The death of former Oklahoma Sen. Fred Harris Saturday reminds us of his lifelong crusade against wealth inequality in the U.S. In a speech at the University of Oklahoma in 2014, he noted:

“America’s middle class has shrunk and shrunk, as so many millions of our people have fallen out or have been forced out of the middle class and into poverty, while the ranks of the rich have swollen. Most authorities think it is difficult to even have a true democracy without a large and stable middle class.

“Economic power translates into political power. Daniel Webster said that if we’re to preserve our kind of democratic system, no person should be so rich as to be able to buy other people, and no person should be so poor as to have to sell. Think of the rich and archly rightwing Koch brothers, or the giant corporations whom the U. S. Supreme Court has said are ‘people,’ with freedom of speech, and therefore cannot be limited in how much they can spend of their special interest money in political campaigns.”

The road to the absurdity that corporations are people was a long one.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

How “persons born or naturalized in the United States” translates to non-person corporations requires enough hoops to jump through as to weary a trained dolphin.

This travesty of language and logic was reinforced in 1906 when the Supremes declared that corporations, for legal purposes, were “persons.”

Our government has made truth-defying rulings before.

In 1893 the high court ruled that tomatoes are vegetables when considered for tariffs, imports and customs. Tomatoes – once called “love apples” and feared as poison by early superstitious colonists – produce their fruit from their plants’ flowers, just like apples and oranges.

More recently, the Food and Drug Administration – in another nod to ignorance and American deceptive marketing – declared that juices extracted from nuts can be labeled “milk,” a product of mammals.

In 2018 FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb admitted the obvious:

“If you look at our standard of identity, there is a reference somewhere in the standard of identity to a lactating animal. And, you know, an almond doesn’t lactate, I will confess.”

But with corporate profits at stake and a [justifiably?] low opinion of the education level of American consumers, the FDA concluded that any white liquid could be sold as “milk.”

While we can chuckle at such absurdities – and lament human hubris that keeps trying to “correct” Mother Nature – the ruling of corporations as people is no laughing matter.

In its 2010 Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that “corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections,” as stated by the Brennan Center, which takes its inspiration from former Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr.

In an obvious reference to the naiveté [or duplicity] of five justices who sided with Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission, the Brennan Center reports: “The justices who voted with the majority assumed that independent spending cannot be corrupt and that the spending would be transparent, but both assumptions have proven to be incorrect.”

You think?

Through Super PACs, specialized political action committees, individuals and corporations have no limits on how much money they can contribute to fund political advertising. That the Super PACs cannot contribute directly to parties or candidates is irrelevant considering the grey areas of advocating or opposing “issues” that just happen to be associated with certain candidates or parties. Fudging and smudging those lines require little skill.

In a 1998 interview, Sen. Harris said, “I don’t like the power of money in politics.”

We could do something about this. An amendment to our Constitution could de-personalize corporations and establish limits to their economic might. The approval of such an amendment by two-thirds of our senators and representatives would send it to the states where 38 states could restore logic to our legal system.

Yeah, the corporations and oligarchs would throw tons of money against such a common-sense corrective.

But such a proposal would expose the extent of corporate ownership of our legislators. We know that Greed’s Own Party enriches the oligarchs. But putting corporate Democrats as well as Republicans on record for their abandonment of the middle class and devotion to Wall Street could set the stage for true election reform – letting the 90% of us who are not being served know which elected officials we should replace.

That could prove a step in the right direction – which is usually to the left.