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I'm really glad that you (and others like you) seem to be tackling this aspect of the corporate unaccountability problem. I'll be checking your web site out. What do you think of the movement to end corporate personhood? There is a lot of evidence that the priginal Santa Clara decision that gave personhood to corporations was never made as such, but was written into the record by an overly-enthusiastic clerk, Bancroft, who had a vested interest in corporate personhood.. (he had been a lawyer for the railroad companies, who were the pharma /oil corps of his day)

For more, see http://poclad.org/ and http://reclaimdemocracy.org/

There is an interesting model brief on this at http://www.poclad.org/ModelLegalBrief.cfm.

Unfortunately, we have sold our sacred God-given HUMAN rights to the highest bidder. When congress talks about individual rights, they are referring to corporate rights and investor rights.

When I first started to get into politics, I looked at the Libertarian party and said "That's what I'm all about. Complete and total freedom." The more I looked into it however, I realized they were referring to corporate rights.

It's a very sad thing to realize that we have sold our soul. But, I think more and more people are starting to wake up, and I think if enough of us do that we can bring awareness to the rest and change the laws and redeem our American values based on individual human rights.

See the following links to learn more about this and find out what you can do to help change it.

POCLAD: Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy
http://www.poclad.org/

Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation.
This is a history of corporate law in America.
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoB.html

Whichever way you look at it this is the end of the line for corporate deregulation. Regulation is now going to be considered pensioner friendly and stockholder friendly.

Well, at least until the current round of presidential speechifying and toothless legislating subsides Wall Street's fears, and corporate America's hand returns to the cookie jar.

In and of themselves, public scandals tend not to result in meaningful and structural change. To move beyond political grandstanding and weak legislation (and the bills being looked at currently are very weak -- see CitizenWorks for more info) requires a significant, independent-minded citizen's movement. A corporate accountability movement of this type could begin with demanding reforms in governance and accounting practices (like forcing corporations to expense stock options, a measure rejected by congressional Democrats), and move on to demanding serious and structural changes, such as taking corporate money out of politics (which will require public financing of elections, and breaking up the corporate strangehold over the news media.

But expecting a significant trend to reverse deregulation to suddenly spring up amongst politicians who continue to take their orders from major corporate donors is, unfortunately, too optimistic.

At the very least we will see the sweatheart deals arranged by Enron and the Gramms to exclude energy derivatives from oversight being swept away.

Don't count on it. As far as I remember, the current legislation doesn't repeal Gramm's Enron bill.

But at the deeper level I think that politicians are not going to be able to score easy votes by dennouncing regulation.

No, few voters are going to get hot and bothered about changes in corporate accounting regulations. However, most of them know, pretty intuitively, that they're getting screwed by big business. Frankly, most of the world understands that the current economic order doesn't operate for their benefit (particularly folks in the two-thirds world who don't just lose money on Enron stock, but get displaced by Enron-financed dams).

And no, that's not Marxist babbling -- take a look at some polling numbers: 67% think most corporate executives are dishonest, 57% think white collar crime happens very often, and the percentage who name big business as the largest threat to America's future is at an all-time high (38%).

However, the public doesn't trust politicians to solve these (or most) problems, probably a leading cause of why fewer and fewer of them bother to vote. And nobody's going to trust grand-standing Democrats like Lieberman (who spends most of his time on his knees before the insurance industry) to take a firm stance against over-reaching corporate power.

IMHO, the only way we're going to see a viable political movement for corporate accountability is with a strong, progressive, independent third party. At the moment, both in the U.S. and around the world, that's the Green Party. Provided we continue moving beyond feel-good environmentalism, the Greens can be a grassroots and effective voice for change, by bringing up these issues when people are paying some attention to them (during the election season) and offering bold solutions, rather than more of the same focus-grouped bullshit. The Green Party in the U.S. is now organized in almost every state, and has a platform full of creative ways to advance real, grassroots democracy.

In closing (and for the purposes of extending my pomposity a bit further), I'd like to remind folks that corporate abuse of power affects everyone, in millions of ways -- whether you're a white-collar type whose 401(k) is suddenly worthless, a software developer who's forced to deal with ludicrous patents, or a worker whose job just got shipped to Mexico. And it will take all of us to effect the changes so desperately needed.

