What an Asshole #31 - Thom Hartmann

[anaxarchos]

This guy shouldn't rank in the list of gen-u-ine assholes. Is he not a social critic? Does he not pound tirelessly on the powers that be? Doesn't he open the doors to an analysis of our present situation, though we may disagree with him? No he does not.

Ah then, perhaps he is a "gatekeeper" - one of those famous "enablers" of the police state who defines radicalism as thus far and no farther? Is he a contemporary example of the COINTELPRO agent? No, he is not one of those either.

This guy is really an asshole. He is a volunteer and he is an example of a class. Hartmann is one of a number of "theoretical" radicals who slam the system from top to bottom without managing to criticize its fundamentals at all. He is Naomi Klein on methadrine. All is conspiracy, and right-wing politics designed to undermine the very goodness of our capitalist, middle-class, democratic, well regulated, American way of life. And... so obvious is all this that not a minute need be spent on political theory, a defensible analysis, or a historical perspective. Instead, politics shares much with shit in the Monkey House - we throw it around and see what sticks.

In stream of consciousness speak, here is a paraphrase of Hartmann's rap for July 14, 2008:

In the 1960s, the political reactionaries in the Republican Party discovered that the middle-class had become a truly revolutionary class. In the middle class' support for Civil Rights, Women's' Rights, Peace, and so many other issues, the political reactionaries saw the handwriting on the wall. This radicalized middle-class, unlike the workers who preceded them, could afford to miss a few paychecks to support their ideals and had a good deal more independence than all of the impoverished who had come before. The result was that the United States was becoming an unstable country by Conservative standards. The mass of Conservative politicians moved swiftly to ruthlessly dismantle this new middle class. A forty year assault was launched, starting with the ideas of Hayek and Greenspan and taking advantage of any shocking circumstance that came along... All that we see today is the realization of that conscious plot.

Ah, but in their fascist fantasies, the Right-Wing forgot something. For six thousand years, Capitalism had lived with a boom-and-bust cycle. In the time of the Romans, with the British and in the first 200 years of American History, crisis was constantly reoccurring. It was only with FDR and John Maynard Keynes' implementation of the middle-class that cyclical crisis disappeared. When the Right-Wing started to dismantle the middle-class, they also began to dismantle the main bulwark against economic crisis....

It goes on like this forever, dear reader... and it goes without saying that not a single idea is worth a damn, not a single phrase is serious, and not a single "fact" is represented accurately though the whole is meant to present a 'radical' demeanor...

...and I gotta believe Hartmann knows it because nobody is this stupid. This convoluted crapola is intended to paste the veneer of radicalism on good old-fashioned patriotic American Philistinism.

What an asshole.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/ThomHartmann.jpg

[Kid of the Black Hole]

I've never paid attention to this guy before but are you sure you can discount the possibility that he's a schmuck?

After reading that spiel of his I can see why the libs love the fucker so much

[blindpig]

Yup, this is what passes for 'deep analysis' over yonder, with some of those prominent voices taking this 'middle-class under siege' crap and running with it until they collapse in an unsightly heap. And they eat it up, it makes them feel important. And it allows them to forget everything and everybody else, it's all about them.

'Revolutionary middle class'? M'god, what parallel universe was this guy in back when? Though a time machine would more plausibly explain it.

As one who has been smacked upside the head with monkey shit in the zoo and on the internet I can attest to the accuracy of this analysis.

[anaxarchos]

What is it with "progressives" who worked for Goldwater when they were young?


Hartmann was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and grew up in nearby Lansing. Interested in politics from a young age, he reportedly campaigned for Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election. By 1967, Hartmann was studying at Michigan State University and working as part-time news announcer at local country music station WITL while protesting the Vietnam War with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He received his C.H. (Chartered Herbalist) degree from Dominion Herbal College, an M.H. (Master of Herbology) degree from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in Homeopathic Medicine from Brantridge in England.

Hartmann is considered to have progressive / liberal politics (although he describes himself as part of the radical middle) [2]. He is the author of numerous books including Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and Theft of Human Rights, in which he argues that the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394) did not actually grant corporate personhood, and that this doctrine derives from a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court clerk's notes. Hartmann considers this a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founding Fathers of the United States. [3] He has also written on the separation of church and state, drawing upon the Federalist Papers to argue that the Founding Fathers warned against the notion of the United States being a Christian nation. He contends that the 2000 American election and 2004 American election were stolen through electronic tampering, denial of the voting franchise by rigged voting lists, and limiting availability of voting machines. He also accuses the Bush administration of eroding democracy and individual freedoms.

