Employers of Religion

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

People have freedom of religion guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Lately there has been controversy—for example, in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby—about whether corporations need such a freedom as well. I can help answer that: No. They do not.

People can already assert individual rights to religion. When a person creates a corporation, he no more needs additional religious rights for that corporation than a person with a megaphone needs additional free speech rights for that megaphone. A corporation is not a new and distinct human being.†

Corporations are avatars that represent people, performing actions on their behalf, but with augmented strength. But, in so doing, they are like the “power loader” exoskeleton donned by the character Ripley in the movie Alien, or like the superhero armor worn by Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. These vehicles magnify the power of their wearers over others.

It all begins with an understanding that the ones with the brains, with the religion, with the political intent, and with the ethical responsibility are real, natural people who own these corporations. Everything else about corporations is just a vehicle for packaging and focusing power under their control. With rights come responsibilities, and if there is to be neither desire nor mechanism to hold corporations to the simplest social graces that we would demand of any civil person, then we must not think of them as we do civil people.

Consolidated and magnified power, unfettered by the social graces, does not require protection. Indeed, those without magnified power, those at the mercy of such power, are the ones needing protection. That's why we have rights at all—so that puny little people like any of us can stand up against bigger entities, like companies and governments. To say that then companies and governments need the same rights as ordinary people is to make a mockery of the very purpose of our rights. It is to diminish and dismantle human rights, not to extend them.

If a corporation imposes ethical choices upon employees, that's not the corporation protecting its natural rights. That's a person or a gang of people using the magnified power of employment to coerce other people not to follow their own religious beliefs. We've learned to recognize such coercion in the case of sexual harassment, and to understand that there is a responsibility of the powerful in an employment situation not to coerce the behavior of the weak. This is really no different.

The analogy may confuse you if you are comparing religion to sexual harassment, but that's not the right point of view. Both sex and religion can be beautiful things, but only when freely elected. Either forced sex or forced religion is an atrocity. An exercise of power, devoid of joy. A crime.

We allow an employer to use threats of firing to maintain a certain degree of order within a company, but only as long as that order relates to the business. We do not and must never allow employers to use any such threats to coerce behavior outside the scope of the business.

As a free citizen of the United States, you may choose what parts of your religion you like or don't. You can elect to be Jewish and yet perhaps you eat cheeseburgers. And yes, you can be Catholic and still use birth control. These are personal choices you make. Your religious advisors may even be offended. But that's between you and them, not between you and your employer. If your employer is allowed to intervene, even if he thinks he's just exercising his freedom of religion, he's using his magnified power to disallow you from exercising your own.

And that's the crux of it, the meta-rule of religion: Your religious rights stop when they start to infringe mine. We each must leave space for one another. Birth control is a personal choice, and something we each need to decide for ourselves. Employees do not make birth control decisions for their employers, and the same must be true in reverse. Any pretense that the company has a religious need separate from and beyond that of the owners just distracts from the fact that the owner's sphere of personal influence is being allowed to be bigger than by any right it should be.

Moreover, it will not stop there. The issues in question are not about the company being asked to pay for birth control, but merely about a company being asked to pay for access to a company that might pay for birth control. There is already an indirection in place. This indirection is really no different than the fact that the company is paying wages to a person who might pay for birth control, and the next natural step is to allow the company to control what happens with those wages.

It is simply not the company's business in either case. Health care is needed by employees, and it's up to each employee's sense of ethics and religion to elect what is appropriate, within the bounds of the law, to satisfy that need. For a company to dictate more is to either privately dictate a person's ethics and religion or to privately dictate the bounds of law. Either is unacceptable.

Corporations are not people. They do not get offended. Owners of companies get offended. And, if we let them, they'll use their artificial shells of power, like the image of the wizard in the Wizard of Oz, to make their sense of being offended more seem bigger, more important, and more menacing in order to coerce behavior. Corporations might dictate rules that must be followed by employees to keep their jobs. These powers may often be justified as needed for the correct function of the business, and the quality of its product. But there is no correct function of any business in play with the use of birth control—except, ironically, that some businesses might be adversely affected if the people working for them cannot avoid pregnancy and become distracted by an inability to plan the size and timing of their respective families.

Birth control must be the choice of the employee because it is an activity beyond the scope of employment. There is no defensible corporate interest in keeping employees from having control over family matters. It is a naked abuse of power by certain business owners over their employees and a perfect illustration of why corporations must not be accorded some artificially drawn freedom of religion.

Corporate religion is just institutionalized coercion trying to take hold.

We the Flesh-and-Blood People must draw a line.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This third and final part of a 3-part series was originally published December 6, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The first part was Corporations Are Not People. The second part was We The People (and Corporations).

