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Ethically Acceptable
Under pressure over lobbying abuses, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert presented ideas for lobbying reform.
"We need to reform the rules so that it is clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what is ethically acceptable,"
he is cited. And he has serious ideas:
First, we must ban privately sponsored travel in the House of Representatives. I know fact-finding trips are important. This body considers legislation that affects people that cannot always travel to Washington to petition their government. Private travel has been abused by some, and I believe we need to put an end to it.
Second, I think we need to tighten even further the gift rules. A Member of Congress should be able to accept a ball cap or a t-shirt from the proud students at a local middle school, but he or she doesn’t need to be taken to lunch or dinner by a lobbyist.
But what is still "ethical acceptable" to Hastert are campaign contributions. Such like meals, travel or various gifts. His new rules are just a new lipstick color for the lobbying pig:
According to lobbyists and ethics experts, even if Hastert’s proposal is enacted, members of Congress and their staffs could still travel the world on an interest group’s expense and eat steak on a lobbyist’s account at the priciest restaurants in Washington.
The only requirement would be that whenever a lobbyist pays the bill, he or she must also hand the lawmaker a campaign contribution. Then the transaction would be perfectly okay.
Under Hastert’s new rules, the lobbyist has to give a bit more. A $1 campaign check handed over in that fancy restaurant or on the famous Scottish golf range would be sufficient.
"Beyond a shadow of a doubt", that is all there is to Hastert’s ethics.
@anna missed
What is a corporation?
What sets the corporation apart from all other types of businesses is that a corporation is an independent legal entity, separate from the people who own, control, and manage it. In other words, corporation and tax laws view the corporation as a legal “person,” meaning that the corporation can enter into contracts, incur debts, and pay taxes apart from its owners. And there are other important characteristics that result from the corporation’s separate existence: A corporation does not dissolve when its owners (shareholders) change or die, and the owners of a corporation are not personally responsible for the corporation’s debts; this is called limited liability.
How are corporations taxed? (scroll down)
Unlike sole proprietors and owners of partnerships and LLCs, a corporation’s owners do not pay individual taxes on all business profits. The owners pay taxes only on profits paid out to them in the form of salaries, bonuses, and dividends. (Dividends are portions of profits that large corporations sometimes pay out to shareholders in return for their investment in the company.) The corporation pays taxes, at special corporate tax rates, on any profits that are left in the company from year to year (called “retained earnings”).
Since corporations pay taxes, the “no taxation without representation” fever caught hold of the RR companies and other large and growing industries right after the Civil War. Corporate attorneys sought to get cases to the SC to make the argument for corporate personhood for several years before Santa Clara County vs SP RR. The big business based Republican Party, which dominated politics at the time, did not oppose it; some Dems, however, argued against it long after the 1886 decision:
THE FIRST THING to understand is the difference between the natural person and the fictitious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act.
Man is the handiwork of God and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose; the corporation is the handiwork of man and created to carry out a money-making policy.
There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter.
What happens, of course, is that a few powerful people within the corporations make all the decisions and are able to deflect any negative consequences onto the corporate “person” which is legally liable while holding on personally to any wealth those decisions create. Nice deal. Barring an Enron style collapse, the only real risk is from bad publicity (e.g., Merrill Lynch) or corporate infighting in which you lose your power base. Note that in ML’s case, only the high profile analyst Henry Blodgett got publically canned – because his emails became a public scandal – but left with about $45 mil just to keep him quiet. Those above him who actually ran the place avoided this fate but some suffered in the corporate board battles that followed. The corporate “person” took the hit, paid a fine equal to about a year’s postage costs, got some bad PR, hired a new marketing agency and moved on. It felt no shame or remorse as any normal, decent person would and most of the real people behind the corporate mask who were responsible for the scandal avoided real consequences. I could use a corporate person to hide behind myself.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Jan 19 2006 3:24 utc | 11
My take on the “personhood” claim of Corporations is a little different from lonesomeG and Thom (ADD) Hartmann. My argument will more closely follow that of the excellent film “The Corporation”, which, if you haven’t seen it is highly recommended. (It goes beyond the personhood doctrine of Corporations to examine, in depth, the pathological ramifications of their legally proscribed, and mandated, behavior.)
