You want to punish corporations? You want to Prosecute those bastards! Through em in jail, thatll teach them. That will change things. We yell and scream, Obama hasnt prosecuted a single one of those creeps. Hes in their pocket. Just a another member of the old boyz 1% green club. So what does that get us? Say we prosecute 5 of them? 10? 20? Suppose suits from JP Morgan, Chase, BofA, Monsanto, Massey, you name them, got hauled in and nailed. Suppose theyre sitting in prison now, paying for their crimes (writing books, presumably) . What did we get out of that? A little vengeance? Some we showed em, Yayyyy, they wont try that again? What? Ill tell you what. Nothing at all. No change, no control, no chastised corporation, no nothing, nada, zip. What did the corporation do? Why it replaced their fallen from grace And, what did it replace those expendable, interchangeable units (the ones with the DNA) that got sacrificed? Why with other expendable interchangeable units; and, if it was a smart corporation, it replaced them with newer industrial strength models that are more clever, more ruthless, more sociopathic than their predecessors. Nothing changed folks, except we got our moment of feel-good retribution. I know someone will shout out, Yeah, well we gotta get rid of that corporate personhood thing and that will fix their wagon. But will it? I have been on that road for awhile myself. Just get rid of their Constitutional shield, and we can begin to pin them down to behaving properly. We can make statutes that get them out of our campaigns and keep them from buying our government and hiding in their little dens of nondisclosure and all the rest of it. But can we? Does that do it? Think again about how messy, shaky, unpredictable and accidental democratic government really is--by definition. Consider decades of building even a thin layer of regulations to just moderate the behavior of the corporate behemoth. It just took one election cycle and a single shock doctrine to undo almost all of that. On the surface, removing the legal fiction of corporate personhood (a phony legalism to begin with--the idea of some county clerk in California, passed along to an assistant at SCOTUS to write into a headnote to an 1886 decision, later used to justify more legal fictions based on the original falsehood...). Ending that charade might look like a good and necessary step to getting control of our corporate escapee from Pandoras box, but in practice? A few might go to jail, a few new barriers will be circumvented, statutes will be blocked or distorted, some meaningless fines will be imposed--most will never be paid, or whittled down to nothing, or passed along to consumers. The corps will go on their merry way, destroying the planet, the species and anything else that gets in their way. Instead, consider what it means to actually regard a corporation as a person? Consider taking the corporate mouthpieces and legal teams at face value when they say, We are persons with rights under the Constitution. Now consider what that implies about accountability under the law as much as rights under the law. Consider hoisting corporations by their own rhetoric on their own petard. Consider what is required of persons, that is not (yet) required of corporations. Consider corporations as felons: https://facebook/notes/red-slider/corporations-as-felons-repost/634783426568490 If you first take away corporate personhood you cant exercise this option. Because, as non-persons, it makes no sense to say we will hold them equitably accountable as persons. Taking away personhood is a long, difficult and problematic road. But not doing so provides an opportunity that doing so removes. Not an easy one either. Its got a lot of legal theory and persuasion to develop into a rational argument the courts will not be able to ignore. But it also has the immediacy that can convince a lot of people to push the courts in that direction. Which leads us back to the need to unify progressives and establish a few principles on which we can all agree. We need, in short, the numbers.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:53:31 +0000
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