Purge the Merge!

So, back in February, I was asked to comment on the proposed merger between US cable television giants Comcast and TimeWarner Cable, essentially Comcast's acquisition of TWC, the latter an independent company with no ties to media giant TimeWarner since 2009. Comcast, on the other hand, is a major media corporation, not quite on the scale of TimeWarner proper, but the owner of NBCUniversal.

The request for a comment came from the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, where Comcast is king. For my part, I live in TimeWarner Cable territory. But that's besides the point, because the question of the benefits and costs of mergers such as this one transcends localities. But for the record, here's the comment I gave on the deal:

Consumers generally do not have a choice of which cable company to use, the companies are granted monopolies within given territories, so the short-term impact will be negligible. The long term impact will be negative, however, in that in the absence of strong regulation, monopolies have a tendency to overprice their products and services. The merger also makes it harder than ever to protect net neutrality, as Comcast becoming even more powerful will be in a better position to restrict access to certain parts of the internet, and charge more for that access, to in effect create a tier system for online access similar to the system used for cable channels. And since Comcast owns NBCUniversal, there are conflicts of interest between the corporation's role as content provider and carrier that are intensified by this expansion, and further impact net neutrality. The one saving grace in all this is that this trend may result in more effort being put into alternative delivery systems, such as fiber optics from telephone companies, satellite, perhaps an expansion of Internet2 to home delivery, and maybe even a renewed form of over-the-air digital broadcasting.

Now, let me take you to the actual article, written by Julio Ojeda-Zapata, and published on February 13th of this year. Entitled, Comcast-TimeWarner Deal Has Some History in the Twin Cities, the article obviously has a local slant, and you can read it over in its local environment by clicking on the link, or read it here on my more New York Metropolitan Area-based site.

Here's how it begins:

Comcast's proposed Time Warner Cable takeover, announced Thursday, would create a mega-national cable company. Whether that deal would have any immediate impact in the Twin Cities remains unclear, though, especially since Time Warner no longer has a foothold here.

Time Warner once offered its services in the city of Minneapolis and the west-metro suburbs, but Comcast took over that territory in August 2006 as part of a complicated $17.6 billion deal. At that time, the companies bought up the assets of bankrupt cable company Adelphia and then swapped territories around the country to consolidate their respective holdings.

That's when Comcast seized control of virtually the entire metro area, minus small pockets served by other companies like Charter Communications, which still operates in the region.

"We fought very hard to put the Twin Cities together, finally," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said at the time.

And the company is committed at the corporate level as well. It announced last month it is keeping its 700-employee regional headquarters in downtown St. Paul through 2024. From the offices across the Mississippi from downtown's core, Comcast oversees operations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas and Missouri.

For customers, the merger with Time Warner shouldn't significantly alter the operational landscape in the Twin Cities, at least in the short term.

And this is where I come in, with the long and the short of it:

"Consumers generally do not have a choice of which cable company to use, (since these) are granted monopolies within given territories, so the short-term impact will be negligible," said Lance Strate, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York City.

"The long term impact will be negative, however, in that in the absence of strong regulation, monopolies have a tendency to overprice their products and services," Strate added. "The merger also makes it harder than ever to protect net neutrality, as Comcast becoming even more powerful will be in a better position to restrict access to certain parts of the Internet, and charge more for that access."

 And do note that net neutrality has become even more of an issue over the intervening months as the Federal Communications Commission has proven to be less than vigorous in defense of this basic principle regarding online communication, especially in the face of attempts to undermine and eliminate net neutrality on the part of internet providers, i.e., cable and telephone companies.

But let's get back to the rest of the article, which is more concerned with competition among content and connectivity providers:

Barry Randall, a financial-portfolio manager in St. Paul for Boston-based Covestor Investment Management, recently saw his Comcast bill exceed $200 for the first time. He does not believe the proposed merger would have an appreciable short-term effect on that score, or anything else involving Comcast in this area.

But he does think Comcast is running scared because of long-term trends. He notes how more and more people are dumping cable TV for online-streaming options, and how wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T are building mobile broadband networks that are comparable to Comcast's Xfinity broadband Internet service in raw performance.

