> >Get rid of corporate personhood
And Doug wanted to know:
> And replace it with what?
And further asked:
> How would production be organized and owned? I never hear these
> corp personhood types talk about that.
I didn't know the details of the doctrine besides that it came into its own in the 19th century, and that, per what I read, was a bad thing(tm). After a little clicking around, I found that corporate personhood has a longer history than that, and it *seems* what most mean when they talk or write of getting rid of corporate personhood is to curtail the protections of due process and equal protection (14th amendment) to corporation. That seems like a good start (remember that I'm proceeding from a position of generous political power given in the first post).
If a corp. isn't entitled to the same procedures / protections that real human beings are, then things could start getting interesting. You could start small, by prohibiting a firm from contributing to lobbying or industry PR groups--a corp wouldn't be entitled to the same speech rights as a person--and go from there. You could constrain the property rights of a corp, making ownership of certain parts of its physical plant and/or revenues contingent upon providing a certain level of service to the community: blackouts like the one in summer '03 wouldn't just be followed up by polite investigations of what happened but seizures of records, plants, etc. No legal bickering from oil companies in case of a tanker accident like the Exxon Valdez, it just gets cleaned up to certain standards, and if company assets have to be seized to do it, it just gets done.
Basically, I'd say the idea would be reduce firms to entities that are supposed to provide products and services to people, period, and perhaps not all products/services would be permitted. A firm's profits aren't sacrosanct, nor its property, nor its policies.
Last but not least, have the claims of the owners of capital behind a firm be junior to the claims of its workers on a firm's revenues. But this would be the first step to...
Doubtless there are innumerable practical and theoretical problems with this. Have at 'em.
Curtiss