PART 2: CAN CORPORATIONS BE ACCOUNTABLE?
by Richard Grossman*
In the late 19th century, the Supreme Court of Georgia, in
RAILROAD CO. V. COLLINS, wrote:
"All experience has shown that large accumulations of property in
hands likely to keep it intact for a long period are dangerous to
the public weal. Having perpetual succession, any kind of
corporation has peculiar facilities for such accumulations, and
most governments have found it necessary to exercise caution in
their grants of corporate charters. Even religious corporations,
professing and in the main, truly, nothing but the general good,
have proven obnoxious to this objection, so that in England it
was long ago found necessary to restrict them in their powers of
acquiring real estate. Freed, as such bodies are, from the sure
bounds--the grave--to the schemes of individuals they are able to
add field to field, and power to power, until they become
entirely too strong for that society which is made of up those
whose plans are limited by a single life."[1]
Justices White, Brennan and Marshall, dissenting in a 1978 case,
FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON V. BELOTTI:
"It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of
corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amount
of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only
the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the
electoral process... The State need not permit its own creation
to consume it."[2]
Chief Justice Rehnquist, dissenting in the same case:
"...the blessing of potentially perpetual life and limited
liability... so beneficial [sic--R.G.] in the economic sphere,
poses special dangers in the political sphere."[3]
A great achievement of corporations, as they set out towards the
end of the 19th century to transform the law and recreate
themselves, was to replace basic tools of sovereign
people--chartering, defining incorporation laws, "by what
authority" proceedings and charter revocation--with regulatory
and administrative law, new legal doctrines and fines as
corporate punishment. Many people of that time understood that
these changes amounted to a counterrevolution, and so they
resisted with great passion and energy.
Farmers and workers were not willing to concede that the
corporate form would define work and money and progress and
efficiency and productivity and unions and justice and ethical
conduct and sustainability and food and harmful and reasonable
behaviour. They were not willing to concede that corporations
should have the rights and privileges of persons.
So they organized, educated, resisted. They were crushed by giant
corporations' ability to use state and federal government to take
rights away from people and bestow them upon corporations.
Over time, corporations were able to claim for themselves rights
and privileges taken from the sovereign people via violence with
favorable decisions by federal judges. Corporations were
conceded personhood, and a long list of civil and political
rights such as free speech, and property rights such as the right
to define and control investment, production, and the
organization of work.
By the beginning of the 20th century, corporations had become
sovereign and they had turned people into consumers, or workers,
or whatever the corporation of the moment chose to define humans
as.
Without a clear understanding of history, most citizen efforts
against corporations in this century have been struggles against
the symptoms of corporate domination which we have waged in
regulatory and administrative law arenas.
But these are NOT arenas of sovereignty. These are stacked-deck
proceedings, where people, communities and nature are
fundamentally disadvantaged to the constitutional rights of
corporations. Here, we cannot demand "by what authority" has
corporation X engaged in a pattern of behavior which constitutes
an assault upon the sovereign people? Here, we cannot declare a
corporation ULTRA VIRES, or "beyond its authority." To the
contrary, regulatory and administrative law only enables us to
question specific corporate behaviors, one at a time, usually
after the harm has been done... over and over and over again.
In these regulatory and administrative proceedings, both the law
and the culture concede to the corporation rights, privileges and
powers, which earlier generations knew were illegitimate for
corporations to possess. In addition, in these proceedings, the
corporation has the rights of natural persons: a human and a
corporation meet head on, in a "fair fight."
Today, our law and culture bestow our sovereignty on
corporations. So do most of our own citizen organizations
dedicated to justice and environmental protection and worker
rights and human rights. Consequently, our organizations use
their energy and resources to study each corporation as if it
were unique, and to contest corporate acts one at a time, as if
that could change the nature of corporations.
Folks relentlessly tally corporate assaults, study the regulatory
agencies and try to strengthen them. We try to make corporate
toxic chemicals and corporate radiation and corporate energy and
corporate banking and corporate agriculture and corporate
transportation, corporate buying of elections, and corporate
writing of legislation, and corporate education of our judges and
corporate distorting of our schools, a little less bad.