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, incorporation, corporations, corporate personhood, legal personhood, legal person, legal personality, taxation, crimes, punishment, imprisonment, life, death, death penalty, urination, trickle down, census, social security, robbery, slavery, human trafficking, murder, pro-life, childhood, contracts, travel, passport, visa, home country, citizen, citizenship, speech, religion, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, religious freedom, philosophy, ethics, vote, voter, voting, run for office, running for office, candidate, elect, election, elected, office holder

Footnote

†Note that even if you disagree with me, and think that a corporation really is a distinct person, the problem is that such so-called legal people are veritably required under stockholder theory to behave sociopathically. See my article Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics for an elaboration of why. In such cases, where legal people are neither asked nor expected to exhibit other-than-selfish behavior, special restrictions to hold that selfish behavior in check, not special encouragement to be as free as possible in the exercise of that selfish behavior, would seem more appropriate. The notion of a free society is based precisely in the assumption that most of us will not behave sociopathically. It is a calculated gamble that we will tend to do well by each other if allowed the chance. It would be irrational to make such a gamble situations where we do not have such an expectation.

We The People (and Corporations)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Corporations are “legal people.” I explained yesterday why this made no sense. But it's our current jurisprudence, which is to say it's how we do things ’round here, and that sad fact dates back to the 19th century to some very old US Supreme Court cases, particularly the 1819 case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward and the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. So, unfortunately, there's been a lot of time in the interim for this badly conceived legal philosophy to work its ugly tendrils into the fabric of our society.

Before Copernicus figured out that the planets revolve around the Sun instead of the Earth, the orbits of the planets were thought to twist and turn in baroque ways. It wasn't true, but it seemed that way to astronomers of the day because they were building on an inappropriate foundation. The change in law from a “person” being just a person, to a “person” being either a person or something that is really very clearly not a person, is like going back in time to those days when we thought planets didn't revolve around the sun.

Words are the foundation upon which we build our civilization. The specific words we use are arbitrary in origin, but once chosen and used, our brains become wired to have certain memories, associations, and intuitions about them. Although corporate personhood has existed for ages, the practice of asserting it in order to gain far-reaching political power seems more recent. It started out as a way of asserting the legitimacy or manner in which corporations sign contracts or pay taxes, issues one might reasonably want to clarify for corporations, whether they are people or not. But more recently it has been used to imply that we should give rights or make accommodations to corporations simply because “they are people.” After all, people have rights and corporations are people, so—voilà!—corporations have rights, right?

Well, no. Not right. We are wired to react in certain reflexive ways to primitive concepts. We learn and remember a great many lessons and promises in life using words. So if we can change the meaning of word, do all the sentences we've ever spoken using that word still apply?

We know things about “people,” for example. As speakers of English, we come to associate those things we know with the words “person” or “people.” We are taught that “killing” is wrong, but especially the killing of “people” matters. We have laws against killing “people.” We feel uneasy around someone who even might do that. But if learn that a corporation is a person, must we suddenly feel the same kind of revulsion about someone killing a corporation that we have been raised to feel about them killing a person? Should we feel personally at risk sitting at dinner next to someone has killed a corporation? Could we be next?

Words are all we have to describe the rules we've agreed to live by in our society. We guard the text of those agreements carefully, so someone doesn't just edit the words in the night and expect us to comply with a new set of rules. But if the meaning of the words in those agreements can change out from underneath us, we can end up with different rules even without the text of the rules changing. That must not happen.

We must know when shifts of meaning are happening. We must have the right to review and approve the consequences of changes in meaning. It's not sufficient for someone to tell us that such review has already happened under a different understanding of those words. When such tricks are played with words, our gut feelings are easily manipulated.

It occurs to me that I don't know why I'm even bothering to be upset. There's an easy way out of this, much easier than all this fussing. I should just talk to the writers of a few dictionaries and get the definition of “absurdity” changed to mean “brilliant idea” and then the absurdities that characterize the linguistic landscape of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving freedom of speech to corporations, and Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, giving freedom of religion to corporations, would magically become brilliant ideas. And then, perhaps, I'll no longer care.

But can embracing and exploiting such drifts in meaning for tactical advantage really be the answer? Is the Dictionary to be our new battleground? It's too hard to control the Supreme Court, so why not just buy a few publishing houses and change the Dictionary? Is this how wars are now to be fought? If so, we need to call a halt to it before we hurt ourselves irreparably. Santa Clara County notwithstanding, this is no way to run a railroad.

And where are the peddlers of original intent when we need them? No doubt they're busy changing the definition of “original” to more flexibly suit some Machiavellian end, and haven't time or interest to help us. Because as it looks now, it's likely to be Scalias of the court, the self-professed keepers of original intent, who seem to me most likely to afford freedom of religion to corporations. What irony, or perhaps just good old-fashioned hypocrisy, in that.

We need to do something. We The People, I mean.

People People. Not corporate people.

If you catch my drift.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This second part of a 3-part series was originally published December 4, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The first part was Corporations Are Not People. The series concludes with Employers of Religion.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, political, political battleground, santa clara county vs southern pacific railroad, trustees of dartmouth college vs woodward, corporation, incorporate, incorporated, corporate person, corporate personhood, legal person, legal people, copernicus, copernican, pre-copernican, killing a corporation, gut feeling, language, dictionary, original intent, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, corporate speech, corporate religion

Corporations Are Not People

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Corporations are not people, my friends, no matter what Mitt Romney says.

