Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 23:42:22 +1000
Subject: AUT: (fwd) NOT A JOKE: GW Bush's Quote on "Corporate Personhood";


Several days ago I posted the text report of a speech reported to have
been made by GWBush at the Yale Law School - on the subject of
"CORPORATIONS" - More than one recipient thought this was a JOKE post - I
did not then report the source of the story.

The following is relevant to the valiidity of the story. The Presidential
Exploratory Committee web page located at:
http://www.gwbush.com/
contains a similar item which I'm attaching below

Cheers
MichaelP


 =============================---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 1999 22:34:14 -0700
From: Michael Givel <mgivel-AT-earthlink.net>

        The source of GW Bush's speech on "corporate personhood" is his
Presidential Exploratory Committee web page located at:
http://www.gwbush.com/ The web page also links and references the
following organizations for further information: http://www.poclad.org/ or
http://www.ratical.com/corporations/. The entire text of the proposal is
below.

        What is interesting about these proposals and other similar ones
by groups such as the Program for Corporations, Law, and Democracy or
POCLAD is that they are essentially trying to have the state more directly
regulate and determine legal liability for corporate behavior.  If you
commit a business tort under these proposals, the corporation, officers,
or shareholders will be personally held liable. In the case of some
"felonious" corporate actions, they would be dechartered.

        At first blush, this may sound like a good reform proposal.

        But upon further thought (which I have done on the subject in
recent months), is it really? What advocates of this approach are
attempting to do is create a kinder and gentler capitalist system which
requires an ever vigilant state or national government to ensure that
corporations are acting within civilized procedures. A really tall order
that I don't think is possible.

        For instance, if you don't think the actions of say, UNOCAL, are
within the realm of ecological respect or human rights, then decharter
them.  What is missing from this scheme is the fact that capital naturally
moves toward monopoly and concentration both within nations and globally.
So, dechartering UNOCAL would simply mean that other large energy
companies would quickly move to take over their market. Would they be any
better than UNOCAL? No. Just look at Shell Oil or Chevron's practices for
example.

        Even if a government could ride herd over all companies at once to
make sure that their practices are "ethical" what is also missing from
this proposal is the requirement of corporations to make profits also
means by economic necessity and survival that corporations will engage in
activities that use or acquire natural resources and labor. Just look at
the history of labor and capitol struggles in the last 100 years. The list
is endless as to ruthless actions by companies big and small to exploit
their workers and degrade the environment.

        I think that I would take Bush's proposal a lot more seriously if
he ALSO proposed repealing the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act or
called for a bill that did not allow replacement strikers or repealed
prohibition against secondary boycotts during labor disputes (current US
labor law). All of these things would increase the power of workers in
relation to capital in real world and often harsh labor disputes in a way
that would be directly effective with respect to social and economic
justice for the workers involved in the disputes.

        Finally, the call for state or national government to be ever
vigilant in regulation of corporate abuse means that there would need to
be politicians with a political base in a movement or party that would
demand such actions. Where, with a few exceptions, is that a reality on
this planet? Certainly not in the politically and conservative U.S. From
what I know of Canadian politics (and if I'm wrong, then the folks on the
list from Canada should correct me) not in Canada and not in most other
places.

        In essence without, the political organization to defend and
promote such a law or laws, I think that the law would simply be on the
books and relatively toothless. A good example of that is the coalition of
groups in California who recently petitioned the Secretary of State of
California to decharter UNOCAL. That symbolic petition was quickly denied.
There is now a second attempt to decharter UNOCAL and it too I predict,
will be denied. The reason being is that the coalition of liberal groups
who made the petition in California do not have a mass movement backing
them up; rather this is being played as an elite lawyers game within
institutions dominated by politicians, judges, and bureaucrats who support
the status quo.


Michael Givel

=========================

BUSH GETS TOUGH ON "LIMITED LIABILITY"

Plan would help corporations become fully human

Governor and likely Presidential candidate George W. Bush announced
yesterday a bold new "tough on crime" initiative that would imprison or
fine shareholders for corporate crimes committed in their name. Punishment
would depend on the severity of the crime and the number of shares owned.
(Click here for a few specific examples.)

The ultimate aim of the program, Bush said, is to help corporations
achieve their long-term goals. "Corporations have spent the last century
and a half trying to obtain all the legal rights of people," Bush said.
"They're now technically persons, but they're not really human. We owe it
to them--and to our species--to help them finish their quest."

Bush went on to explain that corporations still, even today, lack one
distinguishing human characteristic: a conscience. "Corporations were
invented to keep investors innocent of crimes committed with the help of
their money, accidentally or not. But now that corporations have become
almost legally human, they have to be taught that their actions have
consequences."

Bush said that while "tough on crime" policy has been shown to be useless
with humans, it would work with corporations. "Corporations are just
machines, not like teenage kids. They can be forced to act as if they knew
right from wrong."  "Corporate behavior has become a very loud cry for
'tough love,'" the governor said. "We've got to adapt to a changing world,
and sometimes that means changing laws."

Appropriate punishments

When the governor spoke in detail about proper punishment regimens for
corporate crimes, he tellingly began with what is not punishment.