Isn't it an old story? People create what looks to be a nifty
machine, a robot, called the corporation. Over time the robots
get together and overpower the people. They redesign themselves
and reconstruct law and culture so that people fail to remember
they created the robots in the first place, that the robots are
machines and not alive. For a century, the robots propagandize
and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up
believing that robots are people too, gifts of God and Mother
Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is
good. How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, so
obedient.
Isn't it odd that we don't remember who We the People are? How
sovereign people should regard ourselves, how sovereign people
should act? We need to realize what power and authority we
possess, and how we can use it TO DEFINE THE NATURE OF
CORPORATIONS, so that we do not have to mobilize around each and
every corporate decision that affects our communities, our lives,
the planet.
In the face of what we experience about corporations, of what we
know to be true, why are so many people so obedient? Why do we
hang on to the hope that the corporation can be made socially
responsible? Isn't this an absurd notion? After all,
organizations cannot be responsible. This is just not a relevant
concept, because a principal purpose of corporations is to
protect the managers, directors and stockholders from
responsibility for what their corporations do.
But only people can be responsible. How? By defining ourselves
as sovereign people so that we then can define all the corporate
bodies that we create (governmental, business, educational,
charitable, and civic).
We the People are the ones who must be accountable. We are not
accountable when we create monster robots which run rampant in
our communities and which, in our names, sally forth the across
the world to wreak havoc upon other places and upon other
people's self-governance.
We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable
when we don't act like sovereign people.
We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable
when we play in corporate arenas by corporate rules.
We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable
when we permit our agents in government to bestow our sovereignty
upon machines.
We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable
when we organize our communities and then go to corporate
executives and to the hacks who run corporate front groups and
ask them to please cause a little less harm; or when we offer
them even more rewards for being a little less dominating.
Sovereign people do not beg of, or negotiate with, subordinate
entities which we created. Sovereign people INSTRUCT subordinate
entities. Sovereign people DEFINE all entities we create. And
when a subordinate entity violates the terms of its creation, and
undermines our ability to govern ourselves, we are required to
move in swiftly and accountably to cut this cancer out of the
body politic.
With such deeds do we honor the millions of people who struggled
before us to wrest power from tyrants, to define themselves in
the face of terror and violence. And we make all struggles for
justice and democracy easier by weakening the ability of
corporations to make the rules, and to rule over us.
Some might say this is not a practical way to think and act.
Why? Because corporations will take away our jobs? Our food?
Our toilet paper? Our hospitals? Because we don't know how to
run our towns and cities and nation without global corporations?
Because they will run away to another state, to another country?
Because the Supreme Court has spoken? Because philanthropic
corporations won't give us money? Because it's scary? Because
it's too late to learn to act as sovereign people?
Because in 1997 it is not realistic for people across the nation
and around the world to take away the civil and political rights
of all corporations, to take the property rights and real
property corporations have seized from human being and from the
Earth?
Yeah, and it IS realistic to keep conceding sovereign powers to
corporations, to keep fighting industrial corporations and
banking corporations and telemedia corporations and resource
extraction corporations and public relations corporations and
transportation corporations and educational corporations and
insurance corporations and agribusiness corporations and energy
corporations and stock market corporations, one at a time forever
and ever?
On January 10, 1997, President William Jefferson Clinton sent a
letter to the mayor of Toledo, Ohio. The mayor had asked the
President for help in getting the Chrysler Corporation to build a
new Jeep factory within Toledo city limits to replace the ancient
one which Chrysler Corporation was closing. The President of the
United States, leader of the most powerful nation the world has
ever known, elected head of a government always eager to
celebrate the uniqueness of its democracy to the point of forcing
it upon other nations, wrote:
"...As I am sure you know, my Administration cannot endorse any
potential location for the new production site. My
Intergovernmental Affairs staff will be happy to work with you
once the Chrysler Board of Directors has made its decision..."[4]
Our President may not have a clue, but We the People did not
grant away our sovereignty when we made Chrysler into a
corporation. When we gave the Chrysler Corporation authority to
manufacture automobiles, we made the people of Toledo not its
subjects, nor Chrysler Corporation their supreme authority.
How long shall We the People, the sovereign people, stand hat in
hand outside corporate boardrooms waiting to be told our fate?
How long until we instruct our representatives to do their
constitutional duty? How long until WE become responsible...until
WE become accountable, to out forebears, to ourselves, to our
children, to other peoples and species and to the Earth? |
