The Corporate States of America

The Corporate States of America

 

By Jonathan McIntosh — Cropped version of File:J20_corporate_flag_dc.jpgCropped and uploaded by Trickymaster at de.wikipedia (07:25, 12. Apr. 2009), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8458827

 

Introduction

Large corporations have commandeered the world economy to such extent that, of the one-hundred largest economies in the world, sixty-nine are corporations. Those numbers don’t appear alarming on the surface but placed in the framework of the 2008 collapse of the world economy, the problems of what to do about “too big to fail” takes on an alarming importance. Only a handful of America’s largest corporations have brought down the housing market, reallocated pension and retirement funds of millions of workers into exorbitant salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, produced massive job layoffs around the world, and caused a spike in personal and small-business bankruptcies.

Corporate representatives in government, such as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, have created a “shadow government” that essentially controls American economic policy. The 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United Decision that granted human rights to non-human corporate entities has turned electoral politics into a scramble for massive campaign funds from organizations with no stake in the public interest. The American political system is now governed by those sixty-nine corporate economies, which have perpetual life, unlimited resources, and the ability to make their own law to assure that their rights and their power take precedent over the will of the people and the public good.

We’ve had amble warning about the excesses of corporate power. Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter: “I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which are already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.”

And on another occasion:

“Headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar.”

And again, in a letter to Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin: “I sincerely believe […] that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

The history of the United States has no shortage of great leaders who have alerted us to the dangers of the corporate monster; Along with Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Dwight D. Eisenhower issued public warnings of the encroachment of corporate money and corporate power into government.

 

A History of Corporate Personhood: Causes and Consequences

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed into law in 1869, reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Amendment was written primarily to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1865 that denied citizenship to slaves and clearly refers to person and citizen. But Supreme Court decisions before and after the Fourteenth Amendment have resulted in the creeping — and creepy — definition of “person” to include corporations, including multi-national corporations.

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” A corporation is not a person. American jurisprudence takes corporate strengths and human weakness into consideration in making and enforcing its laws. Prisons are built for people but cannot contain a corporation. Corporations have perpetual life in which to realize their goals, while humans have about fifty productive and voting years. Corporations have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources, while the average worker lives on a weekly wage. Corporations have the legal power to make laws as they wish; the citizen can cast a single vote for a representative he can trust to look out for his interest in the legislative and executive branches of government.

Corporate personhood extends back to Roman law, but its American History began with the end of the American Revolution. Citizens of the newly found republic held contractual agreements with agencies in the mother country. Did the Revolution nullify those obligations? Could the United States legislate new laws to supersede English law that created the contracts?

Those questions came before the new Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in 1816. The state of New Hampshire had passed laws changing the charter of Dartmouth College from a private institution, chartered by the British Crown in 1769, to a state university. The college trustees filed suit. The court ruled that the charter was a contract between the king and the college trustees, and that a state cannot pass laws to alter a contract. That ruling honored corporations and people as equals in contract law.

In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, filed before the Supreme Court in May 1886, “Chief Justice [Morrison] Waite said, ”The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” That statement was made before arguments were heard in the case, and do not appear in the court record. Subsequent cases before the court have drawn on that case as legal precedent regardless of the error.

Since 1886, the court has heard several cases involving corporate personhood, and the benefit or loss to actual humans has swung in unpredictable directions. Then, in 1978, the issue of corporate personhood exploded.

The Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall, brought Marshall v. Barlow’s before the Supreme Court. An inspector for the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA) entered Barlow’s Company, a plumbing and electrical installations contractor. The president and general manager of the company denied access to the agent on the grounds that he did not have a search warrant. OSHA had the responsibility and the authority to conduct warrantless searches of businesses to guarantee worker safety, but Barlow’s argued that the corporation enjoyed the same Fourth Amendment guarantee of protection against illegal search and seizure as an individual. The court sided with Barlow’s, and henceforth OSHA inspections of businesses must be enforced with a search warrant, or OSHA must make an appointment with the company to conduct an inspection.

On January 21, 2010, an appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia reached the Supreme Court. Led by the court’s conservative members, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, citing free speech rights, struck down the McCain-Feingold Bill and allowed corporate entities to sponsor funds to political elections without revealing their source. Multi-national corporations now control the financing of elections in the United States, and corporate financial contributions to the political process reached the one billion dollar mark in 2018. The Democratic Party under President Obama appealed to the corporate interests for a détente. Democrats softened their support of workplace safety, a livable minimum wage, and government regulation of business.

With Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a stunning decision that a corporation cannot be sued for human rights abuses. A panel of the court ruled 2–1 on September 17, 2010, that the Alien Tort Statute gives U.S. courts jurisdiction over alleged violations of international law by individuals only, not by corporations.

Seeing the direction those court decisions will take the country, former President Obama’s plea for détente with the corporate community makes good political sense but has the potential to forever end the democratic system. His party has traditionally championed worker safety, equal employment opportunity, and a livable wage; issues at odds with corporations. If the Democratic party is to survive — that is, to receive unlimited campaign funds from the deep pockets only corporations can provide — it must relax its support of the proletariat. Ergo, détente.

I find reams of eloquent prose about the failure of the American democratic experiment in the phrase, “Follow the money.”

 

Abuses Committed by National and Multi-National Corporations

Who can forget the televised images of Enron company employees who found it hilarious that “grandmas” were in danger of dying in the heat due to the artificial electrical shortages created by Enron to hike their fees for services?

“A Defense Department auditor testified [on August 10, 2010] that DynCorp International billed the government $50 million more than the amount specified in a contract to provide dining facilities and living quarters for military personnel in Kuwait.”

