We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country’s altar that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.
— President Abraham Lincoln, November 21, 1864
Nearly one hundred and forty years ago, towards the end of the Civil War, Pres. Lincoln foresaw the rising power of the corporations that had grown the most due to wartime industries, and penned the above quotation in a letter to Colonel William F. Elkins. Now, in a case heading for the U.S. Supreme Court, the corporate world may be fighting to hold onto everything that Pres. Lincoln feared, and that has come all too true.
While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors’ sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation.
Instead of refuting Kasky’s charge by proving in court that they didn’t lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same “free speech” right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, “The check is in the mail,” or, “That looks great on you,” then, Nike’s reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.
They took this argument all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they lost. The next stop may be the U.S. Supreme Court in early January, and the battle lines are already forming.
The article contains some very interesting commentary on just how corporations have gotten the amount of power that they now hold, including their status as legal “persons” — a status never actually legally declared except through tacit acceptance of a headnote to a court decision, without any legal precedence to support it, added by court reporter (and reporter, former railroad president) J.C. Bancroft Davis in 1886.
More information can be found at Reclaim Democracy’s Kasky vs. Nike page.
(Via Jason Kottke)