Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I haven't read The Corporation by Joel Bakan but I believe the corporation-as-person idea is covered. The book itself is a larger overview of the concept and realities of corporations.

Thom Hartmann covered it thoroughly in his book, "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights."

*****A

Thanks to Peter and Adrienne. Good news, and bad news: the story has been told -- but nobody really wants to hear it.

Yet.

IIRC, When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten is the very first book to devote a chapter to this "The law has always treated corporations like people" history-meme. Before that: Alan Moore has the CIA Eagle mention it in the Shadowplay: The Secret Team half of Brought To Light. But since Shadowplay was more about the history CIA dirty tricks than the history of corporatism, it didn't catch on.

That this "Corporations are people too" meme started with a corporate liberal/quasi-paleocon like Korten tells one a lot about how much info like this really matters. Which isn't all that much, IMHO: at best, some macho-flashing of the rubes, implying that you know How Things Really Are. At worst, the Four (paraphrased) Important Questions come into play: "Yeah?" "And?" "So?" "What?"

Good news, and bad news: the story has been told -- but nobody really wants to hear it.

Yet.

Well, if what I just posted is any indication, progress has been made, somewhat: at first, a well-read Brit anarcho-post-hippy makes a mention of it in a graphic novelization of the first 4 decades or so of the CIA. Then, a new-ageish liberal type in the mid-90s figures he can attract lefty traffic to his book by writing about the history of how it came to be. Hartmann looks into it and is able to find enough stuff in there to flesh it out into a book, and Bakan is able to get the financing to make a film about Corporate Personhood.

Nobody that matters may be really wanting to hear it (Yet). But at this point the Four Important Questions then have to be asked. A lot more people are really wanting to hear it than you think, if Korten, Bakan, and Hartmann et al are able to do what they can do with this meme...:-)

it's a great story. it's still a bit esoteric for us guys on the front lines to whip out in dinner conversation with family and friends. (i get a lot of blank stares.) i loan out my copy of _the corporation_ on dvd as much as i can, but even that is tl/dr for many regular joes.

There's a very long history here

Reformers abound over the last 100
Years

A big pwog move
Occured for a new over riding
fedral corporate charter system
That was
Back in the 20-30's era

I'll be blunt
Like most legal
Trails one only
Sees the foot prints of kong inc

As to sublating kong inc
A new corporate legal status is the wagon of great promise

The horse is a congress as anti
Wage based limted liability corporation
As the congress
Elected in 1866
was anti slavery
Based plantations

Pwogs more recently have kicked up a similar fuss

Cobb I think that's his name
Ran on de person the for profit incs
As the green prez
Its a oaken aged plank of legalistical pwog-pol

Ralph -pol-issimo

Raiders of the lust Inc

The unperson
Kong inc movement
Reminds me of the anti fractional reserve movement

The primacy
Of
Form is mistaken for substance

Regulation
Without a genetic modification
Will not morph bengal tigers into
Vermont cows

"It's always good to be reminded how contingent and contrived are the institutions we take for granted as necessary and ineluctable. "

Like bacon and eggs for breakfast. What a con!!

However, I question OP's dismissal of the issue as "form over substance". On the same logic as he uses to recommend (not endorse, not mildly support, just consider) a public option health plan -- the logic of gradualism -- attacking corporate personhood could be an important step in changing corporate charters and tax rules to give labor, local communities and environmental issues a place on the board of governors, not to mention changing the practice that makes unlimited campaign contributions possible under the doctrine of freedom of speech.

If these bastards doing business among us, and effecting our politics, wan't to considered "persons", let them be responsible as persons.

Hce

Don't miss understand
I completely support efforts to "contain" kong inc

So long as they are sublations
Not just pitch forkers
Rage slash and
Burnings

Why not just
rage burnings ?

From the asshes phoenix like rise the ...

Abolishing common place firm-org limited liability
Ie
A return to proprietor/partnership
Forms
With total liability on each and every...

