The Corporation: A Legal Person

a corporation, which is

* Legal Person (with no moral conscience)
* accountable to stock holders
* not to stakeholders
* relatively recent (after the 14th amendment ... between 1890-1910 there were 307 cases brought to the court ... 288 on behalf of corporations, just 19 for people.)

Source: KSU Introduction to Anthropology

175 Peaceful Protesters at WTO get $1 million from Seattle.

Consider this story in the light of my previous post.

Why did Americans expand the vote from just property owners to universal manhood suffrage after the Constitution was adopted in 1787? One major reason was that the non-property owners had only one political outlet, and that was rioting. American history includes the Whiskey rebellion and Shay's rebellion, both of which were responses to what appeared to be tyrannical government. Armed uprisings by militias in Maryland led quickly both sharp reductions in property rights to vote and to adding an expansive "Declaration of Rights" to the Maryland Constitution. to get the mule to move, first you must get its attention. When nothing else works, a riot is the necessary 2 by 4.

Then Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated the political power of non-violent demonstrations. This was still a way for an oppressed group to bring their requirements to the notice of a government that was otherwise ignoring their needs. The non-violent demonstration is today clearly a much superior form of pressure on governments and corporations which are ignoring the needs of people who are not represented among the decision-makers.

The power of the demonstration depends on the availability of widespread public news. Before newspapers were widely read, it required deaths and fires to get attention. Gandhi had the advantage of newspapers and radios, and was greatly assisted when the British overreacted. The same was true for Martin Luther King. Pictures of the Sheriff of Selma, Alabama siccing dogs on peaceful protesters who included women and children gave the Civil Rights Movement the attention they greatly needed. So did the KKK killings of the Freedom Riders in Mississippi.

Now we get the news that the Seattle Police badly overreacted to the peaceful Protesters at the WTO meeting. I'm happy to see that they are getting the insurance money, but the really important part is that they are getting (positive) widespread news coverage of their message.

Before we get a decent political-economic theory that explains (and limits) Globalization we will have to get a good description of the many problems the current methods are causing. After that we will get the overarching political-economic theory that I discussed in Are corporations conspiring to take over the world.

Maybe we'll get lucky and find some brilliant individual who builds a theory that cannot be so easily reduced to mathematical equations as Keynsianism has been. Not that the math is a bad thing. It's just that the apparent precision of math conceals the many non-quantifiable variables which are often more important than the quantifiable ones are.

Are corporations conspiring to take over the world?

MSNBC has an interesting article on whether corporations are taking over the planet - which makes "Globalism" the equivalent of a conspiracy to dominate the Earth.

It's an interesting article. A major point the author makes is that it is not a conspiracy. It is a bunch of unregulated international corporations which are each working for their own gain, and spreading across the world. It was a similar situation in America when corporations between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression were operating under the then prevalent Economic theory of the Free Market. The world wide depression beginning in 1872 and then the Great Depression beginning in 1929 were not the result of conspiracies. They were the result of the inadequacies of Economic knowledge and theory that existed at that time. They resulted in John M. Keynes' great theoretical presentation the "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money."

Keynesian Theory is not yet full developed. Milton Friedman said in a joint lecture with Paul Samuelson at Texas A&M that he was using Keynesian theory, but disagreed with Keynes about the relative importance of the money supply. The thing is that Keynesian economic theory is that it is applicable primarily to national economies using a single currency and under what is mostly a single set of government regulations. In the meantime, the theory of international economics applies to individual national economies operating in an unregulated space between those economies. Globalism appears to have badly blurred the distinctions between national economies and the theory of international economics.

In short, much like the U.S. economy in 1939, economic events are occurring that are not controlled by existing overall economic theory. The solution has been for corporations to retreat back to unrestricted Free Market ideas as would be expected of corporations operating within the idea of total self-interest. The absence of an accepted overall theory that balances the needs of labor, families, and less developed nations allows the corporations to ignore the problems their actions cause, while competition between global corporation forces them to try to beat each other to the most destructive actions they can take to avoid being left behind.

But the real problem of Globalism is not that it is a conspiracy among the corporations. The real problem is the total absence of an accepted global theory of economics and government agreement on how to deal with the corporations.