Stop the Elite from “Thinning the Herd”

BY BARBARA G. ELLIS

 JANUARY 21, 2022
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Although Malthus wrote this genocidal recommendation to Britain’s royals and ruling class over 200 years ago, this idea always seems to surface whenever the haves fear they are significantly outnumbered by have-nots they’ve controlled sometimes for centuries. They have had good reason to worry, given history’s two major bloody examples of vengeful masses finally erupting, butchering these well-borne abusers, and seizing their wealth and estates in the French and Russian revolutions. They also outnumbered and overwhelmed both police and armies who either deserted or joined the revolutionaries.

That the Trump and Biden administrations, the “entire capitalist class,” and now the U.S. Supreme Court have been secretly embracing Malthus’s eugenical policy. The court’s 6-3 ruling this month struck down the presidential COVID-vaccination mandate for large corporations. It will affect 84 million employees. Only a few days before, this depopulation pattern perhaps was inadvertently revealed by health director Dr. Rachelle Walensky  of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) on a popular morning TV interview show:

The overwhelming number of deaths—over 75 percent—occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities [pre-existing conditions]. So really these are people who are unwell to begin with, and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.

It drew a national firestorm of those instantly recognizing Malthusian—and Hitlerian—implications and demanded her resignation. Almost simultaneously, the European Union (EU) representative to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was declared as “premature” any ruling in its upcoming meeting about opening COVID vaccine’s recipe to worldwide producers for global distribution.

Malthusian elitists have to be secretly pleased about COVID’s depopulation around the world, according to pundit Andre Damon. Even prior to Walensky’s remarks, he concluded:

The pandemic, which in 2020 alone reduced life expectancy by two years, has proven to be manna from heaven for the capitalist class. It has no intention of ending it. It will continue killing, predominantly those above the age of retirement, together with the chronically ill and the disabled,

Historically, when ruling classes practice economic or political eugenics, their first deed is to dehumanize a targeted group with pejoratives so their consciences are clear in committing genocide—or, in the case of COVID’s “herd-immunity” governmental policies, to commit “societal murder.” In Hitler’s Operation T4, 275,000  of the disabled, diseased, and elderly were executed as “useless eaters .” “Non-Aryans” were “untermenschen” (subhumans) and suffered the same fate.

Add to these labels the most hideous of them all, the phrase “thinning the herd.” That’s a sportsman’s rationale for killing animals just for sport supposedly to prevent overpopulation outrunning food and water. So it’s no surprise that from COVID’s onset world leaders among the elitists have been thinking of the masses—us—as livestock. It would free up billions in healthcare, particularly in killing Social Security/Medicare payouts deducted from lifetime wages would cut their taxes to the bone. It also would clear streets from tents and RVs of the homeless.

True, the U.S. Constitution’s preamble declares its aim is to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense” and people’s welfare. But the Framers—men of great wealth and influence—did not have us common folk and Native Americans in mind when those lines were penned. That might explain the bitter, decades-long fight by the elitists against establishing a federal public health service until 1912 or the employee-funded Social Security in 1935, Medicare in 1965.

We ordinary Americans now face their three major “thinning” plans—COVID, war, and climate change, thanks to the inaction of both the Trump and Biden administrations. They and other elitists now tell us we must accept the fate they assigned us. Nonsense.

Not while the American spirit, ingenuity, endurance, and feistiness still exist. Collectively we can fight that death sentence despite what do seem to be incredible odds. Short of a French or Russian revolution, solutions do exist. We can fight back instead of surrendering to despair, defeatism, and death, as our “betters” expect us to do.

Our prime strategy rests on recognizing that the elitists’ greatest fear is our numbers, which when organized, have always overpowered their extinction plans for us.

As English poet Shelley  wrote after the 1819 Peterloo massacre  over Britain’s workingmen striving for the vote:

“Rise like Lions after slumber /In unvanquishable number, / Shake your chains to earth like dew/ Which in sleep had fallen on you—Ye are many—they are few.”

Yes, the overall year-end results do show that the pandemic has afflicted more than 62 million  Americans and caused nearly 900,000 deaths despite a 63 percent vaccination rate.  That the prediction is a million daily infections and 4,500 deaths by February. The Malthusians in power certainly know World War I cut Western lower-class populations by 21,500,000, World War II, by nearly 85,000,000. Most seem to believe they will survive climate change in palatial underground bunkers. Those will quickly become graves on a dead planet if we fail to fight their inaction

The Solutions

As a long-time activist, I know the solutions to these three genocidal plans are legion and readily available for the timid and homebound as well as teenagers, teachers, attorneys and judges, technologists, farmers, factory and service workers, illegals, the medical and scientific professions—of all ages. Among the suggested solutions are those below.

COVID

One basic solution to keep us alive despite the U.S. government’s overall plan to let COVID spread by herd immunity is using scientific truths to destroy the elitists’ big lie that the deadly pandemic is as normal as flu and that the killer Omicron variant is “milder” than Delta. Healthcare experts have warned that the Omicron variant is neither “mild,” nor less deadly than Delta. Significant numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths since Christmas attest to this dangerous lie.