Headlines like that represent a common feature of Americans’ daily lives. We have become inured to corruption. The 2010 mid-term elections resulted in a turnover of the political majority in Congress because of the anti-corruption mood among the electorate. Yet, many of the very people ushered into power have praised the Citizens United decision. The revolution in Washington suggests lyrics from a rock anthem by the British rock group, The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Human rights violations by corporate entities don’t often garner headlines, though. The only way to get a handle on corporations’ involvement is through research. Here are just a few of those violations. For a full list of name brand-name companies engaging in behavior that might have made Genghis Khan blush, the Global Issues website at http://www.globalexchange.org/.

https://archive.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/221-transnational-corporations/46979.html offers a full alphabetical list of offending corporations and links to reputable organizations that back up its claims.

Caterpillar, Inc. supplies equipment to the Israeli army for the purpose of destroying Palestinian homes to facilitate annexation of East Jerusalem.

The crimes charged against Chevron are too numerous to list in a paper of this scope, but they include rape, murder, political corruption, and — the plague of America’s dependency on oil — environmental destruction.

Outside of the United States, the Coca-Cola Company behaves like a mafia family. Murders, kidnappings, and torture highlight its activities in Third World countries, and in some of the industrialized world, reads like intrigue and adventure fiction.

Employees of DynCorp have been found to have engaged in sex trafficking with women and underage girls.

 

A different kind of corporate abuse arose with the Supreme Court's Burell v. Hobby Lobby decision. That case gave closely held corporations a super-power in that it permits Hobby Lobby and others to govern the religious preferences of their employees by denying them health insurance based on the employer's religious beliefs, not on those of the employee. That decision went far beyond the question of non-human personhood, it allows corporations to seek to control workers beliefs. That is only one step removed from attempting to control employees' political affiliation.

It goes without expression that the American version of Christianity is little more than a medieval superstition, yet legal attitudes from 1200 CE govern the Supreme Court's decision in Burrell as well as cases like Sebilius v. Hobby Lobby. In that decision the Court ruled that the personal beliefs of a small number of corporate executives can overrule the personal beliefs of some 50,000 employees.

 

The Future of Corporate Personhood: Consequences

The year 2010 marked the crowning of transnational corporations as the new owners of the American government. Where it will lead us is, at this time, anybody’s guess. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have prepared the way for the new leadership with international laws that supersede federal and state statutes regarding relaxed food safety governance, reduced product quality standards, a virtual end to workplace safety regulations, and the erosion of individual rights and national sovereignty. We have already seen the cost of those agreements in the recent flood of product recalls, tainted food in the marketplace, and the undermining of workplace safety laws.

Social attitudes, too, have favored the growing power of corporate entities. Contemporary views of entrepreneurship no longer include the bootstrap legacy. An entrepreneur is now one with massive financial backing from banks and capital investment firms. Corporate culture is rapidly becoming the only socially acceptable course of economic pursuit. Employment in a large company, preferably a multinational corporation, is regarded as a most noble profession, one pursued by most college students. The arts and crafts, manual trades, outdoor work, jobs in philanthropic organizations, and vocations in religious organizations are rarely considered by those who came of age in the corporate world, and — judging by a barrage of human-interest stories in the media — shunned by even the chronically unemployed.

 

Conclusion

Of all the conceivable results of the corporatizing of America and the world, the bulk of them are unpleasant but that need not be the reality. The companies that now own the country’s political and judicial system rely on consumerism to feed their gluttony, and they have the power to destroy the consumer culture through the elimination of a middle class with disposable income. They must take care that, in bringing down American wages, they do not undermine their own profits. Worldwide, people have shown a surprising tendency throughout history to sacrifice their individual pursuits and band together to resolve injustices. If our new masters do not tread carefully — with much more care than they have in the recent past — they could find themselves pitted against the very source of their power: the consumer.

 

Note: This work is an updated version of an earlier piece that appeared on this website.)

 

Works Cited:

“69 of the richest 100 entities on the planet are corporations, not governments, figures show” https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/69-richest-100-entities-planet-are-corporations-not-governments-figures-show/

 “Corporate representatives in government, such as Senator James Inhofe” https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/james-m-inhofe/summary?cid=N00005582&cycle=CAREER

 “the will of the people and the public good” Corporate Influence: Exploring the Relationship Between Lobbying and Corporate Power. https://systemicjustice.org/article/corporate-influence/

 “Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter” 12 November 1816 Founders Online https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-10-02-0390

 “And on another occasion” Google Books, Hidden Treuhand  page 226 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hidden_Treuhand/wdxvhhUiabEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Headed+toward+a+single+and+splendid+government+of+an+aristocracy+founded+on+banking+institutions+and+moneyed+incorporations+and+if+this+tendency+continues+it+will+be+the+end+of+freedom+and+democracy,+the+few+will+be+ruling+and+riding+over+the+plundered+plowman+and+the+beggar.%22&pg=PA226&printsec=frontcover

 “And again, in a letter” “Thomas Jefferson quote about banking-Truth!” Posted on March 17,

2015 by Rich Buhler & Staff. https://www.truthorfiction.com/jefferson-banking/

 “Those questions came before the new Supreme Court” Definition of a corporation by Chief Justice Marshall in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) https://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/corpor.html

 “A corporation is not a person”: “Surprise! Citizens United Legal Reasoning Doesn’t Rely on Corporate Personhood” By Nick Bentley November 11, 2012 https://reclaimdemocracy.org/citizens-united-corporate-personhood/

 “In the case of Santa Clara County” “Supreme Court: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394. (1886)” https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/118/394/#:~:text=CHIEF%20JUSTICE%20WAITE%20said%3A,laws%20applies%20to%20these%20corporations.

