“Money isn't speech and corporations aren't people”— David Kairys
Corporate personhood speaks to the issue of seeing feudal lands as the personification of divine monarchical rule, where “Feudal relations were blatantly unequal and crowned by monarchical divine right that was nothing less than arbitrariness personified”. So much of contemporary corporate cronyism and kleptocracy emulates that kind of neo-feudal power and often its autocratic fantasizing as “branding”.
The problem of getting to viable, interpretation of abstractions like corporate personhood comes in interpreting the daily constructs of assuming that “norms are forms”, that practices are inviolate, or that machines never make mistakes. Concrete reality is materially different, even as consent is manufactured. Legal constructs insist on a variety of ideological positions, textual, historical or a combination of distorting precedence in a constitutionally “living document”.
Corporate personhood is the legal notion that a corporation, separately from its associated human beings (like owners, managers, or employees), has at least some of the legal rights and responsibilities enjoyed by natural persons (physical humans).[1] For example, corporations have the right to enter into contracts with other parties and to sue or be sued in court in the same way as natural persons or unincorporated associations of persons.
In U.S. historical context, the phrase 'Corporate Personhood' refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations.
For example, in Nike v. Kasky, Nike asserted a free speech 'right to lie', while in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Hobby Lobby asserted a freedom of religion 'right' to exempt itself from aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Narrow, marginalist arguments about why we should feel sorry for capitalists or even more absurdly, firms personified like corporate personhood. As though the corporeal only served the cognitive and collective personhood had no contracts.
Harvard Business Review’s discourse is that of commercial, corporate hegemony, assuming that workers are homogeneous with few differences like those pesky divisions of race, class, gender, origin, citizenship, or ableness. The assumption is that the corporate hierarchy of capital defines the degree of inequality as some historical necessity.
Similarly trust and reciprocity become property relations when reputation gains monetary value, and projected life income becomes actuarial.
This degree of abstraction while symptomatic of privileged discourse is instructive since while the average reader of HBR is prone to ‘splaining of this type, the kind that apologizes for institutional power including inherited wealth, and mystifying the agency and structure of neoliberal management. As though we are meant to be sympathetic to the inequality of corporations as a kind of personified social division or difference.
Inequality isn’t just about individuals — it’s risen between companies, too.
The so-called Google bus protests failed to capture the national imagination the way Occupy Wall Street had two years earlier. The demonstrations were far smaller and seen as a mostly local phenomenon — one region’s reaction to rising rents and urban gentrification. But the episode highlighted an economic trend that the Occupy movement missed and that deserves wider attention. What the bus protesters understood — and what new research demonstrates — is that there’s more to income inequality than the 1% versus the 99%, CEOs versus typical workers, or the finance sector versus the rest of the economy.
There’s more to it than skilled versus unskilled workers, although skills account for a lot.
The real engine fueling rising income inequality is “firm inequality”: In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders.
This corporate segregation is accelerated by the relentless outsourcing and automation of noncore activities and by growing investment in technology. It’s no accident that a company like Google became a flashpoint for controversy; its employees fare much better than workers almost anywhere else.
As companies focused on their core competences and outsourced noncore work, the corporate world began to divide between knowledge-intensive companies such as Apple, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey and labor-intensive companies such as Sodexo, which provides food service and facilities management services.
Workers with lots of education and desirable skills were hired in the knowledge sector, with high pay, perks, and benefits.
Less-educated workers got jobs in labor-intensive firms, where pay was stagnant or even falling and benefits such as health insurance were hardly guaranteed.
Employees from these two types of firms often work in the same building, but they’re no longer in the same orbit. And when it comes time for the holiday party, the struggling contractors are nowhere to be seen.
Winner-take-most competition. What is clear is that over the past 35 years, firms have divided between winners and losers, and between those that rely heavily on knowledge workers and those that don’t. Employees inside winning companies enjoy rising incomes and interesting cognitive challenges. Workers outside this charmed circle experience something quite different. For example, contract janitors no longer receive the benefits or pay premium tied to a job at a big company. Their wages have been squeezed as their employers routinely bid to retain outsourcing contracts, a process ensuring that labor costs remain low or go ever lower. Their earnings have also come under pressure as the pool of less-skilled job seekers has expanded, due to automation, trade, and the Great Recession. In the process, work has begun to mirror neighborhoods — sharply segregated along economic and educational lines.
Reframe the policy debate.
Reframe corporate decision making and hiring practices.
Invest in education.
Boost low incomes through tax policy.
At the very least, it’s time to change the debate around income inequality by recasting the roles of companies from greedy villains or heroic job creators to the fundamental system through which changes in the economy reverberate and the way that most of us get paid.
