How to Save the World

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May 1, 2003

ON DREAMS, PAIN AND SEX: DARWIN WINS AGAIN

darwin I concluded my essay on SARS (no, I won't put the acronym in small letters) with a quote from economist Peter Jay: "Darwin always wins in the end." Three recent news items have caused me to realize just how true that statement is:

The Purpose of Dreams: Rayne has been posting about Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and asking for alternative theories to his "crap". I'd never miss an opportunity to criticize psychologists. The most plausible explanation to me is that since all animals (even amphibians) have been shown to dream, the purpose of dreams is to imagine alternative scenarios. Any creature that dreams of other ways to handle a particular situation (and most dreams seem to be conceivable variations of potential real-life experiences, rather than pure fantasy) has a stronger arsenal for dealing with that situation if/when it occurs in real life. Hence I'd hypothesize that dreamers should tend to out-survive non-dreamers, and that's why there's so many of us around. This is, I'd guess, especially true of artists.

The Purpose of Pain: A group of British wacko scientists has been torturing fish to find out if they feel pain, and to no one's surprise concluded they do. Nevertheless, one small group (presumably creationist psychologists) continues to believe that animals other than humans cannot feel pain because they aren't intelligent enough. Can educated people really be this dumb? Isn't it obvious that the purpose of pain is to discourage repeat of the activity that led to it, in the Darwinian interest of survival? Really, I think we need to experiment on this nut group to see if they're intelligent enough to feel pain.

Why is Sex Fun?: Somewhere in my readings I ran into a book with this title. I haven't read it so I don't know the answer (though if it's written by psychologists, reading it probably wouldn't help). But my instinctive answer would be that this, too, is Darwinian. If something is fun, you want to do it more often, and having sex more often would therefore tend to aid survival of the species. If you're severely stressed and it isn't fun, the cessation of sex under those circumstances would also seem Darwinian. Of course there's always the Klingon alternative of having sex as an irresistable but excruciating imperative. But I think nature has a better sense of humour than that.

Psychologist readers, I'm just kidding in my jabs. Some of my best friends are psychologists, really. I'm an accountant, and turnabout's fair play, so feel free to respond in kind. (How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? None, the lightbulb has to really want to change.)

6:25:06 PM trackback [] comment []

COMPANY, HALT!

It's time to bring Frankenstein corporations to heel, and get them doing what they were originally created to do - serve the people.

There's a case before the US Supreme Court in which Nike, backed by the Chamber of Commerce, Microsoft, CNN, Bush's Justice Department, and an array of massive corporations and media, is fighting for the constitutional first-amendment right to lie to its customers. At Common Dreams, Thom Hartmann explains :

While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation. Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same "free speech" right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, "The check is in the mail," or, "That looks great on you," then, Nike's reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.

Two hundred years ago Jefferson and Madison proposed an 11th Amendment to the Constitution that would "ban monopolies in commerce," making it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, banning them from giving money to politicians or trying to influence elections in any way, restricting corporations to a single business purpose and requiring that the first purpose for which all corporations were created be "to serve the public good." At the time, the amendment was deemed unnecessary because existing State laws already said this. By 1864, corporations had grown so powerful that Lincoln said "Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Twenty-two years later, due to a bizarre legal misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, the courts ruled that corporations were legally "persons" and had the commensurate rights of persons. The juggernaut of undemocratic corporate power has grown ever since, and the Nike case is just taking it to the next logical level. But rights given to corporations inevitably come at the expense of rights of citizens, as NAFTA and the WTO "free" trade agreements, which allow corporations to sue governments for compensation and force them to undo national social, labour and environmental laws that in any way restrict their "right" to operate equally inexpensively anywhere, have shown. Corporations now use their "rights" to buy government favours, crush small entrepreneurial competitors, mistreat their employees, support corrupt foreign regimes, commit Enron-style corporate rape, exploit cheap labour and low social and environmental laws in the third world, conspire to restrict competition and gouge consumers with obscene markups, and lobby for the privatization and deregulation of everything. Now they want the right to lie to people when they do so, under the guise of "PR".
Recently I posted an article entitled Do Corporations Have Too Much Power? , in which I promised to prescribe some solutions to this excess. But Mr. Hartmann has already written the book, Unequal Protection , that does just that. His three point plan is:

Municipal Resolutions that deny "personhood" to corporations (I reported in my previous post on two municipalities that have passed such resolutions). Their purpose and draft composition is explained here .

Municipal Ordinances that revoke explicit and implicit "personhood" rights in legislation under their jurisdiction.

Constitutional Amendments to state and federal (14th Amendment) laws, that clarify that laws and rights enacted to protect and empower "persons" apply only to "natural persons" (people) and not to corporations.

The grassroots movement ReclaimDemocracy.org is working with citizen and consumer groups to help in this task. This site has an excellent history of the original purpose and scope of corporate charters, and a vast set of resources for countering the overwhelming anti-democratic power that large corporations wield in today's world.

Personally, I think we need to go even further, and remove some of the corporate trappings that allowed corporations to become so needlessly powerful in the first place. I would add three more steps to Hartmann's program:

Eliminate corporations as entities under tax law. Treat all corporations like unincorporated businesses for tax purposes. Profits are then deemed to flow automatically to shareholders in proportion to their shareholdings and are taxed in their hands. Corporations can then no longer be used as tax shelters, and complicated multi-company structures can no longer be used to avoid taxes. The debate over tax rates on dividends versus interest versus capital gains becomes moot, and the need for corporate tax returns is eliminated (something even conservatives should applaud).

Prohibit corporations from engaging in any political activity, including lobbying and donating to political campaigns and entities, as part of a broad reform of electoral finance.

Prohibit corporations from owning any property that is not directly related to the company's operations, or entering into speculative activities.

Stripped of their rights, their tax status, their incentive to inflate short-term profits at any cost, and their political activities, corporations could once again become what they were designed to be in the first place: Vehicles to allow the effective raising of capital from a variety of investors, and the investment of that capital for the common good. As partnerships and unincorporated businesses have shown for centuries, there is no need to have a corporate form of business for any other purpose than to enable the financing of cooperative enterprise.

These changes could actually accomplish much more than merely eliminating corporate abuses and returning power and rights to citizens. They could enable and encourage business managers, beyond ensuring a reasonable risk-related return on investment to those that advanced the business funds, to focus on precisely those things that companies were initially chartered to do: provide local employment, help organize community endeavors, invest in local infrastructure, all for the 'common good'. Then, finally, terms like 'financial equity' and 'corporate citizen' will cease to be ironic.

The Nike case is expected to be decided in June. With the Bush regime already working to indemnify pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and the defense industry from being sued by wronged citizens, the ruling will be pivotal, and may well shape the power structure of Western society for decades. Keep watching.

11:35:44 AM trackback [] comment []