Reclaim Democracy!

Court Declares Corporations Are People, Some Human Beings Are Not

by

By Jeffrey Kaplan
Published February 8, 2008

In evaluating allegations that U.S. military forces deprived four British men of human rights during two years they were held captive in Guantanamo Bay prison, a U.S. appeals court found an innovative way to let the Bush administration off the hook. Two of three judges ruled the men — because they are not U.S. citizens and, technically, were not imprisoned in the U.S. — were not legally “persons” and, therefore, had no rights to violate.

While those judges were defying common sense and decency by denying legal personhood to living human beings, an appeals court in Boston has been reviewing an April 2007 decision by Federal Judge Paul Barbadoro that engaged in a different form of judicial activism — granting human rights to corporations.

Barbadoro struck down a New Hampshire law that prevented pharmaceutical corporations from learning exactly what drugs doctors prescribe and how much they prescribe. The law aims to protect doctors and, indirectly, their patients, from drug companies pressuring doctors to choose their products.

The judge’s grounds? He claims corporations, as legal persons, have “free speech rights” that would be infringed by such a measure.

The real issue in these cases (Maine recently passed a similar law) isn’t free speech at all; it’s manipulation and control. The drug salespeople only will decide what to say after poking into the doctors’ prescription records. Under the guise of protecting speech, Judge Barbadoro denied both legitimate privacy rights of doctors and key protections to ensure patients are prescribed drugs based on their medical situation, not pressure applied to their physician.

Taken together, these two rulings are a perplexing and dangerous development. The founding principle of our country is right in the Declaration of Independence: all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is not for judges to decide who is and who is not a human being.

Nor should the courts play Creator by endowing legal constructs like corporations with human rights. Our constitutional rights exist to prevent large, powerful institutions — whether governments, corporations, or other entities — from oppressing us humans.

For too long a strange dichotomy has persisted between many principled people on the political left and right wings. The left wing often warns against the growing power of business corporations. The right wing complains the left ignores the overweening power of the government and is “anti-business.”

Both sides have been seeing only part of the same elephant. What’s happening is a merger of corporations and state.

Already there are corporate “black holes” for human rights that rival government affronts like Guantanamo. Under the Bush administration’s legal framework for Iraq during its occupation, the Iraqi government wields no authority over Blackwater corporation’s security guards.

And it’s not clear the U.S. government does either. As a result, we may never see anyone punished for Blackwater’s wanton killing of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last September.

Then there’s the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, an American employee of Halliburton/KBR in Iraq who claimed she was gang raped by co-workers in 2005. U.S. officials reportedly handed the evidence to KBR, whereupon the evidence apparently disappeared. Nobody in Congress, Democrat or Republican, has been able to persuade the Bush administration to reveal what it has done about the case since then.

Halliburton/KBR, like Blackwater, apparently enjoys the rights of a person, but not the responsibilities.

Editor’s note: shortly after completing this article, we learned of this shocking story: Judge Denies Allows Halliburton to Force Sexual Assault Case Out of Court

The danger of “corporate personhood” is a bit like global warming; people have warned us of the threat for decades only to go unheeded because the dire consequences seemed far-fetched.

But look at what’s happened to the First Amendment. Corporations use it to strike down laws clearly designed to protect citizens, even while courts deny prisoners the right to know what evidence the government is using against them. It’s time for alarm.

We should take offense whenever we hear the dangerous notion of “corporate citizenship” promoted. Soon, the only citizens with real power in the United States may be the corporate kind.

Jeffrey Kaplan is a researcher with ReclaimDemocracy.org, a non-profit organization working to restore citizen authority over corporations.

© 2008 ReclaimDemocracy.org

Uncivil Liberties

by

ACLU ‘s argument that “money = speech” undermines democracy

By Jeffrey Kaplan 
Published March 29, 2006

Editor’s note: We were surprised to get some replies to this article accusing us of being anti-ACLU. To the contrary, we value the overwhelming majority of the group’s work and our advocacy work in defending civil rights overlaps regularly. Indeed, we have collaborated with various ACLU state chapters and regularly find ourselves working as allies far more often than as opponents at the national level to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

We simply think the national directors are badly misguided in arguing that corporations and wealthy individuals have a constitutional right to use their money to wield power over others. The matter is central to our mission of revoking corporate control of our country and the ACLU’s active opposition to that work is a significant barrier. We aim to provoke an open and constructive debate.