 “The Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall brought Marshall v. Barlow’s before the Supreme Court”“Supreme Court: Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc., 436 U.S. 307 (1978)” https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/436/307/

 “Citizens United V. Federal Elections Committee) Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

 “multinational corporations now control…” ‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats. By Anna Massoglia and Karl Evers-Hillstrom, March 17, 2021. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/03/one-billion-dark-money-2020-electioncycle/

 “With Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell…” Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 569 U.S. 108 (2013) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/569/108/

 “former President Obama’s plea for détente”: U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday he wanted to lower the corporate tax rate and eliminate tax loopholes to pay for that, requesting support from the business community to achieve that goal.” 11 Feb. 2011 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41456730

 “jurisdiction over alleged violations of international law by individuals only, not by corporations.”Geoffrey Pariza, Spring 2011, Loyola University Chicago, School of Law “Genocide, Inc.: Corporate Immunity to Violations of International Law after Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum” https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=lucilr

 “jurisdiction over alleged violations of international law by individuals only, not by corporations.” “Companies Immune From Alien Tort Suits, Court Rules” Bob Van Voris & Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg, 17 Sep 2010 https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/companies-immune-from-alien-tort-suits-court-rules/

 “US: DynCorp Billed U.S. $50 Million Beyond Costs in Defense Contract” Published by Washington Post, By V. Dion Haynes, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 https://www.corpwatch.org/article/us-dyncorp-billed-us-50-million-beyond-costs-defense-contract

 “behavior that might have made Genghis Khan blush” December 2005 https://archive.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/221-transnational-corporations/46979.html

 “sex trafficking with women and underage girls.” Sex Trafficking Scandal in Post-Conflict Bosnia DynCorp employees and international peacekeepers accused of forced prostitution and child rape in Bosnia. https://icoca.ch/case-studies/sex-trafficking-scandal-in-post-conflict-bosnia/

 “and the undermining of workplace safety laws” Lori Wallach, essay, “Hidden Dangers of GATT and NAFTA: The Case Against Free Trade” (San Francisco: Earth Island Press, 1993), 23-64.

 “…one step removed from attempting to control employees' political affiliation.” https://healthlaw.org/resource/summary-of-the-supreme-courts-decision-in-hobby-lobby/

Suggested Reading:

Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom, (New York: Atria Books, 2024)

 

The U.N. and the Sex Slave Trade in Bosnia. Isolated Case or Larger Problem in the U.N. System? April 24, 2002. https://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa78948.000/hfa78948_0.htm

 

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America (New York: Crown 2023)

 

“Corporations data 2017” https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Jdgaz_qGg5o0m_6NCU_L9otur2x1Y5NgbHL26c4rQM/edit#gid=1364122473

 

Timothy Gorringe, Fair Shares: Ethics and the Global Economy, (New York, Thames & Hudson, 1999)

 

The History of Corporate Personhood: How did we get to the point where a for-profit corporation can lay claim to religious rights? Ciara Torres-Spelliscy on the slithering history of corporate personhood. Ciara Torres Spelliscy, April 8, 2014https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/history-corporate-personhood

 

SCOTUS Blog: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/sebelius-v-hobby-lobby-stores-inc/

 

SCOTUS Blog

New fallout from Hobby Lobby, By Lyle Denniston, on Jul 9, 2014. https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/07/new-fallout-from-hobby-lobby/

 

Bloomberg Law. Court Opinions. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682, 134 S. Ct. 2751, 189 L. Ed. 2d 675, 123 FEP Cases 621, 82 U.S.L.W. 4636 (2014), Court Opinion. https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Burwell_v_Hobby_Lobby_Stores_Inc_No_13354_and_13356_US_June_30_20

 

SEC. 6. EXEMPTION FOR RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS. https://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ENDA-religious-exemption.pdf

 

Hobby Lobby symposium: A decision based on conclusory assertions and results-oriented reasoning. By Marcia Greenberger, on Jul 2, 2014. https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/07/hobby-lobby-symposium-a-decision-based-on-conclusory-assertions-and-results-oriented-reasoning/. 

SEX TRAFFICKING SCANDAL IN POST-CONFLICT BOSNIA: DynCorp employees and international peacekeepers accused of forced prostitution and child rape in Bosnia. https://icoca.ch/case-studies/sex-trafficking-scandal-in-post-conflict-bosnia/

 

THE U.N. AND THE SEX SLAVE TRADE IN BOSNIA: ISOLATED CASE OR LARGER PROBLEM IN THE U.N. SYSTEM? April 24, 2002. https://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa78948.000/hfa78948_0.htm

Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, and the Big Lie

Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, and the Big Lie

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash 

The lie as a political tool has been with us since the first group of humans huddled together for protection against danger from outside the group, village, or tribe. A leader would have come to the fore; someone seen as wise and capable, someone who could make the decisions necessary to perpetuate the continued existence of his followers. What kind of promises did he make to secure his exalted position? What kind of lies-and-or-facts were told to acquire the consent of the ruled?

From that ancient past until January 22, 2017, American politicians strived to appear as men and women of integrity; leaders who could be trusted to make the hard decisions required for the continued existence of the group and its way of life. On that date, a politician uttered a provable falsehood about the crowd size of Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration crowd size. When a reporter challenged the White House’s numbers, advisor to the president Kellyanne Conway said the crowd size put forward were “alternative facts,” thus ushering in the post-truth era.

Nazi Germany had offered a variation on the alternative fact with Adolf Hitler’s invention of “The Big Lie” as a propaganda technique in which a lie is so bold that its audience is to assume it’s truth that no one “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Then, Norman Mailer coined the term “factoids” for which he described as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper." The Oxford English Dictionary online takes the definition a step further: “An item of information accepted or presented as a fact, although not (or not necessarily) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often as to be popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact “

An additional doctrine of the post-truth era came from UK journalist Damian Thompson who in 2005 coined the term “counter-knowledge,” defined as “misinformation packaged to look like fact and that some critical mass of people believes.”

Those four words and phrases for “lie” merged into one reality with the Fox News broadcast of Sunday Morning Futures, which ignored Rupert Murdoch’s suggestion to avoid talk of Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Because the show’s host mentioned Dominion Voting Systems by name, she opened Fox to a multi-million-dollar lawsuit.

As a result of the “Big Lie” promoted by Donald Trump and echoed by the Conservative media, between 2,000 and 2,500 rioters attended the pro-Trump election conspiracy theory insurrection on January 21, 2021, causing $2.7 billion in damage and four deaths on the day of the attack, plus four suicides by Capitol policce in the days and weeks following.

