Greetings!
I am extremely pleased to have just joined the network and within one day
read a posting on an issue directly related to my interests - Charles
Reid's thoughtful comments on corporations and the Constitution.
Progressive Corporate Law (Lawrence E. Mitchell ed., 1995), offers a
number of very good, critical chapters on corporate law in general and
contractarianism specifically. There is also a great deal of work
currently being done in the areas of corporations and human rights and
corporations and the Constitution. Of interest here are the articles
available on-line at Korten's People-Centered Development Forum
<http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/1997/>. The article titled "The United Nations
and the Corporate Agenda" is especially surprising. Ward Morehouse and the
Council on International and Public Affairs in New are also doing much
work in this area.
The National Lawyers Guild also has a very active committee on
Corporations, Democracy and Human Rights. As a member, I attended a series
of workshops organized by the Committee at the Guild's October Convention.
Workshop participants included Ralph Nader, Maude Barlow (Chair of the
Council of Canadians), Carl Mayer (a New Jersey political activist and law
teacher), Robert Bullard (Clark Atlanta University), Lance Compa (N.
American Commission for Labor Cooperation), and others.
What has come out of this Committee is a mission that echoes the very
relevant and urgent points raised in Charles' comments:
1. The recognition of the personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment is
unacceptable. Protections of the Bill of Rights are given to people out of
a concern for human dignity, liberty or equality. Corporate claims to such
protections should be rejected except in the rare instance that a
pervasive claim can be made that creating and enforcing the corporate
right is necessary to make the right meaningful for individuals. In all
cases the corporation's assertion of such right derives from and is
dependent upon the need to protect the rights of individual human beings.
2. Corporate participation in politics is presumptively illegitimate.
Therefore, e.g. Bellotti v. First National Bank (1978) upholding the right
of corporations to use their money to participate politically, should be
explicitly overruled to the extent that it has not already been implicitly
overruled in Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Comm (1990).
3. In all areas in which corporations exercise significant power over
people's lives, it is presumptively appropriate to require corporate
behavior to meet constitutional norms (just as government actors are
required to do), as well as to respect fundamental human rights. Current
law rarely imposes this obligation. Because of the type of power a
corporation exercises and the authority it receives from the state,
corporate actions should (in certain circumstances at least) be held to
constitute state action.
4. Democratic principles require that corporations respect and follow
rather than evade the local law of jurisdictions in which they do
business, unless that law is violative of fundamental principles of human
rights. With increased globalization, this principle becomes ever more
significant. Contrary to this, the US government is rapidly moving in the
direction of negotiating and endorsing international treaties that would
increasingly free international corporations from the obligation to comply
with local laws. The U.S. is also using its political leverage-through the
WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and other means-to obtain acquiescence from
countries whose domestic laws are likely to be overridden, particularly
developing nations. Although international controls over multinational
corporations are appropriate, international agreements should not be
allowed to free MNCs from the obligations of domestic law.
Peace,
elp
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| "The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion |
| and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to |
| change it." |
| -Noam Chomsky |
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