The American Civil Liberties Union seems to believe that not only does money talk, it has a First Amendment right to do so. In keeping with that highly dubious notion, the ACLU is attacking a Vermont law that limits contributions to political candidates and candidate spending in state elections. In a case now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court, (Randall v. Sorrell) the ACLU argued the law conflicts with the infamous “money equals speech” doctrine first promulgated by the Court in its 1975Buckley v. Valeo ruling.

Editor’s note: The Court struck down Vermont’s expenditure limit and ruled $200-$400 limits on the amount that one person can donate to any individual candidate per election to be unconstitutionally low.

Although Buckley did allow restrictions on individual contributions, the Court struck down a law limiting the funds a candidate could spend on a national political campaign. Many critics think this decision has hamstrung serious attempts to keep wealth from being a dominant factor in elections.

In its amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in Randall, the ACLU, like the justices inBuckley, offers up a legal argument that uses “speak” and “money” as if the words were interchangeable: “Above all else,” the ACLU brief (pdf) states, “the Court concluded inBuckley that ‘the First Amendment simply cannot tolerate [the] restriction upon the freedom of a candidate to speak without legislative limit on behalf of his own candidacy’ whether the source of his money is personal wealth or funds raised from legal contributions.”

The ACLU seems oblivious to the fact that there’s a profound difference between who we are (human beings with an inalienable right to self-expression) and what we may possess (money or other forms of property). Democracy is simply not sustainable in any society that confuses the second with the first.

The argument of the Buckley Court was more appropriate to plutocrats who believe they are what they own than to the ACLU, which declares on its website, “If the rights of society’s most vulnerable members are denied, everybody’s rights are imperiled.” The Court reasoned that limiting individual contributions was OK to prevent potential corrupting influence on a candidate, but declared limits on expenditures violated the First Amendment because it created an unjustifiable “restriction on the quantity of political expression.” The Court majority claimed to believe that a candidate’s war chest would be commensurate “with the size and intensity of the candidate’s support.”

Even 30 years ago, that was a dangerously narrow view, especially in light of the Court’s warning in the same decision against “naively” underestimating “the ingenuity and resourcefulness of persons and groups desiring to buy influence.”

Resourceful they have been. Jack Abramoff, now under indictment in the most extensive political corruption scandal in a generation, was a “Pioneer” for President Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, channeling over $100,000 in individual donations from wealthy donors (those who funneled $200,000 or more were dubbed “Rangers”). The list of the other 548 people who raised $100,000 or more reads like a roll call for Corporate America. Of course, John Kerry’s campaign also relied heavily on such elites.

“Naïve” is too weak a word to describe the ACLU’s attempt to ignore the likelihood such donations had much more to do with business than expressing one’s beliefs. We should beware that criminal acts by the likes of Abramoff and Tom DeLay don’t distract us from the more subtle and completely legal corruption that keeps our representatives from actually representing most citizens.

The Buckley Court ‘s rationale for banning limits on spending by independent organizations that support a candidate was equally suspect. The Court claimed, “The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” So would the Court would consider an ordinance prohibiting the use of bullhorns at town meetings an unconstitutional attempt to “enhance the relative voice” of those without them?

Unfortunately the people with bullhorns are gaining ever-more control. According to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, as of 2003 the top one percent of households in the United States owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth — a staggering 50-percent increase from 38.7 percent just 12 years earlier. During the same time, the wealthy and their allies in Congress repeatedly cut taxes for themselves, while mostbudget cuts targeted the poor .

Though corporations have been banned from contributing directly to candidates for a century, we’re still dealing largely with corporate money here. The Bush campaign gave code numbers to their elite fundraisers, allowing corporate executives to ensure their company was duly credited for donations they solicited. That credit later can be redeemed for access to the administration, if not overt favors.

It is state-granted privileges that allow corporations to amass great power. Governments grant privileges benefiting investors, such as like limited liability and perpetual existence, based on the notion that society as a whole will benefit indirectly.