Corporations are corporations. People are people.

If corporations were people, they would obey the same tax laws as regular people do. Instead, they have a separate set of rules. What an amazing irony, given that “legal personhood” arose, in part, from a desire for equal protection under tax law.

If corporations were people, when they broke the law, they would be punished, not just by fines but sometimes by imprisonment or death.

If corporations were people, they could not urinate in public. This would be a relief to the employees of certain corporations, who are presently asked to enjoy humiliating public displays of trickle down. We'd insist corporations use a rest room like everyone else. Although that would usually require knowing their gender. If something doesn't have a gender, that's a big clue that the something is not actually a person.

If corporations were people, they would be counted in the US census.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

 —13^th Amendment
    to US Constitution

If corporations were people, some would be old enough to receive Social Security.

If corporations were people, taking money out of them would be called robbery, not profit or dividends. Owners would surely justify this robbery by saying the corporation was a dependent body, but we would see quickly enough that it was the owner that was dependent on the corporation, not vice versa.

If corporations were people, other people could not buy, sell, trade or own them. We don't let people own people in the US. We call that slavery. Every person controls his own destiny.

If corporations were people, they could not be dissolved by other people. We'd call that murder.

If corporations were people, then from the moment of their very conception, their ultimate existence would be assured—no backing out allowed. If any other person interfered with or otherwise aborted plans to sign articles of incorporation, pro-life groups would insist that was murder, too.

If corporations were people, they would have a childhood. During their first eighteen years, they would attend school and learn how to be good citizens. They would not be allowed to sign contracts.

If corporations were people, they could not exist simultaneously in multiple countries at the same time. We would know when they were in one country or another. They would need passports and visas to move around, just like people do.

If corporations were people, we'd give them freedom of speech, but no more such freedom than we give any other person.

If corporations were people, there would be limits on how much they could donate to political campaigns. Because people have such limits.

If corporations were people, some could even vote or run for office—if they were old enough and born or living in the right place. But if we caught them coercing the vote of another person, perhaps an employee, we'd throw them in jail.

If corporations were people, they might need freedom of religion. But not so that they could coerce the rights of others, and instead so that they could explore what they thought of life, death, and ethics, independent of the people who gave birth to them. Religion is a very personal choice we should each make for ourselves, not owners for corporations, nor corporations for employees.

If corporations were people, I wouldn't have to write this article. Because when two things are the same thing, so many questions like this just don't come up. And yet the questions keep coming and this list could go on. Corporations are not people in so many ways.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This first part of a 3-part series was originally published December 2, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The next part is We The People (and Corporations). The series concludes with Employers of Religion.

The public domain liberty bell graphic came from freeclipartnow.com.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, incorporation, corporations, corporate personhood, legal personhood, legal person, legal personality, taxation, crimes, punishment, imprisonment, life, death, death penalty, urination, trickle down, census, social security, robbery, slavery, human trafficking, murder, pro-life, childhood, contracts, travel, passport, visa, home country, citizen, citizenship, speech, religion, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, religious freedom, philosophy, ethics, vote, voter, voting, run for office, running for office, candidate, elect, election, elected, office holder

Losing the War in a Quiet Room

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has seemed to tap into a deep-rooted sense discontent in the American populace over how capitalism has gone wrong. Criticism has not come just from the Left, but also from the right, as recently discussed on the excellent new MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes:

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The discussion begins with a quote from Newt Gingrich asking “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money, or is that somehow a little bit of a flawed system?” To which Chris Hayes cheerfully responds, “Well, yes, Newt it is.” The discussion that follows is typical of the many thoughtful exchanges that make this show such an absolute “must watch.”

Early in the discussion, Prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, asks “What’s the opposite of ‘predatory capitalism’?” and chuckles about whether that means a kind of “kinder, gentler capitalism.” Alexis McGill Johnson of the American Values Institute frames the issue as a sort of nostalgia for something lost, and David Roberts of Grist opines that “democratic nostalgia is for a set of laws and regulations that used to restrain capitalism; the republican nostalgia seems to be for nicer corporate titans, to an era of public-spirited rich people.” Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, questions whether the system has adequate benefit for workers, noting that the only thing workers get out of capitalism is jobs, but they don’t get economic benefits or any control of the direction companies take.

It all begs the question: What changed?

My immediate thought on that question came from having listened to the book The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz. In the book, Prestowitz offers the following account that struck me as simply extraordinary:

Excerpt from pages 198-199 of
The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz

THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL CREED

At the founding of Harvard Business School in 1908, Dean Edwin Gay said the purpose of the school was to teach business leaders how to “make a decent profit by doing decent business.” That was McCabe’s creed and what thousands of future business leaders learned at Harvard for many years. But in 1970, the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman sounded a different note. Said he, “Few trends could so much undermine our free society as the acceptance by corporate executives of social responsibility other than to make as much money for shareholders as possible.” This tune was quickly picked up and elaborated by Harvard’s professors and especially by Michael Jensen, who became the dominant American voice on corporate architecture and the proper role of a board of directors and a CEO.

