ENGAGE
US #7: Relationships and Questions
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ENGAGE
US #7: Relationships and Questions
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Our inquiries keep leading us to the activists in every generation who perfected organizations to advocate human rights over property rights, to repel their era's aggressions against democracy. These were people who understood that they could never practice self-governance and enjoy political liberty if they let legislatures, courts and culture define corporations as beyond the authority of the sovereign people.
POCLAD's exchanges with activists started with a focus on corporations. Discussions quickly expanded to include governance and democracy, unleashing a torrent of questions: What should be the legal, political and cultural relationships between people and corporate bodies? Who decides? How were a minority of natural persons in the original thirteen states able to define the majority of human beings as nonpersons? To define Africans as property, Native peoples as invisible? Given that Native peoples, women, African Americans, immigrants, debtors, people without property, gays and lesbians are still organizing for justice and equality, how did corporations become superduper legal persons a century ago?
Should people dismantle giant corporations? Transform them? Should a business corporation be regarded as a citizen? As private? Should it have free speech? Are there constitutional rights differences between the NAACP and the US Chamber of Commerce? Between the Sierra Club and the Chemical Manufacturers Association or the Tobacco Institute? Why does General Motors Corporation have more rights than the United Auto Workers Union?