radman wrote:
> From: "Eddie Black" <eddiecoyote@earthlink.net>
> Subject: RE: How do we win?
>
> [snip]
>
> None of these are our enemy. Our enemy is the idea that a corporate entity
> has the same rights, under the Constitution, as an American does.
This won't quite do for several reasons. First of all, a dog might bite you
but the idea of a dog won't. And, the Constitution meaning whatever
judges say it means, corporate entities do in material fact have not only
the same rights under the constituion as an American does but *more*
rights. A corporation can't be sent to the gas chamber, for example, or
beaten up by the police.
But where did this right come from? Corporations did not in fact become
central to the u.s. economy until well *after* the Court gave them
protection under the 14th amendment. In other words the right came
first, and that right was created by people very like the small shop
owners that this post defends -- that is, small shop owners who wanted
to become big owners. That's the trouble with little independent
businessmen. They eventually eat each other up and the remainder become
big corporate businessmen.
It really is misleading to blame the big bad corporations. You should read
Upton Sinclair's *Brass Check*, written a century ago, not about big
corporations but about the individual and independent newspapaper owners
who some people are so nostalgic for. Those independent publishers were
every bit as nasty as any of the big media congomerates today. The publisher
of the News Palladium in my home town of Benton Harbor Michigan used
to publish lies every bit as vicious as any now published in the Wall St.
Journal or any of the big conglomerates today.
Carrol
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