The Court--We're All Equal Now

Yesterday the Supreme Court took a step backward into the Nineteenth Century—the bad part of the 19th Century, at that. It abolished limits on how much corporations, unions and other large givers could contribute to election campaigns.
It said these limits were a violation of free speech. (One cannot help wondering how these conservative justices would react to a suit demanding total free speech for child pornography.) According to the court, a multi-billion dollar corporation now has exactly the same right to buy political influence as any individual citizen, no matter how limited his means.
There is a certain constitutional logic to this point of view. After all, to be “incorporated” means to be given a legal body (“corpus”) like that of any being who is actually human. In the eyes of the law, General Electric and I are both bodies equal before that law.
Then we run, smack dab, into the same problem we did back in the 1800s. For more than a century, American workers were forbidden to organize in unions to negotiate with their employers. It was constitutional doctrine that the individual workman and the corporation he worked for were absolutely equal in power and influence in law.
In other words, I—the individual workman—and Standard Oil, then the largest and richest corporation in the world, were expected to sit down in a room together, me with my dollar a day wage and Standard Oil with all of its hundreds of millions were deemed to be absolutely identical in negotiating capabilities.
On more than one occasion the U.S. Army was sent out to enforce that legal view. Those who tried to argue that Standard Oil and I were NOT equal in negotiating power could and did, on occasion, face rifle fire.
So for decades “the iron law of wages” prevailed. Daily pay for men stayed at a dollar a day (twelve to fourteen hours), for women it could be $1.75 a week, kids rarely earned more than a dollar a week. But the court held that these wages were fairly negotiated between equals. After all, as they read the Constitution, it would violate the rights of the corporation to have it any other way.
Using their vast resources, the billionaires who ran the corporations—in a day when a single billion made you the richest man on earth—added to the fairness issue by buying up nearly the entire U.S. Senate.
Rockefeller might own twenty senators; Morgan another twenty. Gould might own five or six. Vanderbilt might have fifteen in his pocket and so forth. When they needed a bill passed or blocked, the owners traded senators back and forth like properties in the game of “Monopoly”. There was no help for the individual in the courts or in Congress.
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution required the popular election of senators—cutting down the degree of control large corporations could buy. In 1935 the Wagner Act recognized that an individual worker was NOT equal to General Motors and granted labor the right to organize in unions and negotiate better wages and conditions collectively.
In the early 1970s, recognizing that my fifty dollar contribution to an election campaign does not make me equal in influence to a large union or corporation that can contribute thousands, Congress began to demand public disclosure of where campaign contributions came from—and to limit their size.
Suddenly, the fifty dollars an individual might contribute—combined with thousands more contributions from citizens like him--might just count. Candidates began to show this was true, especially with today’s internet. You could call it the voters’ version of collective bargaining. Thousands of Davids equaling a Goliath.
But the Supreme Court yesterday was having none of THIS kind of equality. After their ruling, I’m at liberty to contribute as much as I can; a multi-billion dollar corporation has the same freedom. That makes us equal, right? Its unlimited contribution, thousands upon thousands, versus my fifty bucks. Fully equal, right?
Money does talk. It once bought the entire Senate—now it can buy whole elections. As a commentator said yesterday, every Congressman and Senator is going to think long and hard about whether that money is going to talk for or against him—before he votes on anything.