Hartmann is also a vocal critic of the effects of globalization on the U.S. economy, claiming that economic policies enacted since the presidency of Ronald Reagan have led, in large part, to many American industrial enterprises being acquired by multinational firms based in overseas countries, leading in many cases to manufacturing jobs - once considered a major foundation of the U.S. economy - being relocated to countries in Asia and other areas where the costs of labor are lower than in the U.S.; and the concurrent reversal of the United States' traditional role of a leading exporter of finished manufactured goods to that of a primary importer of finished manufactured goods (exemplified by massive trade deficits with countries such as China); Hartmannn argues that this phenomenon is leading to the erosion of the American middle class, whose survival Hartmann deems critical to the survival of American democracy. This argument is expressed in Hartmann's 2006 book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class and What We Can Do About It. One of the book's main arguments is that media deregulation leads to corporate media shifting the American consensus towards the acceptance of privatization and massive corporate profits — which causes the shrinking of the middle class.

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/images/2006/war.middle.class.cover.jpg

[Kid of the Black Hole]

He is the author of numerous books including Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and Theft of Human Rights, in which he argues that the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394) did not actually grant corporate personhood, and that this doctrine derives from a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court clerk's notes.

Why have I never heard some asshole on DU make this argument? It's so right up their alley it could pull double duty and do colonoscopies on the side

[anaxarchos]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e7/Herzen_gay.jpg/200px-Herzen_gay.jpghttps://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/8.RT/SCMEDIA/3.Herzen.gifhttp://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/images/medium/medHerzen.jpghttp://people.emich.edu/wmoss/publications/her65.jpg
Alexander Herzen

"Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it. "

"Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development. "

"We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern cynicism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy. "


.

[eattherich]

When Hartmann doesn't sound all that different from these guys:

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/9365/jones3cb7.gif
http://images.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/16/buchanan/story.gif

Especially with all of that Constitution/founding fathers worshiping crap he spouts all of the time.


Hartmann also started as a Goldwaterite:


Thom Hartmann: The problem is that these guys have lost their core ideology. It's like what Reagan said, and – really from Goldwater – that they had lost the Republican Party. I was 13 years old when I went door to door for Barry Goldwater. I read John Stormer’s None Dare Call it Treason, and I’d read Goldwater’s writings. I was really into it – you know, at the age of thirteen. And my dad was on the county Republican Party's board or whatever. And he’s still a Republican.

For me, three years later, I was out marching against the Vietnam War. Vietnam radicalized me. It caused me to awaken. But what inspired me about Goldwater in ’63 was that he had a philosophy and he wasn't ashamed of it, and it made a certain amount of sense. He lost the election but began the conservative takeover of the Republican party, just because of the power of his beliefs. It’s surprising to me how many people I run into who remember the early 60s who tell the same story. They will say, you know, yes, I started out with Goldwater, too, as a teenager.


This weekend I was in Washington, DC. Prior to the antiwar protest, I went to interfaith service Saturday morning at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation and heard breathtaking sermons from Rev. Robert Hardies, Sister Carol Miller, Ms. Khalila Sabra, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rev. Graylan Hagler, and Bhante Suhita Dharma.

My old friend Rabbi Michael Lerner (disclosure: I was on the advisory board of Tikkun for years) highlighted the gig with a rousing call to action in the streets, and he and I marched partway to the demonstration together.

But what all the speakers knew, and the people in the (literally) overflowing church knew, was that it wasn't about any "big names" or "leaders." It was about the people marching. The people sitting in the pews. The people who went largely unreported in the mainstream media, but ultimately will transform this nation. The people who comprise the Parade.

Ultimately, it's all about the Parade - "We The People." The ultimate question for Americans - one we've been debating since 1787, is: "Do we run our country, or do our politicians?"

This issue - the power of the Parade, of We The People speaking up and speaking out and participating in the political process - was the primary debate in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention. Tragically, it will again be hotly contested as the House of Representatives begins to investigate potential crimes by the Executive branch and the Bush administration begins to push back and claim executive privilege (a doctrine that appears nowhere in the Constitution). ...FDR spoke of the Parade when he said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

JFK called people to the Parade when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask, rather, what you can do for your country."

