Sunday, December 21, 2014


Supreme Court cares not about YOU!
◀ prev ▲ next ▶
By 1886,the Supreme Court had accepted
A New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895: "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court ofthe United States guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic."
By this time the Supreme Court had accepted the argument that corporations were "persons" and their money was property protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Supposedly, the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations. The justices of the Supreme Court were not simply interpreters of the Constitution. They were men of certain backgrounds, of certain interests.
 Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations. However, in 1877, a Supreme Court decision (Munn v. Illinois) approved state laws regulating the prices charged to farmers for the use of grain elevators. The grain elevator company argued it was a person being deprived of property, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment's declaration "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
<br. The Supreme Court disagreed, saying that grain elevators were not simply private property but were invested with "a public interest" and so could be regulated.
One year after that decision, the American Bar Association, organized by lawyers accustomed to serving the wealthy, began a national campaign of education to reverse the Court decision. Its presidents said, at different times: "If trusts are a defensive weapon of property interests against the com unistic trend, they are desirable." And: "Monopoly is often a necessity and an advantage." By 1886, they succeeded. State legislatures, under the pressure of aroused farmers, had passed laws to regulate the rates charged farmers by the railroads. The Supreme Court that year (Wabash v. Illinois) said states could not do this, that this was an intrusion on federal power. That year alone, the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations.
 One of them (Justice Samuel Miller) had said in 1875: "It is vain to contend with Judges who have been at the bar the advocates for forty years of railroad companies, and all forms of associated capital. . . ." In 1893, Supreme Court Justice David J. Brew er, addressing the New York State Bar Association, said: It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few. . . . The great majority of men are unwilling to endure that long self - denial and saving which makes accumulations possible . .. and hence it always has been, and until human nature is remodeled always will be true, that the wealth of a nation is in the hands of a few, while the many subsist upon the proceeds of their daily toil. This was not just a whim of the 1880s and 1890s
 - it went back to the Founding Fathers, who had learned their law in the era of Blackstone's Commentaries which said: "So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the common good of the whole community."
 Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a populationdangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with causefor rebellion, be taught thatall is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign ofsuperiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck

No comments:

Post a Comment