Harriet Miers & the Divine Right of Corporations

I admit it. I’m enjoying the Right fight over the nomination of Harriet Miers. There’s nothing more entertaining than watching Neoconazis and Christian wingnuts hiss and claw like two wet cats in a burlap bag.

But the question that keeps rolling around inside my skull is, Are we being snookered?

In other words: Does the Right really dislike Miers that much, or do they just want us to think they do?

Think about it. If you wanted to cut the legs out from under the Democrats (not terribly difficult when your opponent has two wooden legs), could you do any better than have the loony brigade publicly doubting her stand on Roe v. Wade?

Is this Karl Rove’s last dirty trick before he heads off to a tastefully decorated 8-by-10 cell in Yazoo City, Mississippi?

There are only two possible outcomes to this fight. The Dobson whispering campaign will work (“Psst, Miers supports the death penalty for abortionists, pass it on”) and the Right will grudgingly solidify behind Miers. Barring some shocking new revelations about Miers’ past (“She’s really a man!”), this will leave the Demos with nothing to fight over. They’ll be reduced to grandstanding on C-Span because they don’t have the votes to do anything more meaningful.

Or Miers will find some excuse to withdraw, forcing the White House to nominate another woman with a resume more to the wingnuts’ liking. The Demos would filibuster and the Right would come roaring to her defense, helping solidify the Bush base in time for the midterm elections.

That’s because when the Republicans are under attack, they invariably move to their right. (When the Democrats are under attack, they also move to their right. This is why the Demos are such pansies.) Either way, Rove wins.

But at the risk of offending the six people who actually read this blog, Roe v. Wade is a sideshow. In the grand scheme of things it’s not that important. Women’s rights? Important. Privacy? Also important. But abortions? We’ve got a pill for that now, and if the war on drugs is any indication, there will be no way to keep it out of the hands of those who want it.

The bigger issue – far more important to the Bushies, though they’d never admit it publicly – is how Miers feels about the rights of corporations. Miers is a former corporate attorney. So is John Roberts. These are their real qualifications for the job.

So the important question is not ‘Do women have the right to choose what happens to their own bodies?’ It’s ‘Is Congress empowered to regulate the activities of multinationals, or can they do as they please? Can they fill the air with carbons, dump dioxin in the drinking water, avoid paying US taxes, ignore labor laws, build third-world sweatshops, escape liability for faulty products and, of course, rob their shareholders and US taxpayers blind?’

This is the Enron presidency, after all. Bush is just a corporate proxy – an ex-CEO being manipulated by another ex-CEO, who’s spent the last five years funneling taxpayer money into the pockets of his cronies.

Corporations have purchased the presidency the same way they bought up all the baseball teams. In a few years they’ll obtain branding rights, and we’ll have the Wal-Mart White House, the General Motors Capitol, the Glaxo Smith Kline Supreme Court. This war has been brought to you by Exxon, makers of fine petroleum products for over 50 years.

More than half of the world's 100 largest economic entities are corporations. CEOs who already control budgets bigger than two-thirds of the world’s economies will become even more powerful. They will answer to no one. And we will answer to them.