In a hugely influential 1976 paper and subsequently, Jensen propagated Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder sovereignty and of increased returns to shareholders as the sole purpose of the CEO. His argument was grounded in the view that the shareholder is the corporation’s final risk bearer and therefore also its final claimant. He added the notion that, as agents of shareholders, the corporation’s managers do not necessarily share the interests of the shareholders. Indeed, the managers and the shareholders may be at war because the way for the CEO to maximize his/her private gain may be at odds with maximizing shareholder gains. For instance, a CEO may like corporate jets or want to be part of the society scene, but the costs of such indulgence may be a burden to shareholders. Thus, the central problem is how to align the interests of managers and shareholders and to establish a monitoring mechanism that easily indicates whether the managers are acting properly on behalf of shareholders.

Jensen’s solution was to grant gobs of stock options to CEOs to evaluate their job performance by focusing on the progression of quarterly earnings. This is a single, readily available, objective number upon which a CEO can concentrate all her attention and which the shareholder can readily use to determine whether a CEO is working for him. Jensen emphatically rejected stakeholder theories on the grounds that giving a CEO multiple objectives would be confusing, distracting, and make it impossible in the end to measure performance.

In effect, Prestowitz is noting that this is a recurrence of the old joke

“If you dropped your keys over there,
   why are you looking here?”

“Because the light is better here.”

If I’m hearing him right, Prestowitz is making the bold claim that the reason we stopped caring about people other than shareholders was it was just too messy to do the accounting of worrying about other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, and community. It was administratively simpler and cleaner to only worry about stockholders, and so one day business just quietly decided to do that instead.

Or that was the stated rationale, anyway. Let’s not overlook the outside chance that those pushing for this change fancied themselves the potential later recipients of “gobs of stock options” as CEO of some company operating under the newly proposed rules. No point in mentioning that rationale out loud during the debate when they could stick to the altruistic-sounding story of how this focus on clarity of measurement would just be good for business. “Let's give them gobs of stock” sounds so much more business-like and less self-indulgent than “Let's give ourselves gobs of stock.”

Imagine if we took that “clarity” approach toward our justice system, saying it was too hard to measure justice so why not just measure, let’s say, cost? That wouldn’t fix old-fashioned Justice but it would create a form of NeoJustice that was so much easier to measure, allowing us to be sure we were being successful at it. But to what end?

Really that’s what happened, too. Not with criminal justice but with economic justice. We just let it go, without even knowing it. Without any real notice to or approval by the large community of American citizens affected by the change, American Business just quite literally stopped caring. It’s pretty obvious, at least to me, that this timeline Prestowitz mentions dovetails precisely with the downfall of American society so evident all around us.

A war was fought in a “quiet room” somewhere, without anyone firing a shot, and we’re now living in the aftermath of our unwitting capitulation. No wonder we’re confused about how we got here.

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Possible Follow-up Actions

Putting things to right could begin by undoing the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, and eliminating from the law any notion of corporate personhood. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing for a Constitutional amendment doing so. You can sign his petition supporting this amendment.

Another concrete action is to learn about stakeholder theory and start to ask questions about why it’s there and whether we could change it. It was changed before, and it seems to me it could change again. I don’t know the process by which that would happen. But I think it needs to.

Further Reading

The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz covers additional issues, particularly those of US trade policy, in addition to the matters I’ve discussed here. In some ways, this was just a peripheral aspect of his main point. But it’s an excellent book either way and I very much recommend it. I listened to it as an audiobook from audible.com.

A basic overview of some of these issues can be obtained from Wikipedia articles titled “Stakeholder (corporate)” and “stakeholder theory.”

I also highly recommend Naomi Klein’s excellent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which Milton Friedman and the Chicago School (a.k.a. the “Chicago Boys”) play a critical role. I listened to it as an audiobook from audible.com.

And, finally, my other articles Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics and Sociopaths by Proxy may also shed some additional light in why this all matters.

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Author's Note: Originally published January 22, 2012 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): ows, wall street, occupy wall street, occupy, legal sociopath, naomi klein, shock doctrine, clyde prestowitz, betrayal of american prosperity, constitutional amendment, amendment, constitution, citizens united, sanders, michael jensen, harvard business school creed, creed, harvard business school, harvard, nostalgia, romney, newt gingrich, gingrich, newt, chris l hayes, christopher l hayes, christopher hayes, chris hayes, grist, david roberts, princeton, anne-marie slaughter, american values institute, alexis mcgill johnson, center for constitutional rights, vincent warren, up with chris hayes, chicago boys, chicago school, milton friedman, friedman, shareholder model, stakeholder model, shareholder theory, stakeholder theory, shareholder, stakeholder, quiet war, quiet room, economic justice, justice, war, fiduciary responsibility, fiduciary duty, corporate, corporation, finance, economics, business, politics, lose, losing, lost, society, war in a quiet room

Sociopaths by Proxy

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) recently ran an exposé about American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a back room coalition of Republican legislators who meet to create “model” legislation which can then be pushed on a state-by-state basis in coordinated fashion. In an open letter, the CMD’s executive director, Lisa Graves, writes:

At an extravagant hotel gilded just before the Great Depression, corporate executives from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, State Farm Insurance, and other corporations were joined by their "task force" co-chairs -- all Republican state legislators -- to approve "model" legislation. They jointly head task forces of what is called the "American Legislative Exchange Council" (ALEC).

