Occupy Wall Street vs Tea Party, in 3 sentences:
[via: Cato]
Tagged: Corporation RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
I’ll believe corporations are people when…
-
mazsa
So What If Corporations Aren’t People? “Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873158
-
mazsa
Products and companies are both regarded better as entities transcendent from humans, with their own goals and motivations, rather than being reducible to human use or human intentions. [...] The company’s decisions aren’t actually the shareholders’ decisions. A company has a culture which is not the simple sum of the opinions of the people in it. A CEO can never be said to perform an action in the way that a human body can be said to perform an action, like picking an apple. A company is a weird, complex thing, and rather than attempt (uselessly) to reduce it to people within it, it makes more sense – to me – to approach it as an alien being and attempt to understand its biology and momentums only with reference to itself. Having done that, we can then use metaphors to attempt to explain its behaviour: we can say that it follows profit, or it takes an innovative step, or that it is middle-aged, or that it treats the environment badly, or that it takes risks. None of these statements is literally true, but they can be useful to have in mind when attempting to negotiate with these bizarre, massive creatures. (Also, in contradiction, companies are made out of people, at least partially, and we are responsible for their actions. It’s not simple.)
Matt Webb -
mazsa
What would help is if the Supreme Court (and indeed corporate law in general) adopted a clear principle when it comes to the analogy between artificial persons and real ones: that companies should be treated as people only in so far as it is expedient. They clearly need to be able to enter into contracts just like individuals. But they should not be treated as if they experience such essentially human emotions as embarrassment and a desire for self-expression. Thus they should not have the same rights to privacy and political freedom as a citizen, but should have only as much of a right to confidentiality and political participation as is helpful for the efficient functioning of business (including letting firms contribute to the public debate on the regulation of business). Companies—or rather their bosses and owners—should welcome such constraints: any further “rights” would, sooner or later, be matched by onerous responsibilities.
Schumpeter-
admin
-
-
mazsa
Taxes & Voting: “[...] Thoreau [...] argues that people should be allowed to decide to not pay their taxes if they decide to withdraw from the political system. He does, however, make a point of saying that people should pay for what they use, such as paying the highway tax if one uses the highway. [...]” http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2695
-
mazsa
Common tax rules for companies operating in EU: “How it works
Corporate tax rates in the EU will not change. EU countries will continue to decide on their own corporate tax rates.
When calculating their taxes, companies would have a choice of using the different national systems or the single set of rules.
For example, a company may have operations in four EU countries – three with profits and one with a loss.
The company would be able to file one tax return instead of four. It would add up its profits, subtract its losses and use the common rules to calculate deductions and exemptions – arriving at a single taxable sum.
Each of the four countries would collect taxes on a portion of the taxable sum – based on their national rates. The portion would be calculated through a formula set out by the rules.
For the proposal to become law, the EU’s governments must agree to it after consultation with the European Parliament.” http://ec.europa.eu/news/economy/110318_1_en.htmhttp://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/company_tax/common_tax_base/index_en.htm
-
mazsa
“[...] get rid of the power. Political power is, in fact, the source of the wealth concentrations that fund the industry lobbyists and the campaign contributions. The wealth of big business and the plutocracy is funneled to them by subsidies, protections, oligopoly markups on state-cartelized markets, scarcity rents from artificial property rights, etc., none of which would exist without the state.
Getting rid of the power seemingly involves a Catch-22: How can you dismantle the state policies underlying the political means to wealth, when you’re outspent and outgunned in the policy-making process by those who profit from it? How do you change the system to prevent their making money off it, in a system rigged in favor of the big money?
The answer: Get rid of the money. At first glance this seems to be a circular argument, since — to repeat — we can’t challenge their control of the political means to wealth.
No, we get rid of the money in politics by undermining — at the economic level — the means by which the plutocracy makes its money. For example, we destroy the proprietary content industries’ ability to make money — not by contesting their power in the political arenas where legislation like the DMCA is passed — but by combating their ability to enforce the copyright laws they make money from. We’ll probably never secure the repeal of DMCA in Congress. But we can destroy the record and movie industries’ profit economically, with weapons like torrent download, strong encryption, and proxies — and laugh ourselves silly at the blustering of clowns like Lieberman and Biden. [...]
We solve the problem of money in politics, not by contesting money’s control of the political process — but by economically destroying the political profiteers’ power to make money, and rendering their political power useless.” http://c4ss.org/content/6416
-
mazsa
Critique of The Story of Citizens United v. FEC: Annie Leonard released a video titled “The Story of Citizens United v. FEC,” an eight-and-a-half-minute criticism of http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/420
Lee Doren made his own video critique above in response to Ms. Leonard’s offering.