Would be ludite

Okay Super
Al might love that
After all he's a moss backed sadistic rusticator
He wants to bring back the sponge house

Mjs has a
Tory hero named sam johnson
Who spent time in a sponge house

Hey this opens a galconda.....

Piercing the corporate veil

That is the key

Blow up
the executive suite
Shoot the kong inc
In the head

Get at the ceo
Eliminate
his/her battery of protective weapons
Which include the full resources of the corporation they skippered into a pirate ship
Or slave galley
Or most likely both

I've been pierced
Thru such a veil

But it ain't easy enough
Today it requires
Too much pseudo
Criminality
To stick

The employees
the customers
the creditors
Both bond and share holders
Need easier civil grounds to get at these glass tower trolls
and really nail
Them

Want fast action
Forget the institutional modifications
For now

Allow civil plaintifs
direct access
to the ceo
The board the. cfo and their executive posse etc

Require they use their own funds to defend themselves
And make it easy
To get em
For all they're worth

Sue em
Like doctors

Imagine
the insurance premiums

Personally, I think Ralph is on the lesser track here. There were and are two halves of this story -- the claim to personhood, and the deregulation of corporate take-overs.

IMHO, the latter is the more fundamental of the two moves, as it blasted away the remaining notion that public charters carried an inherent qualitative purpose for the organization. Once corporations could buy one another as their directors saw fit, the public charter became a mere formality, a way of collecting a small tax. Mergers crowned sheer money-making as the only core purpose of the corporation.

This, by the way, was the clear desire of the capitalists, such as Edison, who funded the campaign for deregulation of mergers. The central figure in that drive, a man who has most definitely not been properly historicized and dramatized was one William Cromwell Sullivan, the original corporate lawyer and lead author of the New Jersey Corporation Law of 1888, which knocked down the door and started the consequent race-to-the-bottom.

Dwelling on the secondary point that corporations also moved to claim personhood rights is rather off-the-point, which remains whether or not the public wants to re-establish control over business interests by re-regulating their missions.

I think there might be some real place of big businesses, if such chartering were modernized and democratized. As such, I'm not sure I'm opposed to even corporations enjoying free speech rights. If the people set the limits and purposes, and also used public enterprise to compete freely with them in their own industries, then let these orgs say whatever they want.

Oops: I meant William Nelson Cromwell.

Sullivan & Cromwell was/is the White Shoe firm that Cromwell founded, giving us such lovely creatures as JF Dulles.

The other up-side of letting re-regulated corporations continue to claim the rights of the individual would be that, in the right power environment, there's an obvious other shoe that could be dropped: the responsibility and danger of punishment of the ordinary human personage.

Why not beef up the white-collar criminal system, including the greatly expanded threat of the death penalty?

I agree with md
About state interventions
As a necessary and habitual
over ride agent

Where I part company
With some prog reformers
I fail to be convinced
A good dose of radical rechartering
Can achieve
a strategic repurposing
of
Corporations
Now motivated
Exclusively by "internalizable
gain"

Anymore then prohibition ended the sale of booze

In the immediate instance
To make kong inc
Serve the general welfare
The state needs to create dynamic "incentives"
That by their timeliness accuracy and
weight of reward or punishment
Enforce the aims of society
On a inherently transgressive entity

The society at large will need to see these quasi public institutions as
Open source projects
Where popular interventions by our duly appointed agents is the norm not the crisis exception

Md is really on the beam with his notion of a fleet
Of competing gse's

Let a thousand tva's set sale

Each one
Free to unleash the inherent power of society as a whole

Caveat
as with rechartering
And for precisely the same underlying reason
Imagining we could design an all purpose form of higher gse today is to. Wish
For
a one leap sublation

To bring the better future into existence
Will doubtless require a protracted interval of experience with transitional forms

An interval brimming with well intended error retrenchment and on the fly modifications
And sabotage

After all
The future whatever it will be
Must stil get brewed in very hostile milieu

Created by the flailings and counter blandisments
Of the "public"
Kong incs

As to personhood
I think the whole fiction needs to be demolished

Example

Bankrupcy default dissolution etc
The death penalty
Is wasteful

Gm cuts new ground here maybe

Its the management team that needs to get executed here

Btw
Ralph displays a silly notion of stockholders as owners I suggest they be treated as just another class of creditors
As to the election of the board
That ought to be a public matter like jury selection

More on that later

reclaim democracy website: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/#campaign

lots of info on activism around the issue of corporate shenanigans and what to do about it.