Another solution is opposing plans of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) to “limit” reporting daily cases and deaths, as it’s done with flu, despite the historic medical shock of more than one million COVID cases on a single day (December 7 ). Except for masking, testing, and inoculations, this federal agency has relaxed other public health measures for pandemics such as cutting quarantine time from 10 days to five and gambling they’re well enough not to spread the virus at work and school.

Giving continued praise to the frontliners fighting the herd-immunity policy is yet another solution. They were the first to feel COVID’s lash at hospitals, essential workplaces—particularly the auto industry —and K-12 schools and colleges. Too many factories are still said to be unsanitary and unsafe, and fail to meet the fundamentals of combatting COVID: masks and personal protective equipment, distancing, quarantines, daily deep cleaning of premises and equipment—and replacing ventilation systems to stop this deathly airborne pandemic.

Fear of death has now overcome fears of losing a job as indicated by 68.7 million resignations since November 2020. Or disobeying direct orders to keep K-12 schools open issued by Biden, his Education Secretary, and president of the nation’s main teachers’ union. By now, most working parents recognize major corporations have been the main driver to keep K-12 schools open as babysitters so production and profits are uninterrupted.

Massive defiance has been the result to avoid becoming COVID superspreaders at work or in classrooms, two prime vectors. Teachers are staging wildcat strikes, walkouts, sickouts, and lockouts. Thousands of parents are boycotting schools. Thousands of high school students around the country are online to organize walkouts and strikes following college and university student protests. Nearly 10,000 K-12 schools have been “disrupted” or closed, ranging from New York City to Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Milwaukie, Denver and Seattle,  to San Francisco and Oakland. More than 450,000 K-12 students have been taking remote classes since the first week of January.

The solution here is using activist skills and tools to play a secondary role in backstopping the fight against COVID and its proliferating variants. We’re not needed on picket lines or at union halls but are for dozens of other helpful tasks to support the trades and professions. That includes phone banking, online messaging, canvassing for testing, literature distribution, and fundraising. Not to mention ushering at town halls, assistance at testing and vaccination sites, and answering emails and phone calls.

Turning to the failure of worldwide vaccine distribution, the solution is for people to contact local, state, and federal legislative authorities to force Pfizer and Moderna to “share the technology so the multiple producers across the world can simultaneously manufacture enough to vaccinate the world,” as an Inter Press Service reporter put it.

Our immense numbers are forcing presidents and union leaders to back down on vital COVID issues, seemingly because of Omicron’s lightning spread. Facing vast absenteeism by K-12 students and staff, AFT (American Federation of Teachers) president Randi Weingarten conceded early this month that school districts had no choice but to closures and return to remote education. In early December, Bideninitially scoffed at mailing us free test kits, but a groundswell of public criticism has forced him to announce purchasing 500 million free kits for those requesting them. Free M95 masks mailed to all American homes maybe next if volunteers take on supporting the “Masks for All ” joint bill” just hoppered by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna.

Indeed, the day may come when most Americans will demand China’s iron-fisted, inexpensive, and highly successful “Zero-COVID ” policy. From December 9 to January 9 at least 2,000 cases were recorded, but no deaths. At the start of the pandemic, the government has protected most of China’s 1.4 billion people rather than choosing herd immunity. Highly popular with the masses, the program includes periodic two-month lockdowns for schools and non-essential businesses, quarantines, masks, mass testing, contact tracing, distancing, vaccinations, border controls, and periodic bans on incoming international flights. Some 5,077 testing sites exist with 30,000 staffers, and 132,900 assistants. It was imposed on a Delta outbreak in early December at Xi’an (pop. 13 million) and probably on the recent Omicron outbreak in five other cities.

War

Perhaps the only factor giving pause to our elitist leaders, the Pentagon, and leading war hawks from using nuclear first-strikes against China has been Russia’s Chernobyl power-plant accident in April 1986. One solution could be forcing them to finally join the recently restated 1985 no-first-strike joint statement in the UN Security Council by reminding them that Chernobyl’s 10-day global spread of radioactivity didn’t discriminate between rulers and the ruled. Fallout dust contaminated sources of food and water and poisoned living creatures great and small. Moreover, scientists predict the ground for miles around Chernobyl will be uninhabitable for 20,000 years.

A major solution halting the Pentagon’s provocative deeds against China (or Russia)  might well be volunteers spreading the rumor right now online that a war will resurrect drafting all men aged 18-25 registered for Selective Service. That it will be fought on that country’s vast territory (3.6 million miles ) of Afghanistan-like terrain. Obviously, our volunteer armed service would be insufficient. Conscription has always awakened the masses and caused millions of eligibles to flee their home countries. In Vietnam, fear of a brewing draftee mutiny was a key reason for a pullout and why today’s army is a volunteer.

