Corporations Colonized Democracy

Democracy didn't fall. It was bought, one legal loophole at a time.

Make Lobbying Illegal in Politics.

When this fascist terror regime is brought to justice and we finally get to breathe again, let’s start here. Make it a policy. Because right now we have built an entire government around the idea that democracy is a marketplace and our voices are only as loud as our bank accounts. Sounds more like an auction than a democracy. The rich get richer and the poor and working class get left up Shit’s Creek without a paddle.

Strip corporations of “personhood.” They are not people. They don’t bleed, they don’t grieve, they don’t need healthcare or maternity leave or a living wage. A corporation is just a legal facade wearing a person costume so it can buy elections and dodge accountability in the same fuckin breath. The truth of the matter, is that we gave a profit machine the constitutional rights of a human being, and then got pissed when it legislated like one. All of this can be undone. And it must.

It didn’t happen through a law though. Everything corporations do today is due to a simple clerical error.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to protect freed slaves. “Equal protection of the laws” was written for people who had just escaped being legally classified as property. Almost immediately, railroad lawyers saw the opportunistic loophole. If they could get corporations declared “persons” under that amendment, railroads would get the same protection from state regulation that freed slaves were supposed to get from state abuse.

And in 1886, these assholes got their opening. This all began with the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case. The actual case was a boring tax dispute about fences. See for yourself here: Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad

The Court never even argued or ruled on corporate personhood. But before the decision was printed, a court reporter named John Bancroft Davis, who used to be a railroad company president, wrote into the headnote that the justices agreed corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment. A headnote is a short summary that sits at the top of a published court opinion, written by a court reporter or legal editor — not by the judges. It’s meant to help lawyers skim and find cases fast, kind of like recap in front of a research paper. Headnotes carry no legal weight. It’s an overview, not a ruling. Nobody voted on it. Nobody argued it. A flat-out lie. It was one former railroad executive’s sentence, and it became the founding myth of corporate personhood in America.

Ninety years later, in 1976, Buckley v. Valeo took that headnote and weaponized it, ruling that spending money to influence an election counts as protected speech. That’s the case that actually invented “money is speech” as law, not Citizens United. Citizens United just solidified it, extending that logic to corporations directly and ripping out what was left of the guardrails on corporate election spending. That’s when Super PACs and dark money went from a crack in the wall to opening the floodgates in politics.

Citizens United didn’t create this rot. It just capitalized on a lie that a railroad executive wrote into a legal footnote a century and a quarter earlier, and nobody ever bothered to correct it. At some point we need to own this and fix it, no?

The Lobbyists

A lobbyist costs more than most Americans make in a year. So when we say the poor and working class have no advocate in this country, we’re not just talking out of our asses, we’re reading the actual price tag. Representation has a cost of entry, and most of us were priced out before we were born.

So who’s left to advocate for the rest of us?

It’s the Progressive grassroots candidates. The DSA candidates. The ones running on small-dollar donations and door-knocking and refusing corporate PAC money on plain old principle, not optics. They’re not perfect and they don’t always win, but they are the only people in the arena who aren’t already bought. That matters more than anything else on a ballot. So, do a quick google search and find out who your candidates are in your district. This is the most important election of our lives here in America this November. There’s no room for laziness. Everyone must vote.

America is the House White Supremacy Built

But none of this works if we stop at campaign finance. Because you can strip corporate personhood and outlaw lobbying tomorrow and still wake up in a white supremacist country the day after. The rot isn’t just economic, it’s foundational. It’s baked into who this country decided counted as “American” from the very beginning, and it’s still baked into who gets believed, who gets policed, who gets bailed out and who gets left to drown, figuratively and literally.

What’s it going to actually take to make America a beautiful place to live, somewhere we’re proud to call our home. Not just “great” and absolutely not just white supremacist great?

Let’s be specific, because “great” is doing a lot of unpaid labor in that stupid-ass Nazi slogan.

The decade they’re pointing to is the 1950s. Not the entire sweep of American history, not some fantasy golden age. A narrow band of years, mid-century, postwar boom, and even that framing only works if you never ask, “boom for whom.”

For women, “great” meant you could be fired for getting pregnant and there was no law against it. It meant a bank could deny you a credit card without your husband’s signature until 1974. It meant marital rape wasn’t a crime anywhere in the country until the 1970’s, and wasn’t illegal in all fifty states until 1993. It meant no-fault divorce didn’t exist, so if your husband hit you, your options were stay, or prove fault in a system built to protect him. Great, if you liked being human property.

For Black Americans, “great” was Jim Crow. It was redlining maps drawn in red ink by the federal government itself, deciding which neighborhoods got mortgages and which got nothing. It was the GI Bill, that great engine of the white middle class, given locally in ways that shut Black veterans out of the same housing and education benefits white veterans cashed in on. It was lynching still happening, still going unprosecuted. It was a decade before the Civil Rights Act, a decade before the Voting Rights Act. The interstate highway system, another symbol of that “greatness,” was routed straight through Black neighborhoods to bulldoze them.

For Native people, there was no golden decade. There was termination policy, the federal government literally trying to dissolve tribal nations and relocate people off their land into cities, all happening in real time during the years MAGA nostalgia points back to.

For queer people, “great” meant the Lavender Scare, meant you could be arrested for who you loved, meant psychiatry classified you as mentally ill and there was no vocabulary yet for anyone to say otherwise out loud without losing their job, their kids, their life.

For immigrants, “great” was the legacy of 1924 quota laws explicitly designed to keep the country white and Northern European, quotas that shaped who was even allowed to try for that dream in the first place.

For disabled people, “great” was before the ADA, before curb cuts, before the idea that public space should include them at all.

So when someone says “great,” they are not describing a shared national inheritance. They’re describing a very specific comfort, for white, cisgender, heterosexual men, and they know it. That’s the little detail that gets left out of the slogan, because if you said it honestly, “Make America Comfortable Again, For White Colonizers Only,” nobody would put it on a fuckin hat.

The revised American dream doesn’t get to skip that reckoning. It means land acknowledgment, it means actual material repair. It means reparations conversations that don’t die in committee the second they get uncomfortable. Make these politicians face the truth. Don’t let these fuckers look away. How dare they? It means understanding that the wealth gap between Black and white families in this country isn’t a mystery, like they like to make us believe. There’s a legitimate documented paper trail. It means labor protections that treat a person’s time and body as worth more than a shareholder’s quarter. It means healthcare and housing and childcare that aren’t contingent on how well you performed capitalism this year. It’s people over profits. It means an education system that teaches the whole history, the ugly parts included, because a country that can’t tell the truth about its past has no business calling itself great in the present.

It means we stop mistaking empire for greatness. A country that measures itself by how much it can extract, how far it can bomb, how effectively it can criminalize poverty, is not great. It’s just powerful, and power without conscience is the thing every empire tells itself right up until it falls.

The revised American dream isn’t a bigger house or a second car or a bootstraps fable where suffering is a dick measuring contest you’re supposed to be grateful for. It’s a country where your worth isn’t measured by your productivity, where your safety isn’t measured by your proximity to whiteness, where your voice in a democracy isn’t measured by your net worth.

We don’t get there with a stupid slogan. We get there by making the bribery illegal, by taking the personhood back from the corporations and giving it back to actual people, by funding the candidates who were never for sale, and by finally, finally telling the goddamn truth about which America we’re trying to make great in the first place.

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