Fox is not alone as the right-wing voice in American media. A 2007 joint study by the Free Press and the Center for American Progress found that “On the 257 radio stations owned by the five largest owners of commercial stations, 91 percent of weekday talk programming is conservative.” The study reported that 2570 hours of conservative programming filled an average weekday, while “progressive” talk broadcasted only 254 hours. That is not to say that the entire conservative media is pouring out lies to boost the right-wing ideology but that a tremendous amount of conservative spin is being dumped on the American people. It surprising that the GOP has not won every election they have entered.

Conservative media outlets are not the sole purveyors of right-wing and fake news. Their audience also spreads the word. A subgroup of conservatives known among researchers as “Low-Conscientious Conservatives” (LCCs) were found to be the largest body of people engaged in spreading disinformation,[1] a phenomenon the result of “the Fox News Effect.” But what good is having extensive media power if they cannot use it to push their audience into hating the same people they hate? That is not to say that progressive media does not employ the same kind of emotional trigger headlines that has made right-wing media so ubiquitous. But so much of the left-wing media still seems to focus of intellect over emotion. They have not yet learned that Americans do not think with their prefrontal cortex, but with the limbic system, the areas of the brain responsible for critical thinking and emotional response, respectively.

We are inundated with incessant nationalist claims of patriotic love of country from the media-outraged Right, but what do they love? Not the Constitution, as we have seen with the current administration’s shredding of that document. Not the people, with the constant trashing of people who use government benefits to subsist—at one end of the public welfare scale, or to pull themselves out of poverty, at the other end. I touched on the hate Americans feel for other Americans in a previous mini essay (see “Wealthfare”). Hate has become the political currency of the far Right: hate for Hispanics, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, blacks, the poor, feminists, urbanists, transsexuals, homosexuals, and so on. And so on. The poor, though, occupy a special place in the American hierarchy of hate.

The U.S. initiated massive economic relief for the millions of job losses during the COVID pandemic. That government aid lifted a wide swath of Americans out of poverty, most notably among children. Child poverty was cut by half.

Cause for champagne and confetti, right?

Wrong.

Not even the good news could sway some members of Congress, the conservative media, and LLCs who went to work to accuse the poor of laziness. The message went out across the country: the poor will not work if they can receive government assistance. Ronald Reagan’s Big Lie continued to find traction in 2025, almost half-a-century after he engaged in a brand of synecdoche in which he used a single case of welfare fraud to paint all welfare recipients as lazy moochers. Facts, though, get in the way of his contempt for the poor and the ideologue’s victim-blaming. When states stopped some or all the emergency benefits that were put in place during the COVID pandemic, there was no increase in employment. Millions of beneficiaries of those emergency relief efforts did not flood the job market when their unemployment checks stopped. Those states that cut unemployment benefits did, however, find a significant drop in consumer spending and a slowdown in the economy.

 

Professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis summed up the turn from news-as-information presented with reason to propaganda presented for an emotional response with his four “rules for modern American pundits:”

1.     Never be dull.

2.     Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.

3.     The American public is stupid; treat them that way.

4.     Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.

That well sums up political the political media today.

 

[1] There is, of course, some controversy over the claim of the significance of LLCs in the spreading of fake news, and some researchers challenge even their existence. See the August 21, 2023 paper from the National Library of Medicine at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37602992/

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Bibliography

Alternative Facts: Bradner, Eric. “Conway: Trump White House offered ‘alternative facts’ on crowd size.” CNN, Jan. 23, 2017. https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/politics/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts

 The Big Lie: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. I, 1925and Vol. II, 1926, quoted in McQuade, Barbara. Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.  New York. Seven Stories Press, 2014, 72

 Factoid: Merriam-Webster defines “factoid” as “an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print” while the Oxford Languages defines it as: an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/factoid_n?tab=meaning_and_use#4942990).

Factoid: In his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, (Marilyn, A Biography, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973) Norman Mailer gave us “factoid,” which he described as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper."

 Counter-Knowledge: Levitin, Daniel J. Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era. New York: Dutton, 2017. 168.

 Fox News &2020 presidential election: Associated Press, “Fox News Settles Defamation Suit for $787.5 million, Dominion Says.” The National Herald. April 19, 2023. Accessed November 9, 2025. https://www.thenationalherald.com/fox-dominion-reach-settlement-over-false-election-claims/.

A 2007 joint study; conservative programming: Pierce, Charles P. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free. New York: Anchor Books, 2017. 103.

 Low-Conscientious Conservatives: Kakkar, Hermant and Lawson, Asher. “We Found the One Group of Americans Who Are Most Likely to Spread Fake News.” “One subset of conservatives expressed the greatest tendency to promote false news stories. Here’s what it means for the fight against misinformation.” Politico. 01/14/2022. Accessed November 10, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/14/we-found-the-one-group-of-americans-who-are-most-likely-to-spread-fake-news-526973

 Fox News Effect: The “Fox News Effect”: Dellavigna, Stefano and Kaplan, Ethan. “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting.” 2007. The National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12169/w12169.pdf

 Cause for champagne and confetti: Michael Conti. “A Killer Stereotype: A Documentary and Reading List About the “Welfare Queen” Narrative: At its core, the welfare queen myth shapes who we believe is deserving and fully human, and who is not.” Economic Security Policy, June 8, 2020. Accessed November 21, 2025. https://economicsecurityproject.org/news/a-killer-stereotype-a-documentary-and-reading-list-about-the-welfare-queen-narrative/

 accuse the poor of laziness: “Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Earnings, Employment and Consumption,” Columbia University, Working Paper, August 2021. –quoted in Matthew Desmond. Poverty, by America. New York, Crown, 2023. 82.

See Desmond, Poverty, By America, 85-87 for comments by prominent Americans asserting dependency on government by the poor, or laziness of the poor. In general, those comments were right-wing propaganda.

