Thinking Critically, Community Rights, and Corporations

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are back at reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I can think of 3 powerful quotes that I could pull from today's reading. I'm going to go with this one.

"It is possible to perceive the world such that it makes sense to gas Jews and others at death camps. It is possible to perceive yourself and others such that it makes sense to destroy the planet in order to make money and amass power, to perpetuate and make grow an economic system. None of this is to say these are "wise" choices: It's to say they're choices. It's also to stress once again, how often unquestioned assumptions frame our choices. If we wish to make different choices we must smash the frames that constrain us. We must, if we care about our own lives, and if we care about the life on the planet, begin to remember how to think critically, how to think for ourselves." -- (Pg. 119-120)

I had a couple thoughts related to Community Rights and Corporations this morning.

The first: It occured to me that I'm not against corporations. What I support is once again making corporations subordinate to We The People. A free and sovereign people define and have power over the robots they create. In other words, under the the theory of The United States the corporation was never meant to govern We The People. In my mind, a big reason why the American Revolution was fought was to drive a stake through the heart of the corporation.

The second: What does an authentic win look like for a community fighting a corporate harm? I think an authentic win looks like citizens within the community voting "no", or making a law against the harm being done to them. If a corporation decides to leave because of economic reasons or because of the hassle-factor that is the corporation leaving. You, as a self-governing people have not defined what your values are and codified them into law. Once you have expressed your values into law it's all out there in the open for the next corporation that will be coming in to do the harm.

Do I think this will be easy? No. Do I think it's a magic bullet? No. But I think it's far more effective than fighting corporate harms one at a time. It reminds a lot of whack-a-mole. That is what it looks like for citizens and activists fighting the harms.

Your Wicked Good Militia

I have been looking for this quote since I first heard Paul Cienfuegos use it in a talk that he recorded for Alternative radio awhile back.

"We The People must unite if we are to be a power strong enough to get our sovereign rights back. we must not squabble amongst ourselves over stuff like abortions, drugs, guns, welfare, unemployment benefits, men who whistle at women, cultural differences, race, and all that. a united people must include all of us: the homos, the heters, the yuppy, the hippie, the red necks, hairy, shaved, kinky, spiffy, the work boots, the sneakers, the black shiny pumps, the nose rings, the knit shirts, flannel shirts, pink shirts, the fat, the thin, the tall and the short and the beauteous, and the ugly. We need millions. We can’t fight the corporate scheme if we are all hissing and fluffing and puffing and snorting in little isolated groups which blame other little groups for the country’s ills."--Carolyn Chute

I found it HERE.

It's a Corpocracy

Despite what we've learned since kindegarten: We do not live in a democracy; we live in a corpocracy. If we want to eventually live sustainably on this planet we're going to have to learn how to govern ourselves again. And that is going to involve fighting to elevate community rights above corporate rights. As it stands right now a corporation can come into your community and commit whatever harm it sees fit. The only thing that you can do as a community is try to regulate this legal fiction. In other words, it's a given the corporation is going to commit the harm. You just get to regulate how harmful the harm is going to be. Where I come from that isn't democracy, and its not a good recipe for sustainability.

We've Colonized Ourselves

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (Probably my favorite environmental organization.)posted this on Facebook yesterday:

End "capital-ism" for corporations--- you can help shut down the widespread acceptance of "corporate personhood" even before we amend the U.S. constitution.

It's a tell tale sign of the biases institutionalized in our society that each time I try to send an e-mail or write in a "word" document using the name of a corporation, my spell-checker tries to correct me for not having capitalized the name of the corporation. If we assert that corporations are things and not persons, then honoring the names of corporations with capitalization and accepting their names as personal pronouns seems to me to be a contradiction of the idea that they are things, not persons.

I think that if "microsoft" deserves to be capitalized, then why not Dog, or Dolphin, or Box Turtle...all of which I hold in higher regard than the corporation? In fact, I want never again to capitalize the label ("name") of a corporation.

We at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund often capitalize local "Ordinances," because they are laws of communities. So too County, and Township and Borough -- respecting community self-governance. I generally capitalize People and Nature.

So, we can make a statement not only with what we say, but how we type it. And if we do not, we still make a statement...and it is that we continue to be colonized by the dominant culture, which elevates corporations (property) above People and Nature.

Who will join us in de-capitalizing corporations?

I like the idea of ending "capital-ism" for corporations. I also think they make a good point in saying that Dog, Dolphin, or Box Turtle should capitalized well before Microsoft (This computer does not allow me to not capitalize Microsoft.) Robert Bly was right when he pointed out in "The Sibling Society" that we are the first culture to have colonized ourselves.

Corporations

After reading Erik's post about corporate personhood I had to post this quote out of Derrick Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe.

“Corporations are a legal device invented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to deal with the myriad of limits exceeded by this culture’s social and economic system: the railroads and other early corporations were too big and too technological to be built or insured by the incorporator’s investments alone; when corporations failed or caused gross public damage, as they often did, the incorporators did not have the wealth to cover the damage for which they could be held liable. Because of limited liability, corporations have allowed several generations of owners to economically, psychologically, and legally ignore the limits of toxics, fisheries depletion, debt, and so on that have been transgressed by the workings of the economic system.

“By now we should have learned. To expect corporations to do differently than they do is to engage in magical thinking. We may as well expect a clock to cook, a car to give birth, or a gun to do other than that for which it was created. The specific and explicit function of for-profit corporations is to amass wealth. The function is not to guarantee that children are raised in environments free of toxic chemicals, nor to respect the autonomy or existence of indigenous peoples, nor to protect the vocational or personal integrity of workers, nor to design safe modes of transportation, nor to support life on this planet. Nor is the function to support communities. It never has been and never will be. To expect corporations to do other than to amass wealth at any (externalized) cost is to ignore the system of rewards that has been set up, to ignore everything we know about behavior modification: if you reward someone—those inventing in or running corporations, in this case—for doing something, you can expect them to do it again. To expect corporations to do other than they do is at the very least poor judgment, and the very worst delusional. Corporations are institutions created explicitly to separate humans from the effects of their actions, making them by definition inhuman and inhumane. To the degree that we desire to live in a human and humane world—and really, to the degree that we wish to survive—corporations need to be eliminated." pg. 441