And yet another argument for distorting an understanding of structure and agency proceeds to reinforce corporate agency over human agency, absolving conflict as some “natural” feature of capitalism. Similarly, RWNJs confuse individual freedom and corporate freedom as this InfoWar chart does in a crude two-dimensional space, confusing autonomy with power.
Even in 2011 one could see a different corporate space not identical to its constituents.
Others in ACM have greater experience and understanding of collective organization and its variant forms but the point here is to emphasize how in the insanity of capitalism and its mediated representations.
The US commonplaces of firm organization and communication are so fix(at)ed on the mystified capitalist models and tropes like personhood, as though the corporation had some fetal viability.
In a cooperative with a hierarchical management structure, the manager or management team makes most operational decisions. A Board of Directors, comprised of and elected by the members, makes governance-level decisions and often hires and supervises the manager(s). Most cooperatives use some form of majority-vote decision-making, especially when large numbers of members are voting for Board Directors or bylaws changes. However, some hierarchical cooperatives use consensus decision-making amongst the Board Directors.
In collectives, all members typically participate in the decisions that directly affect them. This may mean that all workers in a given department or management committee make decisions related to their work together. In the case of smaller collectives, most workers may participate in most management decisions. In most collectives, all members participate in the governance of the organization, fulfilling the roles traditionally reserved for Board Directors. However, some larger collectively-run organizations elect Board Directors to fulfill certain limited tasks.[1] Many collectives use consensus decision-making. However, some collectives use a form of majority vote or some combination of the two.
In my own work I tried to emulate that organization, but it is very difficult, given the conventions of commercial discourse, and the scarcity of vanguard firms has its own challenges, but others in ACM can speak to that issue more directly.
Financing is an especially difficult proposition for worker cooperatives. By definition, every worker-owner has an equal vote and gets an equal share of profits. This is not appealing to investors who would choose a company because they want to get a big return on their investment or because they want to take control.
B-corporations, for example, have a typical top-down structure that make for easier decision-making and financial accounting, and in their charters, B-Corporations pledge to equally weigh three factors: profit, the planet, and people.
Weaver Street Market is part of a worldwide movement of businesses that use the cooperative model to meet individual and community needs. Unlike stores that are owned by out-of-town corporations, Weaver Street is owned locally by our customers and employees. We have 18,000 consumer households and 200 employee owners, each with their individual tastes and interests but all sharing the purpose of helping our co-op and our community thrive.
The key to Weaver Street’s cooperative model is the relationship with our owners, made up of shared economics, shared community, and shared knowledge.Worker cooperatives are not new, but they’re seeing new life as progressive-minded employees seek out remedies for the nation’s growing economic inequality. Worker cooperatives are equally owned and governed by employees, who also earn money from the profits of their labor. There are no CEOs here making multi-million dollar salaries while workers receive minimum wage. Nor are there CEOs with decades of experience and education to successfully guide the company through the up and downs of the dog-eat-dog business world.
In worker cooperatives, decision-making is democratic, so each worker has one vote, and policies can’t be determined by an investor whose only priority is profit. (Most profit-minded investors probably wouldn’t touch a worker cooperative with a ten-foot pole anyway.)
Nationally, there are 300 “democratic” workplaces, collectively employing more than 3,500 people, according to the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
The film then features a leaked internal Citigroup memo happily declaring the United States a "plutonomy" (a society "where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few"), with the top 1% of the population controlling more financial wealth than the bottom 95% combined. The same report also raises the concern of "societies demanding a more 'equitable' share of wealth". Moore then interviews Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore (no relation), who believes "capitalism is a lot more important than democracy". The film then cuts to co-determination worker cooperatives like Wisconsin's Isthmus Engineering and California's Alvarado Street Bakery, which are owned and run democratically by their employees, as alternative models to the current capitalist system.There are many different types of cooperatives. There are consumer cooperatives, which are owned and governed by customers (such as New York City’s Park Slope Food Coop); producer cooperatives, which are owned and controlled by independent producers (such as Florida’s Natural Growers); multi-stakeholder cooperatives, which are democratically governed by workers, consumers, and producers, or some combination thereof; and there are worker cooperatives like (now-defunct) Red Rabbit, Austin’s donut co-op, which are equally owned and democratically governed by workers.
Worker-owned cooperatives are rare in the United States, but in Spain, where they are much more established, they’re often followed closely by a whole community. One study looked at the retail chain Eroski, which has both worker-run and traditional stores, and found that the worker-run Eroski stores grew “sales significantly faster” than those not run by workers.
The reason? “Compared to workers in other firms, cooperative members have opportunities for substantial employee involvement and training and also strong incentives because they have a large financial stake in the firm,” the researchers concluded.
As we can see with the current national kleptocratic crisis, finance capital is the terrain upon which crony capitalism has operated, with money laundering, influence peddling, and now electoral interference at the highest levels.
