The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (12 page)

Piketty and Global Warming

The rise of runaway wealth accumulation at the same time as intensifying global warming has created the perfect storm, and these concepts need to be linked in political discourse.

Wealthy corporations and individuals keep reinvesting and getting wealthier. The current framing of global warming in the conservative and often the mainstream media uses both denial and scare tactics like claiming that addressing global warming is too expensive, would ruin the economy, cost massive job layoffs, increase energy dependency, and so on. These are all false claims, as independent studies have shown. But when the wealthy control what appears in the public media, they can control public discourse and public thought mechanisms through the control of language and imagery. And the worse global warming effects get, the greater the pain on the middle and lower classes, while the effects of global warming can be more easily withstood by those with great wealth.

Global warming is the greatest moral issue facing our generation. Accelerating wealth accumulation by the wealthy is a close runner-up. Together, they present a clear and present danger, not just to the United States, but to the world.

Growth

There is a major systemic effect of framing the Piketty insight in terms of inequality alone, and not thinking about how it relates to global warming and other major issues, like the pressure for continued economic growth. Piketty is arguing within traditional economic theory. He estimates that R can in principle (with the right politics) be kept less than G (economic growth measured in terms of GDP) if economic growth G is kept below 2 percent per year.

But growth is compounded and therefore exponential too. Economic growth means population growth, growth in the use of resources, growth in global warming, growth in weather disasters, and growth in the diminishment of the natural world. Over fifty years, even 2 percent growth is huge!

Once one starts talking about global warming, growth itself becomes an issue—population growth, growth in worldwide production for and by that population, growth in food needs, growth in energy needs, growth in natural resource needs, and so on. Fossil fuel use has to be reversed to avoid global warming disasters. An economy based on growth—even as low as 2 percent—in all these areas would not prevent a global warming disaster.

Models for a new “sustainable”—that is, nongrowth—economics are being developed. How does the Piketty insight square with such economic models—if it does at all?

That is a systemic causation question that needs to be asked. For example, the main factor in population growth appears to be women’s education and the availability and use of contraception. Women’s education is affected by poverty, but every bit as much by religion. Religions like Catholicism and Islamism promote population growth, which makes it harder to control global warming. It isn’t just whether R is higher than G.

The Intertwined Systemic Effects

One of the main take-home points of this book is that framing can have massive systemic effects. The absence of adequate framing can have just as massive effects.

Framing the Piketty insight as just about inequality misses most of what we have just discussed. It misses the systemic effects.

Framing is about thought, about understanding at the deepest levels, about circuitry in your brain with strong synapses that last, about changing unconscious, automatic, effortless understanding—in other words, about changing common sense. Frame change itself is a systemic effect. There are a lot of frames to be changed. How can such overall change be effected?

It begins by strengthening the framing for the progressive moral system and for the progressive view of democracy based around empathy and the responsibility flowing from that empathy. In other words, we have to care about others—fellow citizens of the world we have never met and never will meet—and recognize the fact that the private depends on the public.

That in turn depends on another systemic effect—the effect of language and the brain on public discourse, and the failure in universities to teach that effect.

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Government by Corporation

A
s we have seen, there is much that is unframed by the general public that needs to be framed, most notably:

•
Runaway wealth to the wealthy.
The wealth share of the most wealthy is growing exponentially, and the wealth share of others is correspondingly declining. In the absence of adequate framing, most people feel the effects but don’t comprehend the systemic causes.

•
Runaway climate disasters.
The earth is warming dangerously and quickly, and that warming is systemically causing climate disasters, including extreme cold. Without understanding systemic effects, extreme cold leads to the denial of global warming.

•
Runaway privatization of public resources.
The private depends on the public, but conservatives are drastically cutting funds for public resources while successfully promoting privatization. They say that government doesn’t work, and by cutting funds they can make government cease to work. And by cutting government resources for all, they can make democracy cease to work.

But there is an important framing that is beginning to catch on:

• The Constitution applies only to human beings.

