Nexus - 0403 - New Times Magazine-pages

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ALONG CAME THE TRANSNATIONALS ALONG CAME THE NALS For over a century, corporations have been pursuing their relentless drive for power and profit at the expense of ordinary people. tury. We pick up the newspaper and then look out the window, hoping to explain the eeriness of the front page. If there's a full moon in the sky, then maybe, just maybe, the approaching millennium isn't as close it seems. This might at least give us time to quibble over which aspect of social life—cultural, economic, ecological or political—will prove most unstable during the decline of Renaissance man. Those who escape thought-reform at the end of history may trace our decline back to 1886, when the US Supreme Court declared that corporations are legal persons whose life, liberty and property are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified to protect freed slaves, it took railroad-company lawyers less than two decades to turn this amendment into a loophole. By 1904, corporations controlled four-fifths of the nation's industrial pro- duction. Today, transnational corporations [TNCs] control the world's cultural and eco- nomic production as well, and generate most of its pollution. A mere three decades ago, investment abroad meant that a US corporation anticipated a foreign market for goods produced domestically. Today it means factories in many coun- tries, through complex global sourcing, production and sales networks. The labour move- ment, which created the middle class by stunting corporate growth during the first half of this century, can no longer keep up with these changes. Neither can governments. Since the first trade deficit in 1971, the US has shifted from the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor. By 1991, foreign-owned firms controlled half of the US con- sumer-electronics industry, a third of the chemical industry, a fifth of the auto industry, and half of the film and recording industry. The political clout of corporations has kept pace with their economic growth, so there's no longer any need for absurd Supreme Court decisions. Now a lawyer can shop for a congenial offshore bank, deposit a briefcase of mumbo-jumbo in a room with an empty desk, and claim corporate sovereignty anywhere in the free-trade world. Not satisfied with the collapse of Socialism, nor with the worldwide integration made possible by advances in communications, transnationals are setting up international courts such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), packed with their own puppet judges. Never before have corporations enjoyed such power. Many of the few hundred transna- tional giants are bigger than most nations. The economy of Ford is larger than Saudi Arabia's and Norway's, and the annual sales of Philip Morris exceed the gross domestic product of New Zealand.' Corporate hierarchies are rigidly totalitarian. As the transna- tionals control more of the world, this inescapably means a loss of rights and resources for many of its citizens. US law was the first casualty of this corporate onslaught. Originally, corporate charters were designed to serve the public interest. These were State charters. There is no men- tion of corporate rights in the US Constitution, and very few rights came from legislation. As late as the 1870s, states were still removing charters, which were seen as legal fictions, when they no longer served the public. Charters were granted for fixed terms, and own- ers, managers and directors were responsible for corporate debts and any harm caused by the corporation, sometimes at double or triple the damage. Then came the trusts. New Jersey was the first US state to grant corporations any right they wanted. As money flowed into New Jersey, other states did the same thing. * Lawyers hired by the trusts created through the courts a body of case law which continues to grow stronger. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court decreed that corpora- Me of us sense that the end of history will occur sometime during the next cen- by Daniel Brandt ©1996 First published in NameBase NewsLine No. 14, July-September 1996 Public Information Research PO Box 680635 San Antonio TX 78268, USA E-mail: info@pir.org Web: http://www.blythe.org/NameBase/ APRIL - MAY 1997 NEXUS - 13 CORPORATIONS AS 'LEGAL PERSONS' by Daniel Brandt ©1996