-
mazsa
Supreme Court Backs Government Transparency Over Corporate Privacy Claims https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/supreme-court-backs-government-transparency-over
-
mazsa
The UK’s Progressive Tea Party – “In the UK, the Great Recession inspired ordinary people to take on corporate tax evaders—with enormous success”: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-uks-progressive-tea-party
-
mazsa
Privacy of legal persons: “Does FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] give corporations the same personal privacy rights as natural born people?” http://epic.org/amicus/fccvatt/
-
mazsa
“
If corporations must be treated as “persons” for the purpose of campaign contributions – as the Supreme Court mandated last year in the infamous Citizens United decision – why shouldn’t they also enjoy “personal privacy”? [...]
[...] we should ask about the social functions served by privacy protections. Yes weaker privacy protections make it easier to hold firms accountable, but that applies to individual humans as well. And if stronger privacy protects folks more against abuse by governments or others, that benefit should apply to firms as well. Yes people may just have a direct preference for privacy, but such preferences may be weak, and perhaps people working at a firm feel similarly about the privacy of their firm.
For most definition disputes, pretending to resolve it via conceptual analysis just isn’t very honest. It is more honest to argue about the desirability of various consequences of alternate social conventions.”
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/define-via-consequences.html
-
mazsa
“[...] cities and companies differ in a very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are extremely ephemeral. As West notes, Hurricane Katrina couldn’t wipe out New Orleans, and a nuclear bomb did not erase Hiroshima from the map. In contrast, where are Pan Am and Enron today? The modern corporation has an average life span of 40 to 50 years.
This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”
The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”
For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?_r=3&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all
-
mazsa
U.S. Supreme Court declines to review SpeechNow.org free speech case
-
mazsa
Law in Hungary: any company can be nationalized by decree. Shareholders of limited liability companies may be liable with their personal assets.
“Hungary’s parliament voted by an overwhelming majority yesterday (12 October) to nationalise the company [in fact, any company, without legal constraints, by government decree] responsible for the toxic sludge spill from a ruptured reservoir one week earlier, which killed eight [nine] people and caused the country’s worst ever ecological disaster. [...]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also announced the arrest of the company’s CEO, Zoltán Bakonyi, who stands accused of endangering the public and harming the environment.
The law stipulates that the government must freezes all MAL’s assets and appoint a new board. Government sources said the company would be headed by Gyorgy Bakondi, head of the government’s disaster response service.
Reportedly, as well as being responsible for maintaining operations and protecting jobs, Bakondi will also be in charge of determining the company’s responsibilities, launching a compensation scheme for the victims and making sure that similar accidents do not happen again.
According to reports, MAL Zrt has a turnover of 157 million euros. The company is co-owned by Árpád Bakonyi, Lajos Tolnay and Béla Petrusz, all three of whom appear in a list of the 30 richest people in Hungary. The Hungarian press puts the fortune of Tolnay at 85 million euros, while Bakonyi and Petrusz are estimated to have 61 million euros each.” http://www.euractiv.com/en/climate-environment/hungary-nationalises-sludge-spill-company-news-498752
According to the PM Orbán, shareholders of MAL will be liable with their personal assets as well.
The text of the amendment of Act CV 2004 on defense [in Hungarian]: http://www.complex.hu/jr/gen/hjegy_doc.cgi?docid=A1000093.TV
-
mazsa
Speechnow.org v. FEC: “In Citizens United v. FEC [cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/420 , http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission ], this Court held that the government cannot require a corporation to speak through a political committee or “PAC” as an alternative to banning the corporation’s speech outright. In direct conflict with that holding, the D.C. Circuit held that SpeechNow.org – an unincorporated group that makes only independent expenditures and thus poses no risk of corruption or its appearance – must organize as a political committee in order to speak.
The question presented is whether, under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, the federal government may require an unincorporated association that makes only independent expenditures to register and report as a political committee [despite the fact that a more narrowly tailored means of disclosing its independent expenditures exists in 2 U.S.C. § 434(c)].”
http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Brief-10-05-10-101303.pdf @ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/speechnow-org-v-fcc/
admin is discussing. 
mazsa
Supreme Court: whether corporations may assert personal privacy interests
“The Supreme Court is getting involved in an unusual freedom of information dispute over whether corporations may assert personal privacy interests to prevent the government from releasing documents about them.
The court on Tuesday agreed to a request from the Obama administration to take up a case involving claims made by telecommunications giant AT&T to keep secret the information gathered by the Federal Communications Commission during an investigation. [...]
AT&T wants the FCC to keep secret all the information it gathered from the company during an investigation into its participation in the federal E-Rate program, which helps schools and libraries get Internet access. [...]
The case is FCC v. AT&T, 09-1279.” http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9IGVHKG0.htm
Cf. comments
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/29/1954245/Does-A-Company-Deserve-the-Same-Privacy-Rights-As-You
Cf. original
http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/2009/2pet/7pet/2009-1279.pet.aa.html
http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/2009/2pet/7pet/2009-1279.pet.aa.pdf
mazsa
“Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.””
