It’s Time for a New Declaration of Independence.

“Our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves” – Thomas Jefferson

In 1776 the English in America told the English in England to bugger off. Their compliant? Laws were enacted in London that governed the English in America, without the governed having a say. This frustration was most famously expressed in that most iconic of political protests: “No taxation without representation”.

But arbitrary taxes were hardly their only grievance.

The Declaration of Independence enumerated the colonists’ objections. The Constitution later established a framework for the new government. Both are notable in that they acknowledged that society needed rules, but that the rules were to be created and consented to by the citizen – excluding women, the unpropertied, slaves and Indians. Nowhere are authority or rights granted to corporations.

“THE PEOPLE”

And you would have thought that was clear to everybody – it certainly used to be.

Now the Supreme Court makes some flim flam argument that, at their root, corporations are just groups of people and that in promoting the rights of corporations you promote the rights of individuals. That’s nonsense. Whosoever you allow to vote in a democracy has one vote. Let him cast that vote for whomever he choses – and let him have the same degree of political expression as any other voter.

If you give corporations rights, you give the owners extra rights denied to employees. In effect the Court gives license for owners to foist their religion on their employees – consigning the worker to compulsory worship.

Owners have the right to profit from their capital. And owners already have a say in the economic circumstances of the worker. Now the Court gives them a say in their workers’ reproductive outcomes.

So why aren’t politicians of every stripe incensed? Why aren’t they true to the nation’s founding philosophy? The answer lies in the Supreme Court’s poodle-like eagerness to please. And presto, corporations are people with free speech rights and permission to bribe politicians.

Which means that Americans have lost their representation again. But instead of an arbitrary, capricious and distant king pulling the strings, today’s autocrat is corporate America. In 1776 the American English declared independence from an English King. Now American individuals have to throw off “a long train of abuses and usurpations” perpetrated by American corporations

The country would do well to find another group of revolutionaries, as talented as the first lot, to wrest power away from the “factions” so anathema to the founders.

Ironically, returning power to the people is a goal liberals and conservatives can agree on – even if they are at odds with what they would do with that power.

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“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal it’s party divisions & make them one people. I do not speak of their leaders who are incurable, but of the honest and well-intentioned body of the people.” – Thomas Jefferson