Democracy is at risk when we permit vast amounts of money accumulated through these privileges to buy power over the political process itself. Even a majority of Supreme Court justices recognized this problem in 1990 when they noted, “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of [corporate] wealth … have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.”

Those corrosive effects run far deeper than any corruption scandal. According to testimony at state court hearings leading up to Randall v. Sorrell, “party and party leaders urged legislators not to oppose pharmaceutical interests for fear of being ‘shut off in the next election cycle from any contributions.’”

In other words, the money big donors withhold, not just money they give, helps keep legislators in line. The result is a “chilling effect” — a term the ACLU often employs — whereby certain policies are not even discussed for fear of alienating wealthy donors.

As one witness at a Vermont legislative hearing commented, “there’s an agenda out there that is pretty much set by folks that are not elected.”

The result is a well-founded sense of political disenfranchisement on the part of Vermont (and U.S.) voters. As one former legislator put it, many citizens don’t vote because “They think it’s all wrapped up and that the special interests control it and, quite frankly, they aren’t that wrong.”

It’s not the few overtly corrupt politicians that leave citizen feeling powerless, but the legal and unspoken bias of politicians toward large donors. As a Supreme Court amicus brief  by ReclaimDemocracy.org in Randall v. Sorrell states, “Decent people, after all, typically return courtesies with courtesies and favors with favors without keeping exact track or using quid pro quo calculations.”

In view of its ongoing denial of political reality, the ACLU’s position that the “power, even of a democratic majority, must be limited to ensure individual rights” is replete with irony. In this instance, what the ACLU is ensuring is the “right” of the moneyed minority to exercise political power commensurate with its wealth.

Nor is Randall an anomaly. The ACLU has a track record of helping wealth subvert democracy. In Nike v. Kasky, the ACLU supported Nike Corporation’s claim that its alleged lies about the abuse of Asian factory workers was constitutionally-protected “political speech.”

It’s not clear the ACLU’s advocacy for “corporate free speech” and against limiting the power of money in elections reflects members’ views or merely those of executive staff. Gregory Wonderwheel, a board member of the ACLU’s Sonoma County (CA) chapter has tried to provoke debate within the organization on these positions, but has found staff unresponsive. “The organizational leaders have their own opinions and don’t seem particularly interested in finding out how the grassroots members feel about this question,” said Wonderwheel.

The ACLU has been at the forefront of the legal struggle against the Bush Administration’s assaults on our civil rights and those efforts should be applauded. But given the increasing boldness of those attacks, it’s appalling the organization is diverting members’ donations to fight Vermonters’ right to govern themselves instead of focusing all available energy on those real threats to freedom.

It’s time ACLU members call on the leadership to stop undermining citizens’ right to self-governance and recognize the rights of human beings must take precedent over the power of property.

Jeffrey Kaplan writes for the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of ReclaimDemocracy.org.

Additional Resources

  • Find and contact your state ACLU chapter here to find out if they have a position on the issue and share your concerns.
  • An e-mail form to the ACLU national office is here.
  • To read the ACLU’s explanation on the closely related subject for why it argues for “corporate speech” to be protected by the First Amendment, and responses from ReclaimDemocracy.org, click here.
  • ReclaimDemocracy.org’s amicus brief in Randall v. Sorrell.

© 2006 ReclaimDemocracy.org

Beyond the Voting Rights Act: Why We Need a Constitutional Right to Vote

by


By Jeff Milchen

The original version of this commentary was published in several periodicals in 2001 and 2002. Sadly, this issue has proven “evergreeen,” as discussed in this April 2020 commentary: Dying to Vote: A Warning for November

As thousands of civil rights advocates celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Atlanta last weekend, most media coverage conveyed the Act’s importance in protecting the political rights of many Americans. Yet many of those same stories helped perpetuate a dangerous illusion by asserting the 15th Amendment secured a right to vote for Black citizens.

The Supreme Court doesn’t see it that way.

In its 2000 ruling, Alexander v Mineta, the Court decided the 600,000 or so (mostly Black) residents of Washington D.C. have no legal recourse for their complete lack of voting representation in Congress (they have one “representative” in the House who can speak, but cannot vote).