(P.S. Another great resource on corporate power is the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy.)

You forget that what becomes law here will become law everywhere via the WTO. There is no escape we must fight both the government and the transnational corporations untile they have the proper regard and respect for the sovereignty of the individual again.

Poclad
Ratical.org

Most of the problems that CPT addresses are the result of corporate control of our government which stem from the 1886 Santa Clara v Southern Pacific Railroad decision which in fundamental ways first declared that corporations were persons. Thanks to the wonderful SF Mime Troupe I have just become aware of POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy) that is working to educate activists such as myself in ways to contest the authority of corporations to govern.

Are you aware of POCLAD? Do you think they can help in the creation of new ways to fight the injustices that CPT is targeting? And ultimately, how best can we help?

From the POCLAD web site:

What should be the legal, political and cultural relationships between people and corporate bodies? Who decides? .... 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? .... Why does General Motors Corporation have more rights than the United Auto Workers Union? .... Why do environmental laws regulate environmentalists? Why do labor laws regulate unions?

POCLAD is not building a big national membership operation. Rather, we are working with existing groups to launch democratic insurgencies to render corporations subordinate.

Simply disguising advertising as content is bad enough, but there is something more sinister at work...

The big search engines are responsible for generating a view of how the web appears, and being Corporations, they are charted to operate in the public interest. So what about dissident information? Information police brutality, drug legalization, real abuses of corporate and government power,... etc. How do we know that these search engines (really just extensions of the corporo-capitilst state) are not intentionally CENSORING dissident information?

In fact, I have proof that they do. I maintain several dissident web sites (containing marijuana legalization advocacy, discussion about my personal encoutners being assaulted by police and by jail, etc). Here is one such page: http://mu.clarityconnect.net/~bhuston/government/d ick_doctor1.html

Here are recent visits by the Google and Inktomi spiders crawling my site:

216.239.46.90 - - [04/Jun/2001:08:04:02 -0400] "GET /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 200 14950 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
216.35.116.52 - - [15/Jun/2001:06:32:25 -0400] "GET /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 200 14950 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"
216.239.46.12 - - [01/Jul/2001:08:14:01 -0400] "GET /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 200 14950 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
216.35.116.52 - - [19/Jul/2001:05:33:08 -0400] "GET /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"

Both of these spiders feed data to most major search engines, yet no search engine I can find actually finds this page. I used a uniquely spelled keyword: Disslehorst (probably a mispelling).

They USED to serve up this page! Just not recently, indicating some newly installed filters. I will prepare a page detailing the sharp drop off on hits on this page and put it here: http://mu.clarityconnect.net/~bhuston/censorship

Before a court ruling in 1876 that gave corporations the right of naturalized persons under the 14th amendment, all corporate charters were subject to revocation and they were only meant to last for the duration of their narrowly defined stated purpose and mission. If a company violated
1) Their purpose or mission
or
2) Violated their charter They were subject to the revocation of their charter.

This is still possible in this day and age but many large corporations have been attempting to get laws passed that prevent the revocation of charters or that strike the laws for revocation of charters from the books. Charters are and were meant to limit FINANCIAL risk not as a mask for illegal practices. They were originally social intruments meant to be used for the undertaking of large projects fundamentally for the good of the people. It is my belief that many corporations are or have taken the priviledge of their charters well beyond their intended purpose. In other words corporations are a priviledge but not a right and as such they should be treated that way. One example of how this priviledge has been abused is Union Carbide complicity in the Bhopal incident. Of course there are thousands of examples on a lesser and greater scale than this one. All the way from the cartels represented by the RIAA and the MPAA, to the atrocities in Burma.

The Program on Corporations Law and Democracy has a large array of articles on Corporate charters their history in the United states and the power that citizens have to retain their authority as sovereign agents over corporations.

As a side note also read this and start thinking about the role of banks.

I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
(Letter to Logan, 1816). THOMAS JEFFERSON ON DEMOCRACY 138 (S. Padover Ed. 1953).

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