Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Homework Oct. 10
Pick three points or lines of argument from "Abolish Corporate Personhood" that you find particularly insightful or instructive. Before class on Monday copy those into a post on the blog -- http://sps121.blogspot.com/2011/09/intro.html. Be ready to discuss what you find insightful in the points you post.
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There were many pieces of information within this article that was very noteworthy and intriguing however three parts stand out the most to me. The first piece that I found most interesting was the part about how only about 10% of the population at the time of the constitution were considered “actual people” meaning that they were a white male and owned a certain amount of property, which would then leave the other 90% of the population…the poor, women, slaves, etc. to be considered “not people” or as they put it, but not in so many words, sub humans. This is very interesting to be because I had always grown up thinking how awesome the constitution was, seeing as it “represented” every common person in the new United States, reading this now, I can see that this was a misconceived notion. The second thing that I found interesting was the part about how the constitution and the bill of rights are supposed to protect our freedoms, but it actually does no such thing. “Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive”(Edwards, Morgan) this sentence was a huge smack in the face because as I previously stated I grew up thinking that the constitution was set out to protect it’s citizens but in actuality it was set up to protect property. This piece I find interesting because you always hear people say, “well it’s my right to free speech” but the bill of rights only says that the Government can’t make laws to abridge the right to free speech, the difference between the two is immense and is once again a huge wake up call. Lastly, I found the part about how corporations gained personhood rights under the constitution before both women and slaves, this is just a crazy thought, that our founding fathers cared more about the protection of property than they did about the rights of the people who solely made up the United States. It’s an upsetting thing that these seemingly intelligent, and kind men were driven by greed and the desire of power rather than the chance to have equal rights and economic prosperity for all of the citizens.
ReplyDeleteThere was a lot to choose from in this article. The first piece of information i found rather insightful was the fact that the authors of the constitution wrote so that the constitution could only be practiced by people like them. The rich. That certainly is not "the people", seeing as you weren't even considered a person if you weren't a rich white man. What i also found rather interesting is that early on the wealthily people started looking toward the corporations as a way to shield their wealth. It started early, and now it continues. Wealthy corporation owners use the corporations as a way to keep their wealth. One of my last points that i find interesting is how powerful and "superhuman" these corporations have become. They are invincible at the moment. They can't "die" or be imprisoned. And yet they are treated as humans are, and have no human qualities at all. Its upsetting and gives a tremendous disadvantage to people now. Limiting rights where rights are needed and giving rights to the wrong places.
ReplyDeleteIn this article many things sparked my interest and really gave me an understanding on how corporate personhood works, and how our system of government really came to be. One very interesting thing that is highly stressed in this article is how the founding father's created the constitution by understanding that a democracy would affect the role of the rich man. The constitution really is not fair, it was created for protection against the wealthy as well as their property. Another interesting point the article stated was how the right's of the people aren't necessarily protected within the constitution but rather not specified until the actual ten commandments were added. Also how even within the ten commandments the right's of the people aren't really specified but the commandments state what the government can and cannot do to us. One last major thing is how the article says within the constitution "we the people" is never defined. During the time when the constitution was created to be considered a person you had to be a white man with a certain status of property. Now in today's society to be considered a person you just need to be a human being, or now the phrase an "unnatural person" comes into to play when referring to corporations. At the end of the day a corporation is not a person, and I still don't see how they can be protected like they are.
ReplyDeleteThe three statements in the article i found interesting is that the constitution did not protect the people rather property so the people came to a compromise in ratifying the constitution if the government made the bill of rights and with even the making of the bill of rights it dose not give any right to people with what it says but rather in what i dose not say. Also that the only really persons are the rich the ones who can afford to go to court are the only ones with rights. It is also amazing how hard it is to get rid of corporate person hood you would have to do it on a national level and a state level. The hardest part of eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in charge. (Edwards, Morgan)
ReplyDeleteThis article had many interesting points. The first one that really stood out was the one the expressed that “Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive.” I found this rather interesting because I always believed that the constitution was to protect people, when it is really just stats that the government can’t interfere. The second sentence, or paragraph I found interesting is the one that describes how “the phrase about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment, which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government.” I find this interesting because if the people were originally protected from the national government, why weren’t they protected from the state government also? I think that through the Fifth Amendment the people should have been protected from the state government. The third point that I believe is interesting is where is says “ As the rights of human persons in the US are diminished and restricted by the Patriot Act on the one hand, they are also squeezed by corporate personhood on the other. We, the real people, have our rights caught between a rock and a hard place, while the rights of the corporate person continue to expand.” I think that the rights of a corporate person should not be expanding. It is only going to give the corporate person more power than it already has. I also believe that the rights of a natural person should be able to expand.