From their website: “A corporation is designated as a legal person under law. What kind of person would it be? Answer: A psychopath. While this may strike some as obvious, others will find The Corporation a real eye-opener as it delves into the mindset and character of corporate America. This insightful documentary comes to us from Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media), Jennifer Abbott (A Cow at My Table), and Joel Bakan, whose book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (to be published March 8) serves as the basis for the film.
Through interviews with left-wing staples such as Noam Chomksy, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore; company CEOs from Pfizer, Goodyear, and Royal Dutch Shell; activists and whistleblowers; and highlighting specific cases of corporate deception, the three-hour mini-series paints a somewhat unflattering picture of multinationals. Some of the most damning evidence is the film’s exploration of FOX News executives pressuring its reporters to kill a story that exposed links to cancer in a synthetic Monsanto bovine milk hormone.
The Corporation addresses three different themes. In the first program, The Pathology of Commerce, filmmakers examine the pathological self-interest of the modern corporation. Planet Inc. looks at the scope of commerce and the sophisticated, even covert, techniques marketers use to get their brands into our homes. The final program, Reckoning, examines how corporations cut deals with any style of government – from Nazi Germany to despotic states today – that allow or even encourage sweatshops, as long as sales go up.
The Corporation received critical acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has just been named as one of the Festival’s “Canada’s Top Ten 2003” films. The Corporation also garnered the Joris Ivens Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Film Festival in November and will be screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “
I think it is essential to look at the background to all of this because this story is a case in point of the methods the elite use to take a good (in the social justice sense) ruling and turn it upside down to justify their thievery–a tactic they use to this day.
Originally, corporations were essentially limited partnerships formed for a specific purpose (building a bridge) and then dissolved after the task was completed. The increasing role of capital in industrial development in this country, following the grand vision of St. Croix’s most famous bastard son, Alexander Hamilton, led to a number of court cases increasing the rights and purviews of corporations.
To examine how the issue of “personhood” was formed, we must first step back and examine an earlier case, Scott v. Sanford, a case which had nothing to do with corporations, yet improbably, provided an unlikely justification for further rulings. One of my heros, Buckminister Fuller, first postulated in “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” that invention proceeds centripetally, that is, at right angles to intention. This is certainly one of those instances.
It is commonly acknowledged by non-wingnut fascist constitutional scholars that the Dred Scott decision represented the moral nadir of Supreme Court rulings until, at least, Bush v. Gore. Both have been described by Supreme Court Justices as a “self-inflicted wound.”
To quote Wikipedia: “Dred Scott v. Sandford1, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), known as the “Dred Scott Case”, was a lawsuit decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857. It is considered by many to have been a key cause of the American Civil War, and of the later ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, leading to the abolition of slavery and establishment of civil rights for freed slaves. The decision for the court was written by Chief Justice Roger Taney.
Dred Scott was an American slave who was taken first to Illinois, a free state, and then to Minnesota, a free territory, for an extended period of time, and then back to the slave state of Missouri. After his original master died, he sued for his freedom. He initially won his freedom from a Missouri lower court, but the decision was reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court and remanded to the trial court. Simultaneously, Scott had filed suit in federal court, where, after prevailing on the issue of his status as a citizen of Missouri, he lost a trial by jury. Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which used the case to fundamentally change the legal balance of power in favor of slaveholders.
The Court ruled that:
No Negroes, not even free Negroes, could ever become citizens of the United States. They were “beings of an inferior order” not included in the phrase “all men” in the Declaration of Independence nor afforded any rights by the Constitution.
The exclusion of slavery from a U.S. territory in the Missouri Compromise was an unconstitutional deprivation of property (Negro slaves) (Note the “Libertarian” Property Rights argument rearing its fetid little head even here, a precursor to Gail Norton and the Mountain States Legal Foundation arguments which we must combat to this very day.) without due process prohibited by the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This is the first appearance in American constitutional law of the concept of “substantive due process,” as opposed to procedural due process.