There, as the Center for Media and Democracy has learned, these corporate-politician committees secretly voted on bills to rewrite numerous state laws. According to the documents we have posted to ALEC Exposed, corporations vote as equals with elected politicians on these bills. These task forces target legal rules that reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink.

It is a worrisome marriage of corporations and politicians, which seems to normalize a kind of corruption of the legislative process -- of the democratic process--in a nation of free people where the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people, not the corporations.

The full sweep of the bills and their implications for America's future, the corporate voting, and the extent of the corporate subsidy of ALEC's legislation laundering all raise substantial questions. These questions should concern all Americans. They go to the heart of the health of our democracy and the direction of our country. When politicians -- no matter their party -- put corporate profits above the real needs of the people who elected them, something has gone very awry.

. . . ALEC apparently ignores Smith's caution that bills and regulations from business must be viewed with the deepest skepticism. In his book, "Wealth of Nations," Smith urged that any law proposed by businessmen "ought always to be listened to with great precaution . . . It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

One need not look far in the ALEC bills to find reasons to be deeply concerned and skeptical. Take a look for yourself.

In my article Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics, I took the position that not only are corporations legal people, but in fact they are “legal sociopaths.” That is, they are by fixed nature incapable of caring about their employees, their customers, or their community except insofar as such caring accidentally maximizes value of the corporation for its stockholders.

I've also argued in the past, as in my 2008 article Election Stratego, that the Republican party is trending toward running strategic configurations of players, who are really just game pieces for other entities coordinating matters behind the scenes. Others have referred to this same phenomenon by talking about puppet governments, shadow governments, or plutocracies. Once the stuff of conspiracy theorists, recent reports and analyses seem to increasingly suggest that the practice of corporations purchasing legislation is becoming a reality. ALEC is only the most recent example. There's the influence of the Family, the Koch Brothers, and Grover Norquist, and other people and corporations with seemingly disproportionate interest and power in modern politics.

The Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court has seemed not only to legitimize these activities, but to ignite a fire in them. They can now operate much more in the open than before. Events we've seen in Wisconsin and in Michigan are just a few prominent examples of increasingly organized attempts that are going on nationwide that seem single-mindedly bent on bringing American workers to their collective knees.

In her recent article Obama fights full-tilt Tea Party crazy, Joan Walsh suggested “the president is dealing with a conscience-free opposition.” Reading this, something clicked in my mind that connected up this notion I have of corporations as sociopaths, and I realized the cancer has spread, so now due to this effect of politicians being bought off by corporations, we not only have corporations acting as sociopaths, but we have politicians hell bent on doing the bidding of these corporations. And if the corporations are, as I've argued, sociopaths, then these all-too-willing servants of the corporations are almost literally “sociopaths by proxy.”

And this is especially bad because government is really the only entity that exists as a counterweight to the forces of business. Government regulation is, by design, capable of regulating industry in order to assure the general welfare. Yet if these businesses are by nature singularly interested in their stockholders' needs and in general obliged not to care the concerns of other stakeholders (such as their customers, their employees, or the communities in which the corporation resides and operates), then who is to look out for the individual? A single individual is often too small to stand up to a corporation in any test of wills. And with legislative action afoot to systematically dismantle and disempower labor unions and to reduce or eliminate the ability to bring class action, good old-fashioned government regulation is the last line of defense for the ordinary citizen—protecting, even if imperfectly, against the tendency of business to exploit and oppress populations for monetary gain.

I've heard it suggested that government should do for people only what people cannot do for themselves. But individual citizens cannot keep banks from adopting predatory lending practices. They can't keep oil companies from using unsafe drilling practices. They can't make sure the food we eat is safe. There are a great many protections that government has traditionally seen as their duty to provide, and yet we're watching an organized attempt by certain politicians—in eager service of corporations—to eliminate the FDA, the EPA, and even the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They speak of “starving the beast,” but in the end the ones starving if this keeps up will be us, the American citizens.

America is under attack from within by forces that do not have the best interests of American citizens at heart, indeed by entities that have no heart at all—by corporations—legal sociopaths—and their dutiful servants in Washington, the Republican Party. The Republicans fancy themselves leaders, but they are not leading, they're clearly following. If they step out of line, they're harshly dealt with by forces outside of our view or control.

The Democratic Party is not immune to the suggestions of Big Business either, but at least they are not yet moving in 100% lockstep to the tune of their corporate overlords. In spite of some partial influence, many elected Democrats are still advocating strongly on behalf of the common citizen. So at least with the Democrats there is hope.

