Eugene Area Conference This Weekend: Come Learn About Corporate Personhood

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published May 26, 2009 @ 09:19PM PT

For anyone in the Eugene area, I will be in town this weekend doing two presentations related to corporate personhood, both for the Lane Community College Peace Center's 2009 conference, "Peace and Collective Action: Connecting Hope to Change."

My colleague at Democracy Unlimited, David Cobb, and I will host a breakout session on Friday on "Corporations and Militarism," followed by another session on Saturday on "Challenging Corporate Rule Through Community Organizing." Descriptions for these sessions and others are here:

http://www.lanecc.edu/peacecenter/2009%20conference/breakouts.html

Registration for the conference is here: http://www.lanecc.edu/peacecenter/2009%20conference/Registration.html

I hope if you're near Eugene you'll consider attending! If you can't make it but are part of a group putting on a similar event, and you'd like to have someone present on corporate personhood, please be in touch.

(And while we travel across the country, if you're quite far from northern California, we can also put you in contact with others in your neck of the woods doing education and organizing on this topic.)

Group for "Separation of Corporation and State" on Facebook

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published May 20, 2009 @ 06:38PM PT

Looking for another way to network with those working to end corporate personhood?

If you're on Facebook, you can join the group "One Million Strong for the Separation of Corporation and State" and join the discussion over the best way to to end corporate dominance of government.

Here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=43811311612

Help End Corporate Personhood through Community Organizing

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published May 17, 2009 @ 11:43PM PT

Are you wondering how you can get involved in the work of challenging corporate power, and more specifically, of ending the legal doctrine of corporate personhood?

If you are, I'd like to invite you to attend an event specifically aimed at training citizens to do community organizing on these issues: the "Community Organizing for Deep Democracy" retreat.

Here's the recent press release for the event:

Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County will host its annual training and retreat, "Community Organizing for Deep Democracy," August 7-9 at their headquarters in Eureka, CA. The yearly event brings together organizers and leaders from communities across the country to learn and consider new strategies for systemic change and democracy-building in the movement for social justice.

The weekend involves historical analysis of both the role of people's movement in the United States and the legal structures that shape the distribution of power, with special attention paid to role of the corporation and the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. This historical basis is paired with anti-oppression activities, organizing training, and discussion of new models and solutions for successful social change.

This exploration draws on Democracy Unlimited's own work, which has included the groundbreaking Humboldt County legislation that banned non-local corporations from donating to local elections. Attention will also be given to their ongoing community building efforts to strengthen democratic, sustainable local food and economic systems.

"The Deep Democracy workshop has become a turning point in my organizing efforts," said Courtney Childs, a past participant and community organizer from Corvallis, Oregon. "The historical perspective, the tremendous support for each of us participants, and the focus on rights-based organizing have enabled me to influence others quite positively."

"Our goal is to see every participant leave with the knowledge, skills, networks and tools they need to mobilize their own community," said Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Executive Director of Democracy Unlimited.

Registration for the retreat is due by July 1. Cost is on a sliding scale of $250-400. Those interested in participating can find more information or register by calling 707.269.0984, emailing info@duhc.org, or by accessing the registration form at http://duhc.org/deepDemocracy.html.

Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County is a grassroots organizing group based in Eureka, CA. They design and implement grassroots strategies that exercise democratic power over corporations and governments. They seek to create a truly democratic society by provoking a non-violent popular uprising against corporate rule in Humboldt County that can serve as a model for other communities across the United States.

Maine Communities Assert Right to Water, Deny Corporate Rights

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published May 12, 2009 @ 04:41PM PT

There was a news flash on the Alliance for Democracy blog this week about another effort in Maine to both the rights of a community to its water and the rights of an ecosystem to "exist, flourish, and evolve." A proposed ordinance in Wells, ME, would deny constitutional rights to corporations within the town of Wells while guaranteeing greater water rights to the town's residents. You can read more here:

http://afd-headlines.blogspot.com/2009/05/vote-to-test-corporate-water-rights.html

This follows on the heels of an ordinance passed in Shapleigh, ME, earlier this year, in which residents denounced corporations for acting as a modern-day colonial power in their attempts to strip the town of one of its natural resources, then shipping it elsewhere for profit. The focus in Shapleigh and Wells centers on Poland Springs, a subsidiary of Nestle. Because land rights and mineral rights (for minerals or resources underneath the land) are generally kept separate legally, Nestle can tap into underground water resources without paying anything in return, even if their tapping of a given aquifer greatly affects other public and private uses of that water.

You can read more about Shapleigh's success by one of its own organizers, Jamilla El-Shafei, here: http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/04/maine-rejects-corporate-control

And check out the Defend Water for Life campaign as well as the Save Our Water campaign for more news and ideas for action.

