ATDTDA (5): The American Corporation

[Dave Monroe]

Not to step on anyone's (John's, Paul's, whoever's) toes here, I HOPE,
but, while circling back to The Vormance Expedition, this again caught
my eye ...

   "'Evolution.  Ape evolves to man, well, what's the next step--human
to what?  Some compund organism, the American Corporation, for
instnace, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal
personhood--a new living species, one that can out-perform most
anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or
powerful he is.'" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 147-8)


14th. Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution

http://www.nps.gov/archive/malu/documents/amend14.htm

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment14/

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxiv.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html

Beginning in the 1880s, the Court interpreted the Fourteenth
Amendment's Due Process Clause as providing substantive protection to
corporate interests. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment
protected "freedom of contract", or the right of employees and
employers to bargain for wages without great interference from the
state....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Civil_and_other_individual_rights

''Persons'' Defined .--Notwithstanding the historical controversy that
has been waged concerning whether the framers of the Fourteenth
Amendment intended the word ''person'' to mean only natural persons,
or whether the word was substituted for the word ''citizen'' with a
view to protecting corporations from oppressive state legislation, the
Supreme Court, as early as the Granger Cases, decided in 1877, upheld
on the merits various state laws without raising any question as to
the status of railway corporation plaintiffs to advance due process
contentions. There is no doubt that a corporation may not be deprived
of its property without due process of law, and although prior
decisions had held that the ''liberty'' guaranteed by the Fourteenth
Amendment is the liberty of natural, not artificial, persons,
nevertheless a newspaper corporation was sustained, in 1936, in its
objection that a state law deprived it of liberty of press. As to the
natural persons protected by the due process clause, these include all
human beings regardless of race, color, or citizenship....

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment14/03.html#3

Liberty of Contract

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment14/03.html#6

Cf., e.g., ...

The Corporation (2003)

http://www.thecorporation.com/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12998.htm

http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=46

The film charts the development of the corporation as a legal entity
from its genesis to unprecedented legal protection stemming from
creative interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United
States Constitution, that is from its origins as an institution
chartered by governments to carry out specific public functions, to
the rise of the vast modern institutions entitled to some of the legal
rights of a "person." One central theme of the documentary is an
attempt to assess the "personality" of the corporate "person" by using
diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV; Robert Hare, a University of
British Columbia Psychology Professor and FBI consultant, compares the
modern, profit-driven corporation to that of a clinically diagnosed
psychopath.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation#Basic_plot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation

Narrator

150 years ago, the business corporation was a relatively insignificant
institution. Today, it is all-pervasive. Like the Church, the Monarchy
and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is
today's dominant institution. This documentary examines the nature,
evolution, impacts, and possible futures of the modern business
corporation. Initially given a narrow legal mandate, what has allowed
today's corporation to achieve such extraordinary power and influence
over our lives? We begin our inquiry as scandals threaten to trigger a
wide debate about the lack of public control over big corporations.

Through the voices of CEOs, whistle blowers, brokers, gurus and spies,
insiders and outsiders, we present the corporation as a paradox, an
institution that creates great wealth, but causes enormous, and often
hidden harms.

To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to
behave like an externalising machine, we can analyse it like a
psychiatrist would a patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis, on
the basis of typical case histories of harm it has inflicted on others
selected from a universe of corporate activity.

Having acquired the legal rights and protections of a person, the
question arises - what kind of person is the corporation?

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Corporation#Narrator_.28.22Mikela_Mikael.22.29

Noam Chomsky

[...]

Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons. But then
special kinds of persons, persons who had no moral conscience. These
are a special kind of persons, which are designed by law, to be
concerned only for their stockholders. And not, say, what are
sometimes called their stakeholders, like the community or the work
force or whatever.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Corporation#Noam_Chomsky

Robert Monks: The great problem of having corporate citizens is that
they aren't like the rest of us. As Baron Thurlow in England is
supposed to have said, "They have no soul to save, and they have no
body to incarcerate."

Michael Moore: I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when
they think about corporations, is they think you know, corporations
are like us. They think they have feelings, they have politics, they
have belief systems, they really only have one thing, the bottom line
- how to make as much money as they can in any given quarter. That's
it.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Corporation#Others

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Corporation

However ...

   "'If that brings you comfort, believe it.  I believe in incursion
from elsewhere....'" (p. 148)

Immanence vs. transcendence ...