 Insurrection rioters: Lori Robertson, "FactChecking Claims About the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot," https://www.factcheck.org/2022/01/factchecking-claims-about-the-jan-6-capitol-riot/, January 6, 2022

 Divine Vehicle: Martha McHardy, “Steve Bannon Says ‘There’s a Plan’ for Trump 2028.” "We need him for at least one more term," he said, describing Trump as a "vehicle of divine providence, he's an instrument." Oct 24, 2025 https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-says-there-plan-for-trump-2028-election-10931543

 “Trump Administration’s Problematic Claims on Tylenol” by Kate Yandel, September 23, 2025 https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/fact-check-trump-administration-tylenol-autism/3814365/

 “Repeated Falsehoods at Autism Press Conference” by Jessica McDonald, Lori Robertson and Robert Farley.  https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/repeated-falsehoods-at-autism-press-conference/  Final tally of lies: Analysts say Trump told 30,000 mistruths – that’s 21 a day – during presidency; Former president made almost 21 untrue statements a day while in office, analysis suggests-- "According to analysis by the Washington Post, Mr Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims between his first day in office, on 20 January 2017, and his final day on Wednesday, when Joe Biden was sworn in as the country’s next president."Gino Spocchia - Thursday 21 January 2021https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-lies-false-presidency-b1790285.html

Professor Andrew Cline: Pierce, Charles P. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free. New York: Anchor Books, 2017. 104.

Philosophical Atheism: A Review

 

Philosophical Atheism: A Review

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

 

Ernest Nage’s essay, “Philosophical Concepts of Atheism” appeared first in Johnson E. Fairchild’s 1959 philosophy anthology, “Basic Beliefs: The Religious Philosophies of Mankind,” and then, in 1997, in Peter A. Angeles’ “Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God.” Nagel stated that his purpose in writing the piece was to “show how atheism belongs to the great tradition of religious thought.”

“No!” I wanted to shout at the open book. “Atheism has no connection to religion beyond the suspension of belief in its claims pending sufficient evidence to the contrary.” I pressed on, determined to debunk Nagel’s tagging of atheism as a philosophy and a component of religious thought. Atheism, I would counter, is simply the disbelief in a god or gods. Nothing more. Nothing less. To call it a philosophy is like calling creationism theory a philosophy. Mere disbelief does not make a philosophy of atheism. To insist on the atheist philosophy argument play too easily into the laughable theist claim that theism is a religion.

"Philosophical Concepts of Atheism" begins with a definition of theism as the view “that the heavens and the earth and all that they contain owe their existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-consistent, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous and benevolent being, who is distinct from, and independent of, what he has created,”

That is a definition of a transcendent god, but it does not address pantheism. Did Nagel feel that pantheism was not subject to criticism? Or that it is not a part of “the great tradition of religious thought”?

Also, defining atheism as a philosophy presented a greater challenge that forced the author to break atheism into two categories and four sub-categories: (1) “those which hold that the theistic doctrine is meaningful, but reject it either on the ground that (a) the positive evidence for it is insufficient, or (b) the negative evidence is quite overwhelming; and (2) those who hold that the theistic thesis is not even meaningful, and reject it (a) as just nonsense of (b) as literally meaningless but interpreting it as a symbolic rendering of human ideals.”

That, too, aroused some kickback from me for the “or” in (1.a.) and (1.b.). Why not “and?” Can’t we question supernatural claims for both insufficient positive evidence and overwhelming negative evidence? Of course it can. I do not see why an atheist cannot hold both positions, and that (2.a.). is an added legitimate position. Nagel appeared to claim that the three positions are mutually exclusive. I contend that they are not.

 

It is when he takes on theists’ arguments for the existence of their god that his essay shines. He dismantled the argument from design, and the cosmological and teleological arguments. His thoughts on the ontological argument- the claim that because God is a perfect being, “he is one whose essence or being lacks no attributes.” Nagel’s debunking caused a problem: Repeating Immanuel Kant, Nagel said that “existence” is not an attribute. Understanding that premise is above my pay grade. Why is it not an attribute? His answer to the question requires a greater education in philosophy than I currently hold. So, I will put that into the category of “weak atheists’ arguments” until I can better understand the attributes of existence. And why it is not itself an attribute.

Moving on.

Speaking of weak arguments, tackling the argument from design is- for someone of Ernest Nagel’s intelligence, like shooting fish in a barrel (pardon the cliché). He first takes apart the watchmaker argument on which so much of the argument from design depends, and then he dismantles the “Divine Mathematician” segment of creationists’ insistence on filling any hole in scientific knowledge with a supernatural deity.

Then, we come to my favorite: the Problem of Evil. Apologetics for evil have been so thoroughly debunked that it would be redundant to discuss Nagels’ disposal of them. It, like the argument from design, is beneath Nagel’s attention. That he expended ink and intellectual energy on the topic can only mean that such apologetics were a common response to unbelief in 1959.

 

Having dismissed the common claims of evidence for a supernatural being or beings, Nagel turned his attention to his stated purpose in drafting the essay: to “show how atheism belongs to the great tradition of religious thought.”

 He wrote that “philosophical atheists have not shared a common set of positive views, a common set of philosophical convictions which set them off from other groups of thinkers.” On asserting that “there has never been a what one might call a “school of atheism,” he then sets out from there to establish a school of atheism. He rejects from discussion of philosophical atheism the “’village atheist’ whose primary concern is to “twit and ridicule those who accept some form of theism.” Those of us who have suffered gross and minor injustices at the hands of Christians for our refusal to join their club reject his rejection, Nagel’s off-handed dismissal rings hollow. The “village atheist” with some training in rhetoric can display the intellectual capacity to debate supernaturalism from a philosophical perspective, but he can also engage feral religion in metaphorical back-alley brawls.

He parses philosophical atheists into three major groups: (1) those which “reject the assumption that incorporeal agents can exercise a causal agency.; (2) atheists generally agree that “controlled sensory observation is the court of final appeal in issues concerning matters of fact,” a wordy way of saying that the empirical method (of which I considers methodological naturalism as a significant component; Nagel does not elaborate) is the final arbiter in disputes of fact; and (3) philosophical atheists “have generally accepted a utilitarian basis for judging moral issues. It is on this claim that I wrestle with. Years ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with that, but reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” changed my mind about utilitarianism as a basis for morality, but I have yet to find its replacement.

