Meals From The Marketplace

           “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … .”

-U.S. Constitution, Amendment I

            Ever meet a corporation?  Ever have an extended conversation with one?  Ever invite one to a party?  Ever have one as a best friend?

            The Bill of Rights, which comprise the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, was ratified in December of 1791, a scant two and a half years after the original document, which established the supreme law of the land, had been ratified by the original states to the union.

            I mention this fact because, at the time, nothing like the present day corporation existed. 

            The first corporations in the United States formed in the mid-nineteenth century, and extensive laws recognizing their existence were not promulgated until later in that century.  Historically, corporations formed to provide protection to individuals who engaged in business affairs from being personally responsible for their business decisions and activities.  It was a way to foster an expanded economic climate such as developed with the explosion of industry in what became known as the Industrial Revolution.

            Prior to that period in the nation’s history, the idea of a corporation as a shield against personal liability would have been antithetical to the American economic scene.  Much of that early economy was still agrarian, and little of it involved financial dealings in which large groups of individuals contributed money to a business so as to advance the activities of the business while profiting from the business’s profits, all for the public good.

            The obvious conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that those who wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights had no thought of extending the rights therein guaranteed to anything like a corporation, whether legally recognized or merely de facto existent.

            And yet, in spite of this indisputable fact, a five-member majority of the nine-member Supreme Court decided last week that the free speech guarantee in the First Amendment applies with equal force to corporations and, presumably, to trade unions, associations and other non-human entities as well.

            The implications of this decision (in a case entitled Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission) are devastating for a nation whose democratic principles are already suffering mightily from the adverse effect of money in its electoral processes.  What makes the decision even harder to swallow is the makeup of the majority.  All five of the justices who signed on to the lead opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy have espoused to the “strict constructionist” method of interpreting the Constitution.

            That method, simply stated, seeks to interpret the Constitution as the founders intended it.  And since the founders certainly did not have non-human entities that didn’t even exist at the time in mind when the Bill of Rights was enacted, it is impossible to believe that they intended to extend the guarantee of free speech to those entities.

            In fact, any self-respecting strict constructionist would be loathe to even so much as suggest such a possibility in any other context but the one that the Court chose to deal with in the Citizens United case.  (And don’t let that name fool you; Citizens United is not a group of human beings formed for the purpose of bringing something akin to a class action suit.  It’s a corporation formed for the purpose of producing political ads, such as the one in issue before the Court: a full-length movie offered as a political advertisement denigrating the then-presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.)

            And so, if the majority opinion in the case does nothing else, it surely exposes the hypocrisy of the strict constructionists’ “principles.”  Likewise, the case also reveals the judicial activism that the right wing of the court now embraces (and has embraced for years, contrary to public perceptions that are largely promulgated by the “right-wing” media). 

            To be specific, in ruling as it did, the strict constructionists on the Court took a case that could easily have been decided without reaching the Constitutional issue (a key step characteristic of an “activist” Court) and then overruled not one, but two prior Court decisions, thereby rejecting the doctrine of stare decisis (another key step characteristic of an “activist” Court).

            Thus the current majority wing of the Court is fully exposed by its decision in Citizens United to be anything but strict constructionist and to be the embodiment of an “activist” Court.  Needless to say, this gang of five is composed entirely of Republican presidential appointees (Scalia by Reagan in 1986, Kennedy by Reagan in 1988, Thomas by the first Bush in 1991, Roberts by the second Bush in 2005, and Alito by the same Bush in 2006).

            But the unveiling of the true character of the Court’s majority is at best a silver lining to what is otherwise a horrendous blow to America’s great experiment in democracy.  Once the full implications of the decision take effect, political campaigns are likely to look more like McDonald’s commercials than debates over weighty issues like war and peace.

            How will this change occur?  Quite simply, what the decision allows is corporate political speech not just on ideas or policies, but in favor of (or in opposition to) specific candidates for office.  In other words, what is now on tap in American politics is the commercialization of elections.

            Some will say that we are already at that state in the deterioration of American democracy.  And, to be sure, we are a long way from the purity of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. 

            But now, we will have the marketing departments of our largest corporations putting together glitzy political ads for Joe Smith or Jane Jones, proclaiming them to be “scientifically-proven” to promote the “best results” in a test of comparable candidates.

           And their smiles will be brighter.  For sure.