In spite of POTUS45* it doesn’t take more than a basic understanding of the pastiche represented by the Celebrity Apprentice TV franchise to see the entrepreneurial (ad)venture capital fantasies.
one can see that trying to run the Executive Branch like a reality TV game show is failing
‘The Apprentice’ is a reality television show that debuted during the 2003–04 season in the United States on NBC. In 2005, a similar version debuted in the United Kingdom.
In both versions, a group of contestants compete for several weeks to earn a one-year job contract running either a company for Donald Trump (U.S. version) or a company for Sir Alan Sugar (U.K. version).The contestants are split into two teams and given a task to complete each week. After each task is completed, the losing team faces a boardroom confrontation in which one of the contestants is fired.This process continues until there is only one contestant remaining.
There are three major motivations for using this game as a supplement to class lectures.
First, on the television version, the tasks performed each week typically require the contestants to make a variety of business decisions.This provides the first part of the motivation since in the game students get the opportunity to learn first-hand how economic principles can be used to make better business decisions. In addition, students are held accountable for their decisions (just like on the show) and therefore it is likely that the lessons become more meaningful.
Secondly, on the show, and in the classroom version, each team selects a new project manger for every task allowing for a variety of management styles to be examined. In constructing this game, one goal is to give the students an opportunity to take on a leadership role while gaining experience managing a team. Having each student take a turn as project manager allows for this objective to be met.
The third aspect of the television show that is relevant to the classroom version is the variety of backgrounds of the contestants and how they use their specialties to make decisions. It is important for students to see how the different fields of business overlap and can be used congruently to determine how best to approach a problem and make a decision.The tasks themselves are constructed so that students are encouraged to work together using the skills they have acquired both in economics and in other fields as well.
Overall, the goal of this game is to provide an opportunity for students to gain experience in making real-world business decisions by engaging them in a hands-on learning activity...
One of the main learning objectives for a managerial economics course is to introduce students to the types of business decisions that mangers face and to provide them with a set of economic tools that can be used in the decision-making process. In addition to this objective, it is also important that we incorporate a variety of teaching methodologies to help students develop the skills that businesses tend to look for when hiring new employees...
As for my own interests, the western land crisis is an interesting problem in personification, projection and property rights.
In some cases it is an attempt to privatize land capital otherwise set aside by the Federal State by devolving it to regional states’ interest in exploiting resources.
In other cases it is the ideologically strange colonizing and re-colonizing of land rights in some cases based on religion and race, and in others it is about repatriation of rights in the context of colonial, historical power, and all the associated conflict of civil rights that have evolved from that power.
Ecofeminism is a term that links feminism with ecology. Its advocates say that paternalistic/capitalistic society has led to a harmful split between nature and culture. Early ecofeminists propagated that the split can only be healed by the feminine instinct for nurture and holistic knowledge of nature's processes.
Modern ecofeminism, or feminist ecocriticism, eschews such essentialism and instead focuses more on intersectional questions, such as how the nature-culture split enables the oppression of female and nonhuman bodies.
Similar to the way corporate personhood works in some countries, these rivers can now conceivably incur debts and own property, but more importantly, it means these rivers can petition courts (with the help of legal guardians, of course) to protect themselves from pollution and misuse.
The idea was broached by University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone in a 1972 paper titled, “Should trees have standing?” It became the concept’s definitive explanation, and its legacy endures today. “We sort of picked up where his work left off, thinking this actually could work in law and it might resonate really well with indigenous groups,” Ruru says of Stone’s paper.
Legislation similar to New Zealand’s is also on the books in Ecuador and Bolivia. A group in India is trying to protect the Ganges River with a comparable law to the Te Urewera Act. Now, if a handful of rights of nature advocates in the U.S. have their way, we’ll start seeing more public lands here gain legal rights of their own…
More than 100 communities in the U.S. have already enacted some form of rights-of-nature legislation on the local level, Biggs says. In April 2013, as part of a 10-year process toward becoming a “sustainable city,” the city council in Santa Monica, California, passed an ordinance that empowered the city and residents to file suit on behalf of local ecosystems. The law could apply if, say, an otherwise legal development or activity threatened a natural area. Movement Rights also worked with Mendocino County, in northern California, to write an ordinance giving the county the right to be free from fracking. And in 2006, local leaders in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and Movement Rights to ban toxic sludge dumping on similar legal grounds.
Wild laws are designed to regulate human participation within this wider community. They seek to balance the rights and responsibilities of humans against those of other members of the community of beings within the natural environment that constitutes Earth (e.g. plants, animals, rivers, and ecosystems) in order to safe-guard the rights of all the members of the Earth community.