The Court affirmed the district court’s interpretation that our Constitution “does not protect the right of all citizens to vote, but rather the right of all qualified citizens to vote.” And state legislatures wield the power to decide who is “qualified.”

As a result, voting is not a right, but a privilege granted or withheld at the discretion of local and state governments.

True, our Constitution explicitly prohibits discrimination in granting the franchise based on a person’s race, sex, or (adult) age via the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments. The 24th Amendment also bars disenfranchisement via poll taxes. But those protections are like a house with no foundation. States and other governments can and do disenfranchise individuals and groups of citizens, and so long as they do it without provable bias, it’s entirely legal.

Washington, D.C. residents are not the only victims. Without an affirmative right to vote, Americans repeatedly are disenfranchised or otherwise deprived of their political voice and denied a legal basis for retrieving it.

Just months after the Alexander decision, a 5-4 Court majority in Bush v. Gore denied Florida citizens a right to ensure their votes were counted, saying “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote [for presidential electors].” Tens of thousands of Floridians who were purged wrongly from the voting rolls were denied recourse against Republican state officials who, under the guise of preventing felons from voting, disenfranchised them.

The Bush v. Gore ruling also meant Florida ‘s legislators could have followed through on their threats to simply disregarded citizens’ votes and choose electors themselves.

Our lack of a right to vote also weakens legal arguments for challenging anti-democratic structures that routinely prevent citizens in several states from enjoying a choice other than Democrats or Republicans at the polls. Georgia, for example, has institutionalized a two-party duopoly, devoid of outside competition, by requiring independent or “third party” candidates for U.S. Representative to gather signatures from 5% of registered voters, a feat not accomplished since before the VRA.

Worse, Georgia and Indiana recently passed laws requiring government photo identification to vote, despite lacking any evidence that people are impersonating others at the voting booth. Georgia’s law must first be approved by the Department of Justice under a provision of the VRA requiring jurisdictions “with a history of discrimination” to gain approval from the DOJ before changing voting laws.

If these laws take effect, a disproportionate number of minority, poor and elderly people who lack ID will be dissuaded from voting. This is exactly the kind of discriminatory scheme the VRA was created to stop, but so long as voting is a state-granted privilege rather than a right, courts are likely to let the law stand.

While we speak of “spreading democracy” globally, the U.S. is one of just 11 nations among 120 or so constitutional democracies that fail to guarantee a right to vote in their constitutions.

Although many constitutional scholars reject the Supreme Court’s reasoning in denying such a right, blaming the justices will not solve our problem. It’s time we caught up with our own rhetoric by amending our Constitution to transform a right to vote from myth to reality.

Resources

Creating “Terrorism” Out of Misdemeanors

by

Bush Administration manipulating statistics on terrorism investigations, convictions

By Bert Dalmer 
First published by the Des Moines Register, May 16, 2005

Editor’s note: We posted this report by Mr. Dalmer last year, which exposed some of the absurd cases classified as “terrorism” by the Bush Justice Department.

Newly released documents show that the U.S. Justice Department has greatly broadened how it defines and counts terrorism-related cases, a move that helped justify the department’s call for more funding and greater powers. However, the scant information provided about those cases has watchdog groups and members of Congress crying foul.

The criticism comes in the wake of independent reports suggesting that federal prosecutors have overstated their success in preventing further terrorist activity and attacks. Among the terrorism cases that have been identified in Iowa: the arrests of three contractors, all American, who failed to report drug convictions prior to starting work at airport runway jobs.

“I don’t know why they would call those terrorism cases,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican. “They are obviously not.”

Justice Department memoranda obtained by The Des Moines Register under the Freedom of Information Act show officials loosened record-keeping practices and broadened the definition of terrorist crimes before the department reported a surge of new terrorism-related prosecutions in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The records show that top officials instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to catalog their work in ways that served to inflate the number of terrorism investigations. Even tips that were immediately disregarded, the memos show, were to be counted as terrorism-related investigations.

The higher numbers have since been cited in budget requests and in defense of the expansion of police powers, such as those granted by the controversial USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal in Congress this summer.