Conceptual metaphors have no legal standing. We normally think using thousands of them, but the law does not overtly give them any official role in the law itself. So far as the law is concerned, metaphorical thought, which is ubiquitous, does not exist. But in reality, unconscious conceptual metaphors do exist, they are everywhere, and they have consequences. This disparity between the law and the human brain and mind is unframed—not part of most people’s everyday consciousness or discourse. At the same time, a major metaphor has entered into the national consciousness because of certain Supreme Court decisions—that Corporations Are Persons with Constitutional Rights.

Reflexivity enters here. Decisions made by our courts have the power to turn metaphors into facts-on-the-ground, as in this example. Those metaphors taken as facts give rise to further court decisions extending those metaphors.

The power to turn metaphors into facts can be an awesome power—a power with enormous political impact. The Corporations Are Persons metaphor has so great a political impact that it is worth some discussion here. Let’s begin, though, by looking at two powerful metaphors that form its roots.

Cognitive scientists who study metaphorical thought have recognized two common metaphors, which we adopt unconsciously and automatically, that are relevant here.

Metaphor 1: Pluralities Are Groups.
The Pluralities Are Groups metaphor attributes group properties to separate individuals—whether warranted or not. The result is that the group is perceived as an entity with different properties than the individuals in it. Take a look at the two operative words:

• A
plurality
consists of people, animals, plants, or other things considered separately—ungrouped. A number of people may be riding on the subway, for instance; but aside from being on the same subway, they are not necessarily part of any particular group. They are a plurality—but they need not have common characteristics, goals, or functions.

• A
group
is an entity, conceptualized metaphorically as a container for other entities. The group can, and usually does, have properties, resources, goals, and functions that are separate from the individual entities in the group.

Once we combine the two metaphorically, we being to think about pluralities differently. For example, a club, a church, an association (e.g., the AARP—the American Association of Retired Persons), can have money, a home, legal responsibilities, and liabilities (they can be sued or a lien can be placed against their property) that don’t apply to any individual members. Similarly corporations can be sued, while their stockholders can be immune to such lawsuits as individuals.

Metaphor 2: Institutions Are Persons.
Ask most people if institutions are people, and they will say no. In fact, our definitions of the two words are quite distinct.

• An
institution
is an abstract entity conceptualized metaphorically as a container for people. An institution is typically defined by its goals, resources, and by various functions, responsibilities, and privileges for whatever people are in the institution. The institution is defined independently of the people who happen to be in it, serving its functions.

• A
person
is a human being. Human beings have goals and resources, and typically have responsibilities, privileges, and carry out functions. Human beings also have properties that institutions do not have: human bodies and brains, feelings and emotions, desires and beliefs, physical functions and needs, as well as social roles and the ability to think and communicate.

But this conceptual metaphor has long been in our brains. We use this metaphorical mode of thought constantly when we are comprehending and discussing institutions, as in: The EPA was disappointed by the court ruling; Major League Baseball wants to wipe out the use of performance-enhancing drugs; Stanford thinks that online courses are a good idea; Berkeley is troubled by rape on campus; Planned Parenthood was disgusted by the recent court decision; and so on.

These two conceptual metaphors—Pluralities Are Groups and Institutions Are Persons—exist in many parts of the world and have for millennia. And in many cases they have been recognized in law. Roman law recognized certain business and religious groups as institutions with the properties of human beings: goals, resources, functions, responsibilities, and privileges. Today, we still attribute these properties of human beings metaphorically to institutions.

There is a long history of just what properties of human beings are attributed metaphorically to institutions. For example, the Medieval Church saw monasteries as institutions with goals, finances, responsibilities, and privileges—but differing from people in that they lacked a soul. In England, “companies” were institutions given exclusive rights or “charters” to do business for the financial benefit of their shareholders and the British Crown. One of the most successful was the East India Company.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by the owners of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which had a charter to do business in the New England area. The metaphorical idea that A Government Is a Business came to America in 1623 with the Massachusetts Bay Company, and has been part of American political life ever since.

Before 1819, the commonplace conceptual metaphor that Institutions Are Persons began to be applied to corporations and was limited to such matters as goals, finances, responsibilities, privileges, and so on. But there is a difference between this very common and limited view of corporate personhood and a view that gave corporations constitutional rights! That took the Corporations Are Persons metaphor out of range of normal conceptual metaphor and into the power of the courts.