            The current big HBO hit, “Big Love,” is now four episodes into its fourth season, and while the main characters have not changed, much of the storyline has.

            For those who have not hooked up with the show (let alone gotten hooked by it), here’s the basic essence of the story.  The central characters are Bill Hendrickson and his three wives, who all live together with their seven or eight (hey, it’s hard to keep track) children in a quiet middle-class suburb of Salt Lake City.

            Yes, the Hendricksons are Mormons, albeit they aren’t in good standing with the official church.  They’re polygamists, which the church has outlawed for over one hundred years.  But this family, and a whole slew of other folks in the series, is practicing the “principle,” which, although it is never completely spelled out, appears to involve a belief that being married in God’s eyes assures eternal life with all family members in a physical paradise.

            The first three seasons of the show, which lists Tom Hanks as a co-executive producer, focused largely on Bill and his three wives and their ongoing run-ins with the father of one of the wives who reigned supreme as the “prophet” of a sizeable enclave of similarly-minded Mormon polygamists.  That guy, Roman Grant (beautifully played by Harry Dean Stanton) died (or was killed off) at the end of the last season, leaving Bill Hendrickson to ponder whether he might have a future as the new “prophet.”

            But Bill has a different calling (at least to this point in the fourth season of the show), and it is politics.  Thus, much of the action is taking place in Washington, DC, with beautiful shots of the Capitol and other monuments as backdrops for the intrigue that is unfolding, plot-wise.

            Meanwhile, back on the ranch, Bill’s first wife is trying to run the big Native American casino that the Hendrickson’s are co-owners of.  That plot-line is getting into heavy social issues the likes of which aren’t visited on commercial television at all: issues like cultural purity, reverse racial bigotry, and ethnic insensitivity.

            And as if that isn’t enough, Roman Grant’s son, who also wants to be the new “prophet,” is “fooling around” (his words) with another Mormon male (an attorney who vows to avoid the temptation of carnal coupling every time they meet, only to succumb moments later). 

            So the show has taken on a decidedly more aggressive posture in the world of cable broadcasting, dealing with serious issues and doing it in a way that doesn’t preach and doesn’t judge.  It’s a show to watch, even if it all sometimes seems just one notch above a glorified soap opera.

            And what make it eminently watchable are its excellent cast and top-notch production values (to include the on-location scenes in the nation’s capital that premiered this week). 

            The cast is led by Bill Paxton as Bill Hendrickson and Jeanne Tripplehorn as wife #1, Chloe Sevigny (in the role for which she just won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress) as wife #2, and Ginnifer Goodwin as wife #3.  Other standouts are Amanda Seyfried as the eldest daughter, Douglas Smith as the eldest son, Matt Ross as the “fooling around” would be “prophet,” and Mary Kay Place as wife #2’s mother, who was one of the now dead prophet’s many wives.

            Okay, so you kind of need a scorecard to keep track of the players.  But don’t let that little detail stop you.  This show has as much entertainment value as any show on the tube these days, and it doesn’t hurt that it is exploring, in its own bizarre way, some of the cutting social and political issues of our times.

            “Big Love” isn’t a great television show, but for what it’s trying to do, it gets a solid A from us.

            In 1994, with less than two months left in the regular season, major league baseball shut down over a dispute between the players and the owners.  The games were not played again until the following spring, when a District Court Judge named Sotomayor forced the parties to resume business.

            The following years were difficult for the sport.  Many fans had been disillusioned.  Attendance plummeted and revenues followed.  Even salaries slowed in their inexorable climb to the stratosphere.

            And then, in 1998, something very exciting began to unfold.  Two players, Mark McGwire of the Cardinals, and Sammy Sosa of the Cubs, started hitting a lot of home runs.  At the time, it had been 37 years since a new single season home run record had been set.  In 1961, the New York Yankees’ Roger Maris had hit 61 long balls to break the theretofore cherished record of Babe Ruth.  Many had thought the Maris mark would last forever.

            But McGwire and Sosa charged at the record almost in lockstep, and the question soon became not if either would break the record, but which one of them would break it first.

            The honor went to McGwire, who ended the season with an astounding 70.  Sosa trailed with an equally remarkable 66.  And with those performances, baseball had regained much of the following it had lost four years earlier.