Dred Scott was not free, because Missouri law alone applied after he returned there.”
The amendment provides a broad definition of national citizenship, overturning a central holding of the Dred Scott case. It requires the states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons (not only to citizens) within their jurisdictions. The framers’ main intent was to ensure equal protection regardless of race, while including some protection of the right to vote.
Current Supreme Court Justice David Souter has called this amendment “the most significant structural provision adopted since the original Framing”. (McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky (2005).)
The ramifications of this ruling led directly to the civil war. Again from Wiki: “The decision was a culmination of what many at that time considered was a push to expand slavery. The expansion of the territories and resulting admission of new states meant that the longstanding Missouri Compromise would cause the loss of political power in the South as all new states would be admitted as free states. Thus, Democratic party politicians sought repeal of the Missouri Compromise and were finally successful in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which naturally ended the “compromise.” This Act permitted each newly-admitted state south of the 40th parallel to decide whether to be a slave state or free state. Now, with Dred Scott, the Supreme Court under Taney sought to permit the unhindered expansion of slavery into the territories.
Although Taney believed that the decision would settle the slavery question once and for all, it produced the opposite result. It strengthened the opposition to slavery in the North, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make even bolder demands, and led to the establishment of the Republican Party and rise of Abraham Lincoln.
The reaction to the decision from opponents of slavery was fierce. The Albany Evening Journal combined two themes in denouncing the decision as both an offense to the principles of liberty on which the nation was founded and a victory for the Slave Power over the free states:
The three hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty-five Slaveholders in the Republic, accomplished day before yesterday a great success — as shallow men estimate success. They converted the Supreme Court of Law and Equity of the United States of America into a propagandist of human Slavery. Fatal day for a judiciary made reputable throughout the world, and reliable to all in this nation, by the learning and the virtues of Jay, Rutledge, Ellsworth, Marshall and Story!
The conspiracy is nearly completed.Note the “Conspiracy Theory” concept being used without apology in MSM! The Legislation of the Republic is in the hands of this handfull of Slaveholders. The United States Senate assures it to them. The Executive power of the Government is theirs. Buchanan took the oath of fealty to them on the steps of the Capitol last Wednesday. The body which gives the supreme law of the land, has just acceded to their demands, and dared to declare that under the charter of the Nation, men of African descent are not citizens of the United States and can not be — that the Ordinance of 1787 was void — that human Slavery is not a local thing, but pursues its victims to free soil, clings to them wherever they go, and returns with them — that the American Congress has no power to prevent the enslavement of men in the National Territories — that the inhabitants themselves of the Territories have no power to exclude human bondage from their midst — and that men of color can not be suitors for justice in the Courts of the United States!
That editorial ended on a martial note:
… All who love Republican institutions and who hate Aristocracy, compact yourselves together for the struggle which threatens your liberty and will test your manhood!”
O.K., so the ruling was a complete travesty and embarrassment internationally to US mercantile interests as slavery had been ruled out in Europe and its colonies for twenty and up years.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted post-Civil War as an attempt to correct the racist ramifications of Dred Scott. Again from Wiki: “The amendment provides a broad definition of national citizenship, overturning a central holding of the Dred Scott case. It requires the states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons (not only to citizens) within their jurisdictions. The framers’ main intent was to ensure equal protection regardless of race, while including some protection of the right to vote.
Current Supreme Court Justice David Souter has called this amendment “the most significant structural provision adopted since the original Framing”. (McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky (2005).)”
Next, we go back to Wiki, under the topic, “Corporate Personhood”:
The Civil War accelerated the growth of manufacturing and the power of the men who owned the large corporations. The systematic bribing of Congressmen was instituted by Mark Hanna, sugar trust magnate Henry Havemeyer, and Senator Nelson Aldrich and their associates. (Jonathan Shepard Fast and Luzviminda Bartolome Francisco, Conspiracy For Empire, Big Business, Corruption and the Politics of Imperialism in America, 1876-1907 (Quezon City, Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1985), p. 92-97).