Ben Franklin openly endorsed the Parade, saying: "In free governments the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns."

Americans love the Parade - the idea that We The People are really the ones in charge, and that we want our representatives to represent us, not to "lead" us. It's in our political DNA. Our Founding document - our original political gene pool - speaks of it: "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

This isn't meant as an endorsement of Edwards, although I have little doubt he would make a fine president, even though I do disagree with him on past votes and many issues. That's not the point: rather, it's an agreement with his push that we all join the Parade.http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_thom_har_070130_join_the_parade_for_.htm

Lots of otherwise rational people like the guy,but there's an awful lot that I find annoying about him.He sees to believe all the garbage he spouts abut The Constitution making the government a tool of the people.,and how it will be OK if we redress our greivences to our friendly elected Democrats.I don't know what sort of parallel universe he lives in,but it seems completely removed from ours.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

You're on a roll here eats

[Michael Collins]

(Hartmann also writes books on ADD and how to overcome it without drugs, just fyi)

The Orange Revolution was a construct of US foreign policy executed through a variety of players. This "revolution" is an
icon among some but it's a ringer once you dig even just a bit below the surface. Here's a good summary article. Not like
this is a secret.

But who could have guessed;)



Analysis
US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

by Ian Traynor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa


With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.

In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.

US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.

In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.

In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.

Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.

There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.

The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.

In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.

[anaxarchos]

There's Nothing "Normal" About A Middle Class
Thom Hartmann
The Huffington Post
September 4, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hart ... 32532.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/theres-nothing-normal-_b_32532.html)


"That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone." --Thomas Jefferson to Horatio Gates, 1798.

There is nothing "normal" about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy.

As twenty-three years of conservative economic policies have now shown millions of un- and underemployed Americans, what's "normal" in a "free and unfettered" economy is the rapid evolution of a small but fabulously wealthy ownership class, and a large but poor working class. In the entire history of civilization, outside of a small mercantilist class and the very few skilled tradesmen who'd managed to organize in guilds (the earliest unions) like the ancient Masons, the middle class was an aberration.

A middle class can only come about in one of two ways.

The first is by a sudden change in the relationship between population and resources. After the Black Death wiped out more than a third of the population in 14th century Europe, the increased demand for labor drove up the price of labor to the point when a middle class emerged in some places. Many historians identify this as one of the factors that brought about the Renaissance.

Another example came four hundred years later, when a second European middle class (and the first European middle class in North America) emerged because of the "discovery" of "resources" (e.g. "we can steal gold, wood, furs, and land from Native Americans) in The Americas. Some historians suggest that increasing the overall wealth of Europe (and Europeans living in North America) while the overall population was relatively stable produced not just a second middle class, but brought about The Enlightenment and the American Revolution as well.

But as the population of North America increased in the years leading up to the Civil War, the middle class began to vanish. From the 1830s until the 1930s, outside of family farms, the American middle class was again small and limited to shop owners and specialists.

Thus, when the Republican Great Depression hit America, Franklin Roosevelt was faced with a dilemma: how to create a middle class without killing off a third of the population or discovering gold in a distant land?

What he came up with - largely by pragmatic, trial-and-error work - was a synthesis of controls on previously-uncontrolled capitalism which, quite literally, saved American capitalism from itself. The Wagner Act of 1935, mandating unions when 51 percent of workers voted for them. The Social Security Act. Minimum wage and maximum hour laws. Child labor laws. The government as employer of last resort through the WPA, CCC, etc.

Republicans are fond of arguing that World War II ended the Republican Great Depression, not FDR's policies, but in that argument they ignore a central economic reality: When money is invested in infrastructure like roads, bridges, dams, hospitals, and schools (as FDR did), that infrastructure produces a return on that investment for generations to come. When the same number of dollars are put into bombs and then dropped on Dresden or Tokyo, those dollars vanish along with the bombs, never to be recovered.

While gearing up for the war did stimulate and alter the American economy, it's much easier to argue that WWII actually slowed our recovery from the Republican Great Depression, because it forced FDR to shift so many resources from infrastructure and into disposable instruments of warfare.

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, he set about to undo FDR's New Deal. For 26 years now, economic conservatives have run this country, and the result has been the steady deterioration of the middle class, a rise in the wealthy elite, and a massive transfer from infrastructure investment to war expense. The result could easily be another Republican Great Depression (or, more likely, given the massive debts run up by Reagan and both Bush's, a Republican Weimar-style Hyperinflation).

