Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Shane Mage" <shmage at pipeline.com>
On Oct 29, 2011, at 12:10 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> ...The call to abolish corporate personhood, for example, betrays a
> lack of having thought anything about scale and organization...
The idea that the issue of "corporate personhood" has anything to do with "scale and organization" betrays a lack of having understood what the issue is all about. It has *nothing* to do with the status of corporations, creatures of the states, as *legal* "persons" able to act economically, to sue and be sued over contractual issues, to provide limited liability to their owners. It has to do with *constitutional* personality--the court-invented gift of constitutional rights, rights that the text of the constitution grants only to *natural* persons. Constitutional corporate personhood is the means for capitalists to use the courts to guarantee their property from expropriation, on the grossest scale to evade taxes and legal controls, and to make ironclad their financial control over the two- party system of "democratic" electoral fraud, and, consequently, over the entire judicial system.
The call to abolish corporate personhood consists simply of this proposition:
"All rights as specified in the US Constitution or as retained by the people under the Ninth Amendment apply to all natural persons and only to natural persons."
Shane Mage
"scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying attention to"
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