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.

Educating on Corporate Personhood - Resources and Study Group Materials

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published April 17, 2009 @ 12:27PM PT

Someone mentioned in the suggestions section, and I want to highlight here, the educational resources on corporate personhood available from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

At this point in time, the phrase "corporate personhood" still means very little to most people. It almost certainly doesn't make most people think of a legal doctrine that interferes immensely with basic democratic ideals.

That's why education on the topic is so important. You can take a big step in helping bring an end to the vast accumulation of corporate rights through corporate personhood by educating yourselves and others about how that accumulation has happened.

WILPF has made that incredibly easy by putting together a set of materials available for anyone wanting to lead a study group on the topic of corporate personhood. The "Challenging Corporate Power, Asserting the People's Rights" study group packet has ten sessions that start with the history of the corporation and corporate personhood, and move to understanding current laws around the corporation in both modern regulatory and international law. Previous resistance movements (such as radical unionism and the Populist movement) are also covered, and the study group ends with examples of actions being taken by communities at the local level.

See their page on "Getting Started" for easy steps to get a group going, and then download all the materials you need for the study group, including readings and suggested discussion questions.

An especially helpful resource, whether or not you decide to do a study group, is the Timeline of Corporate Rights put together by WILPF member Jan Edwards. It briefly summarizes many of the legal cases granting rights to corporations and puts them into perspective next to the rights gained for human beings in U.S. history. You can access the timeline, and an article providing some analysis, here: http://wilpf.org/docs/ccp/corp/ACP/CP_article%2Btimeline.pdf

The Real Boston Tea Party: Challenging Corporate Monopolies

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published April 16, 2009 @ 02:59PM PT

News coverage abounded of anti-tax "tea parties" yesterday. What was for the most part strikingly absent, however, was any genuine contextualization of these events within the real history of the Boston Tea Party. This is unfortunate as the original Tea Party remains one of the best examples of direct action against corporate rule.

That the participants in the Tea Party were protesting "taxation without representation" and King George has become a truism, passed down unthinkingly in elementary school text books. But really, it is at best misleading. This becomes clear if we ask even the most basic question like, Whose tea was dumped in the harbor?

The answer is, of course, that the tea belonged not to the King but to the East India Company. That same company had been one of the main beneficiaries of the recent tax acts, which disproportionately affected local American tea merchants and not the East India Company itself, giving the world's largest tea merchant a de facto monopoly in the Americas. This could even be seen as the goal of the acts; the East India Company, the prized crown corporation, held enough control over both the collective and personal purse strings of the members of Parliament that it was not difficult for them to have such a monopoly granted. (Legal monopolies were, in fact, an essential part of the idea of the crown corporation as devised by the British monarchy.)

Crown corporations in pre-revolutionary America were explicitly governing entities with legally granted power to make laws in the new colonies. Governing the colonies was the legal mandate of many such corporations: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Virginia Bay Company, and others.

Furthermore, the size of the East India Company and the privileges granted to it by the crown meant that it had one of the most powerful seats of the table when decisions about trade in the colonies were made. And their decisions, more often than not, favored their own business over that of individual entrepreneurs in the Americas.

The Company greatly benefited from the Tea Act of 1773, which removed the export duty on tea only for the East India Company. (The longer title of the Act actually reads:

An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licences to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.) And it was this Act that at least in part inspired the Boston Tea Party.

This means that it was in fact a tax break for one of the world's most powerful corporations that was the true target of the Boston Tea Party. It was a protest against such corporations being granted the ability to make governing decisions that the colonists thought by right should belong to them or their representatives. It was not, as many seemed to suggest yesterday, a protest against any taxes being levied by a national government for the purpose of providing public goods or services. The entire discourse around the tea parties has hence been completely off the mark.

Nonetheless, as citizens concerned about the power of corporations, the Boston Tea Party is an excellent example of direct action for change. The destruction of what would now be millions of dollars of corporate property seems unthinkable to us today. But if we pay attention to the actual history of the U.S., it is the step so many of the country's original revolutionaries saw not only as thinkable, but as reasonable and effective.

And effective it was: neither the Articles of Confederation nor the United States Constitution granted corporations any of the vast powers they had enjoyed before the war with Britain. Those powers were something regained much later, as noted in last week's post on the legal history of corporate personhood.

As the discussion about the tax day tea parties continues, it's a perfect opportunity to introduce others to the deeper history behind the Boston Tea Party, and engage them in considering a broader perspective on the structures of power in our country, which are not limited to - and perhaps aren't even primarily - within the national government. They are corporations that have returned to the privileged position enjoyed by the East India Company and others before the country's founding.