            McGwire’s record, however, did not last nearly as long as Maris’s.  Three years later, at the age of 37, Barry Bonds hit 73 homers.  Previously Bonds had never hit as many as 50.

            Around that time, folks started asking questions about the sudden surge in home runs, not just by noted sluggers like Bonds, McGwire and Sosa, but by former singles hitters like Brady Anderson, who had hit 50 in 1996 after never hitting more than 21 in eight previous big league seasons.  Suddenly sportswriters and fans were talking about PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) generally and about steroids in particular.

            Were all of these guys “juiced”?  Was cheating occurring at the highest levels of the game?

            In the spring of 2005, following the release of a tell-all book by Jose Canseco in which the former slugger admitted to regular and consistent steroid use by himself and many other players (many of whom, including McGwire, he named), Congress finally took up the issue.  Several big-name sluggers were called to testify.  McGwire was one of them.

            “I’m not here to talk about the past,” he said, when asked if he had ever used steroids.  His non-denial was generally accepted to mean that Canseco’s allegations were true; McGwire had used steroids while breaking the home run record.  (Bonds was not called to testify at those hearings, but he subsequently admitted he had used steroids, although he claimed not to have known that’s what the drugs were.)

            Earlier this month, McGwire finally came clean.  The impetus was his pending return to baseball.  He will serve as the Cardinals’ hitting coach this year, and he had to know the media would be hounding him every day if he didn’t address the long-standing issue before the season started.

            Whether the Hall of Fame was on his mind is another question.  Since his retirement following the 2001 season, McGwire has been on the HOF ballot four times.  His vote totals each year have never exceeded 25 %, a long way from the 75% needed for election. 

             Some voters (members of the Baseball Writers Association of America) have stated that they would never vote for McGwire so long as he refused to acknowledge his use of steroids.  Of course, now that he has admitted to such use, many of those same voters say they will never vote for him anyway.

             In truth, McGwire’s stats, apart from the prodigious home run totals (583 lifetime, which is still 8^th on the all-time list) were not Hall of Fame caliber.  He was a mediocre average hitter (.263 lifetime average) with little else to commend himself for that exalted status.

            But should he be kept out of the Hall because he cheated?  That question isn’t all that easy to answer, because to keep McGwire out on that basis alone would mean that a slew of other stars of the era would also have to be excluded.  Among the high-profile players who would otherwise merit serious consideration (if not automatic election) are Roger Clemens (the seven-time Cy Young Award winning pitcher), Alex Rodriguez (the current player who may end up with the lifetime home run title) and, of course, Barry Bonds himself.

            Cheating is a no-no, of course, but how are cheaters to be identified?  Is circumstantial evidence enough?  Many big name players are “alleged” to have used steroids, and the allegations are often based on nothing more than increased body size and increased on-field performance.  Actual testing did not begin until 2003, when the players’ union finally agreed to allow its members to be tested.  But, of course, most players who had been using PEDs went off of them at that time, the “steroids era” thus coming to a de facto end.

            And what about the claim that “almost everybody was doing it; if I didn’t I’d be at a disadvantage”?  In his book, Canseco claims that 85% of major leaguers were using steroids.  If that figure is accurate, the likelihood is that many players felt pressured to use PEDs.

            And then there is the question of why steroids, in particular, are regarded with such hostility.  Canseco alleges careful use of steroids is no more harmful to the body than any other drug. 

            In his excellent documentary, “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*,” (the asterisk is intentional), Christopher Bell explores the truth about anabolic steroids and its effect on America’s culture.  His conclusion is hardly definitive, but he suggests that steroids are not nearly the major health risk everyone has been led to believe they are.

            So, what to do with Mark McGwire?  The bet here is that he, along with many of his PED pals, will eventually be accepted into the hallowed Hall, and then, in time, the asterisks by their names will gradually disappear.

            Is the presidency of Barack Obama really all that different from the one Hillary Clinton would have had? 

            That question might not be all that important in the grand scheme of things as the president completes his first year in office next week.  But it is one that many who wildly supported Obama should be asking themselves. 

            The hypothetical comparisons, while entirely speculative, are not all that encouraging for those who really thought “CHANGE” meant things would be far different with Obama as president than they would with Hillary leading the way.

            Let’s start with the idea of bipartisanship.  It sounded so good during the campaign.  Obama came across to many voters, especially his most ardent supporters, as the kind of guy who could bring well-meaning folks with differing viewpoints together.  His biography, especially his tenure as the president of the Harvard Law Review, suggested he was a master at breaking down defenses by offering humility instead of machismo.

