Thursday, May 1, 2003

Contains 70% Recycled Content Dave Pollard today has a thought provoking entry on the origins and role of corporations in society. It quotes heavily from an article by Thom Hartmann. I recommend them both as food for thought. In looking at Hartmann's article, I saw another facet that I wanted to highlight. You hear a lot from the banshees on the right about the evils of judicial activism. You never know just how well people know history, but their fear of the power of judicial activism might stem from the effectiveness of one of their own victories in 1886. However, in writing up the case's headnote - a commentary that has no precedential status - the Court's reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, opened the headnote with the sentence: "The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Oddly, the court had ruled no such thing. As a handwritten note from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis that now is held in the National Archives said: "we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision." And nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons. Nonetheless, corporate attorneys picked up the language of Davis's headnote and began to quote it like a mantra. Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate on the issue), was quoting Davis's headnote in subsequent cases. While Davis's Santa Clara headnote didn't have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions its new doctrine of corporate personhood became the law. Prior to 1886, the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment defined human rights, and individuals - representing themselves and their own opinions - were free to say and do what they wanted. Corporations, being artificial creations of the states, didn't have rights, but instead had privileges. The state in which a corporation was incorporated determined those privileges and how they could be used. And the same, of course, was true for other forms of "legally enacted game playing" such as unions, churches, unincorporated businesses, partnerships, and even governments, all of which have only privileges. But with the stroke of his pen, Court Reporter Davis moved corporations out of that "privileges" category - leaving behind all the others (unions, governments, and small unincorporated businesses still don't have "rights") - and moved them into the "rights" category with humans, citing the 14th Amendment which was passed at the end of the Civil War to grant the human right of equal protection under the law to newly-freed slaves. Well, you learn something new every day. By the way, if anyone has any more info on Jefferson and Madison's proposed 11th Amendment limiting the rights of corporations, primary sources and the like, I'd be interested. I always like to see the evidence myself before I begin quoting stuff like that. What can I say, it's the history major in me. 4:46:15 PM    Put your John Hancock right here!

Absolute Oil Corrupts Absolutely On Marketplace yesterday I heard a piece on how oil is an awful foundation on which to build a democracy, for counterintuitive reasons. First, you might have noticed that oil-based countries are almost universally corrupt. Those in charge line their pockets instead of investing in the country. The reason why they get away with this is because oil-rich nations generally have no taxes. They run their state apparatus off of oil revenue. The fly in the ointment here is that without taxation, there is no representation. The taxes that citizens pay are the root of the power they hold over their governments. The commentary was concerning itself with the future of Iraq, but another connection occured to me. Bush is firmly rooted in the oil-based ecomomy of west Texas. He also hates taxes. You can take it from there. 2:17:14 PM    Put your John Hancock right here!

If More Is More... So this past weekend, I heard an audio clip of Bush saying that the Dems are in agreement that tax cuts are good because they encourage growth, so why are they holding out on us by only agreeing to a little bit of a tax cut (a little bit? Well, that's another matter). Even if you accept the premise that tax cuts would be good for the country right now, that's like saying you need vitamins, so why take just one when you could take the whole bottle. Or aspirin. Or antibiotics. Or sleeping pills. 1:03:14 PM    Put your John Hancock right here!