Collective Conscience

by poputonian

The founders of the United States dealt with negative societal forces in different ways. To control the power of government, they established three coequal branches: executive, judicial, and legislative. To ensure freedom of religion, they separated church and state. To reduce the power of the military, they placed it under civilian control. But the founders understandably missed one other major threat to society: the corporation. There is a reason why they didn’t foresee this threat. In their day, corporations were public charters that…

…could only exist for a limited time, could not make any political contributions, and could not own stock in other companies. Their owners were liable for criminal acts committed by the corporation and the doctrine of limited liability (shielding investors from responsibility for harm and loss caused by the corporation) did not yet exist. [Drutman essay: The History of the Corporation]

In short, if the corporation ever acted outside the public interest, the charter could be revoked, and many times it was. Interestingly, albeit unfortunately, the founders did not anticipate the need for a constitutional provision that would keep the public interest aspect of the corporation intact. Without such a constitutional provision to control the erosion of public interest, it was through the court system that the monied interests won the game. A google search will turn up the cases, one I believe was in Santa Clara, California in the 1860s, and at least one other in the state courts of New Jersey, where the courts gradually determined corporations weren’t people and thus shouldn’t be held responsible in the same way you might hold an individual responsible. [Ed. See in the comments iconoclast, justin, and rob for a superior explanation (and links) of how the corporation gained protections while limiting their liability.] The net effect was that anything close to a corporate conscience was stripped away and a runaway power was born, one that was incongruous with the founders’ intent to protect the public interest from private greed. From destruction of the planet to an inequitable distribution of wealth, we live every day with the residual negative impact of corporations that have no consciences.

What should we say about the political system? Does America have a collective conscience, or are we absolved, as individuals, of any responsibility as long as we can say we didn’t vote for George W. Bush? I’ll call the question one more time: If he as the head of our national entity committed crimes against the nation and humanity, and the crimes become known, is he allowed to ride out his term in office, or do we act to remove him? As the Nichols article I posted about below indicates, the founders put a safeguard in the Constitution to protect against elected “despots and tyrants”. The safeguard, mentioned six times, is the impeachment option.

As to the question of a collective national conscience, I received an email from a reader who I think eloquently expresses the importance of collective responsibility for Iraq, but who perhaps disagrees with me about the need to impeach. The email begins with a quote from my earlier post:

“In the eyes of justice and humanity, how do we — you and me — as part of a representative democracy, escape an equal share of responsibility for the carnage?”

This is exactly the key question.

My answer is a little different from yours. I think we have to push the country to accept things that you take as premises in your post. You’ve already accepted them, and so have I, but the nation as a whole hasn’t, and because of that, anything we do without accepting them is bound to be tainted.

We’re responsible for those deaths, and we’re living in a democracy. Everyone focuses on Bush’s refusal to accept responsibility for what he’s done, and that’s really important. But the same thing is necessary for the country as a whole.

This isn’t some abstract thing, or just a desire to see the nation do penance for its crimes. It affects the way we see the conflict now and our options.

This whole mess was caused by problems over here, in this country — our own inability to understand other culture, things that are broken in our political system, problems with our own press, the ease with which such an ugly war was sold to the public as a whole, etc.

But when we talk about what to do next, we take this patronizing attitude — the Iraqis have to learn this, or isn’t it unfortunate that they didn’t go through the enlightenment, or the Iraqi government has to learn that we can’t do it forever, they’ll have to step up and “take responsibility.” Like a suburban dad teaching a kid how to ride a bike, we’ll have to take off the training wheels.

As far as I’m concerned, we need to do two things. We need to internalize the reality of what’s happened — that our aggression caused these deaths, and that it caused the ongoing chaos.

And we need to take our obligation to our victims seriously. Right now, that means trying to structure policies so that as few Iraqis die every day as possible. The civilian death toll has to be the dominant metric.

A while back, I was thinking about whether or not bush lied to get us in to this war, or if he was just spinning very hard and went right up to the line. I think he lied, but I decided that it doesn’t really matter.

When 665,000+ people have been killed, what difference does a lie make, one way or another? To put it another way, if he didn’t lie, would things be better? The body count dwarfs conventional morality, and the ideas we have about right and wrong in our personal spheres don’t necessarily make much sense on the level where Bush is operating.

When this is over, Bush will probably have been responsible for more than a million deaths. Probably a lot more than a million. Does it matter if he lied, or if he’s censured or impeached? If he’s forced out of office six months early, and Cheney runs out the clock, will the dead come back? It would be a farce to say that justice had been done — what kind of justice can balance the books on a million deaths?

It doesn’t address the core problems — one of which is that people are still dying. The other core problem is that we are a paranoid, warlike country, and our public was willing to follow Bush down this path.

If you listen to the populist right on talk radio now, you’ll hear that they’re defiant, unbowed, totally delusional, and filled with hatred. And many millions of our fellow citizens listen every day, nod their heads, and say, “damn straight.” That’s what we have to try to fix, although I have to confess I have no idea of how to do it.

Listen to the debate about what to do now — there is absolutely no sense of shame in any of it. That’s what we have to fix. Our actions have lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and we are not ashamed.

I don’t want America to be as amoral as the modern corporation, and my belief is that if we don’t act within the provisions of the Constitution to impeach, that is exactly what we’ve become. If not through impeachment, where does the imprimatur come from that says the Iraq war was unjust and immoral? Will the national conscience be expressed through the “free” press? Ha! The “free” press is incorporated. On the other hand, as the above correspondent concludes, what real difference does impeachment make when compared to a million dead?UPDATE: See iconoclast, justin, and rob in the comments for a better explanation of the evolution of the corporation and the Santa Clara case in particular.UDPATE II: A mention also to Vast Left who provided a link to documentary of The Corporation … definitely one not to miss.