In summary, “Philosophical Concepts of Atheism” offers effective arguments against the claims of the existence of a supernatural entity or entities but falls short of providing evidence that “atheism belongs to the great tradition of religious thought.” He wrote an otherwise brilliant essay that would have served better if his stated purpose had been to debunk common arguments for supernaturalism.

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Who Killed William Goebel?

 

Who Killed William Goebel?

 

William Goebel (photo: public domain)

 

“Assassination is probably the only enterprise where private industry is not more efficient” ― Pierce Brown, Iron Gold”

Governor William Goebel and his friends Frank Helm and the Kentucky state Attorney General W.J. Hendricks walked to Helm’s First National Bank of Covington, Kentucky, when they came upon John L. Sanford, who had been leaning against a metal rail as though waiting for someone. With his right hand in his pocket, he shook hands with Helm and Hendricks with his left hand, turned to Goebel, and said, “I understand that you assume authorship of that article.”

“I do,” Goebel said.

Sanford pulled out a firearm. He shot at the governor, piercing his clothing. Goebel drew his own weapon, fired once, and killed Sanford with a single shot to the head. Goebel pocketed his weapon, called is brother Justus, and turned himself in to the police. A previous threat by Sanford to kill Goebel and the testimony of witnesses to the shooting acquitted Goebel the charges of dueling and murder.

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The Goebel-Sanford feud began years earlier, when Senator Goebel introduced a bill that reduced tolls on Kentucky’s roads, bridges, and railroads, including the Roebling Bridge between Covington and Cincinnati, one of Sanford’s investments. In retaliation, Sanford arranged through powerful men to block Goebel’s chance for a seat on the Court of Appeals.

Later, Goebel moved three of Covington’s accounts from Sanford’s bank to Frank Helm’s First National Bank of Covington, further enraging Sanford., who then threatened to kill Goebel.

Sanford had practiced for some time a custom of the period in which citizens could post scandalous remarks about their enemies in newspapers. Goebel retaliated by posting a comment about Sanford in which he referred to his enemy as “John Gon — h — ea Sanford. The sexual disease insult resulted in Sanford’s assassination attempt.

John L. Sanford was not the Senator’s only enemy. Indeed, Senator-turned-Governor Goebel possessed an abrasive personality that attracted the ire of powerful men.

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Before he ran for office in the Senate, William Goebel worked in his private legal practice where he took on corporations and railroads. For fifteen years he fought against corporations who abused their power over workers and the widows of men killed in train wrecks. During those years, he never lost a case against the L&N Railroad, the most powerful corporation in the state.

On entering politics in 1887, the Senator fought for the rights of blacks, women, and the working class while fighting abuses by corporations. The company that suffered most from Goebel’s populist crusades: the L&N Railroad. Goebel sought to have railroads pay their fair share of taxes, to raise those taxes, and to curtail the L&N monopoly’s generous lobbying that gave the company immense power in state government. When a bill to abolish the state’s Railroad Commission came before the Senate, L&N President Milton H. Smith’s lobbyists spent lavishly to encouraged friendly legislators to kill the bill. On learning of the lobbyist’s influence, an investigative committee sought and failed to get an indictment against the lobbyists, but the bill to abolish the commission died in the General Assembly.

During the 1890 convention to rewrite the state constitution to comply with amendments to the U.S. constitution. Goebel included in the new document a provision that secured the Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulated railroads.

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In 1899, Goebel ran for governor or and won the Democratic Party’s nomination at the raucous party convention held at Louisville’s Music Hall that the New York Times described as “a continuous performance of howling farce. . . .” (Walker)

L&N’s chairman, August Belmont wrote in 1999 a letter to Goebel saying he would do all he could “to counteract the evil influence of your unjustifiable hostility.” He told Goebel’s friend, Urey Woodson, that He and his associates had spent 500,000 dollars to defeat Goebel. L&N’s president, Milton Smith, took charge of the campaign against Goebel’s run for governor.

Goebel told Woodson that, as his first act as governor, “he would ask for a special grand jury and get an indictment against Milton Smith and his cronies for criminal libel and put them in in jail for at least two years.” (Walker)

Kentucky Secretary of State Caleb Powers participated in (and allegedly organized) a meeting to plan an armed force from the eastern part of the state to descend on Frankfort to influence legislative action.

Goebel lost the election, but the Democratic State Central Committee found thousands of illegal ballots and asked for a recount that gave Goebel a leading edge in the race. The Democratically controlled General Assembly voted to give the election to William Goebel over William Taylor. Taylor sent out letters to friend to hurry to the capital. Many of those friends came from the rugged eastern mountains and arrived with weapons. Most of them came by way of fee passes on the L&N Railroad.

On January 30, 1900 — the day before Goebel was to assume office — he walked across the capitol plaza with two friends when a shot fired from the Executive Building struck him in the chest.

William Taylor seized control of the governorship, immediately declared a state of emergency, sent letters to friends requesting that they hurry to Frankfort, and called out the militia.

Democrats attempted to meet but were barred from the capitol by the militia. They met secretly at the hotel where Goebel lay dying and invalidated enough votes to declare Goebel as governor and John C. Beckham as lieutenant governor.

Over protests of his physicians, Goebel was sworn in as governor on his deathbed on January 31, 1900. He ordered the legislature to assemble and rescinded Taylor’s call to the militia. His order was ignored.

On February 1, 1900, Taylor signed vouchers to pay the militia (President Redman). Farmer’s Bank refused payment on the grounds that Taylor had usurped the office.

A court order restrained Taylor from interfering with the legislature. Alonzo Walker was deputized to serve the order on Taylor, but Taylor would not permit him to enter, so Walker tacked the order to the door, whereupon Taylor ordered the militia to apprehend him.

