaining about harmful government actions, not fictitious corporations using this clause to swamp our government with lobbyists and pro-corporate think tanks to create pro-corporate public policy that benefit the rich. 
  • We need to create a proud army of civil servants dedicated to the common good, where the notion of serving the public is respected as a noble and critically important life calling. 
  • We enhance this by criminalizing the revolving door in all directions, preventing corporate comrades from serving as public policy making officials and preventing public policy making officials, from using their knowledge and connections made as a public servant to benefit corporate profits. 
  • We support Move to Amend’s 28th Amendment, ending corporate personhood and money as speech, and declare victory in the war corporate elites have declared on democracy. 
  • We reverse two centuries of Supreme Court rulings that have empowered corporations and their wealthy owners, executives and well paid professional henchmen. 
Dartmouth College v Woodward, decided a few years after Jefferson made his plea to crush corporate power, is the first decision that needs to be reversed. That court ruling took corporations, which are rightly a creation of the government, and subordinate to it, and made them equal to government. Over the next two centuries, the Supreme Court made corporations superior to citizens. It gave them rights reserved for living humans in the Bill of Rights. It declared that money is equal to speech and that limiting corporate money in our politics limits corporate free speech rights. 

We have to separate corporations and state to save our democracy. Now is the time to do it. ​

Separating Corporations and State

For further information on separating corporations and state , check out the following issues of Justice Rising: