Dear Folks, this is the strongest and longest letter I have ever written to a
government body. I have no idea whether any of it will sink in, but
represents my greatest concern about the condition of our nation today.
John L. Giannini, MA, MDiv, MBA, LCPC
Jungian Analyst and Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor
151 N. Michigan Ave, Suite 8l5, Chicago, Il., 60601
Tel: (312) 946-l244 .H: (773) 973-6641 Fax: (3l2) 856-0134
E-mail: johngia10@rcn.com
June 2l, 20ll
Dear Justices Roberts, Olito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy,
All five of you are Catholics. I now almost a ninety year old man with some perspective on socio-political issue. I have a serious concern about your sense of justice and morality. I am mailing, for one thing, some short summaries of the Pope’s encyclicals on social issue, beginning with Pope Leo XIIIs’ l891 called “On the Condition of Labor.” Labor means ordinary people who work for the big corporations. That was the situation in Leo’s time, given for example in our country the power of Rockefeller and Morgan at that time, who then controlled in some way or another l40 companies other than their own. The issue that Pope Leo raised was Power for the few versus a reasonable level of living for the many.
I also have a degree from Stanford, an MBA, in which I focused on Industrial Relations and Personnel. The outstanding teacher then was Prof Theodore Krebs, who had served as advisor to FDR. His course, required for all grads, was on trickle-up economy, in which, as money flows to more individuals and families and small businesses, the economy grows from the bottom up. Also such an outlook supposed and legislated the right of labor to both organize and bargain and included a high rate of taxation for the wealthy at 70%. The rich still thrived and our economy was reasonably stable for 50 years from roughly the l930s to the l980s and Reagan. After War War II, both Truman and Eisenhower followed the FDR approach, further aided by a GI bill that produced millions of middle class folk Such an economy was opposite the one followed by Hoover and in recent years by Reagan and the two Bushes. Two moments in this post-war period illustrates the crucial issue between elite power and citizen power. the elite power brokers versus the ordinary middle and poor classes levels of influence. One was Eisenhower when in his last talk he warned of the “Military Industrial Complex” which he could have easily added “Political and even later, Evangelical. The other was Reagan’s fatal conclusion, that “Government is the problem.” Again the issue is clear: the Military Industrial Complex serves the private power brokers and elite few, versus a common reasonably conscious and economically secure majority, served by a strong government that honors the many, Any government worth its salt functions like a set of rules and referees, say, for football. Without such rules and referees, mayhem would occur on the field. Also, a democracy honors a deeper truth about humankind itself, that leads to regulations That truth follows the wisdom of our founders. that all are born with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as fostered by a compassionate political leadership.
In my graduate studies, we studied the condition of labor at the turn of the 20th century and to its middle. It is a startling story of insufferable conditions in sweat shops, women and children working l2 and l4 hrs a day, initial attempt to unionize with men hired to beat and kill the strikers by corporations. Leo XIII saw this in this country and as well as in others. He argued that such was a patent immoral situation, not just in terms of conditions but of wages. He argued that every worker deserved a “living wage,” that would make possible a decent standard of living for every family that met needs from clothing and food to education and old age security. He also held that workers had a right to organize and bargain with employers. In other words, gentlemen, we see again the ancient issue of power versus justice, the power elite versus ordinary folks. As Catholics I ask you to consider what your moral imperatives have become and what they should be in regard to Elite Power versus the ordinary citizen?
While there at Stanford, I joined a Young Christian Student group where for the first time we were as lay people studying and commenting on the scriptures on our own, with only a priest guide. We discovered the church to be really “the Body of Christ” in Pauline Theology and comparably the “Tree and the Vine” in John’s gospel, in which each of us has a specific vocation and dignity as well as being in the service of the many. This idea of the Church was given central prominence in Vatican Two as the “People of God”, a term which is in total opposition to the experience we’d all had of the a Church described in terms of Ecclesial Power from the Pope down to the Priest. Again, as in civil life, the basic issue was: Power in a few and subservience for the many, which Vatican II in its “Church in the World” sought to correct with the above Pauline and Johanine theologies as well as articulating a dignified morally based vocation for laypeople in the church itself as well as in political life. .
We also learned in Scripture that the essence of Christianity, as articulated by Jesus, is found in love, community and care for the needy. We see the sacredness of every person in the Beatitudes and the societal meaning and commitment of that sacredness in Matthew 25: “What so ever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.” The “least” of my brethren has to do with all people, and not with just an ecclesial or a wealthy elite. Indeed as to the latter, we hear that a leader must most of all learn to be humble, before he can be a true leader, and we learn that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eyes of a needle, than for a rich man to go to heaven.” And “going to heaven” does not mean the next life, but realizing in each moment on earth the sacred moral imperative in one’s own soul and in social life We learn that our first challenge is love of self, as the golden rule, and then love of neighbor, as also found in the Old Testament. Further in the Gospel of James, we read “How can you say you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see.” We also see Jesus confronting the Power Brokers of his time, calling the Pharisees, with their outward piety “hypocrites” and literally attacking the money changers in front of the Temple. Again, it is patently evident that the essence of Christianity is service of the people and not subservient obedience to the Power Elite in the Church. That Elite unfortunately developed after over a century and slowly became dominant with family based liturgies and community giving way to a hierarchical and dogmatic view of the Church. Vatican II sought to correct that historical error. All of you need to read Robert McClory’s book, As it Was in The Beginning: the redemocratization of the Catholic Church. Over and over again, in every organization and in every historical era, the issue is the same: How to balance Power in the Few and in the Rich, versus a decent economic and spiritual power for the many.
Given this context, how do you five view your behavior as justices? The “Citizens’ United” case gives us a definitive answer, along with others, such as the one in which you recently did not allow that Walmart has been biased against l.5 million women both in terms of earnings and promotions.. Justice Olito I watched you on C-Span a few weeks ago. You scoffed at the charge that you are more for business and thus the big power brokers versus the average American citizen. You remarked, in effect,”After all what I have been doing is following the law.” The law is one of those archetypal words that cannot easily be described. We surely can call it a fundamental principle. However, very early in Continental and English law in the Middle Ages, the civil law that allowed a husband to divorce his wife without no recourse for the latter and her children, was felt by many to be seriously unjust. Of course, patriarchal man and a his male-dominated society could not envision this to be a violation of justice. After all, such a male dominance in all of life including the family was an established “fact” for centuries. But if for one moment you as a male could emphathize with the other half of the human family and ask how you would feel if you were in her shoes, how then would you have behaved?
The answer came from Medieval monks inspired by a statue of Mary in the cathedral of Chartres in France. The statue was called, “Mary Queen of Equity,” a term indicating not only her power and popularity as practically a goddess figure as reported by Henry Adams in his great book, Mt San Michele and Chartres but also the importance of equity in balancing the rigidity of a so called rule of justice. Mary Beard, picking up on Adams, in her book, Woman A Force in History, records how the monks, with support from the Papacy, set up Courts of Equity, which corrected the injustices against wives and their children. Then this system of justice passed over to the Chancellor in England and become the essential makeup of the Courts of Chancery, which now also exist in American law. However equity must be functional in all legal considerations because a law is not just an objective entity, totally untouched by circumstances and other aspects of a complex human behavior especially with emotional dimensions which enable us to empathize with another person’s experience.
Toss into this mix a strange addition to the law of corporations which is absolutely a violantion of common sense and of the most sacred of theological realities.. In the Supreme Court decision of l886 entitled Santa Clara County vs The Southern Pacific Railroad, the court held that henceforth a corporation was to be considered a “person.” This strange decision certainly a corruption of common sense, was based on the Fourteetnth Ammendment, passed at that time which held that so-called slaves were persons and so were to be free. The term, person, is a profound way of understanding the nature of a human being, the meaning of which is based on the fact that we are endowed with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Also in classical philosophy and theology, we learn that to be a person means to be endowed with Soul, with a sacred unique life, that is realized ultimately in both the emergence of reflective consciousness and out of that consciousness the capacity for free will.
How can the five of you continue to endow a corporation with such a reality. For one thing, the corporation exists by virtue of rights and responsibilities as created by the state. How in God’s name can a state endow a corporation with personhood. This endowment comes from Nature or from Divinity,depending on your philosophy or theology.
Think too of the consequences of that l886 fabrication? This fact alone has spurred, especially since Reagan the emergence of lobbyists numbering then around 300 to now thirty thousand spending roughly an average of l5 million each week while congress is in session. In effect, given our concern for the power of an elite over a vast citizenry, this means, as Thom Hartmann has written in his book, Thresholds, that “the interests of a small (fewer than one millionth of one percent) of the people on the planet have achieved priority over the interests of every other human, every other institution, and, perhaps most importantly, over the biosphere” (p. 154)
Hartmann and all of us concerned about the very existence of our democracy have watched since “Citizens United” unlimited moneys going anonymously to mainly Republicans based on this strange fiction, that corporations (including Labor Unions) are persons, like you and I, and so can express their voice with millions of monies from corporations, the amounts of which our little unions can hardly counter. Your Justice Stevens, in his minority judgment in this case, argued that such a view is contrary to common sense, since corporations are not citizens, can’t vote and cannot hold office!!!!!! Further corporations are controlled by and in effect the slaves of powerful officers and stockholders. In what sense, given this fact, is a corporation endowed with “life, liberty and the pursuit of justice”. The absurdity of even asking this question highlights the absurdity and danger of such a manufactured “Soul” which in effect is given to a corporation.
So this is the ’LAW” that you, Judge Olito and the others have based your decision on..
Consider circumstances, context and empathy, all aspects of the law of equity when you came up with this decision Lets bring closer to home Hartmann’s above statement of the enormity of this idea of corporations as persons as to their power among our own American citizenry. We know now that in our country one percent of our population own roughly 40 percent of all of its wealth, which in terms of numbers is equal to the wealth of the lowest one hundred and fifty million people in our nation. Also in l987, the ratio of the earnings of the average CEO in comparison to the wage of an average worker was roughly forty to one. Now the ratio is well over 400 and reaches even up for some to l000 to one. Moreover, we have watched since 2008 the economic catastrophe laid on the entire world by a few thousand “gamblers” of mortgages and especially packaging these assets and others into vast derivatives to the tune of more than 700 Trillion, many times more than the assets on which this gambling has been supposedly based. By virtue of your decision, you have given a further package of power to corporations that eclipes anything that labor unions can muster and certainly the monies that we as citizens can collectively equal.
In the WalMart case, in which the plaintiffs definitively established bias against women, you five, led by Judge Scalia, argued that a class action does not allow its individual participants to an “individualized award of monetary damage.” What in the world is any class action but a collection of individuals, each of which has a specific personal reason for being involved. In effect in this case you are denying to each person what you argue belong so ridiculously to a corporation. It is as if you are implying that another kind of collective, that is, collective bargaining by unions in which they bargain for each of their workers a raise is also a legal impossibility. Is this your next decision, gentlemen?
Finally, each of which is endowed with a “conscience,” meaning a “knowing with,” that is, an “inner ethical knowing with your Soul,” which is the spiritual ground of your personhood.
Finally, I beg of you: reflect on what it means to be a moral citizen. Given that you are all Catholics, consider seriously Leo XIII encyclical. See also the encyclicals of Pius XI, John XXIII, and Pope John Paul that enlarge on and continue this moral outlook
Sincerely, John L. Giannini
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