Randall smelled the desperation when he visited a Comcast store in Highland Park to pay his cable bill.

The company has been pushing its next-generation X1 television equipment, and "I could see the marketing effort first-hand," he said. "Anything that reduces the number of remotes in the living room is going to get a try, even while Comcast is subject to a changing competitive landscape."

Local observers have complained for years about the region's paucity of competing Internet providers with pricing and performance similar to Comcast's Internet access, a scenario not likely to change if and when Comcast gets regulatory approval to acquire Time Warner.

 While cable companies are given monopolies over their territories, here in the New York Metropolitan Area they compete with satellite TV services, and telephone companies. But it's easy to forget that other parts of the company don't have as many options as we do, just as, for those of us of a certain age, when we were growing up, we had access to seven VHF channels, including the three major commercial networks and PBS, whereas in other parts of the county, outside of similar major markets, folks might have had access to only one or two networks, and one or two local stations. Anyway, here's how the article ends:

David Lutchen, who runs Lutchen Computer Services in Cottage Grove, said Internet options other than Comcast border on the pitiful.

Verizon does not offer its fiber-optic-based Internet service in this area. CenturyLink does provide phone-based DSL service, but the infrastructure to support the service in Lutchen's area is spotty at best, he said, and connection speeds pale compared to those of Comcast broadband.

"We just don't have a very steady CenturyLink option," he said.

Comcast, in defending the proposed merger, said it will divest itself of several million cable subscribers to allay competitive concerns, and to make this deal more palatable for federal regulators, which need to sign off on it. Some such subscribers could be in the Twin Cities.

And hey, you can't blame them for focusing on the local angle, and the immediate impact on consumers. But we also need to talk about the large scale and long term impact on the media landscape, and the harmful effects of industry consolidation. 

Or to put it succinctly, let's purge the merge!

Lessons of Torah Law

As I have on previous occasions, this past Friday I took a turn as lay leader of Sabbath services at Congregation Adas Emuno.  You may recall that I have been on the Board of Trustees and was recently elected Vice-President of this small Temple, located in Leonia, which is in Bergen County, in northern New Jersey, and follows the tradition of Reform Judaism (and that I've set up a congregational blog at http://adasemuno.blogspot.com).  And as I have on previous occasions, I thought I'd share some of that experience with you.

After the opening section of the service, and before the call to worship (Barachu) prayer, I said that with the High Holy Days almost upon us, I thought I would read a poem (and song lyrics) by Leonard Cohen that was inspired by the Yom Kippur liturgy:

Who By Fire

Leonard Cohen

And who by fire?
Who by water,?
Who in the sunshine?
Who in the night time,?
Who by high ordeal?
Who by common trial?
Who in your merry merry month of May?
Who by very slow decay?
And who shall I say is calling?




And who in her lonely slip?
Who by barbiturate?
Who in these realms of love?
Who by something blunt?
And who by avalanche?
Who by powder,?
Who for his greed?
Who for his hunger,?
And who shall I say is calling?




And who by brave assent?
Who by accident?
Who in solitude?
Who in this mirror?
Who by his lady's command?
Who by his own hand?
Who in mortal chains?
Who in power?
And who shall I say is calling?

After reading this, I explained that in the call to worship, whether the call is issued by a rabbi, cantor, cohen (descendant of the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem from the House of Aaron, brother of Moses), or lay leader, the service leader is calling to the congregation to participate in the Sabbath services, to come to worship God.  In doing so, we all join together in calling to God to answer our prayers.

The service then proceeded as usual until we reached the point where it is customary to provide a sermon or D'var Torah (Word of Torah).  I prepared a bit of a talk about the week's Torah portion (parshah), which I'd like to share with you now:

This week’s Parshah is Ki Teitzei, which covers Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19.  Of the 613 laws and commandments contained within the Torah, 74 can be found in this section.  In the Reform tradition, we do not regard the laws as having been written or dictated by God, but as the historical product of fallible human beings, human beings who were struggling as they reached towards something greater than themselves, who were inspired by their sense of the sacred and the spiritual, moved by their relationship to God, and in a sense divinely inspired.
 
