Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970106065615.00874db0@ilhawaii.net> Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 07:06:36 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:jhanson@ILHAWAII.NET> Subject: THE CORPORATE MACHINES To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
THE CORPORATE MACHINES 11/6/95
by Jay Hanson
Nowadays, everyone knows that corporations control our
political system and subjugate our citizens. But before the
Civil War of 1861, citizens controlled the corporations. Up
to that time, corporations were chartered for a specific
limited purpose (for example, building a toll road or canal)
and for a specific, limited period of time (usually 20 or 30
years).
Each corporation was chartered to achieve a specific social
goal that a legislature decided was in the public interest. At
the end of the corporation's life time, its assets were
distributed among the shareholders and the corporation ceased
to exist. The number of owners was limited by the charter;
the amount of capital they could aggregate was also limited.
The owners were personally responsible for any liabilities or
debts the company incurred, including wages owed to workers.
Often profits were specifically limited in the charter.
Corporations were not established merely to "make a profit."
Early Americans feared corporations as a threat to democracy
and freedom. They feared that the owners (shareholders) would
amass great wealth, control jobs and production, buy the
newspapers, dominate the courts and control elections
(one-dollar-one-vote).
After the Civil War, during the 1870s and 1880s, owners and
managers of corporations pressed relentlessly to expand their
powers, and the courts gave them what they wanted. Perhaps
the most important change occurred when the U.S. Supreme
Court granted corporations the full constitutional
protections of individual citizens. Congress had written the
14th Amendment to protect the rights of freed slaves, but in
an 1886 decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific
Railroad) this was expanded when the courts declared that no
state shall deprive a corporation ". . . of life, liberty or
property without due process of law."
"There was no history, logic or reason given to support that
view," U. S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was to
write 60 years later. But it was done anyway. By applying
the 14th Amendment to corporations, the court struck down
hundreds of local, state and federal laws that were enacted to
protect people from corporate harm.
By the early 20th century, courts had limited the liability
of shareholders; corporations had been given perpetual life
times; the number of owners was no longer restricted; the
capital they could control was infinite. Some corporations
were even given the power of eminent domain (the right to take
another's private property with minimal compensation to be
determined by the courts). Of course, a corporation cannot be
jailed. It cannot even be fined in any real sense; when a
fine is imposed, it is the shareholders who must pay it.
In effect, the U. S. Supreme Court bestowed natural rights
on un-natural creatures, amoral beasts that were created to
serve selfish men. Now corporations had life and liberty (but
no morals), and the fears of the early Americans were soon
realized.
Large corporations are autonomous technical structures
(machines) that follow the logic inherent in their design.
Corporate machines ingest living, natural systems (including
people) in one end, and excrete un-natural, dead garbage and waste
(including worn-out people) out the other. These machines
have no innate morals to keep them from seducing our
politicians, subverting our democratic processes or lying in
order to maximize profit. Moreover, they are only nominally
controlled by laws, because the people who make our laws are
in turn controlled by these same machines. Today in America,
we live under the de facto plutocracy of the corporate
machines (one-dollar-one-vote).
Corporate machines, in an orgy of corporate profit, have
completely destroyed American Democracy and now destroy the
very basis of our lives -- both physically and morally. These
machines leave our children to face an ugly future of fighting
each other over the un-profitable leftovers!
The only arguments that we can muster against this relentless
destruction are religious and ethical: the obligation of
stewardship for all of God's creation and the extension of
brotherhood to future generations.
But corporate machines have no religion or morals
-- and we have no chance.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
Will we be able to salvage our political system without
violence? Here is one candid opinion from an executive with
the influential public-relations firm of Hill & Knowlton:
"The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of
the environmental movement," Mankiewicz confided. "They
sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions
are all on the other side -- if they can be heard. They think
the politicians are going to yield to the emotions. I think
the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies
will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because
the companies are too strong, they're the establishment.
The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in
the square in Romania before they prevail." [p. 24]
From:
WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE: The Betrayal of American Democracy,
by William Greider; Simon and Schuster, 1992 0-671-68891-X
- - - - - - - -
WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD
by David Korten
Hitting the nail smack on its head is a rare ability -- and
David C. Korten has got it. With one simple observation he
disables the argument that equates free-market economics with
democracy: 'In a political democracy, each person gets the
vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as
many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote.'
Korten is not a left-winger backed by a radical tradition.
He is very much a product of the establishment -- Harvard
Graduate Business School, the Ford Foundation, USAID. But
over the course of 30 years working in different parts of
world he has managed to keep his eyes and his mind open. His
verdict on what the free market and its overlords -- the
multinational corporations -- are doing to the world is
unambivalent. We are, he says, suffering from a threefold
human crisis: the deepening of poverty, social disintegration
and environmental destruction. At the heart of this crisis
is the tyrannical dominance of corporations. Unaccountable,
polluting and driven by a blinkered addiction to economic
growth, they serve the interests of a very small international
elite and are harming the rest of us.
Nothing startlingly new about this analysis. What is new
is the direction it's coming from, and the persuasive clarity
and authority with which Korten mounts his case. He is
extremely well-informed and commands a punchy, personal,
writing style that can connect with a diverse readership. He
is also well abreast of developing trends. 'The economic
globalization process is creating islands of wealth in poor
countries and seas of poverty in rich countries,' he comments.
This makes seeing the world as divided along class lines more
meaningful than in terms of 'rich countries' and 'poor
countries.'
Korten pins his hopes on the 'ecological revolution' that
is bound to come. He also looks to an 'awakening civil
society' and the growth of social movements -- drawing quite
plausibly on examples from around the world. Korten sets
forth an agenda to 'reclaim the economic spaces...in favor of
the small & locally accountable'. It sounds like another
example of well-established green ideas entering the
mainstream, and being presented as something new.
That aside, Korten's mixture of acute observation,
COMMON-SENSE PRACTICALITY and vigorous idealism may open more
than a few minds.
New Internationalist, January, 1996, p.32
WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD by David Korten;
Kumarian Press (203) 953-0214 and
Berrett-Koehler (415) 288-0260, 1995; ISBN 1-887208-00-3
Jay Hanson <mailto:jhanson@ilhawaii.net>
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