The conscription rumor needs to be accompanied by anti-war demonstrations to force Biden and Congress to pursue diplomacy—and positive cooperative global goals. It could start with an anti-war campaign during the winter Olympics in Beijing. An accompanying project could be promoting a continuous, all-out campaign to push for joint moves by the U.S. and China to battle climate change.

Another project involves campaigning to convince Biden and President Xi to prevent global extinction by finally joining the 86 other nations who years ago signed the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons  (TPNW). Volunteers also could join a consortium of 80 anti-war groups which just issued a statement to eliminate the 400 ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles)—and their future upgrades—stored in the upper Midwest. They cost billions to maintain, are an ever-present accident risk, and are “an existential threat to humankind.”

Starting anti-war teach-ins is another operation, along with workshops, town hall meetings, peaceful Sunday rallies and marches, picketing home offices of Congressional delegations, and petitioning the president and Congressional delegations. Another solution sure to awaken Americans is publicizing and sending a draft bill for an annual “war tax” to Congress, legislatures, city councils—and the mainstream media— which would offset significant cuts to Pentagon appropriations.

Climate Change

The climate crisis seems to have drawn the greatest number of activists in the world and is always open for membership. At least 15,000 nonprofit environmental and animal-welfare groups have attracted tens of thousands who once thought the immensity of saving the planet was beyond them. In addition, most also have discovered that any climate action, large or small, changes despair and depression to positive energy and helps tackle a group’s needs.

The main solution to stop the relentless march of our planetary extinction involves educating the public to know they do have the power to do what governments have deliberately failed to use since the first UN COP (Conference of the Parties) at Berlin in 1995. Participants did admit that developed countries emitted the most greenhouse gases from fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), and suggested all nations collectively work to leave them in the ground.

Yet 26 years later at the recent COP26 meeting in Glasgow, famed 19-year-old youth environmental leader Greta Thunberg called its results to be another failure. She accused delegates of continued inaction covered by “blah, blah, blah .” They were told that because major fossil-fuel polluters controlled most countries financially, the solution to shutting down that industry to meet the goal of a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030  will be done by environmentalist pressure.

Prior to Glasgow, 400 young climate leaders from 186 countries at the Youth4Climate  summit in Milan fine-tuned a document for COP26 leaders containing tough and smart “thematic areas of climate action” they intend to implement. The direct-action Sunrise Movement with its thousands of 17-25 year-olds undoubtedly will be among the vanguard. So will thousands of the imaginative, high-energy, and influential British-born global Extinction Rebellion (XR) group and its XRYouth wing

One high-risk problem in the American nuclear power industry to be solved by publicity is semi-trailer trucks carrying nuclear waste on major highways (“mobile Chernobyls ”) to storage dumps despite the horrific possible danger of road accidents. Residents along those corridors need regularly updated route maps and truckers’ schedules for residents. A major, long-term project is decommissioning all nuclear power plants and shifting to renewable energy sources of solar, wind, geothermals, hydropower, and biomass. They are far cheaper to build and operate—and don’t leak radiation into land or groundwater.

The main effort in fighting climate change, however, is still phasing out the fossil-fuel industry. The top eight fossil-fuel extractors to be targeted as globally genocidal are (in rank order of current production) Kuwait Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, BP, National Iranian Oil, and Shell.

They exist largely because banks and investment houses have financed operations. So a few years ago major environmentalist Bill McKibben led a fast-growing, climate-protecting army in what has now become a massive ongoing unpaid divestment campaign. I soldiered on by spending two months finding and compiling fossil-fuel holdings of mutual funds for investors. Our labors paid off handsomely.

The global giant Peabody Energy Corporation and 100 others went bankrupt in 2021, and Shell took a major blow. Billions also have been divested and invested elsewhere by the Ford Foundation and 72 faith-based institutions.  Many U.S. cities followed suit: New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Vancouver, as well as London, Berlin, Milan, Oslo, and Durban. Millions have also shifted by institutions, especially college and universities thanks to tireless student campaigns at Harvard, Dartmouth, University of Toronto, University of California, Oxford, and 77 other British universities. Five major investment groups ordered utilities in their holdings to “decarbonize” by 2035.

Direct action is one largely visible tactic that has enjoyed significant success. Its derring-do deeds have brought international attention to exploitive practices of fossil-fuel companies damaging private land, threatening major aquifers and regional water sources, and destroying environmental surroundings. Those colorful actions have lifted morale, and both inspired and recruited thousands. They have held nationwide strikes to protect Native Americans’ lands and water from pipelines of TC Energy’s Keystone XL or Enbridge’s Line 3. The “valve-turners ” have shut down five pipelines transporting Canadian tar-sands oil to the U.S. Thirteen Greenpeace members dangled from a Portland bridge—aided by dozens of “kayaktivists”—attempting to block a Shell icebreaker headed for Arctic drilling.