ReplyDeleteThe article "Abolish Corporate Personhood", by Jan Edwards and Molly Morgan contained a lot of useful information regarding corporations being treated like natural people. The first line from this article that I found intriguing was "Because corporations are property, and because the Constitution protects property rights above all, most people have to abandon the Bill of Rights in order to make a living." This was particularly interesting to me because it is basically stating that in order to make a decent wage to support your family, a person has to give up their freedoms as a "natural" person, in order to appease the rights of a "corporate" person. Another excerpt that interested me was, "Now that the slavery lie could no longer be used to maintain minority rule, they needed a new lie, and they used the 14th Amendment to create it". By comparing slave owners to corporate leaders, the author of this article is making a very powerful statement. The ways that slave owners and corporations have ensured that the minority will continue to rule is certainly something worth studying. The final sentence in this article that intrigued me was, "Corporations acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote". What surprised me the most about this sentence is how corporations were granted personhood well before living, breathing human beings. This is a staggering fact and only helps to show how the minority(corporations) have had an unfair advantage over the majority(natural persons) since the landmark case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
ReplyDeleteThe article "Abolish Corporate Personhood" has a lot of interesting information that ties into the topics and discussions we have been having in class. The first line I found interesting from the article was " In colonial times, corporations were tools of the king's oppression, chartered for the purpose of exploiting the so-called "New World" and shoveling wealth back into Europe.". This is very similar to how corporations work today, the rich, or "king", use corporations to make even more money. Corporations were not popular with the colonists as they are not popular with people today. The second line that caught my eye was "Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor." This process is what made corporate personhood. The culmination of this process was the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case. The third line that I found intriguing was "In less than 30 years, African Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while corporations had acquired them." This line really makes you think about the world we live in. How is it possible that non-living conglomerates are able to achieve legal personhood, when an actual person is denied the same legality? It really makes one examine just how much power the minority of wealth holds.
ReplyDeleteThere were a lot of interesting points in this article but the three main sections that stood out to me were:
ReplyDelete1. The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government, which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people.
2. Early corporate charters were explicit about what a corporation could do, how, for how long, with whom, where, and when. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and they were prohibited from any part of the political process.
3. Corporations are whatever those who have the power to define want them to be to maintain minority rule through corporations. As long as superhuman "corporate persons" have rights under the law, the vast majority of people have little or no effective voice in our political arena, which is why we see abolishing corporate personhood as so important to ending corporate rule and building a more democratic society.
These points all helped clarify the difficult to understand concept of corporate personhood.
While the article made many excellent point, the points I chose were related to interpreting Amendments. First, I looked at the idea that the First Amendment does not guarantee freedom of speech, it simply prevents the government from hindering speech. Thus, it is not actually said that we have freedom of speech. Second, I chose the argument that during the time the Bill of Rights was made, the colonists were not happy with corporations as they were run by a different set of rules and often operated outside the law. As such, the framers would never have wanted corporations to gain the rights they have by claiming protection under the 14th Amendment. Finally, I chose the point that of all the Supreme Court cases relating to the 14th Amendment in the 50 after the Amendment was passed, one half of one percent were African-Americans while over 50% were corporations. An amendment that was clearly referring to natural persons has done more for corporations than any other group.