And let's be clear, I'm not saying that this new class of Republican “leaders” are themselves sociopaths. It's not inconceivable that some are, but let's generously assume not, since it won't change my point. Whether they are themselves sociopaths or just willing proxies for behind-the-scenes sociopaths, it's all the same. America's citizens need and deserve a government of, by and for the people—the real flesh and blood people, the ones the founders of this nation originally wrote the Constitution to protect.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published July 27, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Past Articles by me on Related Topics
To Serve Our Citizens
Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics
Teetering on the Brink of Moral Bankruptcy
Hollow Support
Election Stratego

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, legal sociopath, sociopath by proxy, center for media and democracy, cmd, american legislative exchange council, alec, control, power, power grab, protections, dismantling, attack, attack from within, people, we the people, of by and for the people, corporations, corporatism, plutocracy, shadow government, puppet government, puppet state, koch brothers, the family, c street

Just a Gut Feeling I Have

A Slice of Life

In 1991, at a visit to Walt Disney World in Florida, I ate at the Coral Reef Restaurant in the EPCOT theme park. It’s a wonderful restaurant, with tasty food, great service, and a highly unique view into a huge aquarium where you can watch a fascinating variety of fish, rays, and turtles swim by as you eat. I’ve eaten there a number of times.

On the occasion I’m thinking of, they still had a practice that has since gone away: Butter was served to the table in in the shape of a certain well-known mouse. I mention this because it created quite an emotional complication for us: When we wanted to butter our bread, it was necessary to cut into this adorable figure.

It was just a block of butter shaped in a clever way, but the gut feeling that it was something more than that was quite strong—enough so that I complained to Disney about it by letter after I returned home.

I bet I wasn’t alone in my dismay. Butter comes in ordinary rectangular pats nowadays.

Emotions on Autopilot

My daughter recently dragged me to the TV to see something on Home Shopping Network. They were selling a pool cleaning robot from iRobot. But what had caught her attention was that they had the sample robot “trapped” in a small tank. She explained that it had seemed happy in the larger tank, which seemed to her more like its “natural habitat,” but looked distressed in this little tank. I’ve included a YouTube video of it here; just watch the first 30 seconds or so and you’ll get the point. She couldn’t help but see this cute little device a helpless, trapped animal.

The video that goes here is unfortunately no longer unavailable.
Sorry about that.

It isn’t a trapped animal, of course. But it’s easy to see why she felt that way.

We’re wired to look for hints of humanity. We see faces in clouds, in mountains, in coffee, and, of course, in the moon.

Sometimes it works in a way that is sort of the reverse of that, where we see what we want to see. This may happen by processes as disparate as imprinting, which helps a child detect a parent, or wishful thinking, which helps lonely people on farms and citydwellers with a passion for aluminimum headgear to detect UFOs. In both of these cases, rather than our brains seeing something that looks like a thing and telling us it therefore must be that thing, our brain can, instead, when properly primed, decide it’s seeing a thing merely because it expects to see that thing.

Hitting Below the Belt

So it should hardly be any surprise that when a woman undergoes an ultrasound device while she’s pregnant, she would readily identify what she sees as a baby. There’s a reason we sometimes refer to women who are pregnant as “expecting.” Hormones in her body is preparing her for the notion that a baby will at some point appear. And whether she is eager or simply apprehensive, it’s the obvious association to make. But that doesn’t mean it’s already the baby she is expecting to one day arrive.

A woman who is expecting may be anxious to see the end result. But that result cannot be hurried.

The truth is that the process of birth is a process of building scaffolding and doing piecewise substitution. The framework of a child is there long before the actual child is. Each of the pieces presuppose the existence of each of the other, so you can’t build it from toe to head. You have to put an approximate framework in place first, and then come back for the detail work.

So it’s little surprise that the pro-Life movement is pushing for legislation that compels women to view an ultrasound of their fetus before being allowed to have an abortion. There’s a great deal of emotional vulnerability just then, and if it gains tactical political advantage, why not exploit it? An example of just such legislation was recently signed into law by Governor Rick Perry in Texas. The idea is that if they can’t make abortion illegal, they should do anything they can to slow the matter or make it more emotionally complicated.

They’re counting on a visceral reaction even from women who have thought this through carefully as a logical matter. Warm emotion knows better than cold knowledge, or so the cold logic of research into warm emotion tells us. Ah, the delicious irony. Well, modern politics is full of it. I guess we should just get used to it.

It did give me an idea, though.

Labor Pains

It’s been really bugging me that companies in the United States seem to think it’s okay to make a profit by laying off US employees and hiring abroad for cheaper. It may save a few dollars for that company but bit-by-bit it compromises the integrity of the entire US workforce, threatening to drag down standards of living. As I wrote about in my article To Serve Our Citizens, it’s as if the plan to bring jobs back to the US is to first drive wages, working conditions, and health care to the very lowest level so that it’s competitive with most exploited countries abroad and then magically jobs will pour back into the US. Great.

