[lbo-talk] Challenge for leftists of all stripes

[Etienne]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:38:20 -0500, "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
said:
> My whole point is that a corp is an institutionalized version of Mr 
> Moneybags, and both will behave in pretty similar fashion. I don't 
> understand what the corp personhood crowd sees as an alternative to 
> the corporate form. If it's some sort of semi-socialized hybrid form, 

Aren't there two aspects to this which people are confusing? One is
corporate personhood in the sense of corporations being treated as
single entities capable of entering into legal relationships separate
from the relationships of the shareholders, board, etc. The other is
corporations being granted (some of) the civil rights of real people.

So the point of abolishing corporate personhood isn't to replace
corporations with some other legal form - it's to remove some of the
restrictions on regulating corporations which the current interpretation
of legal personhood forbids. The regulation Nathan is talking about
doesn't seem like it would require massive political reform, and it's
certainly not some kind of quasi-socialism. Abolishing the legal
personality of corporations might be, although if it were, presumably
John Q Moneybags would just stop using the corporate form.

(I seem to remember reading in a Micheal Moore book about some piece of
civil rights law under which only twenty cases, or something, had been
brought by actual people, with the other thousand uses being
corporations, but I can't remember the details)
-- 
     "There are very few members of the establishment press
      who will defend the idea that things like aggressive
      flatulence, forced feedings of swill, or even a barely-
      muted hostility on the part of the candidate would 
      justify any kind of drastic retaliation by a professional
      journalist - and certainly nothing so drastic as to
      cause the Democratic front-runner to cut short a major
      speech because some dangerous freak was clawing at his
      legs and screaming for more gin."
                                              -- Hunter S. Thompson
Tim                                             http://www.huh.34sp.com/