ATDTDA (5): The American Corporation

Mon Apr 2 14:56:18 CDT 2007

This passage which Dave reminds us about, and the discussion leading  
up to it  and following it give 2 interpretations  of "the  
unfortunate events to the north, the bad dream I still try to awake  
from, the great city brought to sorrow and ruin (The I here is F  
Vibe) ) .
  One interp is that the corporation as a kind of superhuman being,  
with purposes of its own is using people like sled dogs, first for  
transportation then for food. The other interpretation (148)is that  
humans  are facing an incursion from  a "they" who have disrupted and  
forsworn time, time travelers. The third major interpretation we find  
earlier in the words of the "Librarian" starting on 133, who speaks  
of alien beings with criminal frames of mind hidden by the 90 degree  
ray bending properties of Iceland Spar. This 3rd view is repeated by  
the Magyakan and those who claim to have heard the being speak,( now  
held in Matteawan), who heard:1) vengeful, serpent like hisses     2)  
"the man shaped light shall not deliver you ' and "Flames were always  
your destiny my children."  So we have from these witnesses a kind of  
mindless alien consumer on a binge, or a challenger to the sacred  
beliefs of divine protection, or a devil or deity or religion  
carrying out its long promised judgement. How much of a leap is it to  
connect the  statements of the northern badass to the harsh calvinist  
godlike judgements of  S. Vibe, or to contemporary fundamentalists  
like Falwell or Bin Laden, or Dick Cheney? Cheney's transformation of  
countenance could make any child and most adults believe in demon  
possession.

Like Rashomon or other works of art , P consciously and explicitly  
gives us one event and several interpretations( with more  
interpretations available via literate analysis). Still, even with  
many interpretations I fail to see for example 1 planet/universe on  
which there was a WW1 (or a 9-11) and another universe where this  
event was avoided.

I find the sled dog analogy frighteningly apt. Once the "global"  
corporations have externalized all their "costs " to the planet, what  
planet are they going to live on.What if there aren’t enough sled  
dogs? What good will capital machinery do us without bees or snow  or  
clean air?

On Apr 2, 2007, at 4:52 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> 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 ...