Grassley, the senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he and his staff were “oblivious” of the changes in how terrorism cases were being counted. He said he has yet to hear back on an inquiry he made in early 2004 into massive discrepancies in terrorism arrest figures that the Justice Department presented in two different settings.

“I’m always cynical about (the executive branch) padding the numbers to justify more appropriations,” Grassley said. “If it’s found that’s the case, we ought to raise Cain with them, so they know that we’re watching and they aren’t going to get away with it.”

Justice Department representatives failed to return repeated messages seeking comment. In the past, officials explained that the sharp increase in cases was a reflection of a renewed vigor to disrupt terrorist threats.

In one Justice Department memo in 2002, a top official emphasized to prosecutors that following the new statistical guidelines was of utmost importance.

“We know that over time we will be called upon to report on the volume, type and outcome of your terrorism and anti-terrorism matters,” Deputy Director Theresa Bertucci wrote to federal prosecutors. “In an effort to account completely and accurately for all of your work, we must capture all terrorism and anti-terrorism matters and cases.”

In the past, some prosecutors have said that they sometimes charge people linked to terrorist activity with lesser crimes where evidence is weak, just to see that they are deported. They also want credit for investigations that seek to detect terrorist activity but which lead to arrests not related to terrorism.

“The fact that many terrorism investigations result in less serious charges does not mean the case is not terrorism-related,” former department spokesman Mark Corallo said in 2003.

However, the Justice Department has also rebuffed calls by Grassley and other officials to support its claims with case particulars that could put the public more at ease.

“Since Sept. 11, Americans have been asked to accept restrictions on their liberties. They deserve to know what they are getting in return,” said U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, in a hearing on the Patriot Act last week.

This year, for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks, the department omitted without explanation any figures on terrorism-related investigations and convictions in its annual performance report.

The omission followed an audit by Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, that criticized the accuracy of the statistics. The statistics account for the number and nature of leads from citizens and law enforcement agencies, and are grouped into crime categories defined by Justice Department policymakers.

In a series of memos sent to the nation’s prosecutors between September 2001 and April 2003, records show that the Justice Department:

. Required that any investigation involving a suspected terrorist link, even if unsubstantiated and unprosecuted, be counted as terrorism-related.

. Expanded the number of terrorism-related crime categories from two to six. Now, when federal authorities looking for terrorists make an arrest for other reasons, the case is logged by prosecutors as “anti-terrorism.”

. Exempted terrorism cases from a policy that generally counts leads only when prosecutors spend an hour investigating them. Unlike leads on conventional crimes, those on alleged terrorist activities are now immediately logged by prosecutors even if they are disregarded.

In the two years after the policy changes took effect, federal prosecutors were credited with winning 1,065 terrorism-related convictions. In the year leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, prosecutors took credit for only 29 such convictions. Hundreds of additional arrests by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have also been reported.

The Justice Department has identified few of the defendants, even at the request of Congress.

David Burnham, a Syracuse University researcher and author whose 2003 report on terrorism statistics provided new insight into the department’s handling of the cases, said the new reporting methods “of course would lead to more numbers” of such prosecutions.

“How much?” he said. “You can’t quantify it. There was an increase of government activity against terrorism, too.”

Burnham said he can appreciate the Justice Department’s interest in tracking the government’s anti-terrorism activities more closely. But he is skeptical that the jump in prosecutions was based purely on the initiative of federal agents.

“For decades, crime statistics have been manipulated for political reasons,” he said. “Many administrations have used that data to toot their own horns in inaccurate and misleading ways.”

Since the release of Burnham’s report, news organizations across the country have used the information to identify some of the government’s so-called terrorism targets: college entrance exam cheaters, check forgers, sham husbands and those who overstay visas, among them.

Of the 35 terrorism-related cases cited in Iowa in the two years following the Sept. 11 attacks, most that could be identified by the Register involved fraud or theft. Three were connected explicitly to terrorism: Luke Helder, an accused mailbox bomber who has not been deemed mentally fit to stand trial; and Youssef Hmimssa and Brahim Sidi, who marketed fraudulent documents to illegal immigrants, including members of a terrorist sleeper cell in Detroit.

