The very existence of democracy worldwide may be doomed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. There is a long precedent in U.S. history that will now become a global phenomenon where national politics will be manipulated to favor corporate interests over those of the common people.
Citizens United merely unleashes what has been lurking in the political background for decades. It legitimizes an effort to empower a new master class of supra-national corporate elitists who have no allegiance to any nation, and in fact consider nations to be obsolete obstacles to their own self-aggrandizement.
In essence, these New Aryans see the common people of the world as little more than commodity labor inputs, little different from farm animals to be harvested. For years they have worked to achieve this goal that is now almost certain after Citizens United. They haven't even tried to keep this secret.
When President Obama took the extraordinary step of chastising the Supreme Court justices by saying in his State of the Union speech: "I believe [that decision] will open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections" he was actually understating the situation.
The historical precedent is this. When the United States was formed, it followed the economic ideas of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations." England at the time had already had a revolution that ended their feudal society. They already had a parliament that recognized the rights of the common populace. Smith argued that the wealth and power of a King was the wealth and power of the nation as a whole. Thus Smith suggested that the king should seek to empower the common people in order to enrich the entire nation.
Conversely, France was still a feudal society and when the French revolution occurred, there was a controversy over whether the democrats should take over the industrial sector that existed as part of the aristocracy. The French aristocrats fled to become Emigres and they developed the economic idea of Laissez-faire capitalism, that the government should leave the industrial sector alone. Thus the Laissez-faire concept of capitalism was divorced from the common people and from the idea of a national interest, and instead represented an economic philosophy for the benefit of an elite.
When the U.S. was first formed there was a dichotomy between these two ideals. Alexander Hamilton and the Cincinnatus wanted to create a new royalty in the U.S., and the Alien and Sedition Acts were designed to promulgate this. Thomas Jefferson advocated the Adam Smith approach and created a political party primarily to fight the Alien and Sedition Acts. He was relatively successful and in America we developed a capitalism that is seen as a means to empower the common populace, ala Horatio Alger. At the same time, Jefferson championed public education for the common people specifically as a bulwark against the rise of an American royalty.
However, there are three major incidents in history which demonstrate Jefferson was only "relatively" successful and that there is a continuing threat of royalist Laissez-faire advocates.
First, with the rise of the Robber Barons as an emerging American aristocracy, Teddy Roosevelt promulgated his "Bull Moose" party which avowed "To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
Second, the "Corporate Coup" by Republican industrialists against Franklin Delano Roosevelt attempted to replicate the rise of Mussolini in Italy after World War One. It was only thwarted by a retired U.S. Marine General war hero that they approached to fill the role of Mussolini.
Third, former World War Two Supreme Allied Commander and President Dwight David Eisenhower warned in his farewell address that corporate interests were corrupting congress and seeking to influence decisions to their benefit rather than the benefit of the nation.
Thus there is a continuing precedent from America's founding that four U.S. Presidents have warned against, five if you include President Obama, that democracy in the U.S. is threatened by a corporate elite.
With that historical background, what has not been popularly recognized in recent years is that an international multinational corporate group of what I call "New Aryans" have over the years of dealing with governments around the world, begun to consider themselves as removed from any national interest and they consider the common people in nations as simply commodity "labor inputs."
It has not gone completely unrecognized. In 2003, Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum, speaking in Davos, Switzerland, to the world's top business leaders warned: "Today, large parts of the population feel that business has become detached from society, that business interests are no longer aligned with societal interests."
There are also many books such as "The Divine Right of Capital" and "Global Capitalism" and "The Transnational Capitalist Class" and "The Global Class War" which began its introduction with a conversation with a corporate lobbyist "It took me a little while to understand her point: we internationally mobile professionals had a shared self-interest in freeing transnational corporations from the constraints imposed by governments on behalf of people who were, well, 'not really like us.'"
It is not like these New Aryans have been secretive about their plans. They have openly espoused for years the ultimate Laissez-faire philosophy that governments should not interfere in their power. They have chanted "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" and openly avowed that given the chance they would drown government in a bathtub.
At the same time, many Republicans have openly advocated the Leo Strauss view as summarized by Stephen Holmes in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), "Strauss applies this criticism to law; law spells weakness; law is a trick of the weak to tie down the strong. Hence, Strauss applauds the decisive leader who acts outside of the law to achieve his goals."
The self-styled Straussian Irving Kristol, deceased philosopher behind the rise of Ronald Reagan, long ago stated "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."
In other words, the mindset of the supra-national New Aryans is that somebody should govern above "everyone" in a modern democracy to control the "truth" they are given through such media as Fox News. They would see national governments as merely obstacles to be manipulated rather than the democratic ideal as something to empower the common populace.
We have a long historical precedent of attempts by the corporate elite to undermine the democracy of America through what Teddy Roosevelt called "the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics" and we have enough examples today of such an alliance dominating the national politics even when McCain-Feingold was in effect.
But the unholy alliance of yesterday was somewhat held in check by the national character of American politics. But as former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in a CNN interview, that is all taken away and corporations can now even openly buy members of the judiciary.
The new unholy alliance will be between the royalist Republicans and a class of New Aryans who control international commerce through corporate registrations in America and other countries that are wholly owned subsidiaries of multinational corporations registered in island nations subservient to their control.
Thus the taxation of democracies will be limited to taxing the common people while the New Aryans exist as superior beings above such mundane national concerns. What five Presidents have warned of is now merely a matter of implementation. And as we shall see in part 2, that implementation is already well under way in America.
President Obama grossly understated the consequences of Citizens United. The New Aryans were well under way to subverting American democracy before Citizens United, but now democracy is doomed. And that may have been the plan.