But indirect action individually or with a group still constitutes most of the pieces for the environmental mosaic. For those hesitant about “doing something” greater to save the planet than separating garbage, long-time activist Ralph Nader points out that “less than one percent of citizens stepping forward can turn the tide” in what looks like a colossal, impossible undertaking.

For example, Oregon’s 350.org community, other environmental groups, and tribes spent a year to successfully stop—mostly by permit denials—a $10 billion, 230-mile pipeline project by Canada’s Pembina corporation to build a liquefied natural gas export terminal. Opposition arose instantly from thousands of written comments, months of impact and legal research, testimony, rallies in Salem and along the pipeline route, persistent lobbying of the governor and Pembina’s financial sources.

If the volunteer effort is limited to donations, it’s been suggested those funds be sent to the major environmental organizations—Greenpeace, 350.org, National Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement, etc.—because they are spent directly on a cause rather than 90 percent for overhead and promotion. To find an organization to fund, the website Mobilize is a good place to start.

After warning us all that “the ruling class is united… in greed” against us,” Sen. Bernie Sanders  just laid down the gauntlet to keep us from being exterminated by the elitists’ mishandling of COVID, their attempts to provoke a major trade war with China, and continuing the do-nothing policy preventing a climate apocalypse:

No one individual is going to save us. We must rise up together. Our greatest weapon in these times is our solidarity….The challenges we face are enormous and it is easy to understand why many may fall into depression and cynicism. This is a state of mind, however, that we must resist—not only for ourselves, but for our kids and future generations. The stakes are just too high Despair is not an option. We must stand up and fight back.

That means taking some kind of action against their “thinning the herd” by remembering “Ye are many—they are few.”

Is Corporate Personhood White?

BY STEVE MARTINOTFacebook

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The modern concept of “race” seems to rise above the cultural structures by which society organizes itself. Though that privilege was called in question by the suggestion that “race” is a “social construct,” it still remains to articulate the structure of that construct? For instance, the issue of whether “race” is a noun or a verb has still to be debated. As a verb, it is an avatar for “to racialize,” which refers to what one group of people does to others. And that suggests that “race” cannot be understood apart from its history.

The issue we raise here is that the history of race cannot itself be divorced from the parallel development of the corporate structure. Is it possible that the corporate structure was actually midwife to the birth of race, whiteness, and white supremacy? Would that not suggest an intimate relation between corporate personhood and white racialized identity. How could that be? A relation between an artificial social structure and a form of human identity? What would the unwitting revelation be in such a relation?

The complete history interlinking “race” with the corporate structure is too complex for a small article like this. We can however get a taste of it by examining two points in that double trajectory: the birth of white racialized identity in the 17^th century Virginia colony, and the 19^th century invention of corporate personhood.

The discussion here will not be an anthropology. Nothing that occurs with respect to the corporate structure has not been intentional, while anthropology pretends to study what evolves impersonally from a people. Conversely, to think that racism is simply an effect of prejudice or false consciousness is coherent only by ignoring the cultural effects of contextualizing social dynamics, such as colonialism, and the rise of the multinational corporation.

***

Return with me, please, to the Virginia colony, founded in 1606 by English nobles and a passel of English bond-laborers under contract. Administratively, the colony was organized as a corporation (“the Virginia Company”), directed by a Board of Directors in London, with an on-site subsidiary Board called the Colonial Council. The overall purpose of the enterprise was 1) to be profitable, and 2) to provide dividends for investors (that is, to be profitable). The responsibilities of the Virginia Board of Directors (Va BoD) were to parcel out the land, to find markets for what the colony produced, and to insure the existence of sufficient labor for colony productivity.

The English laborers, held under indentured contracts, were essentially “chattel,” or “objects” owned for the term of their contracts. The typical contract held a person in thrall for 14 years, granting a small parcel of land and some money upon release. Whether the money and land were provided by the contractor (owner) or by the colony was a condition stated in the contract. Insofar as “chattel” signified that persons were “things,” they entered into bartering exchanges as economic value, and could be used also for payment, to cover the interest on debt, or to be given to someone as a gift, etc. The “sale” of a bond-laborer was accomplished by exchanging the contract for money. The buyer of the contract would thus become the new “owner” of the person.

At first, the colony came close to perishing, unable to figure out how to make this un-English land produce like English land. Though the Algonquian societies nearby were accomplished agrarians, the corporate BoD scorned them and their advice. Indigenous life did not correspond to BoD’s preconceptions of what the colony needed to do. As English people got sick and died, the colony raided the indigenous and stole food from them. In the corporate mind, there was an inherent right to seize the indigenous, their land, and their skill as corporate assets. Even today, that same arrogance infects US corporate relations with the rest of the world. Many Latin Americans migrate to the US because US corporations have impoverished their home countries, seizing their “assets” (resources, labor, productivity, financial reserves, etc.) through imposed debt or forced sale.

