Supreme Court and Immortality
The recent Supreme Court decision is based on the belief that corporations enjoy the same constitutional protections as ordinary citizens. Now, our forefathers lived in a different economy and so nothing in their writings suggests that they considered corporate citizenship. If anything, they warned us about the undue influence of business powers. So, how did it happen historically, legally and specifically that corporations got their human rights explicitly?
I found am interesting answer in the Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann.
If you read it, you'd see that the notion of corporation as a citizen was introduced by lawyers for railroad companies (largest corporate players at the time) in their fight with the government. It further tells a fascinating story how one of these lawyers became the clerk for the court and how he wrote the historic decision that applied the Bill of Rights to corporations. The author shows in detail that railroads won the case based on a different argument, but the written decision included both, thus attributing to the Supreme Court the decision it never actually made.
On the one hand, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. On the other, like a logical development of a relentless push by powerful lawyers committed to their cause - in other words, no conspiracy is required to push things where Marx said they'd go anyway.
I am not a lawyer and I assume that a different story exists that refutes or tries to refute Hartmann's account of The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (the subtitle of the book). My interest was in social construction of reality, or specifically the reality of an Agent: an accountable body with free choice and rights. Students of social construction often focus on the subtle, I focus on lawyers: they are the worker-bees, who toil on constructing social reality on our behalf daily and in writing. Agent is a Burkean term: otherwise it could be called a person, a citizen, and now a corporation.
My thinking was: If we can construct personalities (Agents) attached to individual bodies, why not to multiple bodies? Why is it not the road of the future? Wouldn't that assure immortality? Isn't that what lots of other movements tried to accomplish?
I found am interesting answer in the Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann.
If you read it, you'd see that the notion of corporation as a citizen was introduced by lawyers for railroad companies (largest corporate players at the time) in their fight with the government. It further tells a fascinating story how one of these lawyers became the clerk for the court and how he wrote the historic decision that applied the Bill of Rights to corporations. The author shows in detail that railroads won the case based on a different argument, but the written decision included both, thus attributing to the Supreme Court the decision it never actually made.
On the one hand, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. On the other, like a logical development of a relentless push by powerful lawyers committed to their cause - in other words, no conspiracy is required to push things where Marx said they'd go anyway.
I am not a lawyer and I assume that a different story exists that refutes or tries to refute Hartmann's account of The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (the subtitle of the book). My interest was in social construction of reality, or specifically the reality of an Agent: an accountable body with free choice and rights. Students of social construction often focus on the subtle, I focus on lawyers: they are the worker-bees, who toil on constructing social reality on our behalf daily and in writing. Agent is a Burkean term: otherwise it could be called a person, a citizen, and now a corporation.
My thinking was: If we can construct personalities (Agents) attached to individual bodies, why not to multiple bodies? Why is it not the road of the future? Wouldn't that assure immortality? Isn't that what lots of other movements tried to accomplish?