Nike, Asimov, and Abraham Lincoln

[smokingboot]

Following on from nyarbaggytep's post today re the Kyoto agreement, the following regards the power of corporations in the States. This is not about knocking the US or its people. This article is out of date, but the last part is painfully appropriate now, and is one of Lincoln's most famous quotes on his fears for the future of his country.



Published on Wednesday, January 1, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Now Corporations Claim The "Right To Lie"
by Thom Hartmann

While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation.
Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same "free speech" right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, "The check is in the mail," or, "That looks great on you," then, Nike's reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.

They took this argument all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they lost. The next stop may be the U.S. Supreme Court in early January, and the battle lines are already forming.

For example, in a column in the New York Times supporting Nike's position, Bob Herbert wrote, "In a real democracy, even the people you disagree with get to have their say."

True enough.

But Nike isn't a person - it's a corporation. And it's not their "say" they're asking for: it's the right to deceive people.

Corporations are created by humans to further the goal of making money. As Buckminster Fuller said in his brilliant essay The Grunch of Giants, "Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys - legally enacted game-playing..."

Corporations are non-living, non-breathing, legal fictions. They feel no pain. They don't need clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, or healthy food to consume. They can live forever. They can't be put in prison. They can change their identity or appearance in a day, change their citizenship in an hour, rip off parts of themselves and create entirely new entities. Some have compared corporations with robots, in that they are human creations that can outlive individual humans, performing their assigned tasks forever.

Isaac Asimov, when considering a world where robots had become as functional, intelligent, and more powerful than their human creators, posited three fundamental laws that would determine the behavior of such potentially dangerous human-made creations. His Three Laws of Robotics stipulated that non-living human creations must obey humans yet never behave in a way that would harm humans.

Asimov's thinking wasn't altogether original: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison beat him to it by about 200 years.

Jefferson and Madison proposed an 11th Amendment to the Constitution that would "ban monopolies in commerce," making it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, banning them from giving money to politicians or trying to influence elections in any way, restricting corporations to a single business purpose, limiting the lifetime of a corporation to something roughly similar to that of productive humans (20 to 40 years back then), and requiring that the first purpose for which all corporations were created be "to serve the public good."

The amendment didn't pass because many argued it was unnecessary: Virtually all states already had such laws on the books from the founding of this nation until the Age of the Robber Barons.

Wisconsin, for example, had a law that stated: "No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office." The penalty for any corporate official violating that law and getting cozy with politicians on behalf of a corporation was five years in prison and a substantial fine.

Like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, these laws prevented corporations from harming humans, while still allowing people to create their robots (corporations) and use them to make money. Everybody won. Prior to 1886, corporations were referred to in US law as "artificial persons," similar to the way Star Trek portrays the human-looking robot named Data.

But after the Civil War, things began to change. In the last year of the war, on November 21, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln looked back on the growing power of the war-enriched corporations, and wrote the following thoughtful letter to his friend Colonel William F. Elkins:

"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

Comments

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent quote.