The first successful product of the colony was tobacco, a drug. (Cotton didn’t become a primary export crop until the invention of the cotton gin.) Tobacco was a drug that became immediately profitable in Europe. And it came to serve as a form of colonial currency used for payment. It was the cultivation of tobacco that turned the colonial landholdings into plantations.

Tobacco production is labor-intensive. When a Dutch slave ship showed up in Jamestown in 1619 with 20 Africans unpurchased in the Caribbean Islands, the Va BoD paid for them and distributed them to the plantations.

At first, these and subsequent African arrivals were held under typical contract conditions, 14 years and out (with land and money). The Va BoD however decided that the Africans were not eligible for the “protections” of English law, and so they were not given contracts. Some were actually released after 14 years of labor. But the colony gradually ignored its own principles, and started to hold Africans for longer and longer periods. The reason for this was the exchange market for laborers. When bond-laborers under contract were sold, the proximity of their release date was a factor depressing their price. That decline in laborer value, which was accounted as estate wealth, could be increasingly ignored with respect to the Africans, who had no official release date. This neglect empowered the colonial tendency to impose perpetual servitude on the Africans, giving them a different form of asset value – though that tendency remained a contested issue well into the 1660s.

What solidified African bond-laborer existence as assets (tradable elements of structural wealth) was the auction market system. Transference of an English laborer was accomplished by transferring the contract. Since Africans didn’t have contracts, they could only be sold in person. As a marketplace developed, so auctions were institutionalized. They created a sense of “standard” value for different body types, in the same way that securities markets today establish asset values for the securities of different corporations. The existence of such standards meant that plantation owners could calculate their total estate value, and claim political advantages based on that (in colonial society, Virginia and Maryland by that time, political power accrued directly to wealth). Thus, under the force of economic and political power, the drive to hold all Africans in perpetual servitude was irresistible.

This historical process was quite distinct from that evolving in the Caribbean and South America with respect to enslavement. The Spanish and Portuguese plantation systems were based on royal military conquest, and worked laborers under an attrition system. It was cheaper to subject them to starvation conditions and replace them with new arrivals from the slave ships. It was a continuation of the initial colonization, which totally depleted indigenous populations on islands and areas of South America. It was the English labor contract system, originally using English bond-laborers, that set the English colonies on a different trajectory, and eventually produced the notion of person as a corporate asset.

The denial of legal rights to Africans was the first step toward the invention of “race.” The second step was the colony-wide shift of the labor force to Africans (after the 1650s), which augmented the distinction between colonial subject and colonial asset. It was that distinction from which a white identity first appeared in Va., in the 1690s. When the English first came to North America, they didn’t see themselves as white (racially). Their first official reference to themselves as white occurs in 1691. It was only as a form of social identity. It became a cultural (racialized) identity in the 1720s with the organization of the slave patrols. They raised violence against the black bond-laborers to the level of a norm. [This history is recounted in greater detail in my book, “The Rule of Racialization.”]

In short, it was the confluence of economic and political structures in the colony that produced the white racialized identity that then fostered its own culture of racialization. As a footnote to this process, and the fact that it took the English almost a century to racially identify themselves as white, when the first Africans were introduced to the colony in 1619, and with the subsequent arrival of others, intermarriage was common. Apparently the Africans and English found each other fairly attractive. The landowners’ desire to set the Africans aside for perpetual servitude led to the passage of a string of anti-miscegenation laws, all of which failed miserably in their goal. In the process, the VA BoD went so far as to overturn the most basic European patriarchal norm, namely that children take the class status of the father. In 1662, totally in service to the augmentation of corporate asset values and plantation wealth, the Va BoD ruled that a child of racially mixed parentage would take the servitude status of the mother rather than the father. The child of a black woman would be black, and enslaved. This in turn led to severe penalties for a white women who bore the child of a black man. When the anti-abortion movement seeks to legislate women’s relation to their child producing capacity, it is following in the footsteps of colonial development of enslavement.

As another footnote, the emergence of a white identity from a social distinction imposed on the Africans reveals that whiteness came first as a racial identity. It formed the basis on which certain European narcissistic taxonomists, such as Linnaeus or Buffon, thought to divide humans as a whole into races as subgroups. Their theorizations create a mindset of white race primacy and hegemony that then served to rationalize European conquest of others.

Corporate Personhood

Thus we see that, at the foundation of what eventually became the US, the corporate structure was already acting to change the concept of a person through its role in the emergence of “racial” difference. Let us move to a later moment when US jurisprudence decided that “personhood” itself could be changed to fit the corporate structure. It was a moment in proximity to that in which black people were denied any juridical claim to personhood itself.

In popular belief, the source of corporate personhood lies in an 1886 Santa Clara railroad case. That is a mistake. Its real source is to be found in another railroad case that came before the Supreme Court in 1844, called the Letson case. The chief justice on the court at that time was Roger Taney, whom we remember as the author of the Dred Scott decision in 1856. The latter decision barring black people from US citizenship and personhood, and the former granting those same designations to corporations, both emerged from the same mind, using parallel reasoning.