A layoff is a little like an abortion. A corporation is just a great big person and it has people who live inside it just like a pregnant mother. But corporations don’t feel the same sense of responsibility for the care and feeding of those people they carry around inside them that an expectant mother would for any baby or babies she might be hosting. Disposing of unwanted employees who’ve become a drag on the mother ship is almost a lifestyle choice for some corporations.

From the corporate point of view, the employees don’t really matter at all because it only matters that the mother corporation itself survive, not the individual employees. The peers of corporations are other corporations, not people; people are too small to matter. Corporations may be people, but people are not corporations. People are just little parasites to be occasionally flicked aside. Corporate fetuses, if you will. Potential corporations, but not actual corporations. And, as such, they are easily replaced—easily aborted. Too easily.

So what’s to be done?

Well, what if we borrowed a page from the pro-Life playbook and required a bit of ultrasounding at the corporate level before we let them abort all those employees? What if we made a law that said that before a corporation could lay off a person, someone with sufficient budgetary authority that they could actually cancel the layoff if they wanted to had to sit down and chat with each affected employee for, say, an hour. One at a time. A kind of corporate ultrasound. They’d have to get to know the employee as a person before they’d be allowed to abort them. They’d have to hear how the planned procedure would affect the employee in a personal way. Maybe they’d even learn something about how having that person leave would impact the corporation itself. In sum, they’d have to put faces on those affected by this otherwise-sterile procedure. And maybe in so doing they could find a way to avoid the procedure.

Oh, and waiting periods—did I mention waiting periods? I think it’d be great to have a healthy waiting period after having had this little chat. A chance to reflect. Yeah, I know, after a while the waiting period might cause irreparable harm to the company. But I’m sure the pro-Life movement has an excuse for why that’s okay, too. We’ll borrow from that as well.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published July 7, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, visceral, emotion, emotional, abortion, mickey mouse, disney world, coral reef restaurant, aquarium, irobot, wishful thinking, layoffs, outsourcing, waiting period, forced to watch, required, ultrasound, sounding out, listening, hearing, seeing, sensing, gut reaction, gut feeling, fetus, baby, life, effect, affect, affected, impact, law, manipulated, manipulation, potential life, potential corporation, scaffolding, Verro 500, pool cleaning, robot, hsn, home shopping, home shopping network

Rethinking Mega-Corporations

When the Microsoft antitrust case came along, the issue seemed to be that Microsoft controlled too much of a market that needed to be substantially more free. But the problem was that people didn't like the government deciding how to partition up the space. The problem is that government intervention in how to divide up market spaces is too subjective, leaving open options for corruption, bad understanding of a market, etc. The sense was in some that this is something best decided by vendors, and yet the problem was that if you left it to Microsoft, it didn't seem to be deciding the issue well.

“EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti could never build Microsoft Windows or successfully sell it, yet he and his antitrust regulators get to decide if a great American corporation may or may not improve its products,” said Nicholas Provenzo, chairman of The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism.

I thought about this a lot at that time and have continued to ponder it since. I always come back to the same conclusion—that there probably needs to be something like a maximum size company or at least an incentive for not creating ever larger companies. I don't quite have the entire idea fully fleshed out in my head, but I'm confident enough that there's a good idea in there that I think it's time to at least throw it out for discussion, even knowing it will be controversial. But the point is to have some objective measure or incentive that leads to the desire of a company to stop growing.

No matter how smart the leader of a company is, we should be encouraging that person to teach others his or her skill, not to acquire ever-more power for himself alone after the company is above a certain size.

As companies grow super-large, the number of them necessarily grows super-small. This implies reduced competition, which eliminates the exact reason we allow markets and competition in the first place. We need to incentivize companies to seek an intermediate size for many reasons; in light of recent events, one way to express this is as a need to avoid the “too big to fail” phenomenon.

It's my understanding that increasingly in recent years antitrust legislation is not pursued in cases where consumers seemed to be seeing lower prices, on the theory that no matter what the structure of the industry, lower prices for consumers is always unconditionally good. That sounds wrong, and the recent fiasco in the marketplace seems an illustration of why that might be.

The problem seems not just to be the inappropriate manipulation of markets, but merely the reliance on a single company at all; because this implies that really only one human mind—or a small number of human minds—is making decisions for too many people at once. In effect, it implements a kind of corporate dictatorship, or at best rule by a very few people.

In the best case, that leads to a single person having the power to make something extraordinary that others might not think to make. But the problem with that is that if any such individual fails, they bring their company and everyone in that company down with them. There is, of course, a risk that these super-leaders are truly unique souls and that no other person could possibly cause what they did to come to pass; but, if so, there will be huge confusion once they're gone. Worse, our structure also allows them to pass on the power they have amassed to someone who did not earn it. The company does not go back to being disorganized after they leave, the power they perhaps rightly assembled is now a simple commodity to be passed along to someone who didn't earn it by being truly unique. And yet there may be many people, not just one, who are at the next tier waiting to shine.

