For-Profit Fascism: United Airlines, Citizens United, Private Prisons

The Chicago Aviation Security Officers who dragged a passenger off United Flight # 3411 this week probably signed up to protect and serve the traveling public. You know — to find children who’ve gone missing, or investigate thefts of property, maybe even prevent assaults.

Did any of them sign on to bully customers in support of corporate profits? Because that’s what they did, and in the twenty-first century, the American legal system may have their backs. American law and law enforcement keeps heading in that direction of protecting profits at the expense of individual rights.

Citizens United, the landmark Supreme Court case that declared corporations to be “associations of individual citizens,” ruled that corporations are entitled to the same First Amendment free speech protections as actual, flesh and blood individuals. Corporations can now employ their free speech rights to influence elections. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens wrote that “A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”

No, we cannot function as a democracy when laws are being bought and sold, or when people are being subjected to violence for the sake of profit. Shamefully, America is the world leader when it comes to locking up its citizens — the flesh and blood type only, of course — and corporations are making a profit by restraining, imprisoning, and punishing our citizens. Those corporations are also influencing law enforcement.

For-profit prison lobbyists require a conviction-rate commitment from politicians who want to have those prisons built in their districts. And once a human being is convicted, the freedom to live as a citizen with a decent job, with voting rights, is not easy to regain. This burden falls hardest on the African American communities. As Michelle Alexander has so incisively argued in The New Jim Crow, the American criminal justice system has created a new system of racial control. Racism is against the law, but discrimination against convicted people is perfectly legal.

The man who Chicago officers assaulted and dragged off flight # 3411 is already being demonized in the press as someone with a criminal past, as if that makes it okay for police to physically assault him. Brutality, however, can never be justified by someone’s status.

When he was dragged off the plane, the flight # 3411 passenger was only a paying customer who wanted to keep the seat he had paid for. United wanted his seat, and three other seats, for their employees who needed to get to Louisville, presumably so they could make more money for United. Are we a country where interfering with a profit margin is now a crime?

Increasingly, wealth in America is being concentrated into the hands of a few. If a major American airline, like United Airlines, can blithely use violence to insure its profits, what’s next? You know the answer because it’s happened before, right here in America. The system of slavery was a violent, for-profit system. Anti-labor agencies like Pinkerton were part of a violent, for-profit system defending capitalism against labor.

Will the wealthy few decide who among us gets arrested, who gets prosecuted, who gets convicted, who gets beaten, who goes to prison? Watch out, middle-class America. This time, they’re coming for the customers.

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