Life in prison for stealing food

Tom Lehman uswa12 at lorainccc.edu
Thu Jun 3 15:28:57 PDT 1999


I don't doubt for a minute that there is a lot of fuzzy thinking in the whole corporate charter debate. Then again fuzzy thinking is a way of life in corporatized America. The average person out there in the street has no idea that corporate charters even exist. Or that one of the main thrusts of American economy history and political economy has been the battle between people and corporations; going all the way back to joint stock companies chartered by the British monarchy.

People in general have no idea that state legislatures charter corporations or set standards by which corporations may obtain licenses to operate in a state. To most folks corporations are a given and not even a creation of the peoples representatives. They have no idea how corporations came into existence or what role they should play in the society.

Many states once had strong corporate chartering processes and unique ways to control corporations; some were ruled out of existence by the federal judicial process. Many if not most other unique methods of control by charter were lobbied out of existancece by the corporate interests. Even in violation of the law on the books at the time.

Either we control the corporations or they control us.

Your email pal,

Tom L.

Doug Henwood wrote:


> James Farmelant wrote:
>
> >Don't such reformers fall into the error of confusing property
> >relations with the social relations of production?
>
> Yeah, and as far as I can tell they don't really think much about the
> organization of production. Their model seems to be an unexamined nostalgia
> for an era of small-scale competitive capitalism, an entity whose actual
> existence must be seriously doubted. Weren't early small enterprises
> actually local monopolies, and didn't it take larger firms with national
> scope to develop something approaching competitive markets? I don't see how
> you can carry on sophisticated production across time & space without
> something like the enterprise form - not one owned by outside shareholders,
> necessarily, or run by despotic managers, of course. But when I said that,
> Alex Cockburn denounced me as an apologist for capital.
>
> Doug



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