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
admin
Let corporations run for political office: “[...] In a recent quiz, I asked students to give an advantage and a disadvantage of letting corporations run for political office, relative to the status quo. Most gave an advantage I had described in lecture, that firms could develop a consistent brand and reputation on which voters could rely. I hadn’t mentioned any disadvantages in class, but 80+% spontaneously said that a disadvantage is elected firms would support self-serving policies.
Wow. Even GMU econ undergrads, not especially inclined to see the bright side of politicians, see corporations as more intrinsically selfish and corrupt than politicians. The idea of firms as dark untrustworthy aliens is indeed buried deep in our psyche. Xenophobia lives.
Added: I guess I need to spell this out. Humans evolved concern for others because this enabled individual humans to better survive and reproduce, especially by being better respected and liked by others. Similarly, firms who hoped to succeed in the industry of running for office would seek to create and maintain a clear positive long-term brand, one that voters could respect, like, and embrace. It is crazy to assume firms will always hurt their customers for any temporary gain just because some paper somewhere declares firms must seek profits.
Added 1p: Consider an ordinary politician who hopes for 15 more years on the job, versus a firm now holding 100 offices that hopes to continue for another fifty years. Which one is more scared that news of a corrupt act would destroy their future political popularity? Which will try harder to avoid such acts?”
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/unselfish-politicians.html
Cf.:
“[...] it is my high honor to nominate one of our newly enfranchised corporate citizens. A citizen that has shown, in this hour of need, that it is able to create jobs. That understands how to invest and grow and meet a payroll. That has the character to stand up for freedom and justice at home, in China, and around the world. And that has pledged, above all, “don’t be evil.”
It is with great pleasure that I nominate this fine citizen, Google Inc., for the presidency of the United States.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a4mv6q80zqVY
Cf.: http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/420 and http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/partition-is-necessary-and-sufficient-for-equivalence
mazsa
“A partition of a set A is a collection of disjoint nonempty subsets of A whose union is all of A.
“Studying equivalence relations on a set A and studying partitions of A are really the same thing. Given any partition D of A, there is exactly one equivalence relation on A from which it is derived.
“The proof is not difficult. To show that the partition D comes from some equivalence relation, let us define a relation C on A setting xCy if x and y belong to the same element of D. Symmetry of C is obvious; reflexivity follows from the fact that the union of the elements of D equals all of A; transitivity follows from the fact that distinct elements of D are disjoint. It is simple to check that the collection of equivalence classes determined by C is precisely the collection D.
“To show there is only one such equivalence relation, suppose that C1 and C2 are two equivalence relations on A that give rise to the same collection of equivalence classes D. Given x is an element of A, we show that yC1x if and only if yC2x, from which we conclude that C1 = C2. Let E1 be the equivalence class determined by x relative to the relation C1; let E2 be the equivalence class determined by x relative to the relation C2. Then E1 is an element of D, so that it must equal the unique element D of D that contains x. Similarly, E2 must equal D. Now by definition, E1 consists of all y such that yC1x; and E2 consists of all y such that yC2x. Since E1 = D = E2, our result is proved.” Munkres,2000, pp. 23-24.
mazsa
The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations. [...] This protection has been extended by explicit holdings to the context of political speech. [...] The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
Supreme Court of the United States
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. (Applause.) I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. (Applause.) They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address
-
mazsa
Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen (Md.) will introduce their legislative counterpunch to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on corporate campaign spending the week after the Presidents Day recess, the Democratic lawmakers confirmed on Thursday.
SUMMARY OF CITIZENS UNITED LEGISLATION: http://electionlawblog.org/archives/schumer-vanhollen.pdf
-
mazsa
“The recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allowing corporations and unions to spend freely on ads explicitly supporting or opposing political candidates, will worsen matters. The threat of unlimited amounts of negative advertising from special interest groups will only make members more beholden to their natural constituencies and more afraid of violating party orthodoxies.
I can easily imagine vulnerable members approaching a corporation or union for support and being told: “We’d love to support you, but we have a rule. We only support candidates who are with us at least 90 percent of the time. Here is our questionnaire with our top 10 concerns. Fill it out.” Millions of campaign dollars now ride on the member’s response. The cause of good government is not served.
What to do? While fundamental campaign finance reform may ultimately require a constitutional amendment, there are less drastic steps we can take to curb the distorting influence of money in politics. Congress should consider ways to lessen the impact of the Citizens United decision through legislation to enhance disclosure requirements, require corporate donors to appear in the political ads they finance and prohibit government contractors or bailout beneficiaries from spending money on political campaigns.
Congress and state legislators should also consider incentives, including public matching funds for smaller contributions, to expand democratic participation and increase the influence of small donors relative to corporations and other special interests.”
Evan Bayh: Why I’m Leaving the Senate
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21bayh.html?hp=&pagewanted=all -
mazsa
-
mazsa
https://www.economist.com/node/18437755/comments