EL CULTO DE FALSAS IMÁGENES

To address the first question, what are some of the primary sources of corporate power, I argued that there are three primary sources of corporate power: its personification under the Fourteenth Amendment, the development of its voice, and finally, its acquisition of First

how each of these developments in the corporation’s evolution were also important aspects of corporate power. Individually, each development contributed to the rise of corporate power in the U.S. Collectively, however, they form a trinity of corporate power, with the first element – personification of the corporation under the Fourteenth Amendment – setting the stage for an unfurling of corporate rights that would dramatically change how human beings experience the social world.

The trinity can also be contextualized as a veritable trifecta of corporate power, because trifecta captures both the chronological and speculative nature436 of the evolution of corporate power via the three primary sources I have highlighted in this study – personification under the Fourteenth Amendment, the development of the corporate voice, and the acquisition of First Amendment speech rights for political expression. It also accounts for the fact that if any of these phases of the corporation’s evolution or aspects of its power were to be missing or if they had never occurred (and in the order in which they occurred), then it is unlikely that the modern corporation would have developed as it has; its power would have been unable to become so pervasive. All three pieces of this “corporate power puzzle” were prerequisite for the

corporation’s rise to institutional hegemony. These assertions are strengthened when we take into account a few alternative and hypothetical scenarios that omit a key component of the trinity. It is worth taking a moment to imagine what would have happened if there were no Fourteenth Amendment-based corporate personhood, no corporate voice, or no First Amendment free speech rights for corporations.

The significance of Santa Clara – and its role as a primary contributor to the evolution

of the corporate form and its power – becomes magnified if we consider what might have

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Speculative because there was no guarantee that the corporation would have developed as it has, especially during the nascent stages of its evolution.

happened had the ruling gone the opposite way; that is, if the personification of the corporation had remained limited to the Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) rules.437 The corporation still may have been able to develop a voice through the public relations field, but how that voice developed and to what uses it was put would have remained tightly controlled or at least significantly constrained by individual states, which issued and controlled corporate charters. Similarly, the acquisition of corporate speech rights would have probably come to fruition in some way. However, it likely would have been on a much smaller scale because some states may have permitted corporations to have very liberal speech rights while others may not have done so.

If the personification of the corporation under the Fourteenth Amendment had never taken place and if corporations were regulated by Dartmouth rules, it is possible that the transformation of money into speech would have occurred, but the reach of that money/speech would have only gone so far, because limiting the geographic reach of corporate speech rights to particular states would have significantly constrained the corporation’s ability to influence political policies and electoral outcomes broadly on a national level. Thinking through these alternate scenarios highlights the individual significance of each aspect of the trinity of corporate power as well as illuminates the interdependent nature of the relationship between Fourteenth Amendment personification of the corporation, the corporate voice, and corporate speech rights as key sources of corporate power. I will continue to elaborate this point by imagining the corporation without a voice.

Although corporations were personified under the Fourteenth Amendment and emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as very wealthy persons, without a voice they would have

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been left with the raw, vulgar power of the corporate police forces that were far too often popular mechanisms of corporate persuasion during labor conflicts. This method of persuasion relegated the corporation to the status of a repressive state apparatus (RSA). Because repression is often met with resistance, the development of the corporate voice was one of the most important aspects of the development of corporate power. As a non-violent form of persuasion, the corporate voice served a transformational function, moving the corporation from an RSA to an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), because it enabled the corporation to persuade with ideas and words instead of bullets and clubs.438 Public relations as the corporate voice was a key

instrument through which pro-corporate attitudes, beliefs, and values were (and still are) disseminated to the public and woven into everyday practices, becoming taken-for-granted norms.

From the Industrial Revolution to the 1970s and beyond, it appears that the corporate voice has played a significant role in establishing a corporate-friendly ideological orientation in society that functions to legitimate the corporation as a worthy and benevolent member of the human community attuned to major social issues, and with its own unique perspective to share.439 This rhetorical positioning of the corporation by the corporate voice functioned as a primer, setting the stage for the forthcoming corporate speech rights movement of the 1970s. Essentially the personification of the corporation in conjunction with the development of its “voice” functioned to make the idea of corporate speech rights a conceptual possibility, and

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It is possible that violence and the corporate voice did operate together at times and that turn-of-the- nineteenth-century corporations did not stop using violent tactics when public relations and the corporate voice were discovered. However, the corporate voice provided an important alternative form of corporate persuasion, eventually becoming the dominant mode of corporate persuasion, replacing overt violence. 439

Robert L. Kerr, The Rights of Corporate Speech: Mobil Oil and the Legal Development of the Voice of Big Business (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2005).

eventually a legal reality. Noting the significance of an idea for transforming the socio-political arrangement, Ernest J. Wrage wrote, “The study of ideas provides an index to the history of man’s values and goals, his hopes and fears, his aspirations and negations, to what he considers expedient or inapplicable.”440

The way that the Supreme Court has ruled on key corporate rights cases is in many ways indicative of what the Court, and what society, finds expedient. The battles fought on the court are emblematic of the battles fought in society.

The achievement of corporate speech rights for political expression was the crowning jewel in the trinity of corporate power. Even if corporations were persons with a voice, without speech rights the contemporary political power corporations hold today would have been nearly impossible to achieve. Without First Amendment free speech rights for political expression, corporate speech would have been restricted to commercial speech, which requires a higher level of truthfulness in communications and did not permit the political expression of corporations. The acquisition of free speech rights are what provided the corporation entry into the political arena. Acquiring speech rights, or perhaps more aptly put, the “fusion of money/speech,” 441

made the corporation a much more powerful political player on the national stage. It enabled the tremendous wealth of corporations to be used to influence the outcome of democratic political elections because, when money counts as speech, corporations are well positioned to use their vast treasuries to out-shout – or rather outspend – average citizens. This means that the corporate person is able to have the loudest voice of all. When the corporate voice is the loudest, the voices of other persons are prevented from entering the marketplace of ideas, while the ideas and

policies of the corporation circulate prominently and dominantly in the public sphere.

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Wrage 451. 441

Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neoliberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4.3 (2007): 327-331.

To briefly summarize, my research reveals that personification, voice, and speech are each independently key contributors to rise of the modern corporation and its power. In addition, my study illuminates the less obvious fact that when these three components of corporate power function collectively, as a trinity, they produce what is arguably among the most powerful entities the world has ever known – the modern corporation.