Making Corporate America Safe for Democracy

Occupy Wall Street highlighted class conflict between the United States’ “99%” and “1%.” Now coronavirus exposes its dysfunctional Establishment, another name for the 1%. They lack a sense of duty, or noblesse oblige fitting man or woman to rule. They know how to exploit, but not how to govern. Like Nero, the emperor, fiddling while Rome burned, plutocrats continue to water stocks and inflate currencies and bloat their accounts with more billions of paper dollars while people cough to death.

Occupy Wall Street failed. A mere protest, it should have stood for a set of principles—popular sovereignty in the workplace as well as the public. Occupy Wall Street should have sworn to overcome servitude.

Defined by Servitude

Notwithstanding glittering generalities about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the medieval European master-servant relation still defines American law. Most employees serve at the pleasure of their corporate employer. They are “at-will” and can be fired at any time and for any reason, or for no reason at all. To the corporation, labor is an expendable commodity.

Yet there are contradictions. Revered economists Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and political scientist John Locke, defined labor as man’s property in himself. Smith described labor as “the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.” According to the labor theory of value, labor that produces goods determines their values. Thus labor determines the value of GDP (gross domestic product).

But the Establishment commodifies labor. Their laborer is servant. Writing in 1970, U. S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas said the Establishment was “the new George III.” In his book Points of Rebellion Douglas describes tyranny in terms of the military-industrial complex, with civil rights and Vietnam the hot-button topics of the time. Douglas saw that what we now call the 99% had legitimate grievances against him and his fellow one-percenters analogous to those listed against George III in the Declaration of Independence. For Douglas and the authors of the Declaration, George III made the perfect rhetorical foil. But the Establishment is actually the new William the Conqueror.

Medieval England’s vanquished Anglo-Saxons defeated by the victor Normans set the paradigm for today’s vanquished 99% and victor 1%. Since William the Conqueror led the Normans to victory in 1066 until now, the English have endured under the divine right of kings. In the 1700s King George III denied colonists of Virginia and Massachusetts etc. their self-proclaimed rights of Englishmen. In 1776 colonists redefined themselves as “Americans” and declared their independence from the king. The upshot was a new divine-right regime.

Despite their guarantee of a republican form of government, Americans suffer under the divine right of wealthy white men. The constitutional framers’ “original intent” is revealed in the fact that, until President Andrew Jackson, only white men with landed property could vote. “We the people” meant propertied white men. Does it still?

According to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, “No State shall pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” However congressional nonfeasance on this point is a big reason why the essential terms of America’s social contract remain master and servant.

The Corporation

Consider the Virginia Company (1607) and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629), corporations akin to General Motors and IBM before King Charles I remodeled them into “colonies.” Settlers of Massachusetts enjoyed “all liberties and immunities” as members of the private corporation. They made laws for company and colony; they directly participated in corporate governance. They were known as freemen.

Massachusetts’ and Virginia’s seventeenth-century corporate charters were blueprints for state constitutions to come. Their state constitutions, in turn, served as models for the U.S. Constitution. These constitutions were all contracts. Thus civics begins with contract law.

The Contract

Every valid contract has three essential elements: offer, acceptance, and consideration. Offer and acceptance constitute mutual assent. Each party consents, or not, to the other party’s contractual terms. A consideration is a substantial bargained-for exchange. The two parties must have more or less equal bargaining power. Their promises to each other, spelled out in the contract, constitute mutual obligation.

Here’s an example: A offers to mow B’s lawn for $120. B accepts A’s offer. They have a valid contract for they have mutual agreement and a bargained-for exchange. Their promises to each other (A promises to labor and B promises to pay) constitute mutual obligation. So long as A’s good-faith effort reflects an honest day’s work, B is obligated to remit an honest day’s pay.

Read the full blog post here.