Failure to understand this key point is part of why the environmental movement has struggled so much since the heady early days of the 1970s, when America's last liberal president created the EPA and signed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act:  environmentalists keep thinking that natural people--the ones who suffer from pollution and toxic waste--are the ones with rights.  They don't realize that every Inc. has the same rights, and lots better lawyers, and lots more cash to give away at campaign time.

And, thanks to the railroad lawyers who dominated the bench in the Gilded Age, we got a footnote to a Supreme Court opinion around 1886 that said, essentially, "We think it goes without saying that a corporation is a person and is therefore entitled to the rights of persons like due process and equal protection."

This led to a long era--about 80 years long, actually, in which the 14th Amendment was used about 100 times more often for the defense of corporations than it was for freed slaves.

Now, true, Wal-Mart is, like all corporations of a certain size, a sociopathic person---remorseless, self-centered, blind to the harms caused to others, self-justifying, and completely unconcerned with anything but its own appetites.

But, despite all that, legally it is still a person just the same, which means that it has property rights in polluting, in exploiting its labor force, and in consuming resources at a totally unsustainable pace.  Because of those rights, mere mortals (like Legislatures) cannot pass laws that constrain those behaviors without showing that the laws do not target the corporations qua corporations.  

In other words, the judicial activists of the 1800s  decided that, rather than an arrangement for marshalling capital, corporations like Wal-Mart are legally persons with the same rights as any other.  And, therefore, you can't do to them anything you're not going to do to unincorporated entities (formerly known as people).

See the website for the Project on Corporations, Law and Democracy (poclad.org) for the gory details.

(* as we say in Michigan)

The 5% Project

I would add, though, that not only is it relevant to point out that the legal definition of "person" was long ago expanded to include corporations.  It is also essential to understand corporations as human-created organizations directed by human beings, and therefore about whose decisions and actions ethical predications can be made.

The charge of sentimentality is a red herring.

To be sure, such globally striding creatures as those bearing the names "Wal-Mart," "BP" and "McDonalds" are not accurately treated as ethical monoliths.  They each are directed by lots of executives, interested in particular aspects of their creatures' capabilities, with somewhat different values and agendas.  And no doubt those values and agendas often come into conflict (which, as best as possible, is kept a company secret).  Still, all those executives were once upon a time free human beings, who chose to sign on to a particular life style in a particular world.  Their responsibility does not end, once they got hired, and once they started proving efficient.

We should add that the culture of corporations seems to require its employees to abandon a sense of their human dignity.  The early-morning pep rallies that Wal-Mart's "associates" are forced to participate in, with real or feigned enthusiasm, are a particularly disgusting and abusive example.  But in fact corporations have many more subtle ways of exacting loyalty, commitment and personal compromise.

Could David possibly be insisting that when we think of the Wizard of Oz, we must be focused on that big talking mask high up on the Art Deco wall, and must ignore the man behind the curtain?  Surely Bart does not agree.  To say nothing of Toto.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The human concept of value is expanding beyond merely economic benefit to social and environmental criteria.

We have to help people who shop at, invest in and lead the world's largest retailer increase their awareness of this evolved notion of value.

Approbation and reward, engagement and condemnation will have to continue -- hand in hand -- for a good long time.  

They have had more rights for a long time now.  Bankruptcy laws that allow them to get out of paying pensions and healthcare obligations while still retaining there property.  Get out of jail free cards on every crime imaginable.

The problem here is that corporations are not actually sentient beings that can be held accountable, for that reason they should not be given any rights as citizens in the same respect as real citizens.

Can Halliburton be jailed for its larcenous "contracting with america" performance around the world, or Bechtel for its spread of nuclear waste in groundwater?  Nope, so nothing is done.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

    "By replacing real governing power with the toothless Regulatory System, corporate schemers have us trudging off to permit application hearings, hat in hand, to beg our elected Zoning Board members and Environmental Agency employees not to let corporations use their pre-engineered regulatory law as a community wrecking ball. . . . Our authority to simply decide what kinds of communities we want to live in has been robbed from us through an ingenious bait-and-switch. Regulatory agencies create the illusion that we have legal remedies in the face of corporate assaults on our communities and families.To safeguard the future for our children and the planet it is time we confront these usurpations. What needs to become clear is that it is no use just fighting a particular corporation, a site battle, a permit. In every campaign, we are fighting hundreds of years of accumulated law and custom that have stolen democracy, rights, and self-determination from us. And it matters what you will do next." - CELDF

The question is, is it more accurate to treat them as a machine or as a person when considering your actions, policies, and support.