William Goebel died February 3, 1900. Lieutenant Governor John Beckham was sworn in as governor. The funeral train, February 6, 1900. On that day, Judge Moore ordered the release of Alonzo Walker. Taylor initially ignored the order but soon gave in. Goebel was buried with great pomp and ceremony on February 8.

Taylor withdrew the militia two days later. The legislature was permitted to meet for the first time since the crisis began.

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Surveyors determined that the shot came from Caleb Powers’ office. Warrants were issued for the arrest of Powers and John Davis, state Capital Square policeman.

“Governor” Taylor ordered the militia to deny Sheriff Sutter entry into the capitol to serve the warrants.

Powers and Davis escaped Frankfort disguised as soldiers and accompanied by twenty-five soldiers to Barbourville, a stronghold of the Taylor faction. Police chief Ross of Lexington stormed the train with his entire force and took Powers and Taylor prisoner after a desperate battle.

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In 1909, Governor Augustus E. Willson pardoned all parties involved in the Goebel assassination.

End

Sources:

[1] The Late Governor Goebel, Marianne C. Walker. HUMANITIES, July/August 2013, volume 34, Number 4. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/julyaugust/feature/the-late-governor-goebel. Accessed 08/14/2019

[2] Nicholas C. Burckel, 1974, William Goebel and the Campaign for Railroad Regulation in Kentucky, 1888–1900 https://filsonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/publicationpdfs/48-1-5_William-Goebel-and-the-Campaign-for-Railroad-Regulation-in-Kentucky-1888-1900_Burckel-Nicholas-C..pdf citing The Louisville Courier-Journal, October 17, 26, 1899. Accessed 11/07/2021

[3] “Caleb Powers: United States Representative, Politician,” “The prosecution charged that Powers was the mastermind, having a political opponent killed so that his boss, Governor William South. Taylor, could stay in office.” https://prabook.com/web/caleb.powers/1060693

[4] “Goebel Shoots Sanford” www.nkyviews.com/Kenton/text/Goebel_shoots_sandford.html

 

 

Shareholder versus Stakeholder

 

Photo by Barnes & Noble

 

An interest in corporate greed and the corruption of the democratic system by corporations led me to the bookstore and there to scan Lynn Stout’s The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public. On closer reading, I found that I did not get what I expected from the book. I read, not a rant against Milton Friedman’s insane economic views, but a reasoned and sober review of the problem with the idea of shareholder primacy.

Lynn Stout (September 14, 1957-April 16, 2018) was at the time of publication of The Shareholder Value Myth, the Distinguished Professor of Corporate and Business Law at the Clarke Business Law Institute, Cornell Law School. Ms. Stout died at age 60 after a long struggle with cancer. She graduated summa cum laude from in 1979 and earned a master’s degree in public affairs in 1982, both from Princeton University; and a J.D. degree from Yale Law School also in 1982

 

Through news media and internet slop, I had been led by online news and social media to the belief that shareholder primacy was the corporate law of the land. That belief was shot down by the author by only the second paragraph and the fact is repeated throughout this, the last publication before the author’s death. Shareholder primacy (or shareholder dictatorship, as she referred to it at one point) is not corporate law. The book’s author established the fact with careful documentation and meticulous attention to detail. She established connections between the more infamous corporate scandals to the ideology of shareholder value, and yes, she made clear that shareholder primacy is an ideology.

Adolph Berle, an early proponent of that ideology in his 1932 publication The Modern Corporation and Private Property, had abandoned his position by the time of the 1954 printing of his The 20^th Century Capitalist Revolution (found here: https://ia804605.us.archive.org/31/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.190591/2015.190591.The-Twentyth-Century-Capitalist-Revolution.pdf). Economist Milton Friedman, however, didn’t get the word that shareholder primacy was a dead issue, or he disagreed with it, in the creation of the Friedman Doctrine through his 1971 New York Times article, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” (https://yieldpro.com/pdf/infographics/2024/0910/friedman.pdf)

The book links various corporate corruption and criminality to shareholder primacy ideology; disasters ranging from the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill to escalating CEO compensation that reached five hundred times that of the average employee by 2003. The rue professional, Stout pulls that off without a hint of rant or rave, but with well-researched references and a cool, detached voice. Her telling of the 1919 Michigan Supreme Court’s Dodge v. Ford decision and its relation to the myth of shareholder primacy as a legal requirement, alone, makes the price of the book a bargain. ($20.95 at Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-shareholder-value-myth-lynn-stout/1110855846?ean=9781605098135.)

 

Lynn Stout delivered on the book’s subtitle, How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public. She challenged Friedman’s opinion on the social responsibility of corporations by introducing the stakeholder: the debtors, contractors, employees, and the public. I found her argument convincing that “shareholders and debtholder alike have equal—and equally fallacious—claims to corporate ‘ownership.’” (Stout, 38)

She went from there to knock down the claim that shareholders are the “residual claimants” in corporations, that is, the party that has priority access to the residual profits of a corporation after it has met its legal obligations.

Ms. Stout packed a lot of punches into a thin book, covering such areas as the principal-agent model of corporate structure That model states that the owner of a business, assumed to be the shareholder, hires an agent, the manager(s) to run the business. The principal-agent model gained traction in the business world with the 1976 publication of a work by Michael Jensen of Harvard Business school and William Meckling, University of Rochester (Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure) The author knocks down that argument by pointing out the corporation’s responsibility to the stakeholder and role of the stakeholder in the corporate structure.

Before reading The Shareholder Value Myth, I knew only enough about corporate law to consider Milton Friedman’s and the Chicago School’s as intellectually unhinged. I thank Lynn Stout for providing solid framework to support that opinion.

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Wealthfare

 

Wealthfare: Socialism for the Wealthy, Capitalism for the Rest of Us.

Photo by Roman on Unsplash 

An old friend called to wish me a happy birthday. The conversation began with some rehashing of old times before it veered into the politics of welfare recipients and the mass deportation of immigrants, as conversations so often do in these days of authoritarian rule and its white-hot hatred of “the Other.”