The idea that turning a nation's economy over to "free market" corporatists is idiotic isn't new. Thomas Jefferson laid it out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival.

"Those seeking profits," Jefferson wrote, "were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge."

He added: "I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. ... We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. ... [Otherwise], as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, ... and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers."

A totally "free" market where corporations reign supreme, just like the oppressive governments of old, Jefferson said could transform America "...until the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man."

To stimulate our economy after the collapse of the Republican Great Depression, FDR also instituted progressive taxation, which gave workers more to spend, thus stimulating demand for more goods and services.

Progressive taxation, too, has a long history: As Jefferson said in a 1785 letter to James Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

As Jefferson realized, and FDR proved, with no government "interference" by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there will be no middle class.

And as history around the world proves, when the middle class vanishes, democracy often goes with it.

Let's review this most interesting of social theories:

1. The key to social progress and prosperity is a "middle class". In fact, it is also the basis of "democracy". "...as history around the world proves, when the middle class vanishes, democracy often goes with it."

2. "A middle class can only come about in one of two ways."

3. "The first is by a sudden change in the relationship between population and resources. After the Black Death wiped out more than a third of the population in 14th century Europe, the increased demand for labor drove up the price of labor to the point when a middle class emerged in some places. ...Another example came four hundred years later, when a second European middle class emerged because of the "discovery" of "resources" in The Americas."

4. This 'organic' and neo-Malthusian 'method' for middle class history is responsible for not just "democracy" but also "the Renaissance", "the Enlightenment" and "the American Revolution".

5. The other 'method' for creating a middle class is FDR, Thomas Jefferson and government policy.

6. BUT, whatever the source of its creation, the middle class is inherently meta-stable, disappearing naturally through 'organic' economic concentration and also through an inorganic and political but equally inevitable counter policy.

7. The conclusion is not stated but it is either that "all good things are doomed" and life is not worth living... OR... the purpose of life is to constantly fight to enter or recreate the middle class because nothing good is possible without it. This is only possible through a continuous struggle for policies and persons who are eventually doomed to be undone... perhaps in combination with New-Age prayer for the appearance of organic Malthusian miracles.

And, that's it...

All of it...

What a pendejo.
.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

You forgot that its the Republican Great Depression

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Here's a start on Hartmann's claims re: corporations, the 14th amendment, the "Santa Clara" case, et cetera

The opening that I quote here is just window dressing. They don't spare any expense in gussying up their lunatic bullshit. It gets "better" as it goes on.


James Baldwin once compared white Americans' view of their own history to a factory within whose walls they have barricaded themselves. They remain trapped in that factory which "at an unbelievable human expense, produces unnamable objects." [1] Those objects are unnamable because they exist deep within our world of shared cultural beliefs. But we do have names for their outward manifestations: environmental degradation, class oppression, and racism, to name a few. Such a list must also include the legal fiction that the corporation is a person.

The primary engine of white United States history has been the use of property, the ownership of things, as a means of domination over people -- and the use of people as property, for slavery was the original basis for wealth in white America. But there are other ways besides slavery in which notions of property and race have become fused. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois noted that whiteness yields a "public and psychological wage" [2] to all white workers, which is expressed in the freedom to mingle across social classes, preferential treatment by police, eligibility for government jobs, and simply a greater sense of well-being than blacks.

Du Bois well understood that most of the wages of whiteness accrue not to poor whites, who receive only a pittance, but to the dominant classes. But what even he may not have been aware of is how, at the time of its birth, the modern corporation received as its patrimony the wealth and privileges accumulated during slavery. In 1883, the very same year that the US Supreme Court heard arguments in favor of declaring that a corporation is a natural person, the Court also invalidated the enforcement of civil rights for African Americans. [3] This was the first of a series of decisions that led to the Court's approval of racial segregation. The Court eventually held that both corporate personification and racial segregation were justifiable under the Fourteenth Amendment, [4] which was passed with the explicit purpose of protecting the rights of former slaves after the Civil War. This connection is more than a mere oddity of US legal history. These court decisions are part of a common social structure in which the exercise of social power through property rights continues to mask the concomitant disempowerment of people of color. In effect, what the courts decided is that corporations are people while African Americans are not; and that, while property could no longer be held in the form of black skins, it could still be invested in white ones.

http://www.ratical.org/corporations/birthOwhiteC.html