I understand the confusion.  Writers and thinkers have considered the issues associated with machine, especially robots, and what rights robots might have.  Especially if the robots are made from a mix of an organic housing  and silicon based cyber chips, aka a cyborg, an entity that looks, smells, acts, and feels like a person but has a cyber mind rather than a human mind.

Star Trek put many cyborgs together and called them a borg.  When visiting a large corporate headquarters it is possible to understand where the writers of Star Trek got this concept.

The most popular cyborg stories have such cyborgs as the  antagonist, with character elements that are similar to the protagonist, but evil instead of good.  Sometimes the stories have a cyborg who is the hero.  Robert Heinlein's Friday seems to me to an especially attractive version of such a hero, even though she is an Artificial Person.

Light, and sub-atomic particles, as well, for that matter, act like both particle and wave.  They can be treated as both.  I believe that corporations can be treated as both person or machine.  However, it is not a dumb machine.  Rather than as is the Wizard in Oz, corporations are more like the Borg in hyperspace, so use appropriate safety precautions.

I certainly do not believe the person concept applies to corporations as far as warranting them the right of political franchise.

My answer is that it is more accurate to treat a corporation such as Wal-Mart as both a machine and as a person when considering your actions, policies, and support than to view it as a you would a person.  I do not think it is effective to think of a person as a machine.

As a machine it will have instructions, procedures, objectives that are spelled out.  For Wal-Mart the big thing for years has been return prior to taxes.  The fact, that as a result of this policy, it is systematically reducing the buying power of the middle class and thus its customer base is of no matter to the corporate body.  Wal-Mart will continue to pay Americans little for its labor and eliminate domestic markets for American produced products while keeping its best face before the American people.  Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, J P Getty, Bill Gates, and other people who have been successful created foundations to help people.  Wal-Mart will never create such a foundation.

Tell it to Kenny Lay's ghost.  Or whomever is running that alabama based steel corporation that keeps killing it's workers. Or the nuclear contractors spreading radioactive contamination through the groundwater.

It will have the same effect on the ghost as it has on the live CEOs.  Zero.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

thanks very much for raising a topic that greatly interests me: not so much robots and cyborgs in themselves, as what human beings' ethical responsibilities are toward them and other forms of artificial intelligence.

Probably Isaac Asimov is the pathfinder here.  I do not know the Heinlein story that you refer to (Michael has it, though).  The murderously jealous crush that HAL has for Keir Dullea in "2001" -- I know how the poor dear feels -- is ever interesting, though that story does not go too far.  But the story of the replicants in Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," and in the derived movie "Blade Runner," is really a masterpiece.  Spielberg's "A.I." is not well-liked, but is a must-see on the subject.

Star Trek has definitely added lots of good new material.  The separate evolutions of Data in Next Generation, with the Pinocchio intertextuality (cf. the dream of the Blue Fairy in "A.I."), and of the Emergency Medical Hologram in Voyager, are very well thought out.

As for the Borg: There is an interesting Voyager episode in which Chakotay is briefly introduced into the collective mind of a community of ex-Borgs.  And then there is (almost) every teen-age boy's favorite, Seven of Nine, she of the amazing figure, which played a part in Illinois politics not so long ago -- will the future President Obama invite her to his inauguration?

But my favorite Borg episode is in Next Gen, the one in which an individual Borg (a kind-of-cute teen-age boy in fact) is captured, and develops an individuality, and befriends Geordi, who gives him the name "Hugh."  At first Picard wanted to send him back to the collective, bearing in his head an incapacitating, paradoxical mathematical puzzle that, when shared, would destroy the Borg.  But Dr. Crusher warns that that would amount to genocide, and so would be unethical.  Guinan (my favorite Star Trek character, and one of Whoopi Goldberg's most fun roles), despite her bitter hatred of the Borg, finally recognizes that Hugh is a person, and persuades Picard to send Hugh back without the killer math problem, but with his new-found individuality.

Now: I appreciate your comparison of corporations, and the corporate culture, to the Borg collective.  I would not go so far myself, but I know what you are saying.

All the same, I tend to agree with SMLowry, who rightly points out that corporations are neither person nor machine, so our similes likening them to one or the other are misleading; and goes on to make two different but related points regarding how activists should consider corporations.  First, though ancient precedent in US law may recognize corporations as "persons," activists are under no moral obligation to do so; rather the reverse.  (I do not know if JMG intended any restrictions on how we should consider corporations.  It is valuable that JMG corrected David's simple judgment, and added some important nuance.)  Secondly, there are real flesh-and-blood human beings, persons, who direct corporations, and they should always be held responsible for what the corporations in their charge do.