Beginning in the 1870s corporate lawyers became bolder about using the Webster/Marshall theory of corporations as persons, arguing that as such they were entitled to some of the legal protections against arbitrary state action accorded also to natural persons.
It should be understood that the term “artificial person” was in long use, prior to the Dartmouth College decision, and was in principle distinct from any contention that corporations have the rights of natural persons. “Artificial person” was used because there were certain resemblances, in law, between a natural person and corporations. Both could be parties in a lawsuit; both could be taxed; both could be constrained by law. In fact the corporations had been called artificial persons by courts in England as early as the 16th century because lawyers for the corporations had asserted they could not be convicted under the English laws of the time because the laws were worded “No person shall…”
In the late 1800s railroads were the most powerful corporations in the country. Most of the nation’s farmers were dependent on them to haul their produce; even the manufacturing corporations were at their mercy when they needed coal, iron ore, finished iron, or any other materials transported. In four cases that reached the Supreme Court (94 U.S. 155, 94 U.S. 164, 94 U.S. 179, 94 U.S. 180 (1877)) railroads tried to argue that the 14th Amendment prevented states from regulating the maximum rates they could charge. These cases did not rely on just an interpretation of the 14th Amendment as most also tied in the Interstate Commerce clause as well. In each case the Court refused to render an opinion as to whether the 14th Amendment applied to corporations instead couching their decision on the Interstate Commerce clause.
Now, this finally brings us to the retrospectively historically momentous and infamous 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which Hartmann, unclearly, is referring to.
Back to Wiki:
At the lower court levels the question of whether corporations were persons had been argued, and these arguments were submitted in writing to the Court. However, before oral argument took place, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite announced: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”
The court decision, written by Justice Harlan in favor of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, consists of a lengthy discussion of various technical factors and does not rely upon or include the determination that corporations can be classified as “persons” according to the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, the court reporter, J. C. Bancroft Davis, inserted Chief Justice Waite’s comments as “Statement of Facts”, even though Chief Justice Waite stressed to Davis that the court did not rely on this information to reach its decision.
Many cases since have referred to this decision as setting a legal precedent for recognition of corporate personhood, even though the Supreme Court decided in the 1905 case of United States v. Detroit Lumber that headnotes and statement of fact can not be construed as being part of official court decisions.
Some historians have speculated that the reason Chief Justice Waite may have declined to hear arguments regarding the personhood status of corporations is because he may have been convinced that this was the original intent of Congress when drafting the amendment through testimony by Roscoe Conkling during the San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case of 1882. Roscoe Conkling was one of the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment and he claimed that members of congress were careful to use the word “person” rather than “citizen” when writing the Fourteenth Amendment so that corporations could be included in the definition. As evidence, he read from a secret journal that was written during the drafting process. However, in 1932, a Stanford law librarian, Howard Graham discovered that the entries read during Conkling’s testimony differed from the entries in the secret journal. He concluded that Roscoe Conkling, who was working for the railroad industry at the time of his testimony before the Supreme Court, purposely misled the court with his testimony in order to grant corporations the same constitutional rights as natural persons. Eight detailed publications by Graham about the topic were compiled and republished as Everyman’s Constitution in 1968.
Furthermore:
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394 (1886)), at the lower court levels the question of whether corporations were persons had been argued, and these arguments were submitted in writing to the Court. However, before oral argument took place, Chief Justice Waite announced: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”
Was the 14th Amendment about corporations? One of the 1886 judges, Samuel F. Miller, had not thought so in 1872, only 6 years after the Amendment had become law, when the court was “called upon for the first time to give construction to these articles.” In the Slaughterhouse Cases 83 U.S. 36 1872, Miller delivered the majority opinion and discussed the Thirteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment as well as the Fourteenth as follows:
The most cursory glance at these articles discloses a unity of purpose, when taken in connection with the history of the times, which cannot fail to have an important bearing on any question of doubt concerning their true meaning. Nor can such doubts, when any reasonably exist, be safely and rationally solved without a reference to that history, for in it is found the occasion and the necessity for recurring again to the great source of power in this country, the people of the States, for additional guarantees of human rights, additional powers to the Federal government; additional restraints upon those of the States. Fortunately, that history is fresh within the memory of us all, and its leading features, as they bear upon the matter before us, free from doubt.
