POLITICS How to fight corporate power

[Guest guest]

Despite the radical differences in many of the political views on this

list, I think it's fair to say that most of us have an interest in

seeing the stranglehold of corporate power lifted from our society --

raw milk, local farm-fresh food, nutrition instead of drugs, freedom

from vaccinations, etc -- all these things are inherently

anti-corporate.

The presidental candidates most often spoken in support of here,

and Kucinich, are clearly the two anti-corporate candidates. If you

watch the interviews with Bill Moyers that Wanita posted, there are

some obvious disagreements, but they have much more in common with

each other than they have with the other candidates. They other

candidates are corporate candidates, and these two stand apart from

that system.

Many argue that a big federal government is necessary to restrain

corporations, because corporations have become supra-state and even

supra-national entities. States are capable of checking and balancing

individuals because individuals are smaller than they are, but they

are not capable of checking and balancing corporations.

I think there is some truth to this, but it also has a downside: big

business and big government go together. Many have said that

Republicans are the party of business in general, but Democrats are

the party of Big Business. Big Government goes along with both Big

Labor and Big Business, as paradoxical as it seems. Heavy-handed

regulations help stop the big boys from criminal excesses, but they

put the little guys right out of business.

I think we need to look a little deeper at the source of corporate

power, because it is not the free market. Corporations were

traditionally opposed by conservatives as a violation of the free

market! Corporations are essentially agreements where individuals ban

together and subsume their indentity into an abstract entity that

holds responsibility. The individual takes home the profit, but the

corporation -- a fictitious abstract identity -- absorbs the risk.

Nowadays, the corporation gets the state government or congress to

take the risk often, but the individuals that *own* the corporation

still take home the profits.

First we must recognize that corporations are not individuals and

should not have ANY legal rights. Our constitution grants rights to

PEOPLE not corporations. Corporations are *property* that is *owned*

by people. Yet our legal system treats them as individuals. This was

done through the court system, where progressively corporations were

more and more defined as a person, until they were given " equal

rights " under the law. This is a violation of libertarianism,

classical economics and legal theory, and traditional conservatism,

and one that the left opposes too. For example, Noam Chomsky talks

often about this.

Second, corporations legally exist entirely at the mercy of the states

in which they were chartered. The state has the complete right to

revoke a corporation's charter at any point. States charter

corporations for a specific purpose within the public interest.

Originally, corporations were temporary institutions. Say a bridge

needed to be built. The corporation would be chartered for the

purpose of building the bridge, it would build the bridge, and then

the corporation would be dissolved.

So, when we think about how to fight corporate power, we need to bring

the discussion back to these two points: corporations should have no

rights under the law, and corporations are chartered by states for a

purpose within the public interest. True corporate reform needs to,

either through the appointment of judges sharing this view, or by

constitutional ammendment, return the corporation back to the status

of property rather than personhood under the law; and second, people

need to return to the consciousness that they collectively charter the

corporation for the public interest -- possibly, perpetual charters

should be done away with entirely, but at least the threat of charter

revocation should be used more generously (it isn't used at all today,

as if it did not exist).

Finally, we need to provide a revolutionary alternative. With media,

this is being done with the internet. With food, this is being done

with raw milk and pasture-based farming. With pharmaceuticals, this

is being done with dietary supplements and food-as-medicine.

We need to realize how harmful Big Government is to this Revolutionary

Alternative. Agricultural subsidies: corn subsidies are distorting

the market and making factory farms be falsely read as " efficient " and

making it more difficult for pasture-farmers to compete; in

combination with NAFTA, they are driving Mexican farms out of business

and they will become dependent on the US for food like we will become

dependent on China for our paper money if we continue these wars and

Medicare prescription drug plans and so on. NAIS threatens to wipe

out grass-farming. The media corporations and their friends in

government cannot wait to regulate the internet and tax it and

subjugate it to the corporate sphere. Codex threatens to institute

regulation of dietary supplements, prescriptions to buy vitamin C,

vitamins costing as much as drugs, being as hard to get. The FDA is

WELL on its way to trying to wipe out raw milk completely.

We can't just abolish the FDA out of nowhere while we have the drug

companies running around. But, yes, we can look toward a future with

no FDA. Right now we need to break the medical monopoly and promote a

proliferation of a free market of many ideas and avenues and free

choice in medicine. The CDC's promotion of vaccines needs to end.

Whether you want the FDA to exist or not, no one is supporting willy

nilly getting rid of it off the bat with nothing in place to check the

pharmaceutical companies who derive their power primarily from

government. Ron isn't supporting this and no one else is.

But we have to realize, I think, that the solution is small government

and a reform of the legal status of corporations and a recognition of

their actual place in society and the fact that they are chartered for

the public interest, not rights-bearing people. I think that is how

we fight corporate power.

Chris

[Guest guest]

--- Masterjohn <chrismasterjohn@...> wrote:

> Despite the radical differences in many of the political views on

> this list, I think it's fair to say that most of us have an interest

> in seeing the stranglehold of corporate power lifted from our

> society -- raw milk, local farm-fresh food, nutrition instead of drugs,

> freedom from vaccinations, etc -- all these things are inherently

> anti-corporate.

>

> <snip>

>

> But we have to realize, I think, that the solution is small government

> and a reform of the legal status of corporations and a recognition of

> their actual place in society and the fact that they are chartered for

> the public interest, not rights-bearing people. I think that is how

> we fight corporate power.

this all sounds good, but if we eliminated corporations,

without some kind of restrictions on individual power, wouldn't we

just end up with new robber baron monopolies, just like in the 1800's?