My good friend Amazing is doubtful, as well he might be, when we consider the corpse of Ken Lay, and suspect his ghost to have got away to irresponsible freedom.  Perhaps he has forgotten that superlative Russian parable, told by Grushenka in "Brothers Karamazov."  (No time for that now, do not worry.)  As for us left behind in this world, I am almost as good a cynic as Amazing, I am afraid: Are the CEOs and other directors of corporations not unlike the "drivers" of juggernauts, whose removal or replacement means nothing to the course of the huge destructive contraptions that they pretended to "drive"?  I feel that feeling, but cannot go quite so far, just yet.

Let us just harness the energy of the acrobatics, shouts and big big smiles of those poor endentured Wal-Mart "associates" at 6:50 AM, and rechannel it toward something worthwhile, and we shall be able to accomplish great good, in a number of ways.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

These are different levels of organization. Cells, whole animals, corporations/countries/societies. They have similarities as collective entities, but also critical differences.

I think it is too simple to say that a corporation is made up of humans, and hence the true responsibility lies with the humans, whose collective actions somehow bring about the corporation's actions. That ignores the fact that a genuinely new level of organization has been created. The idea of "corporate personhood" at least acknowledges this reality.

In terms of individual atoms, there is no such thing as a "metal." That is a collective phenomenon. So is ferromagnetism -- iron atoms will individually antialign with an applied magnetic field, not align like a chunk of iron will.

Groups of people do not behave like individual people. So it is tempting to call corporations "sociopaths," but that is really not accurate either.

Corporations are just corporations. They should be treated as the whole entities that they are (not broken into their components), but neither should we expect this entity to behave like an individual human.

That's the challenge: What is this collective thing? How does it work? Where are its buttons and levers, and how can we push and pull them to bring about beneficial results for us? This has been the project of corporate law for centuries.

And it is, after all, what our cells are doing to us.

...

The campaign is running again. I heard that the interviewees are prescreened now, which is too bad. And last week, I heard that the pipeline in Prudhoe Bay is corroded and leaking. The company that claims to be beyond petroleum shut down a pipeline that serves up 400,000 barrels of petroleum a day. Maybe Coca-Cola's new line should be "It's good for your teeth."

I read too that the energy expert Daniel Yergin claimed last week that "new analysis of oil-industry activity points to a considerable growth in the capacity to produce oil in the years ahead." It seems unlikely that anyone's going to push hard to change our energy future.

I guess, looking at it now, "beyond petroleum" is just advertising. It's become mere marketing -- perhaps it always was -- instead of a genuine attempt to engage the public in the debate or a corporate rallying cry to change the paradigm. Maybe I'm naïve.
...
John Kenney is a creative director at an advertising agency.

The 5% Project

With untapped reserves bigger than Saudi Arabia's in various regions,Russia and now China,plus the Alberta tar sands reserves at a cost of 10 bucks per barrel; it would be hard for the owners of oil rights to expect the price to stay over 70 dollars per barrel.

And yet we see the price headed to 100 and exxon having the biggest market cap of any corporation in the world.  the oil industry has record profits, not because of a real shortage, but because of the perception of shortage.

Maintaining that fiction, maintains the profitability and political power of these companies.  Withpout that fiction governments would bow to political pressure from their citizens to reign in these global monopolist's power over oil markets.

It's a self-sustaining deception much more powerful than reality would let it be.  This powerful deception is also keeping the focus off the real problem with oil, combustion causing global climate disaster.

So oil companies stave off environmentalists and anti trust advocates with one simple lie, peak oil.  

The "beyond petroleum" campaign is a step further, it (like the green and solar logo of BP)implies that BP is really serious about oil alternatives.

So it is really beyond the peak oil deception, right to:  We (BP)are not only motivated by the shortage of oil, but also to find a cure for global climate problems.  Trust us.

When the reality is that big oil monopolists are only interested in maintaining their power over oil markets, the very thing that is giving  them record profits.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

This article exposes the deception behind peak oil.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

   It is not the scientists who created life (sorry, Dr. Frankenstein, the Supreme Court holds that patent), but judges!

   The problem is that they cannot be jailed or held responsible for crimes in any meaningful manner.

   And that their "rights" have allowed them to pour huge sums of money into an easily corruptible election process.  Until not much else, besides their money, is left.

   Psychologically, they are in the primary stage of developement, where they take only, are aware of others, but are not aware of the fact that others have needs and rights to be respected.

   And we let them rule us.  Sigh.

   Hmmm, sounds like to many modern parents, but ones who have children who will never grow up, who intend to rule the house forever!

patrick

patrick