I was just providing a link to Brad DeLong's blog, not to a particular story. Believe me, his blog is full of stories on voting suppression (and theft) issues.

Sometime last year, about the time of Manjoo's piece here, Kennedy did a piece for Rolling Stone that got a lot of attention. I'm not sure of the order, but I think Kennedy's might have been first, and Manjoo's in reaction to it, more or less denouncing it. Then, Salon printed a response from RFK.

(Good thing I was tending toward low blood pressure, rather than high.)

Must we to bed indeed? Well, then,

Let us arise and go like men,

And face with an undaunted tread

The long black passage up to bed.

Farewell, O brother, sister, sire!

O pleasant party round the fire!

The songs you sing, the tales you tell,

Till far to-morrow, fare ye well!

--from "Northwest Passage," Robert Louis Stevenson

But America is less powerful and influential today, in the realpolitik sense, than it has been since the before WWII.

Sure, and while the concept of realpolitik is generally applied to international relations, I don't see why it can't be applied domestically as well. In this sense, if power and influence are any indication, American neocon realpolitik (while counterfactual in the context of Libertarian at Large's original post) is undeniably real and depressingly successful.

Hence (once again) the dishonest efforts of conservatives to pretend Bush is not one of them.

"Thank you for making this clear. It frequently seems as if libertarians do not believe in regulating business, but want government to have very limited power. It's good to know that you believe corporations shouldn't have this power either."

It's important to keep in mind, when you're talking about government regulation of corporations, that federal regulation is often *sought*

by corporations, because it redounds to their benefit. Corporations prefer, for example, friendly *federal* regulation because it supercedes and vitiates state and local regulation.

The term "corporate welfare" comprehends many more phenomena than most people realize.

Consider these examples provided by political scientist Bertram Gross, in *Friendly Fascism*,

"Although it is perfectly true, as conservative economists insist, that "there are no free lunches," there are scores of corporate "free lunchers" who manage to get other people-via government intervention-to pick up all or part of the bill. Although new forms of this fine-tuned intervention are created every year, some of the more conspicuous examples in the United States are:

* The Federal Reserve system, which supports bankers by maintaining high interest rates and bailing out bank failures.

* The nominally progressive federal tax system, which has become a labyrinth of special loopholes that provide many billions of "tax expenditures" (indirect subsidies) for specific companies or groups. For fiscal year 1980 these tax expenditures amounted to over $150 billion-more than 20 percent of direct budget outlays for the same year.

* The Treasury Department, which maintains huge interest-free deposits in large banks while at the same time paying the banks interest on money lent to the government.

* Billions in direct subsidies that are paid to airlines, the merchant marine, agribusiness and others.

* Federal expenditures for scientific research and development, which have subsidized the growth of capitalism's technological reserve.

* Government guarantees that protect many billions of bank mortgages and foreign investments against losses.

* Government regulations that give the large banks control over the investment of the pension funds of most labor unions.

* So-called regulatory commissions, which help maintain the oligarchic power of the communication media, public utilities, and major transportation interests.

* Government forays into wage-price controls, or "incomes policy," which are used to keep wages down or squeeze out business competitors.

And see my post regarding US corporations engaged in Iraq, for example, who are even less accountable than *acknowledged* agencies of the government. Look at the role the FCC plays in enabling the consolidation of the media by fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger corporations. Look at the way the FDA enables big pharma. Look at the way the federal government enriched big pharma with the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan.

One is well-advised to view the federal government, in other words, as USA, Inc.

KR

That was the name of the Star Trek episode in which Picard used the story of Gilgamesh to communicate with the alien whom he was trying to save (if my memory is correct). The alien spoke only in metaphors, and "eyes wide open" meant he understood what Picard was trying to do.

Being a Picard fan (love his voice), I remember that his soliloquy at the end was something about always trying to find ways to communicate, even between enemies.

In his illuminating book, *When Corporations Rule the World*, David Korten observes that:

"It is noteworthy that the publication of [Adam Smith's]*The Wealth of Nations* and the signing of the US Declaration of Independence both occurred in 1776. Each was, in its way, a revolutionary manifesto challenging the abusive alliance of state and corporate power to establish monopolistic control of markets and thereby capture unearned profits and inhibit local enterprise. Smith and the American colonists shared a deep suspicion of both state and corporate power. The US Constitution instituted the separation of governmental powers that was carefully crafted to limit opportunities for the abuse of state power. It makes no mention of corporations, which suggests that those who framed it did not foresee or intend that corporations would have a consequential role in the affairs of the new nation."

In another of his books on the abuses of corporate power, Korten analyzes what is arguably, because of its far-reaching ramifications, the single most individual freedom-destroying act in the history of the US government, (My emphasis) the 1886 Supreme Court decision in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company:

"... the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.

"Far more remarkable, however, is [the fact] that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision *without argument*. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of argument in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that:

'The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.'

"The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that:

'The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'

"Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history. (Emphasis added).

"The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts."

(David Korten, *The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism*)

Jefferson's fears of corporate power and his hope for the common man's dignity grounded in financial freedom is, at this point in history, far from being realized:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Ken Rogers