The Lie That Changed America

From corporate personhood to Citizens United, the hidden story behind today's billionaire political power - and what we can do about it…

My new book, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, is out today, and it plainly lays out why so much has gone wrong in this country since the Reagan Revolution and how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision came about.

The timing turns out to be almost eerie. Just this week, in a Common Dreams op-ed about California’s Proposition 40, Congressman Ro Khanna posed the question that has become both urgent and existential for America: Are we actually willing to tax billionaire oligarchs, or are we only willing to talk about it?

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once tried to warn us about this very moment, a warning which has echoes throughout history and in dozens of nations:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Prop 40 is really just the tiniest start, it we’re serious about rescuing both our middle class and our democracy. It would put a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of California’s roughly 200 billionaire oligarchs to keep hospitals open as Trump’s Medicaid cuts tear through the state, and the tech billionaires who’d have to pay it are using the power Citizens United gave them to pour tens of millions of dollars into killing it.

Khanna, who’s teamed up with Bernie Sanders on a national version of the same idea, is exactly right to ask.

But there’s a deeper question sitting underneath this: how did a few hundred people get so unimaginably rich, and so powerful, that taxing them at all now feels like a radical act?

How did we arrive at a place where a handful of morbidly rich billionaire oligarchs can spend more on a single ballot measure than working class families will earn in a dozen generations, just to avoid chipping in to save their neighbors’ emergency room?

The answer starts in 1886, with a fraud committed in broad daylight: the greatest political crime ever told, and it was pulled off by the oligarchs of that era.

On a cold winter afternoon in 2002, I was in the Vermont Supreme Court’s law library six blocks from my then-home in Montpelier, because I wanted to read the actual words of a Supreme Court decision that every law student in America was taught to revere.

The case is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and the textbooks all said in 2002 that it’s where the Court ruled that corporations are “persons” entitled to constitutional rights, particularly and specifically under the 14th Amendment.

I pulled down the heavy leather-bound 1889-published volume, found the case on page 394, and discovered something that changed how I understood this entire country: The Court never ruled any such thing!

The decision itself was about railroad fence posts and California property tax, and the justices explicitly wrote that they were not deciding the corporate personhood question at all.

The lie was in the headnote, the little summary written not by a justice but by the Court’s reporter, a former railroad man named J.C. Bancroft Davis, working hand in glove with a corrupt justice named Stephen Field and the railroad barons who supported Field and were the fabulously rich versions in that era of Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg, et al today.

One reporter, one sentence, one lie, and 140 years of consequences for both democracy and working people.

That single fraudulent sentence lay like an unexploded hand grenade just below our political infrastructure until, between 1978 and 1981, it became the foundation stone for the Reagan Revolution.

Corporate lawyers built an entire cathedral of “rights” on top of it, one amendment at a time, until they reached the logical endpoint in 2010, when five corrupt, on-the-take Republican justices handed down Citizens United and effectively legalized the buying and selling of our government, putting the oligarchs in charge and transforming our republic into — as Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program — an oligarchy.

The seventy-year legal war that corporations had lost over and over before 1886, and then “won” by this fraud, is the reason those California billionaires can treat democracy itself as something to be purchased at retail. Money became First Amendment protected “free speech,” corporations became “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights, and a fat enough money bin became the power to reshape American politics.

For about fifty years the hand grenade was largely unexploded, because we still had the political will to hold corporate power in check. From Roosevelt through Carter we taxed great fortunes, legalized and then protected unions, regulated the powerful, and built the largest middle class the world had ever seen, the first in history to include more than half a nation.

Then came 1981. Reagan didn’t simply cut taxes and gut regulations. Following the playbook of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, he reached back and pulled the pin on that 1886 hand grenade, turning corporate constitutional rights into a weapon aimed straight at everything the New Deal and Great Society had built.

The wreckage is measurable, and in the book I walk through it year by year.

In 1980, two-thirds of Americans were solidly middle class, and a single paycheck could buy a home, raise a family, cover college, and fund a dignified retirement. Today only about 40 percent of us are middle class, and it takes two full incomes to reach what one used to provide. If wages had simply kept pace with the productivity of American workers since Reagan took office, the typical worker today would be earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty.

Measuring the result of this lie that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech,” the RAND Corporation calculated that roughly $50 trillion was quietly transferred from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018, every dollar of it out of working families’ pockets.

I still remember my dad coming home from the tool-and-die shop smelling of machine oil, talking at the dinner table about his Machinists Union and the pension that was going to let him and my mom travel the world someday. That was the ordinary promise of American life for about two-thirds of us back then, and corporate constitutional rights took it away from families like the one I grew up in.

Oligarchs from Reagan’s day to today, and the Republicans they own, realized that as working people watched that security disappear, their anger had to be directed away from the morbidly rich and their corruption of the Supreme Court, so they gave us what I call the “deflection playbook,” decade after decade of it.

“Welfare queens,” “illegal” immigrants, “takers” versus “makers,” trans people in sports, Willy Horton, Swift Boat veterans, one manufactured culture war after another (and today “communism!”) all of it engineered to keep working people furious at each other instead of at the very small number of corporations and their oligarchs quietly emptying our wallets.

Which brings us back to Ro Khanna’s question. Taxing billionaires, whether through California’s Prop 40 or the national wealth tax Khanna and Sanders have proposed, is necessary and long overdue, and I hope both succeed.

But as long as that 1886 lie and its offspring stand, every tax and every reform we manage to pass can be litigated into oblivion or simply bought back, the way Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in Citizens United after years of lavish, undisclosed gifts from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire with a stake in the outcome.

You can’t permanently tax a class of people who own the referees in Congress and the Supreme Court. That’s why the back half of my new book turns from the crime to the cure.

The real fix, the one that pulls the keystone out of the whole oligarchic arch, is a constitutional amendment declaring what the Founders always believed: that constitutional rights belong to human beings, not to artificial entities called corporations, and that spending money is not the same thing as free speech.

Move to Amend has already written the amendment, twenty-two states have already passed resolutions calling for it, and cities from Los Angeles to Boston have signed on.

Franklin Roosevelt gave us the vision for a new and progressive America back in 1944, when he proposed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing every American a job, a home, healthcare, an education, and security in old age. We came within sight of that promise once, and it was sabotaged by Reagan, the GOP, and the oligarchs who owned them both.

We can get there again, but first we have to undo the crime.

So please read the book, pick up a copy today (it’s free in libraries), and — after you’ve read it — share it with someone who’s given up on politics because they can’t quite figure out what went wrong. Identifying the origin of the crime, after all, is the first step toward reversing it.

Look up the amendment movement, find out whether your state is one of the twenty-two, and if it isn’t, go help make it the twenty-third.

The morbidly rich spent decades and untold fortunes keeping this story buried, so the least the rest of us can do is tell it to everyone we know.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Who Killed the American Dream?”

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:

They’re Shocked We Won’t Pretend Anymore

Trump and his enablers, the Republican Party, shrug off our righteous fury as “derangement”, but what is normal and natural about running over constitutional rights with a road grader

~ Jeffrey Hobbs

Also, how many know about Koch Industries, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and so many other institutions, including religious ones, that are under the radar, that have pushed their agenda to achieve basically where we are today, going backwards, not progressively forward, fighting against a rapidly warming planet ( Mother Earths FEVER), shared equality, etc. Inequality IS the enemy between us !!

~ Roger Schwellenbach

Read the Article | See all Comments

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Click on the image above for the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is out today in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.