corporations as people

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Apr 20 09:25:15 PDT 2001


J Cullen wrote:


>Some in the populist movement would like to abolish corporations
>altogether, limit the length of their charters or otherwise limit
>their activities, seeking smaller-scale and locally accountable
>corporations; others (and I count myself among this number) would
>like to make corporations more accountable to states, communities
>and "stakeholders," such as workers and neighbors of industrial
>plants. I think there should be a popular mobilization to force some
>public-interest tradeoff for the limitation of liability of
>corporations and their shareholders. That probably would require a
>new Supreme Court to overturn the Santa Clara decision and all its
>illegitimate grandchildren, or a constitutional amendment to declare
>that corporations are not entitled to the same considerations as
>natural persons.

Which itself would require something like a revolution. I'm mystified by all the attention paid to legal strategies, with hardly a word said about the political mobilization they'd need. Damn, it's hard enough to organize a union - taking on the legal basis of capitalist (*not* corporate) power is truly massive.

Doug



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