In 1819, the Supreme Court made a fateful decision in
Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward
. Before the American Revolution, King George III granted a corporate charter to Dartmouth College, giving it land in New Hampshire and giving the trustees the right to administer the college. In 1819, the trustees deposed the college president. The New Hampshire legislature was outraged and passed legislation taking away the college’s charter from King George, putting the state in charge, and in effect, making Dartmouth a state college. The trustees brought a case against the state, with Daniel Webster arguing their case passionately before the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Marshall. The court ruled that, even though all political ties had been severed with King George, the charter still constituted a “contract” with King George, the person. The court held that this contract fell under the Contracts Clause of the Constitution, which forbids a state to pass laws overturning contracts. Though the provision in the Constitution applied to contracts among persons, the court held that it applied to corporations as well. Dartmouth remained private and under the control of the trustees. Meanwhile, a line had been crossed. A constitutional clause granting rights of contract and property to persons now applied to corporations. And an institution, the British monarchy, called metonymically the British Crown, was now taken literally to be a person, King George.

In 1868, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, making slaves free, giving them equal protection under the law, and guaranteeing them the right to vote. The first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In the years leading up to these amendments, large industries, banks, and railroads took corporate form, and became rich and powerful. Many states set about regulating them and restricting their powers. With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment intended as protection for former slaves, railroads saw a way around these restrictions.

They assumed the opposite of the Pluralities Are Groups metaphor, which separated the properties of group entities from the individual properties of their members. The new Groups Are Pluralities metaphor identified the properties of the group with properties of the members. They began arguing that corporations were persons and had as one of their properties the same constitutional protections as persons had. They argued this for nearly twenty years and kept losing. But they got the idea into public discourse, especially among people employed by the railroads.

Then, in 1886, they got a break. The railroads had brought four cases concerning taxes to the Supreme Court, including
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
. In Santa Clara County, there was a tax provision that allowed persons paying mortgages on their property to deduct the amount of their mortgages from their taxes. Southern Pacific Railroad had a huge mortgage and wanted its mortgage costs deducted from its taxes, which would make a lot of profit for the railroad and cost Santa Clara County a lot of tax money.

The case was argued in the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Morrison Waite presiding. Waite had earlier been a railroad lawyer. The court recorder was J. C. Bancroft Davis, formerly president of a small railroad.

The precedent of corporate personhood came out of this case. But the precedent did not come from any argument in the case or anything written in favor or against by any of the justices. The precedent came from an oral remark by Chief Justice Waite that was taken down by court reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis. The remark appeared in the headnotes for the case and nowhere else. The headnote quoted Waite as saying:

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

That set the precedent, which was then cited in succeeding cases.

Bear in mind, as we go through the list of cases, that British common law defined corporations and their shareholders in such a way as to legally separate the properties of the shareholders from the properties of the corporation, so that the shareholders were free of certain liabilities of the corporations—hence the LLC, the limited liability corporation. Each of the following court decisions violated this essential property of corporations, by automatically attributing to corporations certain of the constitutional rights held by shareholders—namely, constitutional rights of due process, free speech (seen as money contributed to political campaigns and spent on the media), freedom of religion, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and double jeopardy.

Bear in mind the Mitt Romney quote from the 2012 presidential election: “Corporations are people, my friend. . . . Everything corporations earn eventually goes to people.” He neglected to say which people.

In 1889, the court overtly granted due process protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations; in 1893, it was Fifth Amendment protections of double jeopardy; in 1906, Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure; and in 1978, the First Amendment right to make contributions to ballot initiative campaigns.

In the latter case, the metaphor was extended: Though a corporation could not go to the polls and vote, as a “person” it has the right of free speech since its shareholders have the right of free speech. Then a further metaphor: Speech as Money going to campaigns—not for candidates (real people) but for policies affecting corporations. It was a step toward Citizens United.

Interestingly, Citizens United is not directly about corporate personhood and does not depend on that general metaphor. It depends instead on two other metaphors.

• Money Is Speech

• Nonpersons Have the Right to Speech

These two metaphors form a logic: People have a right to as much speech as they want. Since money is speech and nonpersons have the right to speech, it follows that nonpersons have the right to spend as much money as they want on elections.