Many of the laws are difficult to relate to, as they speak to us from a time and place that was very different from our own.  There are laws about how to deal with a beautiful woman taken captive during war, and laws providing exemption from military service for newlywed men (maybe that's not so hard to relate to).  There are laws governing marriage and divorce, including laws pertaining to polygamous marriage, and laws concerning the virginity of brides.  There are laws about nocturnal emissions, laws against incest, prostitution, adultery, libel, and cross-dressing.  And there are laws about going to the bathroom back when there was no such thing as a bathroom to go to.


But together with laws that seem to have no relevance to our lives today, there are commandments that speak to us about the fundamental requirement for ethical behavior.  So, for example, we are told:

Chapter 21:22. If a man commits a sin for which he is sentenced to death, and he is put to death, you shall [then] hang him on a pole.  23. But you shall not leave his body on the pole overnight. Rather, you shall bury him on that [same] day, for a hanging [human corpse] is a blasphemy of God, and you shall not defile your land, which the Lord, your God, is giving you as an inheritance.

Yes, there were harsh punishments in ancient times, harsh justice for harsh times, but the line is drawn here between justice and vengence.  This commandment comes to us from the same era in which the Greeks were singing the songs of Homer, about how Achilles, the greatest hero of the Achaeans, killed Hector during the Trojan War, and tied his body to his chariot and dragged it around and around in front of the city, until finally Hector’s father, King Priam, comes out and begs Achilles to let him bury his son’s body.  For our ancestors, that kind of behavior was outlawed by the Torah.


And we are commanded to watch out for each other:

Chapter 22:1. You shall not see your brother's ox or sheep straying, and ignore them. [Rather,] you shall return them to your brother.  2. But if your brother is not near you, or if you do not know him, you shall bring it into your house, and it shall be with you until your brother seeks it out, whereupon you shall return it to him. 3. So shall you do with his donkey, and so shall you do with his garment, and so shall you do with any lost article of your brother which he has lost and you have found. You shall not ignore [it]. 4. You shall not see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen [under its load] on the road, and ignore them. [Rather,] you shall pick up [the load] with him.

And a few verses later:

8. When you build a new house, you shall make a guard rail for your roof, so that you shall not cause blood [to be spilled] in your house, that the one who falls should fall from it [the roof].

And still later:

Chapter 23:16. You shall not deliver a slave to his master if he seeks refuge with you from his master. 17. [Rather,] he shall [be allowed to] reside among you, wherever he chooses within any of your cities, where it is good for him. You shall not oppress him. 

Here we see the great value that we place on freedom in our tradition, which is not surprising given our biblical history of  Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, and how Pharaoh enslaved the Israelities.  And so we find the following commandment:

Chapter 23:7. If a man is discovered kidnapping any person from among his brothers, of the children of Israel, and treats him as a slave and sells him that thief shall die, so that you shall clear out the evil from among you.

Zero tolerance! 


We also find laws about how to conduct business including the use of honest weights and measures, who we can charge interest to and who we can’t, how to deal with loans and security, and the commandment to treat workers fairly:

Chap. 24:14. You shall not withhold the wages of a poor or destitute hired worker, of your brothers or of your strangers who are in your land within your cities. 15. You shall give him his wage on his day and not let the sun set over it, for he is poor, and he risks his life for it, so that he should not cry out to the Lord against you, so that there should be sin upon you.  

There is an obvious connection between these ancient commandments and the significant Jewish involvement in labor unions and the struggle for worker’s rights that took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 


The Torah also introduces what was then a novel notion of personal responsibility, that individuals alone are responsible for their actions, and guilt, and punishment, ought not to be transferred onto members of their family.  And so the law declares:

16. Fathers shall not be put to death because of sons, nor shall sons be put to death because of fathers; each man shall be put to death for his own transgression.