The Letson case arose because railroads were involved in interstate commerce, over which Congress was Constitutionally given jurisdiction. Problems arose because corporations were chartered by states, so malfeasance resulting in court action in a state other than the home state of the enterprise could only be heard in federal court. For a corporation to be able to respond to such suits, it would have to have standing in the federal court.

Constitutionally, only “persons” had such recognition. For Taney, the needs of interstate commerce implied that, if a corporation was to have federal court standing, it had to have personhood. And that, in turn, implied federal citizenship. It was Judge Taney’s concept of corporate personhood that more recently was the basis for the Supreme Court decision in the “Citizens United” case. That decision held that corporations had the right to participate in elections as persons. Though they could not vote as entities, they could express themselves (under the 1^st Amendment) by other means, which included donating large sums of money.

When, in 1856, Mr. Dred Scott appeared before Taney’s Supreme Court, he was suing for his freedom. He had been taken to a free state from his home state of Missouri by his “owner.” While there, he was considered a free man, and had gotten married. While still under tutelage to his erstwhile owner, he returned to his “home state” and sought to live as a free man, having been recognized as one during his sojourn in the other state. When his erstwhile “owner” denied him that right, he sued. And the case went to the Supreme Court.

Once again, that structural linkage between the corporate structure and the structure of racialization raised its ugly head. Taney denied Scott his freedom using the same arguments he had used in the Letson case, only in reverse, or rather, turned upside down. Black people had never had standing or citizenship at the federal level, he claimed, and so could not claim personhood or freedom at the state level. Taney referred back to English colonialism, and to its reduction of black people to their status as assets, wealth, things (three-fifths, etc.) to be controlled by “persons” (white or artificial). Thus, while the difference between federal and state power was used to give corporations personhood, the same difference was used to deny black people their existence as persons.

As a Supreme Court decision, the case guaranteed the sovereignty of the slaveholding class, and put a huge crimp in the abolitionist movement of that time.

This quirk of dual power in the US enabled Taney to complete a transformation in jurisprudence that the corporate structure had initiated in 17^th century Virginia. Today, at the core of US jurisprudence, and still at odds with US ostensive philosophical principles, there is an acceptance of rule, control, and cultural hegemony by artificial (non-human) entities (the corporate structure) that takes its initial colonial establishment as its precedent. In a strong sense, the system later established by Jim Crow legislation both rendered black people non-persons as corporate assets and deputized all white people as a “patrol” or managerial class over them. And today, not as political representatives of a constituency, but as corporate entities acting in the name of political party competition, half the states of the US are working hard to obstruct or deprive black people of full voting rights.

As we watch oceans die, tornadoes arrive in teams, glaciers melt, and entire communities get destroyed in the interest of resource extraction, we can recognize that there is a destructive core to the corporate structure to which mere capitalism has never been able to lay claim. The primary difference between the two has been capitalism’s dependence on labor for its earnings, whereas, as we see more and more clearly every day, the corporate structure profits most from the “earnings” in securities trading, and the ever rising prices of stocks and derivatives (as a financial reflection of corporate amassing of asset value). Capitalism needed to guarantee a certain level of survival for its labor forces, whereas the corporate structure can dispense with any community that gets in its way (witness that fracking is still going on in the US, destroying both geologies and ecologies).

Where real estate corporations today enrich themselves by buying houses (rented or not) as an increasing mass of assets (whose primary effect is to increase housing prices and rents), so colonial corporations enriched themselves by turning people into assets (and which is still the primary effect of racialization).

Corporate personhood evolved in tandem with the structures of racialization, and the production of racialized groups. If “race” is the verb “to racialize,” as something that one group of people does to others, it means that black people were not born black but were made black by white supremacy in the same sense that white people were not born white but were made white by white supremacy. And if the corporate structure is intimately involved in this process, it not only forms part of the structure that makes black people black in the process of making white people white, but therefore implies that corporate personhood is itself actually white.

As we seek to grasp the true meaning of our climate crisis, we must not neglect to recognize the cultural contribution of white colonialism and white supremacy to the pillaging of the planet and its people, through its corporate structure.

Steve Martinot is Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance, Forms in the Abyss: a Philosophical Bridge between Sartre and Derrida (both Temple) and The Machinery of Whiteness. He is also the editor of two previous books, and translator of Racism by Albert Memmi. He has written extensively on the structures of racism and white supremacy in the United States, as well as on corporate culture and economics, and leads seminars on these subjects in the Bay Area.

The Cold War Reborn and Resurgent

BY WILLIAM ASTOREFacebook

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In the early 1960s, at the height of America’s original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear bombers it already had, like the B-52s featured so memorably in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Predictably, massive future overkill was justified in the name of “deterrence,” though the nuclear war plan in force back then was more about obliteration. It featured a devastating attack on the Soviet Union and communist China that would kill an estimated 600 million people in six months (the equivalent of 100 Holocausts, notes Daniel Ellsberg in his book, The Doomsday Machine). Slightly saner heads finally prevailed — in the sense that the Air Force eventually got “only” 1,000 of those Minuteman nuclear missiles.