            And, to his credit, he tried, perhaps more than Hillary would have tried.  But let’s not forget that for all the supposed hatred that surrounded her political persona, Hillary was greatly respected by colleagues on both sides of the aisle during her eight years in the U.S. Senate.  She probably had a better bipartisan track record there than Obama had amassed in his shorter four-year stint.

            But let me not digress, because whatever skills either of the two has in this area, they would both probably have been met with the rigid opposition the Republicans have thrown at Obama. 

           To state the matter simply and directly, the Republican Party has been a complete embarrassment to the concept of bipartisan governance for the last year.  It has taken on the strategy best espoused by its de facto leader, Rush Limbaugh, of seeking to assure that Obama fails.  (“I hope he fails,” Limbaugh famously told his radio listeners in the first weeks of Obama’s term.)

             The result has been the emergence of a unified party that not only votes against any meaningful Obama initiative but seeks to throw roadblocks in front of those initiatives at every opportunity.  The Senate filibuster is the best example of this strategy. 

             Think about it: Other than for judicial nominations, when has the minority party in the Senate ever used the 60-vote requirement so consistently as we have seen the Republican minority use it this last year?

            Suddenly, a “tyranny-of-the-minority” rule controls the flow of business in the “less democratic” of the two Congressional houses.  (Senate seats are not apportioned by population as they are in the House.)  And the Republican leadership is enforcing that rule with remarkable efficiency.

             The result is a far less appealing health care/health insurance reform bill than would have been adopted with simple majority rule.  And because the will of the Senate must be satisfied for any bill to be passed, the health care “change” that we will see enacted early this year will be far less dramatic (and far more appealing to the vested interests in the status quo) than it would otherwise have been.

             Would Hillary have had any less success on this issue?  Would she have been any less effective at working with all 100 Senators?

             Ponder that one while we move to foreign policy.

             Obama won the Nobel Prize.  Good for him.  Hillary certainly would not have gotten that honor bestowed upon her (this early, at least).  But what did that award have to do with actual accomplishments?  The answer, in all honesty, is very little, as Obama himself humbly acknowledged in accepting the prize.

             But what Obama didn’t acknowledge is that not only didn’t he deserve the award, but he was, at the time he accepted it, as much in lockstep with George W. Bush (a president who, it may safely be assumed, would never be considered for any kind of peace prize) as Hillary Clinton would ever have been.

             Would Hillary be doing anymore than Obama in Iraq?  Not likely.  Both would have accepted the Bush deal to have all combat forces withdrawn in 2011.  Would Hillary be doing anymore than Obama in Afghanistan?  Probably not.  She has the same hawkish tendencies he has shown, tendencies that Obama hides better, but the facts speak for themselves: Obama has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan since he took office, has continued the drone missile attacks in Pakistan, and has been just as belligerent in his actions (if not his words) as Hillary would have been in all his foreign policy decisions.

             Still not convinced?  Let’s consider a few other “change” opportunities Obama has had on his plate.

             Homeland security was an area that cried for change.  Better intelligence coordination would have prevented the Christmas bomber fiasco, as Obama himself has finally admitted.  Would Hillary have been any less vigilant than Obama and his charges in that effort?  And could Hillary have selected a more tone deaf cabinet Secretary than Janet (“the system worked”) Napolitano?  Shades of “Brownie” without the flood, thank God.

             What about gay rights?  Surely Obama, the first minority president could have repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” by now.  Any doubt Hillary would have been any slower in doing so?

             And then there’s the economy.  Let’s see, we have Larry Summers running it, in a new position especially created for him.  Summers is a bright guy, no doubt, but isn’t he the same fellow who was Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary?  Bill Geithner is also supposed to be a bright guy, although most of us are still looking for clues to verify it.  Would Hillary have chosen any less “change-oriented” folks to direct the nation’s economy?

             And who, exactly, has the Obama domestic policy team helped?  We’ve had bailouts for the banks, for the big auto makers, and for the wall street tycoons, but the little folks, the ones who really need change, are still struggling, still trying to figure out why the harder they work, the more behind they get.

             Would Hillary have done any less for them?

             Bottom line, did we get what we bargained for?  I’m just asking.