"Fines are not punishment, they do not build character," Bush said.
"What's a ten-million-dollar fine to a giant corporation? Fines seldom if
ever affect the pocketbooks of shareholders or managers, those who make
the decisions or power the machine. But hitting pockets and people
directly is a totally different thing."

"We must remove the burden for controlling corporations from big
government, from regulation and fines, and place it squarely on the
judiciary," Bush said.

Bush outlined his unique two-tiered punishment program, which would punish
corporations for legal infractions according to their severity. Bush
explained that there would be two "suites" of punishment, for levels of
crime roughly corresponding to misdemeanors and felonies.

In one "suite"--for "misdemeanors" like bilking taxpayers of seven-figure
dollar amounts, overcharging consumers, attempting monopolies, and
contributing to simple human troubles like asthma and brief bouts of
homelessness--punishment would take the form of short- or long-term share
confiscation. (Click here for legal precedent.) Dividends of confiscated
shares would pay for remedial actions, where possible, as well as
public-good programs like the education of human prisoners.

"My own brother was a player in the Savings and Loan scandal," Bush said,
"but he's prepared to face the consequences. Remedies for serious problems
are never easy, especially when they hit at the root."

The second punishment "suite," for "felonies"--causing major diseases,
committing homicide, contributing to national disasters in the U.S. or
abroad, large-scale bilking of taxpayers, etc.--would involve direct
punishment of the shareholders in question.

The Governor used Union Carbide's 1984 Bhopal massacre, in which thousands
of villagers were killed by lethal gas, as an example of a crime that
would be classified as a "felony." Others included the German industry
forced-labor cases, the Mattel sweatshop fires, etc. (While retroactive
prosecutions based on new laws are usually not permissible, these crimes
might be, based on the pending Pinochet case, as well as the Nuremberg
cases of 1945.)

In the Union Carbide example, the Governor took out a pocket calculator
and tallied up figures. Each death would cost the company a "negligent
homicide"  charge, for approximately twenty years of incarceration each.
Twenty years multiplied by 2000 equals 40,000 years in prison, with
aggravating actors such as a lack of remorse or compassion tripling the
total.

This penalty would be divided among Union Carbide shareholders, each of
whom could expect to spend from a few weeks to several years in prison,
depending on the size of their investment. A minimum penalty could be set
by a judge--so that an investor with even a fraction of a share would be
liable for that minimum, say two weeks in jail. (This would apply even to
those who had invested via "mutual funds," without knowing the precise
direction of their investments.)

Although Bush addressed with ease most questions concerning the punishment
programs, he admitted that several major problems remain to be solved.
The death penalty, for example, while often merited in corporate crime
cases, had no obvious application--"We can't talk about 'little deaths'
here," said Bush, making an obscure bilingual pun better left
untranslated.

Also, the issue of global markets poses some problems, Bush said. "These
penalties will eventually have to be agreed on by a global governing body
like the WTO, not only here at home in Texas and America. Otherwise we may
create a better market here, but the changes will be irrelevant in the
bigger picture. And influencing such a powerful and state-independent body
as the WTO is a very involved process."

Despite these problems, Bush and his team remain confident that their
corporate-punishment program will greatly improve the human landscape.
"We feel certain that in this case as in all other free-market cases, the
search for the right combination will do nothing but benefit consumers."

Why human?

Bush called corporate efforts to obtain the legal rights of humans
"compassionate greed," and said that it was "not entirely about getting
richer."

"You'd have to be very cynical to think that corporations, when they won
protection as 'persons' under the 'Freed Slave' Amendment, were thinking
only of their own wealth," Bush said. He was referring to the 14th
Amendment, which had been designed to protect the rights of freed slaves,
and which was used in 1886 to establish corporations as "natural persons"
under the law.

"It's clear that corporations just admire humans and what we have. We
should be good hosts and help them however we can. Right now, that means
making them responsible and responsive."

Good for markets?

While some experts dispute whether corporations can actually become human
beings, most agree that punishing corporations for the crimes they commit
will at the very least have a positive effect on the market.

"Everyone agrees that government regulation makes markets sluggish,"  said
Bush, whose proposals were drafted by a blue-ribbon team of economists and
social scientists headed by Yale sociologist Dalton Conley.

"Government regulation has been necessary because it's the only controls
we've had," Bush said. "But if each shareholder is personally responsible
for corporate crimes--from safety errors all the way down to lies about
quality--then you've got market controls, just like that."

"Not only will big government and regulation become unnecessary," Bush
said, but you'll also eliminate the need for several layers of management,
which will be great for profits."

Bush dismissed concerns that personal liability for corporate crimes might
discourage individual investors from taking a risk. "People love to
gamble," he said, "and this will make it all very real."

For those who do not thrive on such risks, Bush suggested that the mutual
fund industry would easily adopt new decision-making processes, just as it
has in the past. "The prime mechanism of regulation will be shareholder
judgement.  If investment in one company is likely to land you in jail,
you'll invest in another instead. Mutual fund companies will find it an
exciting challenge to obtain and keep investor confidence--it will
reinvigorate the industry, and in fact the whole concept of investment."

  For more information on corporate history, please visit
   http://www.poclad.org/ or http://www.ratical.com/corporations/.

================



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