Corporate Personhood and the Bailouts: On General Motors

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published May 08, 2009 @ 05:39PM PT

The discussion around the major U.S. car companies, and the constant recital of the mantra that they are "too big to fail," fails to answer a question we should all be asking: Just how did these companies gain such a prominent status in our society anyhow?
 
Being "too big to fail" is a great place of power. It signifies the ability of these corporations to demand response from our elected representatives in a manner that those same officials generally feel they need not give to normal citizens.
But the truth is that these companies are not so "big" because they at one point were "winning" the capitalist game. Rather, their current size and "indispensability" were made by consolidating power that should belong to citizens, and doing so in ways that are explicitly illegal.

The claim that they are "too big to fail" only continues to shore up the usurpation of citizen power and authority, at the very moment the belief that this usurpation has somehow been beneficial for the majority of people turns out to be nothing but a sham.

General Motors and the other big car companies have not always been able to be so open in their overtaking the right of citizen's to make decisions about vital aspects of their economy and society. But it is something they have done for much of their history. In fact, at one point in time, GM - along with a number of other corporations, including Firestone Tires and Standard Oil of California - was criminally indicted for the manipulative actions they took that resulted in the destruction of the United States' early mass public transit infrastructure, so that the automobile might instead become the dominant mode of transport for Americans. General Motors, forming a company called "National City Lines," bought up public trolley and streetcar systems, only to then systematically rip out the rail lines and dismantle the public transit system.

Such a change, of course, meant enormous profits for these companies, as without public transit, people began to acquire cars to deal with their transit needs. Despite such profits and the criminal indictment, however, the penalty handed to General Motors and its co-conspirators: a fine of $5,000 levied on each corporation and only $1 on each CEO involved.

You can read more about the "Great American Streetcar Scandal" at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal.

The scandal not only demonstrates the privileges and power enjoyed by corporations over everyday citizens in the United States, it also demonstrates their ability to implement mass societal change that, dealing with public infrastructure and some of the basic systems that shape our daily lives, should not have been left to a few corporations. Such a decision rightfully belonged to us.

If we take the right to self-governance seriously, it is you and I and our fellow citizens - not for-profit corporations - who should be making the decisions about whether, for instance, we want accessible public transit more or less than a system of roads, highways, and automobiles. We should have been able to make the decision about whether our communities would be structured around vehicles that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of injuries each year and over 100 deaths each day Such numbers include those who aren't even driving: between 4,000 and 5,000 pedestrians die each year in automobile accidents. (See http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx for more numbers. According to National Safety Council data (cited here), even riding on a bus, rather than in a car, is 170 times more safe.)

General Motors' claim that they are "too big to fail" is nothing but a more open replay of what they did in the 1930s and 40s. That is, it is them claiming the right to make fundamental decisions about our economy and our society in order that they might later generate more profit; profit not for all of us, but for a few. The casual acceptance of a corporation claiming the right, authority, or sovereignty to sway major public decisions (with actual citizen input in the process minimal at best) is a sign of how the conception of "corporate citizens" has expanded beyond its status as a legal doctrine, to infiltrate our everyday cultural understandings of what is going on.

"Ending corporate personhood" is thus more than just turning over this legal doctrine. It is calling out and naming this acquiescence to the "corporate citizen," and refusing to do so ourselves. And it is remembering the history of how these corporations became "too big" in the first place: by brazenly, and criminally, usurping the rights of actual citizens.