Senator Elizabeth Warren's explosive question to bank regulators - have the big banks gotten too big to put on trial when they break the law? - raises the most important question of all, with far more dire implications: Does the United States of America still maintain effective sovereignty over its own business institutions? The ability of the US government to make and enforce laws against the will of Big Business has eroded so greatly since the 1980s that the citizenry must question whether large corporations remain subject to the laws and Constitution of our republic, or if they have become ersatz foreign powers operating on our territory, with our resources, and abusing our people while wielding the equivalent of diplomatic immunity to the legal consequences of their actions.
This is a deeper and even more urgent subject than "corporate personhood," since if corporations are indeed people with rights, then at least by extension we could insist that they also be subject to the same criminal justice accountability as individuals. But instead we find something far more egregious and destructive going on: The elevation of the corporation beyond even the sovereignty of elected governments, and yet operating in plain sight on the territories of nations whose laws they corrupt and evade with impunity.
Such a state of affairs combines the worst of all possible circumstances for the nations being occupied, making every possible remedy either impractical or politically destabilizing. First and foremost, the resources needed to rigorously enforce laws against them in court simply do not exist: Governments by nature must rely on taxing the same pool of money that corporations overwhelmingly control in order to fund government institutions, and law enforcement is only one of those institutions, so the fraction of resources devoted to holding business accountable is that much smaller than what business has at its disposal to fight perpetual court cases. In other words, the US government is outgunned in court by Big Business, and by a huge margin. Only when a case is peculiar to a single company, and the rest of its industry is either indifferent to the outcome or is eager to see a competitor fail, can the government compete.
There is no way this kind of relationship would be tolerated with an explicit foreign power. The US since 1945 has not accepted the possibility of being unable to compete militarily with any other nation, but because these businesses are run by individuals who are allegedly Americans (despite living all over the world, skipping out on taxes whenever they feel like it, and having about as much in common with the average American as they do with African bushmen), Big Business is not politically identified as foreign - it is treated as a contributing part of the United States even when it clearly holds no loyalty, does not respect our laws, avoids giving anything back whenever possible, commits crimes with impunity, and constantly assaults the integrity and effectiveness of our government in countless Byzantine ways.
Secondly, in terms of financial institutions, business is the primary mechanism through which all economic policies are propagated, so any disruption to that system can result in Mutually Assured Destruction. Basically, banks are like the face-grabber creature in Alien: Any attempt to remove it endangers the life of the host. This allows banks not only a self-triggering defense mechanism against accountability, but allows them to hold the nation and the world hostage by threatening global economic destruction if any attempt is made to enforce national sovereignty over their operations.
But meanwhile, the situation is not static - banks and other big businesses are all the while using the impotence of government to continuously increase their share of and unchecked power over economies; tightening their control over media, academia, and regulatory institutions; and undermining rule of law and democracy both in the United States and around the world. So, to extend the Alien analogy, they pose us with a dilemma - risk the patient to remove the parasite now, or guarantee the patient's death when some grotesque critter bursts out of his chest later. Pull the trigger on the banks and suffer the short-term economic consequences that might arise both naturally and due to malicious action on their part, or wait as the American people bleed to death financially and become little more than farm animals to the 0.001%.
As a geopolitical system, the operation of these quasi-sovereign corporations has more in common with some historical and even present-day theocracies (like the Vatican, or the Iranian religious authority) than any explicit secular state: They spend massive amounts of money on propaganda, setting up fake "think tanks" to promote corporatist ideology, packing economics faculties with puppets, and engaging in full-throated fanatical smear campaigns against politicians who deviate in any way from their prescribed doctrines. This is reminiscent of the Catholic Church's relationship to feudal authorities in the Middle Ages, legitimizing and delegitimizing monarchs according to its own interests, and promoting wars abroad to shore up its own power domestically. Similarly, some governments actually can exert some level of power, but only the worst and most brutal (e.g., China, Saudi Arabia) who basically compete on the same zero-sum basis as corporations. But democracies lose out badly in the mix.
And all of these enormous problems would be devastating even with a 100% ethical, honest, and uncorrupted government, but in fact the money of Big Business is so vast that government practically swims in it like a solvent. Big Business not only exempts itself from prosecution for even the most heinous crimes imaginable, but at the same time pushes through laws imposing even more draconian, irrational, and authoritarian control over the lives and freedoms of ordinary people.
We are not allowed to have rational gun control despite the clear mandate of the 2nd Amendment because that would (a)negatively impact the profits of the gun manufacturers, (b)reduce profits for all the palliative industries that have arisen due to all the murder and suffering caused by these guns, (c)limit the profits of the prison-industrial complex, and (d)create a safer, more civilized society that is less controllable through fear. The failed, irrational, and immoral War on Drugs continues unabated because Big Business profits from both the cartels and the government institutions that fight them, whereas a legal pharmaceutical business is far less profitable. We are not permitted to address the global threat of climate change because of coal, oil, and natural gas industries, and all ancillary industries that arose to support them. Solar, wind, EV transport, and other clean industries are not permitted to have a fair shake because they have far smaller profits for now than the fossil fuel and related industries. We are not permitted to regulate campaign finance because that would reduce the corrupting power of corporations.
Meanwhile, minor infractions by ordinary people with little economic power - or even just exercising Constitutional rights when Big Business finds it inconvenient - result in brutal suppression by police, draconian prison sentences to support the prison-industrial complex, and in many cases to deliver slave labor to private prisons who then use their inmates as a free or virtually free factor of production. More and more, the United States of America is simply being phased out in favor of a feudal/religious anarchic corporate state where fundamental human and Constitutional rights are subject to situational veto by employers and rich campaign contributors, and there is no set of circumstances whatsoever that would result in these people being sent to prison and their businesses terminated unless they had made some equally powerful corporate enemy.
It has even invaded our everyday discourse. Think about this: How often do we hear America referred to as a "market" rather than a "country"? How often do we hear the population referred to as the "workforce" or "labor pool" compared to being called the American people, or the people, or the citizenry? For every opportunity to engage in democratic civic engagement - which many of us have to claw through mountains of deliberate obstacles to reach - corporations invade our lives with a thousand different petty ways to remind us that they own us, that we are powerless chattels who mean nothing to them, and that it is the natural order of things that we obey and deliver our life's blood to feed their unearned and unelected power.
I am heartened to hear Senator Warren take the first step to what must ultimately be a line in the sand: Either the Constitution is sovereign, or money is - there is no third way, because politicized money does not permit competing motives, and does not tolerate democracy one second longer than it is forced to. Sooner or later, we must either recognize that Big Business is a hostile foreign power occupying our country, or else surrender any pretense that we are citizens of a republic.