[p2p-research] on corporate personhood

[Michel Bauwens]

 Corporations as
Uber-Citizens<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/douglasrushkoff/~3/Tq36fze2ZqI/>

By Douglas on Uncategorized

  Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling was positive in one respect: it made law
out of what was already happening. While corporations earned “personhood”
back in the 1860’s when a court clerk (likely bribed) added this language
into the margins of another court decision, they never quite had the rights
of citizenship before. They already write our laws (through lobbies) elect
our leaders (with money) and create public opinion (with money and PR). *If
you’re interested in how and why that happened, please read my book
Life Inc<http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/>
.* But they have always tended to do so by working around government’s
efforts to limit their influence.

It was a losing game for a government by the people, of course, because
almost no one gets into office without the kind of corporate assistance they
need to pay back if they want to get into office again. Meanwhile, while
corporations have enjoyed the benefits of personhood for over a century,
they don’t suffer the main pitfalls: chiefly, death – but also despair,
fatigue, and the need to feed their kids. They could outrun or at least
outlast any effort to curb their influence. That’s how the railroads got to
trample States’ rights to their own land, how GE got out of cleaning the
Hudson River, and so on. They just wait, make a little progress, and then
wait some more.

The era of Obama seemed to promise something different. Here was candidate
who, at least initially, raised more cash through decentralized means than
by appealing to large centralized corporations. As a candidate funded
through small donations by real people, he seemed to offer an antidote to
business as usual. If a couple of hundred million people donating small
amounts could, in aggregate, raise more money than a couple of hundred
mega-corporations, then democracy stood a chance even as the PR and money
driven spectacle it has become. Of course, Obama’s later donations turned
out to be just as corporate as anyone else’s (if for no other reason than
that they smelled a winner), and his hands almost as tied. He raised so
much, he rejected the campaign finance tenets he had promised to adhere to
back when he thought he’d be the underfunded candidate.

But the lasting sense was still that real people might be able to exercise
at least some influence over who gets elected to office. Maybe, just maybe,
the net and a new spirit of participation could play some small role in the
democratic process and even make incremental progress in developing campaign
finance reforms. Meanwhile, over the last thirty years, legislators on both
sides of the aisle have sought to free themselves of corporate influence,
and passed what legislation they could limiting corporate campaign
contributions (especially by non-humans).

Luckily for corporations, the activist justices appointed by an earlier
version of our corporatist government (the Bush 2 regime) have decided to
reverse this process. Instead of acting as as stopgap to preserve
constitutional rights, they are serving as a new legislative branch –
rewriting the law by declaring it unconstitutional. It is a violation of
corporations’ *civil liberties* to limit their influence over the political
process. Even though they are artificial entities, with greater access to
capital, infinite longevity, and no interest in or connection to humanity,
we now guarantee them the right of free speech.

Of course, the right of free speech was created in order for human beings to
have the ability to talk back to the corporation – the British East India
Trading Company – that was running the colonies before the Revolutionary
War. And it was upheld a century later so that laborers could organize
unions or speak out against industrial abuses without fear of getting
killed. (Even though most unions, perhaps predictably, ended up becoming as
abstracted as the corporations they were created to counteract.) Freedom of
speech was intended a way for human beings to guarantee their ability speak
out against largely systemic and structural repression. Now, that structural
repression itself has that same guarantee.

All this does is make centralized government even less relevant to our
plight as human beings. I admire folks like Larry
Lessig<http://action.change-congress.org/page/s/citizensunited>for
their faith in our ability to reclaim a government by the people, to
use
the net to expose and even reverse corporate influence in the political
process, and for us to legislate a commons back into human affairs (even
though it has been on the decline for the past 600 years).

But I’ve got more faith in our ability, as people, to rebuild our society
and economy from the bottom up, without the participation or approval of a
corporate-funded and corporate-driven central government. We can rebuild
local economies based on the abundance of our labor and resources rather
than the scarcity of centrally issued currency. We can rebuild local
agriculture based on the quality of the topsoil, the features of the
climate, and the nutritional needs of people rather than corn lobby laws.
And we can rebuild our mechanisms for making meaning based on our shared
hopes and values rather than those developed by PR firms to make us compete
for false, individualistic goals.

In short, I say screw ‘em. Let’s do this ourselves.


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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