And especially significant is the following passage, which outlines not simply charity, but our tzedakah, our obligation to the poor, which begins and ends with a reminder of our humble origins:

18. You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord, your God, redeemed you from there; therefore, I command you to do this thing. 19. When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to take it; it shall be [left] for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord, your God, will bless you in all that you do. 20. When you beat your olive tree, you shall not deglorify it [by picking all its fruit] after you; it shall be [left] for the stranger, the orphan and the widow. 21. When you pick the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean after you: it shall be [left] for the stranger, the orphan and the widow. 22. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt: therefore, I command you to do this thing.

So, what lessons can we learn from this?


First there is the idea of Law itself, and the Torah constitutes one of the first systems of law.  Law was a new idea in the ancient world, it was an invention that transformed our concept of justice.  Before there was law, people had a sense of what was right and wrong, of what was permitted and forbidden, but nothing was clearly spelled out.  Judges would resolve disputes and decide on punishments based on their intuitions and assumptions.  And they would rely on myths and parables, narratives like the story of Cain and Abel, and try to figure out if the case before them was similar to the story or if it was different, and to what extent it was different.  This was how societies functioned before there was writing.  With the Hebrew aleph-bet, it was possible to write down a set of laws, and instead of a parable, you could have a clear and simple statement like, You shall not murder.  This is much more abstract, it’s not a matter of comparing two specific, concrete examples, it requires us to apply a general rule to a specific instance.  It requires a new kind of thinking, one that today we consider to be a more highly developed mode of thought.


It is important to understand that back in biblical times, Judaism was not simply a religion as we understand religions to be today.  The Torah also represented the culture of the Jewish people, our history, and our political system, as well as our legal system—it was our constitution.  And the problem with written law is that it needs to be interpreted, and this became more and more true as time passed, and so we developed the tradition of interpretation, and Talmudic scholarship.  The written law gave us the stability and continuity we needed to survive, even without a land of our own.  And the need to continually interpret and reinterpret the law gave us the flexibility we needed to be able to adapt to changing circumstances, changing times, changing cultures, over the centuries.  It is that practice of ongoing interpretation that serves as the justification of our branch of Judaism, of the Reform movement.


Of course, our tradition of law has much to do with the fact that so many of our people choose to pursue legal careers in the modern, secular world.  And, in introducing law, and legal thinking back in the ancient world, the Torah introduced new ideas such as the idea that everyone is equal before the Law.  Not only did this place special emphasis on the value of equality, but it also meant that every person was to be considered equal as an individual.  Today, we take individualism for granted, but it was almost unheard of back then, when all anyone knew was tribalism.  So while the 613 laws and commandments included some rather strict discipline, we can also understand it as part of an amazing revolution that wrenched our people out of a tribal mentality and put us on the path to modern world, and in doing so, provided a foundation for all of western civilization.


The lesson of law is associated with a second lesson, that of Order.  There is an interesting, you might say curious aversion to mixing in the Torah.  For example:

Chap. 22:9. You shall not sow your vineyard [together with] a mixed variety of species, lest the increase, even the seed that you sow and the yield of the vineyard [both] become forbidden. 10. You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. 11. You shall not wear a mixture of wool and linen together. 

Perhaps this where we get our fashion sense?  (No mention of synthetics here.)  But it also is related to our kosher laws concerning food.  And this overall concern with order may seem odd to us, but when you think about it, our God is a creator of order, God creates by organizing, and differentiating, separating darkness from light, night from day, sky from earth, humans from the animals, man from woman, and the Sabbath from the weekdays.  The Torah introduces a new kind of orderly thinking in opposition to chaotic times.


A third lesson is that of holiness.  The specifics are less important, say, the law that a bastard cannot enter the assembly of God, which may have seemed righteous in ancient days, as a way to drive home the sanctity of marriage, but does not resonate with us today.  But the important point is the general lesson of order again, in this instance distinguishing between the sacred and the profane, so that we will show respect for what is sacred.