“Who is going to do the jobs that immigrants are doing? Who is going to perform the back breaking grunt work and the tedious, mind-numbing jobs that Americans refuse because there is something better out there for them?” I asked.

“When Americans get hungry enough, they will take those jobs,” he said.

His remark left me speechless. He expressed a desire for his fellow Americans to experience such levels of hunger that they would be compelled to accept low-pay and often back-breaking jobs they have declined for decades.

On one hand, my friend claimed that Americans would take the low-paying and often thankless jobs that immigrant now perform when they face desperation, but then, he complained that poor people are poor because they are lazy.

What is wrong here? The problem concerns the need of the authoritarian mind to punish our most vulnerable, and I see this hunger in all my authoritarian-minded friends, acquaintances, and online discussion partners. It is a feature of many social media posts. When they heap their social and political opinions on me, I see that no cruelty is too severe against brown-skins, transgenders, homosexuals, immigrants, atheists, liberals, civil service employees, and non-Christians. Those people against whom they bend their rage are to be purged from “their” culture, and eliminated with cruelty, rounded up like cattle and sent to foreign hellholes or deprived of all civil rights and censored. Respect is reserved for those sufficiently deprived of melanin. Those authoritarians express outrage ranging from outright bigotry to cold, calculated contempt when discussing their plans for The Other.

They tell me that the poor are lazy. The homeless are voluntary. Why are my taxes paying people to not work? They ask. And in each of their statements decrying the poor, they regurgitate the lies and innuendos that still haunt us from the 1980s. Their vision of the government-assisted poor is straight out of the Ronald Reagan’s hasty generalization in his promotion of the “welfare queen” as the typical welfare recipient.

Since the Reagan administration, wealth disparities have grown dramatically, income-tax rates for top earners have fallen, and overseas manufacturing and automation have reduced the availability of blue-collar jobs.

The one thing all my circle of authoritarian ideologues share is a vision of the government-assisted poor as welfare queens when, in the real world nearly every American adult has relied on a major government program. Rich and middle-class families draw on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family ¹

^·          We provide more for those who need it the least, creating a welfare state for the upper income bracket.²

^·          The four-hundred richest Americans are taxed at the lowest rate—23 percent.³

•     The US spends more than twice as much on the upper class as on national defense.⁴ We spend it on benefits like the mortgage interest deduction which benefits the upper-income class. In 2013, 73 percent of the program benefited the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans.⁵

I call that “Wealthfare.”

WEALTHFARE

People who used non-cash government benefits, like tax breaks, were unlikely to see themselves as beneficiaries of a government presence in their lives.⁶ We see a similar dynamic at work when the beneficiaries of wealthfare—the 10-to-20 percenters—swear by how their hard labor created their success. It calls to mind the old joke about the person who was born on 3^rdbase and thought he hit a triple.

For example, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on tax subsidies for homeowners, while only $53 billion went into direct housing assistance for low-income families.⁷ Low-income earners were born at the batter’s box and facing Roger Clemens on the pitcher’s mound.

Homeowners claim the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes and they may do so for the length of the mortgage—while the lifetime limit for cash welfare to the poor is five years.⁸ Yet, I have heard, frequently and loudly, that those who receive cash benefits have no incentive to work. That is class warfare at its finest. Wealthy Americans enjoy a wealthfare state that is surpassed only by that provided for the corporate state.

PLUNDERBUND

Some facts:

No number better captures the decline of the Unties States into a new state of feudalism and oligarchic rule like: CEO pay rose 940 percent between 1978 and 2018. Worker pay rose only 12 percent.⁹ Rents increased 45 percent. Healthcare cost increased 101 percent between 1984 and 2018. ¹⁰ That increase in rent came, in part, from landlords raising rent when states increased the minimum wage. Landlords also raised rents after the COVID-19 rescue packages, but commentators preferred to blame rent increases on inflation.¹¹

Now, in mid-2025, the Trump “Big Beautiful Bill” requires that the poor again sacrifice so that the wealthy can enjoy even more riches and power.

Is class warfare an incidental result of the American system, or is it a engineered? That’s a question each person must answer for themselves. We can only hope they base their answers on the evidence, and not on their emotional triggers.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 Suzanne Mettler, The Government-Citizen Disconnect (2018) Quoted in Matthew Desmond, Poverty, in America (Crown Publishing, 2023) 92. “96 percent of American adults have relied on n a major government program”

2 John Guyton, et al., “Tax Evasion at the Top of the Income Distribution: Theory and Evidence,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 28542, March 2021, Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 121.

3 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York Norton, 2019, 13-16: Internal Revenue Service, IRS Provides Tax Inflation Adjustments for Tax Year 2020, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2019.), Quoted in Desmond, Poverty 2023), 95

4 Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Major tax Expenditures in 2019 (Washington, D.C., Congress of the United States, 2021). The FY 2023 military and national defense budget is expected to exceed $838 billion. Congressional Budget Office, “Congressional Budget Office Cost Estimate: HR 7900, National Defense Authorization Act for Fisccal year 2023, At a Glance.” July 6, 2022. Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023), 93.

5 Ben Casselman, “The Tax Deduction Economists Hate”,: FiveThirtyEight, April 3, 1015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/. Quoted in Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S Poverty. (Ben Bella Books, 2021) 55

6. Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy (2008) Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 95

7. Matthew Desmond, “House Rules.” The New York Times Magazine 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap.

8. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America (2023)

9. Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO Compensation Has Grown 940% Since 1978,” Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/.

10. Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S Poverty. (Ben Bella Books, 2021) 6-7

See also: Sumit Agarwal, Brent Ambrose, and Moussa Diop, “Do Wage Increases Benefit Intended Households? Evidence from the Performance of Residential Leases,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 19-28, Julu 2019. See also Atsushi Yamagishi, Minimum Wages and Housing Rents: Theory and Evidence,” Regional Science And Urban Economics 87 (2021): 1-13. On the history of landlords raising rents following wage increases, see Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Mumford, City in History. Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 79.

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