Duh! I meant what to do about the shenanigans, not the activism.

If I recall, the actual headnote was that the court would not address the issue of personhood because that issue was one that had already been settled by a prior court decision, which corporations cleverly took to establish as saying that they had already been declared persons. Something like that, the details are in one of those two books.

thanx for the link L
ONE CAN TRACK KONG INC's PROGRESS NICELY THERE

Well, justin, the arbitrary right to pass on prior rulings without comment is one aspect inherent in judicial review. It happens ALL the time, even (perhaps even especially) when the stakes are immense and blatantly wacky.

But that's not an indictment of the U.S. legal system, which actually is vastly under-rated on both left and right.

It's an indictment of the sorry state of our democracy, and our screaming need for Constitutional Convention II/a modernized Bill of Rights.

MD, what does "historicize" mean?

"Once corporations could buy one another as their directors saw fit, the public charter became a mere formality, a way of collecting a small tax. Mergers crowned sheer money-making as the only core purpose of the corporation."

Which raises an interesting question: if corporations are "persons" and it is unconstitutional to own or sell another person, what is the legal justification for selling shares in a corporate person, or selling the corporate person him(or is it her?)self? Isn't that slavery? Do we need an abolitionist movement to free our corporate persons from their bondage to Wall Street and their boards of directors?

some good stuff here:

III. 10:00-11:45 The Great Constitutional Deficiency: Corporate "Rights"

Freeing Politics from Corporate Control - Dr. Ron Daniels Video
Constitutionalizing Freedom - Richard Grossman Video
Corporations Are Not People - Carl Mayer Video
Panel Video

Someone else, then? "Historicize"?

Just guessing, but I took MD to mean something like "set in historical context" -- as contrasted with a narrative of transcendent necessity and rationality.

StO, it was lazy shorthand for "tell the history of," or "write a proper history of."

It's something I myself am quite interest in trying. My oeuvre is non-fiction, though it seems to me this guy could be the heart of a helluva good novel...

It's amazingly hard to find good information on the dude. To my knowledge, there's only been one single biography, and that happened in the 1950s, and is as leaden and technocratic as you could imagine.

This, for a figure who presents a pretty decent case for being among the 50 most influential personages in US history.

Since we are probably stuck with corps for the time being we should pursue whatever reformist measures it is efficient to pursue in order to lessen the harm they do to their various victims. However as to what those reforms should be, the ability to sue individual agents is probably not so important nor effective. Fighting battles in court ends up being a major waste of time and money and large companies have much better legal resources than individuals or even governments (as in the case where the province of Ontario was sued by insurance companies for attempting to create single payer auto insurance in the 90s). Even at the reformist level the most beneficial acts are those that create structural changes that make common abuses of workers more difficult or impossible.

Can corps be transformed into a benevolent form, as Owen appears to suggest? I think so only in the since a concentration camp can be transformed into a daycare center. They were created for a malignant purpose and would not exists in any meaningful sense in a decent society.* But hooray for reforms in the mean time!

*Incidentally, I don't think hypocritically disguising class warfare as something else, as many on the left feel we should do, is actually a good idea. Sure, we can keep calling our workers collective or whatever a just arrangement turns out to be a corporation if we want to. But who are we trying to deceive? The managers and the owners--please, they'll know soon enough when their power is being taken away? Ourselves--if our self-respect is so low we feel we can state openly what we want the prospect for any radical transformation seems in serious doubt? But if all we do is stick to reforms with no significant changes in sight we lay down ahead of us an eternity of futile struggle--in that case, what's the point; suicide would seem a nobler option?