Despite the strategic arms limitation talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the dire threat of nuclear Armageddon persisted, reaching a fresh peak in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. At the time, he memorably declared the Soviet Union to be an “evil empire,” while nuclear-capable Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles were rushed to Europe. At that same moment, more than a few Europeans, joined by some Americans, took to the streets, calling for a nuclear freeze— an end to new nuclear weapons and the destabilizing deployment of the ones that already existed. If only…

It was in this heady environment that, in uniform, I found myself working in the ultimate nuclear redoubt of the Cold War. I was under 2,000 feet of solid granite in a North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) command post built into Cheyenne Mountain at the southern end of the Colorado front range that includes Pikes Peak. When off-duty, I used to hike up a trail that put me roughly level with the top of Cheyenne Mountain. There, I saw it from a fresh perspective, with all its antennas blinking, ready to receive and relay warnings and commands that could have ended in my annihilation in a Soviet first strike or retaliatory counterstrike.

Yet, to be honest, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility of Armageddon. As a young Air Force lieutenant, I was caught up in the minuscule role I was playing in an unimaginably powerful military machine. And as a hiker out of uniform, I would always do my best to enjoy the bracing air, the bright sunshine, and the deep blue skies as I climbed near the timberline in those Colorado mountains. Surrounded by such natural grandeur, I chose not to give more than a moment’s thought to the nightmarish idea that I might be standing at ground zero of the opening act of World War III.  Because there was one thing I knew with certainty: if the next war went nuclear, whether I was on-duty under the mountain or off-duty hiking nearby, I was certainly going to be dead.

Then came 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over! America had won! Rather than nightmares of the Red Storm Rising sort that novelist Tom Clancy had imagined or Hollywood’s Red Dawn in which there was an actual communist invasion of this country, we could now dream of “peace dividends,” of America becoming a normal country in normal times.

It was, as the phrase went, “morning again in America” — or, at least, it could have been. Yet here I sit, 30 years later, at sea level rather than near the timberline, stunned by the resurgence of a twenty-first-century version of anticommunist hysteria and at the idea of a new cold war with Russia, the rump version of the Soviet Union of my younger days, joined by an emerging China, both still ostensibly conspiring to endanger our national security, or so experts in and out of the Pentagon tell us.

Excuse me while my youthful 28-year-old self asks my cranky 58-year-old self a few questions: What the hell happened? Dammit, we won the Cold War three decades ago. Decisively so! How, then, could we have allowed a new one to emerge? Why would any sane nation want to refight a war that it had already won at enormous cost? Who in their right mind would want to hit the “replay” button on such a costly, potentially cataclysmic strategic paradigm as deterrence through MAD, or mutually assured destruction?

Meet the New Cold War – Same as the Old One

Quite honestly, the who, the how, and the why depress me. The “who” is simple enough: the military-industrial-congressional complex, which finds genocidal nuclear weapons to be profitable, even laudable. Leading the charge of the latest death brigade is my old service, the Air Force. Its leaders want new ICBMs, several hundred of them in fact, with a potential price tag of $264 billion, to replace the Minutemen that still sit on alert, waiting to inaugurate death on an unimaginable scale, not to speak of a global nuclear winter, if they’re ever launched en masse. Not content with such new missiles, the Air Force also desires new strategic bombers, B-21 Raiders to be precise (the “21” for our century, the “Raider” in honor of General Jimmy Doolittle’s morale-boosting World War II attack on Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor). The potential price tag: somewhere to the north of $200 billion through the year 2050.

New nuclear missiles and strategic bombers obviously don’t come cheap. Those modernized holocaust-producers are already estimated to cost the American taxpayer half-a-trillion dollars over the next three decades. Honestly, though, I doubt anyone knows the true price, given the wild cost overruns that seem to occur whenever the Air Force builds anything these days. Just look at the $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter, for example, where the “F” apparently stands for Ferrarior, if you prefer brutal honesty, failure.

The “how” is also simple enough. The vast military machine I was once part of justifies such new weaponry via the tried-and-true (even if manifestly false) tactics of the Cold War. Start with threat inflation. In the old days, politicians and generals touted false bomber and missile “gaps.” Nowadays, we hear about China building missile silos, as if these would pose a new sort of dire threat to us. (They wouldn’t, assuming that China is dumb enough to build them.) A recent New Yorker article on Iran’s ballistic missile program is typical of the breed. Citing a Pentagon estimate, the author suggests “that China could have at least a thousand [nuclear] bombs by 2030.” Egad! Be afraid!