A fourth lesson is cleanliness, and in the Torah it is related to being holy, but it also reflects a concern about health and disease.  This is a very powerful theme in the Torah, and no doubt the basis in our tradition for the special interest that we have had in the medical profession, the contemporary phenomenon of Jewish doctors.


There is a fifth lesson here, in the often repeated command to remember that we were slaves in Egypt.  The lesson is memory itself.  It is not enough to write things down, we have to commit them to memory.  This was especially true at a time when there were very few written documents, and very few copies of the ones that did exist.  Writing was understood to be an aid to memory, not a substitute for remembering, as we see it today.  And while the written word appealed to the intellect, memory is more than just a mental operation.  When we memorize something, we learn it by heart, we bind it to ourselves through love, it involves the body as well as the mind, and it becomes a part of our soul.  The commandment to Remember is one of the central themes in our tradition.
  
In the end, the question that our tradition and our religion centers around is not, What is the nature of the Divine?  Our understanding of God is an abstract one, one that could only come from a people whose way of life and mode of thought had been altered by literacy, by writing and reading, by the aleph-bet.  And so our understanding of the Divine is that there is only one God, one God alone, and that God is invisible, omniscient, omnipresent, and almighty, that God created nature, but exists apart from nature and the material world, that God is transcendent.  So, we don’t trouble ourselves with how many gods there are, or what does God look like, or God’s gender, or even God’s personality very much.  Instead, the question that we ask is, What does God want?  That is, What does God want from us?  Or to put it more clearly, How does God want us to live our lives?  That is the question that Judaism revolves around, and that the Torah provides an answer.  And the answer was never better summarized, never better stated than when the prophet Micah (6:8) declared

God has told you, O man, what is good. And what does God require of you?  Only to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

Shabbat Shalom.

At this point, we completed the service, and then, in lieu of the usual closing hymn, given the theme of law and social justice, we sang Bob Dylan's anthem, inspired by our liturgy and tradition, "Blowing in the Wind"--here are the lyrics:

Blowing In The Wind


Bob Dylan


How many roads must a man walk down,

Before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove fly,

Before she sleeps in the sand?

And how many times must a cannon ball fly,
Before they're forever banned?
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
Ghe answer is blowing in the wind.




How many years can a mountain exist,
Before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist,

Before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head,

And pretend that he just doesn't see?


The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,

The answer is blowing in the wind.




How many times must a man look up,

Before he sees the sky?
And how many ears must one man have,

Before he can hear people cry?

And how many deaths will it take till we know,

That too many people have died?



The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,

The answer is blowing in the wind.




The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,

The answer is blowing in the wind.



I wasn't sure how that would would work out, but it is a very singable song, after all, and it sounded pretty darn good when we sang it!  It was a fitting finale for a fine Shabbat service!

The Kagan and Graham Show

Elena Kagan's Senate Confirmation Hearings for her nomination as a Supreme Court Justice have been especially noteworthy for her good humor, as well as her exceptional intelligence.  And what could be more priceless than her response to Senator Lindsay Graham's question about where she was on Christmas Day?

I do like Graham's remark that family is what Hannukah and Christmas are all about! That's a resolution that people of all different faiths and political persuasions can confirm!  

And it goes without saying that July is the perfect time to wish you all a Happy Holiday Season!

The Supreme Identification of Persons and Corporations

Another recent news item that has generated a great deal of internet and media buzz is the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns.  My friend and colleague Paul Levinson is one of the few people I know who thinks the ruling was correct and beneficial, and you can read his statement over on his blog in a post he called, Why the Supreme Court Decision Allowing Direct Corporate Spending on Elections is Correct.   

Paul is a vigorous defender of the First Amendment, a First Amendment literalist cut from the same cloth as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (who, like me, was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity--once a Beta, always a Beta, everywhere a Beta, or so we used to say).

Now, while I don't share Paul's position on the First Amendment, that issue does not concern me here.  Nor do I wish to go into the corrupting potential of unrestricted corporate spending on political campaigns (but see what former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said about the potential for undue influence on the judiciary, on the judiciary mind you, beyond officials elected to the legislative and executive branches of federal, state, and local governments: O'Connor Calls Citizens United Ruling 'A Problem').  These are all very important matters, and all have been the subject of serious discussion, and ultimately these are the issues that matter in this case.

