Corporations v. Democracy
Corporate Power Causes Collapse of US Financial System
WILPF
Session X — Where Do We Go From Here: Local Campaign Development
This is the final discussion session in this study packet. During this session, the group will need to attend to some logistical business in addition to its regular discussion time.
After discussing the readings, allow some time to discuss the entire program that the group has experienced together. Have the people in the group acquired a broader understanding of how the corporate system works and what the power dynamics are behind it? Does the group have a different vision of democracy and its possibilities? Are people interested in incorporating more democratic practices in their other social and work organizations? Do people feel inspired and empowered to change the system?
Session IX — What Does Democracy Look Like?
People ask what alternatives we who resist corporate power suggest. Indeed, a component of our struggle needs to be developing and modeling ways of organizing our common economic and social life based on human equity and ecological health. Ultimately, however, the fundamental alternative to illegitimate corporate governance is democracy: rule by the people.
Session VIII — Global Corporatization
– from Robert La Follette’s 1911 autobiography
Corporate capitalism and its protection by government “security forces” aren’t new, but under the past two decades of influence from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, their destructive impacts have increased dramatically. Multinational corporations now comprise half the world’s 100 largest economies, and the World Trade Organization epitomizes institutionalized power and protection on a global scale. In response to the loss of their homes, jobs, and even lives, the peoples of the world have not stood idly by — from the Chiapas uprising at the dawn of NAFTA to Indian farmers burning fields of genetically modified crops to French farmers bulldozing a McDonald’s.
Session VII — Economic Development and Militarism
– Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine general, writing in 1935
Session VI — People’s and Worker’s Resistance Movements
For the majority of people, all these changes added up to a life of increased subservience to the wealthy minority, and they didn’t accept it lying down. Abuse of workers by industrialists was ruthless and rampant; strikes were frequent and often brutally broken by police, Pinkerton’s hired men, and even federal army troops. Increased mechanization, monopolistic practices by banks and railroads, and falling crop prices all conspired to drive hundreds of thousands of farmers off their land and into tenancy or low wage work. By the century’s close there was an enormous gap between the wealthy and the poor. Resistance to these oppressive systems was born of desperation, hope, and a belief in the promise of democracy. Facing injury, death, disease, and starvation, people rose again and again in the largest mass movements in the country’s history.
Session V — Private Property and the Recovery of the Commons
The design of the federal government relied heavily on the principle of self-interest narrowly seen as the right for a citizen (at that time elite, white males only) to acquire property and have that property protected and enhanced. The notion of liberty, so highly prized, was primarily taken as the liberty to own things. Jennifer Nedelsky, a student and writer of the Anti-Federalist period, states that the “court built upon the general acceptance of the sanctity of property... and aimed at containing the democratic threat to the rights the Federalists considered necessary to a stable market economy and a free and secure society.” (There will be more about Federalists and Anti-Federalists in Session IX.) The states were denied the power to make decisions about property — its definition, production, movement, or distribution. Such matters were the province of the law, the courts, and the minority, not of politics, legislatures, and the majority.
Session IV — The Regulatory State
For many decades concerned citizens have focused their efforts on nudging regulatory agencies toward more rigorous enforcement rather than challenging the illegitimate power of corporate entities and the people running them. This session asks us to talk about these realities and to imagine the kind of changes in our understanding, approach, and institutions that will provide the protections and authority we seek.
Session III — Corporate Personhood
In Session II we noted the 1886 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the same rights and protections as human beings, and in this session we explore that phenomenon in depth. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1868 in order to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. Section 1 reads as follows:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Session II — Historical Overview of the Corporate Taking of Our Authority to Govern
A central task in this session is to establish the group’s process of sharing leadership, an opportunity to design and practice democracy as you grapple with the history and ongoing struggle for self-governance.
CCP Study Packet - Session I — Introduction
The first session of the study group provides an opportunity for the group members to meet each other, find out about the design and content of the course, agree upon discussion and facilitation guidelines, work out logistical details, and conduct an initial discussion. The objectives of the study groups are:
(1) to frame learning and discussion in ways that focus on the root causes of corporate and state oppression
Getting Started
If you’re interested in convening a Challenging Corporate Power, Asserting the People’s Rights study group, here are a few tips for getting started:
• You don’t need any special skills or knowledge. Anyone can start a study group!
• Announce the formation of the group in print and anywhere people gather:
- local community or organization bulletin boards
- newsletters
- newspapers
- websites
- at meetings
- coffee shops
- bookstores
- union halls
Statement on Enron
The focus of the Enron Corporation story belongs less on the individuals at the helm of the corporate entities involved and more on past and present public officials. Who else is responsible for creating and empowering corporate legal entities to amass enough power and wealth to virtually exercise governing powers over the people?
Statement on Illegitimate Corporate Power
July 12, 2002
This is an opportune time to talk with people about corporate power and democracy, but the danger is great that we'll once again be co-opted by reforms and rhetoric about corporate accountability and responsibility. Only human beings can be responsible, and the corporate form should be more than accountable to us; it belongs subordinate, as do all institutions that We the People create to serve us.George Bush and other administration officials, with the complicity of the corporate media, are engaged in the rhetoric and reform of damage control. They are scrambling to frame the problem as one of accounting, as a lack of integrity and character in a few bad corporate apples. It is our job to frame the problem as a constitutional one: the privileging of property over people, especially property organized in the corporate form; the Supreme Court's longtime and continuing empowerment of corporations through the Commerce Clause, the Contracts Clause; and the Court's 1886 declaration that corporations are legal persons entitled to 14th Amendment protections, from which a host of illegitimate rights and governing authority flow.
First Local Government Refuses to Recognize Corporate Claims to Civil Rights: Bans Corporate Involvement in Governing
On the evening of December 9, 2002, the elected municipal officials of Porter Township, Clarion County — a municipality of 1,500 residents an hour north of Pittsburgh in Northwestern Pennsylvania — became the first local government in the United States to eliminate corporate claims to civil and constitutional privileges. The township adopted a binding law declaring that corporations operating in the township may not wield legal privileges — historically used by corporations to override democratic decisionmaking — to stop the township from passing laws which protect residents from toxic sewage sludge.
