[PEN-L:33423] Re: Local Government Rejects Corporate Personhood

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>


> You want a justification for corporate personhood? It furthered what
you might euphemistically called economic development, and more
concretely corporate capitalist expansion. There's no secret that the
courts adopt rules that promote business interests all the time. Lots of
them are even quite up front about it. Is it bad for them to do that?
Depends, doesn't it. What the hell do you expect them to do, anyway?
They'rte not making or interpreting law for a socialist society. In a
socialist society, the courts will make socialist law.

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Nay, because there can be  no such thing. The undemocratic bundle of
rights, priveleges, immunities etc. that constitute contemporary
corporations make the label of personhood utterly beside the point[s].
The question for liberal jurisprudence is whether the State has an
obligation from refraining from allowing the design of institutions of
commerce that violate democratic norms and foster authoritarian and
oligarchic relations of production and the concomitant distribution of
wealth. Bracket for a moment the capitalism/socialism binary and ask
instead whether the State should make democratic law or
authoritarian/oligarchic law. Then retrieve the C/S binary.

To the extent that the State enables
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/marxism/DefenseE.htm , the
need for a jurisprudence of insurgency, along with calls for a
constitutional convention to clear away the detritus wrought by the
National Paranoia State/Empire becomes ever more urgent. What's going on
in PA is not about some narrow interpretation of the Supremacy Clause or
semantic quibbling over the polysemy of 'corporate personhood.'





> As for circularity, the life of the law has not been logic, it has
been experience. I wish I'd said that, but Holmes beat me to it. This
isn't bad case of circularity, anyway. Maybe the first court to cite
Santa Clara as precedent was cheating to use it as precedent, I don't
know if what you say is true, but constitutional courts make up new
rules all the time. The constitution also doesn't say expressly that
state legislatures can't squelch political speech. It was made to say
that by the incorporation of the First Amendment. I assume you don't
have a problem with that one.

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And Holmes statement is a euphemism for "the life of the law has not
been freedom and justice, it has been power and domination." See the
recent bio of OWH "Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of
Justice Holmes" by Albert Alschuler for an unflattering portrait.


> As for legislative precedent, you're talking the framer's intentions.
This is constitutional interpretation. The personhood is that of the
14th Amendment. Are you waxing originalist? And if you are, do you
suppose the Radical Republicans of 1866 would have had a problem with
corporate personhood? If, like me, you're kind of a textualist, the word
"person" is broad and ambiguous, and it's not crazy to read to include
suprahuman entities.
> jks

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The framers are dead and the document they wrote is 90% in the grave
thanks to the path-dependency of the capitalist class treating the State
apparatus as a commodity, the National Paranoia Complex working
furiously to bring us a Panopticon beyond Bentham's wildest dreams as
well as a whole host of other life-hating technologies. As an espouser
of MS and liberal democratic norms in all spheres of social life, you
know in your bones that one of the big pieces of bringing that about is
dismantling the paradigm of corporate governance and you can't change
that without some serious insurgency at the edges of "the law."


Ian