And yet, it seems that the lion's share of the attention, at least as far as I can ascertain, has centered around the fact that the ruling involved the legal decision to grant corporations the legal status of persons.  This was a 19th century decision, traced back to the Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County (home of Fordham University's "sister" school, Santa Clara University) v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company 118 U.S. 394 (1886).  According to the rat haus reality press website, which provides a page devoted to the case, it was the result of a clerical error or unauthorized addition.  Here's what they provide by way of preamble to the actual text of the decision:

This is the text of the 1886 Supreme Court decision granting corporations the same rights as living persons under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Quoting from David Korten's The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism (pp.185-6):

          In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution. 

          Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that

          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 opinion that it does.

          The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that

          The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

          Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.  

          The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

 And yes, this equation offers up all sorts of confusions, contradictions, and uncertainties.  An article on the controversy in the online magazine Slate bears the title, The Pinocchio Project, and the subtitle, "Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy."  The Huffington Post, another online periodical, ran a humor piece entitled Supreme Court Ruling Spurs Corporation To Run for Congress:First Test of "Corporate Personhood" In Politics.   And here's what the most trusted man in America (since Walter Cronkite, at least in certain circles) had to say about it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Supreme Corp
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

 Now, just to be clear about all this, the legal system does distinguish between a "natural person" (which is what the rest of us mean by "person") and "legal person" (which is the kind of person a corporation is deemed to be, as explained in the wikipedia entry on the subject), sometimes referred to as an "artificial person" as well.  A "legal person" is a "legal fiction" which in a sense means that it's a fictional person, I guess...

 So, person₁ is not person₂ after all.  Longtime readers of this blog (meaning anyone who read my last blog post, Be Very Afraid) may recall that this is an example of indexing, one of the extensional devices associated with general semantics, as a way to help us avoid the problem of identification that our language encourages.  

A legal person is not a natural person, it's all legal terminology that may confuse the rest of us, but not jurists, right?


Well, that's in question here, since the decision seems to be about extending to corporations the legal rights of natural persons.   As explained on the website called The Straight Dope, in response to the question, "How can a corporation be legally considered a person"

What most people don't know is that after the above-mentioned 1886 decision, artificial persons were held to have exactly the same legal rights as we natural folk. (Not to mention the clear advantages corporations enjoy: they can be in several places at once, for instance, and at least in theory they're immortal.) Up until the New Deal, many laws regulating corporations were struck down under the
"equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment--in fact, that clause was invoked far more often on behalf of corporations than former slaves. Although the doctrine of personhood has been weakened since, even now lawyers argue that an attempt to sue a corporation for lying is an unconstitutional infringement on its First Amendment right to free speech. (This year, for example, we saw Nike v. Kasky.)

Unless lawyers and judges have some general semantics education, such as the esteemed Frank J. Scardilli, Esq., a longtime Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics who has discussed just these kinds of issues on many occasions, officers of the court are just as prone as anyone else to make erroneous identifications.  Call a corporation a person and you start to think of it as a person, and even if you started out with the distinction between the legal and the natural.  



Moreover, apart from the legal fiction, the very word corporation constitutes a metaphor of embodiment, the root corp meaning body, incorporation meaning to give the entity a body, to make corporeal.


Ordinary people to do not, ordinarily, think of corporations as persons.  We think of them as businesses, organizations, and several other things I cannot name here because Blog Time Passing is a family blog.  It's folks working in the legal sector that talk about corporations as persons, and are vulnerable to falling into the trap of identification, of thinking

Corporation=Person

when they should be thinking instead

Corporation≠Person

 Legal logic, like symbolic logic, allows us to make equations that make perfect sense in that symbolic realm, that universe of discourse, that deductive system, but that do not match up to the reality that we know through our senses, and our common sense.  

The legal map does not correspond to the territory, and the response on the part of critics has been ridicule, and rightly so.

