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By Richard Girard (about the author)
Become a Fan (23 fans) -- Page 2 of 3 page(s)
My answer is this: Corporations are not persons. The history of “corporate personhood” is less than one hundred-twenty-five years old. Corporations before 1886 were short term artificial constructs, used to protect owners and shareholders from experiencing the full financial effect of business failure, misfeasance or malfeasance, whose first priority was—by the wording of their corporate charter—to operate for the public good.
In 1886 you had the Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, where a head note—not part of the actual opinion and improperly included by the High Court's Clerk—gave the impression that this decision established corporate personhood.
Thirty years later the amorality of these corporate persons was ensured in the Michigan Supreme Court's decision in Ford v. Dodge (1916). In this decision, Henry Ford was ordered to place the value of the stock of his Ford Motor Company, and the dividends of his stockholders, ahead of his employees, his community, or the public good.
In other words, if a CEO or board of directors reduced the profit margin of a company without a good reason (in the opinion of the stockholders), the CEO and board were open to charges of fiduciary misfeasance and malfeasance.
After Ford v. Dodge, the corporation has to act in a completely selfish manner, with little or no consideration of the effect its actions will have on others, in order to stay within the letter of the law. This thing—the corporation—has been made more important than lives and welfare of human beings.
A human being exhibiting such behavior is, at the very least, described as having a narcissistic disorder. Sometimes, in extreme cases, they are diagnosed as sociopaths. If a corporation demonstrates these same types of behaviors, it is “good business.”
If that “good business” requires a behavior that, in humans, is considered neurotic to borderline psychotic, it tells me one thing: there is something seriously wrong in the way America runs its businesses.
These inhuman corporate entities have the right of free speech, through expenditure of money on publicity and campaign contributions; yet an eight year old child has no right to the needed healthcare that will permit him to beat back leukemia, because his father's employer dropped his company's healthcare coverage.
These self-same boards or “corporate brains” have the legal right to delay improvements and upgrades of those same factories in order to ensure higher short term returns for their shareholders; until their continuing misfeasance makes it cheaper to move the factory than make the long delayed improvements and upgrades to the existing factory; yet the children of the displaced factory workers have no right to expect nutritious meals to fill their bellies, or properly staffed, up to date public schools to educate their minds.
As we have seen in the current Wall Street fiasco, there is an innate conflict of interest facing any corporation's board and officers, because of the choice they must make between short term profits, and long term company solvency. This conflict arises directly from the decision in Ford v. Dodge, together with the innate greed of people who see more money as the solution to most or all of their problems.
If a human being's mental state represents a danger to himself or society, he is locked away in a mental hospital until he is no longer a danger. Yet if a corporation's “mental state,” in the form of the policies of its board of directors, represents a danger to the corporation or society; we have, for the last twenty-eight years, been told by proponents of the free market economic model that it will take care of itself.
This free market system, of which the conservatives are so enamored, has never worked in the long term for any nation. It failed in Great Britain, who adopted it (at least for the members of the Empire) at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Great Britain's production capacity was so vast, that (together with France) it was able to provide more than half the armaments and munitions for the Allied Powers (including the United States) against Germany and the Central Powers in the First World War. By the time of the Second World War, so many of British industries had been shipped overseas—to places where cheaper labor was available—that it could not properly arm and maintain itself in the field without America and the Lend-Lease Program. (For more on this see Len Deighton’s book Blood, Toil and Folly.)
We have also seen the effects of unregulated capitalism—the heart of the free market system—during America's so called Gilded Age after the Civil War, together with recurrences in the 1920's and today. Monopolies or syndicates (like Standard Oil or the Sugar Trust) dominated every facet of the American economy; economic depressions in 1873, 1883, 1893, and 1907 beggared millions of Americans; political corruption and immoral business practices—illustrated by writers like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair— forced the State and Federal Governments to begin the regulation of businesses, starting with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. It was the American dream for a privileged few, and a nightmare for the rest: with fifty-six percent of the nation living in poverty in 1900 and a life expectancy for males of forty-seven years.
This is the past that John McCain, Phil Gramm and the conservatives at least since Reagan, harkens back to with their message on healthcare, education, a decent job at a decent wage, and every other aspect of the American dream. For these conservatives, real opportunity should only exist as a privilege for the few, and not as a right for the many.
It is the plight of our nation's children that brings the lie into focus concerning the conservative proposition that healthcare is a privilege, and not a right.
Anyone with a sense of decency or justice, with an ounce of empathy or compassion, would agree that it is morally wrong to permit an innocent child to suffer, if the means exist to relieve that suffering. Without a right to healthcare, an estimated one-sixth of the children in the United States are at the mercy of forces that are not only beyond their control, but in many cases beyond the control of their parents.