ReplyDelete1.) The problem is that the phrase "We the People" is not defined in the Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of "We the People" and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with white skin and a certain amount of property. (The states determined who could vote; some states had religious restrictions.) At the time of the Constitution, this narrowed "We the People" down to about 10% of the population. Ninety percent of the people - all the immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who don't own property (the poor) - are, legally, not persons. They were not persons with rights, but were persons for following the law. They're like subhumans. The law didn't label people this way in so many words - which is part of the brilliance of the system and why it's lasted so long - but the net effect was clear. 2.) Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive. So the First Amendment, for example, does not say, "All citizens are guaranteed the right to free speech"; it only says, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . ." The First Amendment just restricts the government from specific encroachments; it doesn't guarantee anything. This was not a concern for the people because they had strong bills of rights in their state constitutions, and at that time, the states had more power than the federal government. 3.) The 14th Amendment, in addition to saying that now all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens, says that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws." The phrase about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment, which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government; now with the 14th Amendment, the states can't abuse people in that way, either. These are important rights; they're written in a short, straightforward manner; and after the Civil War and all the agony over slavery, the people in the states that ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were clear that they were about righting the wrong of slavery.
ReplyDeleteI found this article to be very interesting. There were many aspects that I found particularly interesting for example, it was so strange for me that only 10% of the population was considered “actual people.” This is because there were very few property owners and “citizens.” That is so strange to me. The majority (90%) of the people were not considered a person. They had no say in what happened in the legal realm. Another quote that I found to be very interesting was the quote highlighted before the reading; “Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive.” When I first read this quote I thought it was a different spin on the way of looking at the situation. This quote holds more meaning than I realized. After reading the article I realized that the constitution seems not as a protective document, but a guideline on what cannot do. I never really looked at it like that before. The last item I wanted to mention is the fact that the corporations’ inability to be reprimanded. In the article the author discusses that the corporations cannot die and cannot go away. This is borderline disturbing because we as citizens do not have the power to avoid the exploitation of the corporations. We are hindered by their ability to push through the laws.
ReplyDelete1-Because corporations are a creation of the government - chartered by the state legislatures - they still fell on the government side of the constitutional line with duties accountable to the people. If minority rule by property was going to be accomplished through corporations, they had to become entitled to rights instead, which required them to cross the line and become persons under the law.then it took the ruling class less than 20 years to shift corporations from the duty side of the line, where they're accountable to the people, to the rights side, where they get protection from government abuse.
ReplyDelete2-the "separate but equal" doctrine that legalized racial segregation through what were known as "Jim Crow" laws.in the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of African Americans, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations. "Equal protection under the law" turns out to mean: whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to fight for it.people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution - a long and difficult, but democratic, process - and corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
3-After corporate personhood is abolished, new legislation will be possible. Here are a few examples. If "corporate persons" no longer had First Amendment right of free speech, we could prohibit all corporate political activity, such as lobbying and contributions to political candidates and parties. If "corporate persons" were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, then corporate managers couldn't turn OSHA and the EPA inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled searches. If "corporate persons" weren't protected against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn't force themselves into communities that don't want them.
My there points of insightfullness:
ReplyDelete1.The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government, which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people. We delegate some of our power to the government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a representative democracy, this system should work just fine.
2.So the Constitution's authors left control of corporations to state legislatures (10th Amendment), where they would get the closest supervision by the people.
3.So the Constitution's authors left control of corporations to state legislatures (10th Amendment), where they would get the closest supervision by the people.
Copy and paste error. My final point is
ReplyDelete3.Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the deepest questions of what it means to be human. And if we are to live in a democracy, what does it mean to be sovereign? The hardest part of eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in charge.
Three points that i found interesting and insightful:
ReplyDelete1) Without using the words "slave" or "slavery," the Constitution ensures that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the same
2) At the time of the constitution, we the people was narrowed down to only 10 percent of the population
3) "Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property." i found that this point was extremely meaningful. It enforces the fact that people believe that slaves can be property, and although it may be legal, in reality it is unacceptable and/ or fictional.
ody
ReplyDeleteThe Point.
In the interest of clarifying just how the system works.
The original republic was certainly minority rule by the propertied. As the Civil War and Radical Republicanism unfolded, the propertied elite recognized a new structure of minority rule. That is to provide corporations, the new entities of upper class wealth, with rights greater to individual citizens in a ratio proportional to the former structure of restricted sovereignty to the propertied. These they have provided through Supreme Court rulings. Now corporations are “Superhumans” and people are still people. Minority rule by wealth continues and has been concentrated.