And so, we find ourselves asking questions, some serious, some laughable.


If a corporation is a person, can it be subject to criminal charges?  Actually it can, at least under some legal systems, although typically it's those natural persons who are corporate officers who are charged with crimes.  Corporations can be fined, and sued of course, but can they be imprisoned?  Can they be subject to capital punishment?  Perhaps by being dissolved?  Can they be arrested?


Can corporations vote?  Can they run for office?  Can they be drafted?  Are corporations citizens of a nation?  (They are, in a sense, the nation and state in which a corporation is incorporated.)  Can they immigrate and become citizens of another country?  

Can corporations marry?  The Jon Stewart segment suggests that the answer is yes, in the sense that they can merge.  So corporations can marry each other, but can they marry a natural person?  Could I marry Time-Warner, or Apple?  Could we have children together?  Well, maybe not in the biological sense, but maybe adopt?  Can a corporation be a parent, or legal guardian of a child?  (Isn't that what happened in the movie, The Truman Show?)

As persons, can corporations be owned?  Clearly they are, but does that make them slaves? Can they be freed?  (Many would say that corporations are our masters, not our slaves.)  We might well remember that there was a time when African-American slaves were not considered persons in this country, or at best 3/5 of a person.  Sadly, we have not always granted the status of person to all human beings. 

If corporations are artificial persons, does that mean that robots can also attain that status?  What is a corporation, after all, but a kind of intelligent machine whose parts include natural persons.  (I get this insight from Lewis Mumford, and for a foundational media ecology scholar's insights on this specific topic, see Peter Drucker's 1946 book, The Concept of the Corporation.)  It's science fiction, sure, but this line of legal thinking opens the question up, after all.

If corporations are, in a sense, fictional persons, can other fictional persons also have rights?  Like maybe Superman, Spider-Man, Mickey Mouse, and the like--except they are corporate trademarks anyway.  Maybe Santa Claus, or Johnny Appleseed, or Tom Sawyer, or Paul Bunyan?


No, no, this will not do, not at all.  I am reminded of a line from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.  In describing a fictional novel by the fictional novelist Kilgore Trout of a fictional future where suicide parlors have been introduced as a solution to overpopulation, he writes

One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said: 'Certainly, honey.' And he said, 'I sure hope so, I want to ask something I never was able to find out down here.' 'What's that?' she said, strapping him in. 'What in hell are people for?'

 What in hell are people for?  It's a question we don't have to reserve for the afterlife, or for God, it's a question we can ask ourselves, right here and now.  

One of our central media ecology scholars, Walter Ong, described his philosophy as personalism, the philosophy of the human person.  And it certainly makes sense to me to say, forget about these categories of natural and legal persons, let's just talk about human persons.  And corporations are nothing more than extensions of human persons, meaning that they are inventions, technologies, media.


Of course, the whole reason why the doctrine of corporate personhood was adopted in the first place was to allow corporations to enter into contracts, to hire and fire employees, to buy and sell property, to be sued (which limits the liability of the stock holders and employees), and later to be subject to taxation.  

So, taking all that into consideration, if corporations are not called persons, what else might they be called?  What other entities, aside from persons, can enter into legal and economic transactions?  

The answer seems clear enough to me:  Sovereign entities.  States.  Nations. Governments.  Just as corporations are incorporated, made into bodies, states (along with other organizations) have constitutions, are constituted.  The parallels are quite clear, but also quite discomforting.  We quite rightly can be concerned, and fearful at the thought of the corporation as a sovereignty.  

But corporations already are states, in effect.  And rather than deluding ourselves with legal fictions of corporate personhood, let's work with the legal realities.  Let's talk about and think about and act upon corporations as nations.  We will be, sooner or later.  We can make treaties with corporations, and we can go to war with them if need be.


This would make for a map that would better correspond to the territory, and it may well mean that we'll need new kinds of maps as well.  A new way of looking at the world that we already are living in.  Korzybski, who was a severe critic of commericialism (see his first book, Manhood of Humanity) would undoubtedly approve.