Become a Fan (23 fans) -- Page 2 of 3 page(s)
In 1886 you had the Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, where a head note—not part of the actual opinion and improperly included by the High Court's Clerk—gave the impression that this decision established corporate personhood.
Thirty years later the amorality of these corporate persons was ensured in the Michigan Supreme Court's decision in Ford v. Dodge (1916). In this decision, Henry Ford was ordered to place the value of the stock of his Ford Motor Company, and the dividends of his stockholders, ahead of his employees, his community, or the public good.
In other words, if a CEO or board of directors reduced the profit margin of a company without a good reason (in the opinion of the stockholders), the CEO and board were open to charges of fiduciary misfeasance and malfeasance.
After Ford v. Dodge, the corporation has to act in a completely selfish manner, with little or no consideration of the effect its actions will have on others, in order to stay within the letter of the law. This thing—the corporation—has been made more important than lives and welfare of human beings.
A human being exhibiting such behavior is, at the very least, described as having a narcissistic disorder. Sometimes, in extreme cases, they are diagnosed as sociopaths. If a corporation demonstrates these same types of behaviors, it is “good business.”
If that “good business” requires a behavior that, in humans, is considered neurotic to borderline psychotic, it tells me one thing: there is something seriously wrong in the way America runs its businesses.
These inhuman corporate entities have the right of free speech, through expenditure of money on publicity and campaign contributions; yet an eight year old child has no right to the needed healthcare that will permit him to beat back leukemia, because his father's employer dropped his company's healthcare coverage.
These self-same boards or “corporate brains” have the legal right to delay improvements and upgrades of those same factories in order to ensure higher short term returns for their shareholders; until their continuing misfeasance makes it cheaper to move the factory than make the long delayed improvements and upgrades to the existing factory; yet the children of the displaced factory workers have no right to expect nutritious meals to fill their bellies, or properly staffed, up to date public schools to educate their minds.
As we have seen in the current Wall Street fiasco, there is an innate conflict of interest facing any corporation's board and officers, because of the choice they must make between short term profits, and long term company solvency. This conflict arises directly from the decision in Ford v. Dodge, together with the innate greed of people who see more money as the solution to most or all of their problems.
If a human being's mental state represents a danger to himself or society, he is locked away in a mental hospital until he is no longer a danger. Yet if a corporation's “mental state,” in the form of the policies of its board of directors, represents a danger to the corporation or society; we have, for the last twenty-eight years, been told by proponents of the free market economic model that it will take care of itself.
This free market system, of which the conservatives are so enamored, has never worked in the long term for any nation. It failed in Great Britain, who adopted it (at least for the members of the Empire) at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Great Britain's production capacity was so vast, that (together with France) it was able to provide more than half the armaments and munitions for the Allied Powers (including the United States) against Germany and the Central Powers in the First World War. By the time of the Second World War, so many of British industries had been shipped overseas—to places where cheaper labor was available—that it could not properly arm and maintain itself in the field without America and the Lend-Lease Program. (For more on this see Len Deighton’s book Blood, Toil and Folly.)
We have also seen the effects of unregulated capitalism—the heart of the free market system—during America's so called Gilded Age after the Civil War, together with recurrences in the 1920's and today. Monopolies or syndicates (like Standard Oil or the Sugar Trust) dominated every facet of the American economy; economic depressions in 1873, 1883, 1893, and 1907 beggared millions of Americans; political corruption and immoral business practices—illustrated by writers like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair— forced the State and Federal Governments to begin the regulation of businesses, starting with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. It was the American dream for a privileged few, and a nightmare for the rest: with fifty-six percent of the nation living in poverty in 1900 and a life expectancy for males of forty-seven years.
This is the past that John McCain, Phil Gramm and the conservatives at least since Reagan, harkens back to with their message on healthcare, education, a decent job at a decent wage, and every other aspect of the American dream. For these conservatives, real opportunity should only exist as a privilege for the few, and not as a right for the many.
It is the plight of our nation's children that brings the lie into focus concerning the conservative proposition that healthcare is a privilege, and not a right.
Anyone with a sense of decency or justice, with an ounce of empathy or compassion, would agree that it is morally wrong to permit an innocent child to suffer, if the means exist to relieve that suffering. Without a right to healthcare, an estimated one-sixth of the children in the United States are at the mercy of forces that are not only beyond their control, but in many cases beyond the control of their parents.
Richard Girard is an increasingly radical representative of the disabled and disenfranchised members of America's downtrodden, who suffers from bipolar disorder (type II or type III, the professionals do not agree). He has put together a team to (more...)
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