© 2005 Des Moines Register

Key Elements of a Right to Vote Amendment

by

  1. Make the right to vote an affirmative federal right of citizenship and not a state-administered privilege.
  2. Make automatic voter registration a duty of the federal government, direct the creation of standards for ease of voting, and clarify prohibited activities including the most common disenfranchisement tactics.
  3. Establish statehood for the District of Columbia.
  4. Establish full voting rights and representation in Congress for the people of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories.
  5. Enable Congress to pass laws protecting voters from having their elections dominated by moneyed interests (overruling Buckley v Valeo and successive cases based on it).

Other Resources

Why Privatizing Social Security Would Weaken Our Republic

by

By Benjamin Barber 
First published by the LA Times, January 27, 2005

Social Security privatization has been vigorously challenged on both economic and technical grounds. It has been said again and again that privatization increases risk for prospective retirees without solving the long-term Social Security financing shortfall (if there actually is one). It has been argued that privatization is merely a scheme to divert money from the Social Security trust fund for speculative stock market investments. And it has been noted that it creates new costs (portfolio management, government oversight) without being able to guarantee workers future retirement benefits.

Yet the most profound cost of privatization has been wholly ignored: the systemic cost to our public way of life. By turning a public social insurance and pension policy into a private bet in which personal and private decisions determine who does well and who does badly, we do irreparable harm to our democratic “common ground.” After all, one of this nation’s greatest public goods has been its promise to give every working family a guarantee of support at retirement, or in case of disability or death. This promise, offered to all citizens, wipes away all the distorting traces of class, race and gender that often play out so dismayingly in the private realm. You cannot simply take justice out of the public realm and put it into the private realm without fundamentally weakening the democracy on which the very possibility of justice depends.

Conservatives ought to recognize even more quickly than liberals that privatization – whether of education, housing or Social Security – makes us less of a public. It diminishes the republic – the res publica, or public things that define our commonweal. It turns the common “we” into a collection of private “me’s.” It opts for market Darwinism, in which smart investors prosper but others lose, rather than social justice as its organizing principle. It demeans the “us” by turning “us” into “it” – the big, bad, faceless government bureaucracy. And it privileges the private and individual by appealing to market liberty, as if people could really be free one by one or as consumers alone.

Private market liberty is not political liberty; it is only personal choice. It may generate private benefits (“I want an SUV!” or “Give me 100 shares of EBay!”) but offers nothing for the common good (a fuel conservation policy, for instance). It is as citizens that we pay our Social Security taxes, and it should be as citizens that we enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Yet privatization tries to convince us that the consumer is simply another, more efficient, form of the citizen. The citizen who votes with her dollars rather than her ballots. But dollars don’t deliberate. They don’t seek common ground. They are not bearers of empathy and imagination. As education consumers in Chicago or Washington, we can select the “best schools” for our children, but as citizens we need public schools that help make us all public citizens. As consumers in Los Angeles, we can choose among hundreds of automobile models, but only as citizens can we make the choices that create a public transportation system serving all.

Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: It dissolves the bonds that tie us together. The social contract takes us out of the state of nature; it asks us to give up a part of our private liberty to do whatever we want in order to secure common liberty for all. Privatization puts us back in the state of nature where we possess the natural power to get whatever we can but lose the common power to secure everything to which we have a natural right.

Private choices rest on individual power and skills and on personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities. With privatization, this administration is trying to seduce us back into the state of nature, where the strong dominate the weak and anarchy ultimately dominates the strong and the weak, undermining security for both. Under these conditions, Thomas Hobbes reminds us, we are perfectly free to do as we choose, but as a consequence we live lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Not an ideal recipe for social security.

The Social Security entitlement should not be toyed with and altered in accord with today’s economic fashions. It is an emblem of civic membership and a reflection of the benefits that come with the responsibilities of citizenship.

For us as individuals, privatizing Social Security is probably a bad bet on technical grounds. But for us as citizens, it is a certain disaster. As prospective retirees and private consumers we may want to argue about it, but as citizens, if we care about our democratic republic, we are bound to condemn it.

Benjamin R. Barber, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, is the author of “Jihad vs. McWorld” (Ballantine, 1996) and other books.

© 2005 Los Angeles Times