A Nation Unto Themselves: Corporations, the Wealthy, and a Loss of Human Concern

An idea has started making the rounds the past few days as the coronavirus pandemic grows and the economy sputters. At first it only existed in the margins, a headshakingly stupid thought that was instantly dismissed as barbaric and literal fascism. The idea that the economy needed served and American lives should be put at risk just as the pandemic surged. That senior citizens and at-risk Americans should more or less sacrifice their lives for the sake of the market.

Then it picked up speed.

Where the President of the United States got it, like most of his other ideas, was Fox News. A talking head said it in passing and Donald Trump happened to hear it. Now, as his businesses take a hit and his possibility of reelection looks troubled like it never has been before, the idea sounds pretty good to him. So much so that he spent the press briefing on Monday interrupting his top experts and speaking over them, yet another instance in which Trump’s insecurity and personal delusion put us in danger.

Trump is now obsessed with the idea and corporate America agrees. Of course it does. On Fox News Monday night, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas spoke for the rest of elderly America saying they should be willing to sacrifice their lives for their children to have a good economy.

There’s no telling if Trump and Republican ghouls will get their way and steer back social distancing or societal emergency standards and flood the country with infection. To do so would likely kill millions and wreck the economy anyway. But the swell of this plan requires an understanding of the history of how corporations and the wealthy came to view the world in such brutal and inhuman terms, and how we might work to create a better, more human future.

The concept of a corporation as we know it today began in 1882 as former Senator Roscoe Conkling argued before the Supreme Court that corporations were actually people and should be granted constitutional rights, particularly freedom from unnecessary taxes.

Conkling was representing a railroad company and had been paid handsomely to perjure himself. Conkling had been a member of the committee that drafted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment penned with the mission of giving freed slaves all the rights they deserved. Conkling took that noble mission and sold it to the highest bidder, going in front of the Court and lying by saying that the committee hadn’t just meant freed slaves, it’d intended corporations to have those same rights.

That lie was reinforced by another lie. The court would not rule on Conkling’s case, but Bancroft Davis, a former railroad executive, would report in his journalism that they had upheld and enforced the idea of a corporation as a person and later Stephen Field, a Supreme Court justice so tainted by corruption that he was often forced to recuse himself from certain cases, used Davis’s falsified reporting to establish precedent.

A lie based on a lie based on a lie.

The need for corporate personhood was necessary for the corporation to evolve to the form we know it today. Corporations had blossomed as financial vessels following the Civil War as they worked hand-in-hand with the government to cover the continent in railroads and telegraph wire. The government invested tons of its money into these businesses and was bought and sold by bribes that were hidden and often celebrated.

By the turn of the 20th century, these corporations and their obscenely wealthy beneficiaries controlled the government as a whole and the entire country. They had grown so large off their profits and power there was no limit to what they could, what legislation they could pass. Corporations had outgrown the government that birthed them.

History tells us this was a time of populist change. The corporations grew so large that they had to reined in by progressive movements, by labor unions, by Teddy Roosevelt and antitrust activities. This is true. But history was set to repeat itself again.

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If there’s anything America is bad at it’s understanding history and learning from its mistakes. In this era, that tragic trait is most embodied by the Republican Party, which has a disgusting track record in the 20th century for causing massive crises, bungling them, and then recreating the crises again once recent memory has dissipated.

First it was the Depression-era Republicans who did nothing while Americans starved and the country crumbled, then it was the Reagan Revolution that destroyed the safety net that’d been created to rectify the GOP’s missteps.

What we’re watching now is history repeating itself, only blended with other elements for accelerated damage. Like the Depression-era Republicans, this Republican Party is doing literally nothing to curb the damage caused by the pandemic and the market cratering and urging everyone to remain calm while the deaths pile up. Like the Gilded Age, corporations have again grown so large that they have escaped the grasp of governmental oversight and have discarded any notions of civic responsibility.

Make no mistake, there is a way to fix this without sacrificing millions of lives. Without damning our elderly and vulnerable to certain death. Without doing untold damage to human beings and families and even the economy their deaths will certainly destroy. But that strategy would require change, and corporations and the wealthy will not permit even the slightest change or threat to their standing power.

What we have seen now, powered by Reaganomics and neoliberal globalism, is a new corporation that has straddled the world itself and lost any civic identity. Facebook isn’t American. Facebook is its own nation. Apple is its own nation. Amazon. Walmart. It goes on and on and on until you realize that these economic forums and summits are the actual United Nations that the UN only wishes it was.

Decisions like the one to push millions to certain deaths are the kinds of decisions that are made by unfeeling, unconcerned entities that have only the world to gain from each and every death. They see us pieces to move around in the pursuit of production and profit. Sometimes pieces come off the board. Sometimes it pays to have pieces come off the board and make room for other pieces.

This is how it has been and how it remains.

Donald Trump is the embodiment of the corporate ideal. While we are stuck viewing him in a traditional political sense, what we are missing is that his is a new kind of politics, or a new brand of politics anyway. Post-politics. A mindset dedicated to destroying the means of government, disabling the cogs of the governmental machine, so that business and the wealthy can operate unimpeded by oversight or pesky democracy. This post-political mindset is corporatism put into action, and like any corporation to meet to discuss the possibility their actions are killing scores of people, the question is always what the cost would be if that killing was left unsolved.

Conkling’s perjured testimony was a prophecy. That corporations would become people. That they would become living, breathing creatures that would plague the earth.

He was lying at the time, but he was completely right.

What we have in Donald Trump as President of the United States is the corporation come to life.

Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random house. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of the Muckrake Podcast.