Wild laws may be distinguished from laws based on the understanding that Earth is a conglomeration of objects which human beings are entitled to exploit for their exclusive benefit (e.g. most property laws). The development of wild laws is motivated partially by the belief that it is desirable, and essential to the survival of many species (probably including humans), for us to change our relationship with the natural world from one of exploitation to a more ‘democratic’ participation in a community of other beings. This requires laws that firstly, recognise that other members of the Earth community have rights, and secondly, restrain humans from unjustifiably infringing those rights (as is done within the human community).
Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life...The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled.
In his classic article on the topic the philosopherJohn Dewey warned:
What "person" signifies in popular speech, or in psychology, or in philosophy or morals, [is] as irrelevant, to employ an exaggerated simile, as it would be to argue that because a wine is called "dry", it has the properties of dry solids; or that, because it does not have those properties, wine cannot possibly be "dry". Obviously, "dry" as applied to a particular wine has the kind of meaning, and only the kind of meaning, which it has when applied to the class of beverages in general. Why should not the same sort of thing hold of the use of "person" in law?[24]
Agree that this is a great essay, but would add that it bugs me that the people benefiting from the corporate rights essentially get 'extra' rights/'speech'/votes with the 'corporate person-hood' claim which very obviously limits full political expression to those with the most money.
So even just on these grounds, I see no way in which the preposterous and disastrous Citizens United judgement could be regarded as Constitutionally legitimate, considering that the US Constitution guarantees all citizens equal rights, treatment and opportunity.
I believe that this should be revisited, with the corporate person obliged to show in person in court - no proxies allowed - complete with birth certificate and with blood/DNA tests conducted to assure that this is indeed that specific corporate person and an American citizen. And that the Citizen's United judgement should be voided if the corporate person fails to fully comply.
Edit to add that, obviously, rivers and trees do not purchase elections and political parties, so that such restrictions need not apply to such as these.
The only thing I can point out is that it's not so much corporate personhood as it is corporate ownership of government.
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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Especially instructive to be reminded of how concentrated wealth, via unbridled capitalism, undergirds a legislative body that enacts laws almost exclusively for the benefit of the its biggest campaign donors in the 1%.
The biggest problem going forward, as I see it, is getting the average American to detach himself from the relentless subconscious propaganda that "free market" capitalism is to be followed and exalted as if it were a deity and the key to the (false notion) of the American Dream.
Unregulated capitalism is the scourge of society, there's no doubt.
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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
I am in favor of breaking up big monopolies, reversing Citizen’s United decision, implementing Too Big To Fail and Glass-Steagal legislation, to empower individual entrepreneurs and innovators and to protect the populace from the abuses of large corporations, but when you write, “anti-capitalist” does that mean that you are advocating for an autocratic national centralized socialist/communist regime?
![C70R_TMWkAEqLnV_1_[1]](https://genehowington.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/c70r_tmwkaeqlnv_1_1.jpg)
Comments
Nice diary.
The only thing I can point out is that it's not so much corporate personhood as it is corporate ownership of government.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
@Pricknick
Agree that this is a great essay, but would add that it bugs me that the people benefiting from the corporate rights essentially get 'extra' rights/'speech'/votes with the 'corporate person-hood' claim which very obviously limits full political expression to those with the most money.
So even just on these grounds, I see no way in which the preposterous and disastrous Citizens United judgement could be regarded as Constitutionally legitimate, considering that the US Constitution guarantees all citizens equal rights, treatment and opportunity.
I believe that this should be revisited, with the corporate person obliged to show in person in court - no proxies allowed - complete with birth certificate and with blood/DNA tests conducted to assure that this is indeed that specific corporate person and an American citizen. And that the Citizen's United judgement should be voided if the corporate person fails to fully comply.
Edit to add that, obviously, rivers and trees do not purchase elections and political parties, so that such restrictions need not apply to such as these.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Always insightful, thanks annieli.
Especially instructive to be reminded of how concentrated wealth, via unbridled capitalism, undergirds a legislative body that enacts laws almost exclusively for the benefit of the its biggest campaign donors in the 1%.
The biggest problem going forward, as I see it, is getting the average American to detach himself from the relentless subconscious propaganda that "free market" capitalism is to be followed and exalted as if it were a deity and the key to the (false notion) of the American Dream.
Unregulated capitalism is the scourge of society, there's no doubt.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Markets Are Not Governed by the Laws of Nature.
A free market is an oxymoron.
A market will always be governed, restricted, and regulated by men. The end. It will never be free.
As a construct of Men, the Market is what Men make it. Pretty obvious which "Men" is in charge now ain't it?
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I am curious what "Anti-Capitalist" fully means?
I am in favor of breaking up big monopolies, reversing Citizen’s United decision, implementing Too Big To Fail and Glass-Steagal legislation, to empower individual entrepreneurs and innovators and to protect the populace from the abuses of large corporations, but when you write, “anti-capitalist” does that mean that you are advocating for an autocratic national centralized socialist/communist regime?