…
We repeat, then, in the light of this recapitulation of events, almost too recent to be called history, but which are familiar to us all, and on the most casual examination of the language of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.
(Graham, Howard Jay, Everyman’s Constitution, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1968. See also Graham, Howard Jay, “The Conspiracy Theory of the Fourteenth Amendment,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 47: 341, 1938)
It has been argued that the men who wrote the 14th Amendment specifically meant for the word person to be a loophole which you could drive a giant corporation through. Apparently in one of the railroad cases an attorney who had been on the committee that drafted the amendment waved a paper before the court claiming that it documented such; but the paper was not entered as evidence, nor apparently was it shown to anyone, nor was it saved. However, careful research has shown that, John A. Bingham the member of Congress who is known to have been chiefly responsible for the phraseology of Section One when it was drafted by the Joint Committee in 1866, had, during the previous decade and as early as 1856-1859, employed not one but all three of the same clauses and concepts he later used in Section One. More important still, Bingham employed these guarantees specifically and in a context which suggested that free Negroes and mulattoes rather than corporations and business enterprise unquestionably were the persons’ to which he then referred.
So now corporations have the rights, but not the responsibilites of persons. They are killer sharks trawling the waters of our democracy. Corporations proliferated, and their capitalisation soared.
The final step, in this simplified history, is the step which turned corporations from killer sharks to massive pathological Orcas, the killer whale. And that is the 1919 case of Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford owed a duty to the shareholders of the Ford Motor Company to operate his business for profitable purposes as opposed to charitable purposes.
In 1916, the Ford Motor Company earned surpluses in excess of $100,000,000.00. The company’s president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to stop declaring dividends for investors, and instead cut prices below the price for which they could actually sell cars, while at the same time increasing the number of persons employed by his company. Ford said that he wanted to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars. He stated:
“My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.”
Minority shareholders objected, demanding that Ford continue to charge higher prices in order to pay them larger dividends…
The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto.
Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company’s assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19 million.
In other words, a corporation, like BP or ADM, can greenwash, that is, advertise and promulgate their “heartfelt” environmental and ecological sympathies all they want as a marketing ploy. That is legal. But if any of the actions they might undertake in support of these campaigns, in any way, shape, or form, undermines corporate profitability, well, that is illegal as all shit Jack, and they will be successfully sued in court by shareholders. So remember this well, and explain it to others, when you feel taken in by corporate greenwashing, or PBS propaganda. It is simply illegal for corporations to forego profits for any reason.
As a side note, the Dodge brothers used their share of the 19M to expand the competing Dodge Motor Company.
So that ends our tale of how the Dred Scott decision, and its remedy, the 14th amendment, inadvertently led to corporations becoming conscienceless, pathologically driven, profit maximizing leviathans. They have the rights of persons, but not the responsibilities. The way corporations make money is not by competing, as libertarian assholes might try to convince you of, but by externalizing costs. That is to say polluting the environment and getting you to pay for it, or using interstate trucking as a mode of transportation, and getting you to build the highways. But that is a story for another day.
Coming round to the point I made at the beginning of this argument, this is all important because this is the same Orwellian technique Scalia, Thomas et al. have been employing in Bakke and the two Bollinger cases in turning affirmative action on its head. I’m sure there are other examples as well. (Thoughts?) The point is that the right wing troglodites have learned it is far more advantageous to embrace progressive rulings and then work to slyly and covertly subvert their intent, rather than confontationally seeking to overthrow popularly supported legislation. Same with all their approach to abortion, acceed to the right, but make it darn near impossible to exercize.
Sorry for the length of this, folks. I thought it would be about three paragraphs when I started, but I seem to be suffering from loggorhea at the bar tonight.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 19 2006 4:20 utc | 15
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