Yet the article neglects to mention America’s overwhelmingly superior nuclear weapons and the actual number of nuclear warheads and bombs our leaders have at their disposal. (The current numbers: roughly 5,600 nuclear warheads for the U.S., 350 for China.) At the same time, Iran, which has no nuclear weapons, is nonetheless defined as a serious threat, “an increasingly shrewd rival,” in the same article. A “rival” – how absurd! A nation with no nukes isn’t a rival to the superpower that nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing 250,000 Japanese, and planned to utterly destroy the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s. Believe me, nobody, but nobody, rivals this country’s military when it comes to apocalyptic scenarios — and the mindset as well as the ability to achieve them.

On a nuclear spectrum, Iran poses no threat and China is readily deterred, indeed completely overmatched, just with the U.S. Navy’s fleet of Trident-missile-firing submarines. To treat Iran as a “rival” and China as a nuclear “near-peer” is the worst kind of threat inflation (and imagining nuclear war of any sort is a horror beyond all measure).

The “why” is also simple enough, and it disgusts me. Weapons makers, though driven by profit, pose as job-creators. They talk about “investing” in new nukes; they mention the need to “modernize” the arsenal, as if nuclear weapons have an admirable return on investment as well as an expiration date. What they don’t talk about (and never will) is how destabilizing, redundant, unnecessary, immoral, and unimaginably ghastly such weapons are.

Nuclear weapons treat human beings as matter to be irradiated and obliterated. One of the better cinematic depictions of this nightmare came in the 1991 movie Terminator II when Sarah Connor, who knows what’s coming, is helpless to save herself, no less children on a playground, when the nukes start exploding. It’s a scenethat should be seared into all our minds as we think about the hellish implications of the weapons the U.S. military is clamoring for.

In the late 1980s, when I was still in Cheyenne Mountain, I watched the tracks of Soviet nuclear missiles as they terminated at American cities. Sure, it only happened on screen in the missile warning center, driven by a scenario tape simulating an attack, but that was more than enough for me. Yet, today, my government is moving in a direction — both in funding the “modernization” of the American arsenal and in creating a new version of the Cold War of my Air Force days — that could once again make that old scenario tape I saw plausible in what remains of my lifetime.

Excuse me, but where has the idea of nuclear disarmament gone? A scant 15 years ago, old Cold War hands like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and Sam Nunn, joined by our “hope and change” president Barack Obama, promoted the end of nuclear terror through the actual elimination of nuclear weapons. But in 2010 Obama threw that possibility away in an attempt to secure Senate support for new strategic arms reduction talks with the Russians. Unsurprisingly, senators and representatives in western states like Wyoming and North Dakota, which thrive off Air Force bases that bristle with nuclear bombers and missiles, quickly abandoned the spirit of Obama’s grand bargain and to this day remain determined to field new nuclear weapons.

Not More, But No More

This country narrowly averted disaster in the old Cold War and back then we had leaders of some ability and probity like Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. All this new cold war rhetoric and brinksmanship may not end nearly as well in a plausible future administration led, if not by Donald Trump himself, then by some self-styled Trumpist warrior like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Senator Tom Cotton. They would, I suspect, be embraced by an increasing number of evangelicals and Christian nationalists in the military who might, in prophetic terms, find nuclear Armageddon to be a form of fulfillment.

Ironically, I read much of Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy’s World War III thriller, in 1987 while working a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain. Thankfully, that red storm never rose, despite a climate that all too often seemed conducive to it. But why now recreate the conditions for a new red storm, once again largely driven by our own fears as well as the profit- and power-driven fantasies of the military-industrial-congressional complex? Such a storm could well end in nuclear war, despite pledges to the contrary. If a war of that sort is truly unwinnable, which it is, our military shouldn’t be posturing about fighting and “winning” one.

I can tell you one thing with certainty: our generals know one word and it’s not “win,” it’s more. More nuclear missiles. More nuclear bombers. They’ll never get enough. The same is true of certain members of Congress and the president. So, the American people need to learn two words, no more, and say them repeatedly to those same generals and their enablers, when they come asking for almost $2 trillion for that nuclear modernization program of theirs.

In that spirit, I ask you to join a young Air Force lieutenant as he walks past Cheyenne Mountain’s massive blast door and down the long tunnel. Join him in taking a deep breath as you exit that darkness into clear crystalline skies and survey the city lights beneath you and the pulse of humanity before you. Another night’s duty done; another night that nuclear war didn’t come; another day to enjoy the blessings of this wonder-filled planet of ours.

America’s new cold war puts those very blessings, that wonder, in deep peril. It’s why we must walk ever so boldly out of tunnels built by fear and greed and never return to them. We need to say “no more” to new nuclear weapons and recommit to the elimination of all such weaponry everywhere. We had a chance to embark on such a journey 30 years ago in the aftermath of the first Cold War. We had another chance when Barack Obama was elected. Both times we failed.

It’s finally time for this country to succeed in something again — something noble, something other than the perpetuation of murderous war and the horrific production of genocidal weaponry.  After all, only fools replay scenarios that end in doomsday.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history. His personal blog is Bracing Views.