To see the problem, suppose a person could reliably be said to have ten times the combined intelligence and insight of five people who report to him. And so we allow him to be their leader for a time. Now it becomes time to step down. By definition, this same is not true of the five who stand to rise to his position. It may be that they are capable of stepping into the mechanics of the original leader's position, but the original justification of giving them this position based on the extraordinary thing that only they could do is no longer there. And certainly if it's the case that any one of them was close to the insight and intelligence of the person who dominated, the world would be better off with both of those people at the helm of a company rather than with only one.

Of course, you could iterate this truth all the way down and find that there was no justification that was ever a reason to make a company. And that would be wrong, too, but mainly because it isn't really objectively knowable who is the right person to lead. It's a gamble. And so having many companies of intermediate size allows a compromise between gambling on no corporate organization and on total corporate organization.

Perhaps individuals should be limited to having a majority share in only one company, and minority shares in other companies, again encouraging many human minds to have a serious say in the market. Underlying this thought is something I call my “many minds hypothesis,” that the world will work better if there are a lot of smart people competing rather than just a few. In effect, the current practice in the market involves big fish eating little fish until there is really only one fish and no remaining competition.

A company that has no competition is stifling the creative power of the people within it, who are asked to be conformists to a particular way of thinking. I don't think it's healthy for the individuals, for the company that has come to dominate, or for society.

Since establishing a maximum bound on a company size is hard to do, it seems to me that a possible alternative might be to allow tax rates on a company to increase as the company size increases, creating the possibility of companies consolidating to improve efficiency, but only if the efficiencies are really important.

People sometimes claim that we must have market efficiency, but I think the ultimate efficiency will come when we're all replaced by robots. I don't think that's going to do a lot of good for us or for the environment. And at some point, we may even find the robots think humans are superfluous. But, for now, we have a lot of people who need jobs, and it seems to me that a bit of inefficiency in the market, especially in the form of redundancy and competition, would help a lot.

We've been hurt very badly by the present super-banks losing. If they had been kept from ever getting this large, we'd be in much better shape because there would have been more brains involved and more chances that at least some of those banks would have protected themselves.

Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published March 15, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

See also my related post Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics.

Tags (from Open Salon): inefficiency, market efficiency, singularity, ai, robots, free market, market, robustness, diversity, many minds, many minds hypothesis, competition, maximum size corporation, maximum size company, megacorporations, politics, economics, business

Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics

In our society, those entrusted with control of a corporation are bound by a fiduciary duty to the stockholders. This duty is paramount and cannot be ignored to suit the personal morals or conscience of those who exercise the control; any attempt to follow personal conscience over stockholder rights might potentially be regarded as a breach of fiduciary responsibility.

“A fiduciary must not put himself in a position where his interest and duty conflict.”
   —Wikipedia

As a consequence of this rule, corporations often behave in a way that favors the survival of the company at the expense of individuals. (Although, as Greenspan alluded to in his shocked near-apology in October 2008, there are nuances even within attempts to do well by the company, since issues like short term vs. long term success can matter.) But no matter how you slice it, employees are necessarily way down on the list of concerns that a company has, because a company is worried about its own survival first, not about its employees’ survival. Corporations, by design, care primarily about one thing: themselves and their own survival; all other considerations are secondary.

It’s a curious and controversial aspect of law that corporations are also permitted to operate as legal persons This gives them some of the rights of human beings, sometimes called natural persons to distinguish themselves from—well,—other kinds of persons. For example, legal persons are able to own property, enter into contracts, and be involved as parties to lawsuits.

It seems like almost the stuff of science fiction, having people who are not really people. Humans often express a reasonable and well-placed concern about the concept of human-like entities moving in and among us, but without ethics, morals, or scruples. It’s the reason Isaac Asimov suggested his Three Laws of Robotics, a set of rules he felt should be incorporated (pardon the pun) at a low level in all robots, assuring their ethical participation in society.

The Three Laws of Robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

   —Isaac Asimov

But, unfortunately, corporations are just very clever robots (with full access to human intelligence but explicitly forbidding the application of human ethics). And there is no notion of Three Laws that applies to corporations.

Indeed, corporations seem in many way more analogous to human sociopaths, that is, persons exhibiting dissocial personality disorder. Perhaps we could borrow from the metaphor of legal persons and say they are legal sociopaths. Among humans, we generally fear and revile sociopathic behavior. But for some reason we tolerate it in corporations.

According to Wikipedia, the World Health Organization maintains a classification of diseases that describes the disorder this way:

Dissocial Personality Disorder

1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy.

2. Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.

3. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.

4. Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence.

5. Incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment.

6. Marked proneness to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the subject into conflict.

7. Persistent irritability.

The WHO’s ICD-10 description notes that this includes amoral, antisocial, asocial, psychopathic, and sociopathic disorders, but not conduct disorders or emotionally unstable personality disorder.

Now I’m not medically trained, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. We’re talking metaphors, and the metaphor is going to be imperfect. I think the high level point is that this is the set of disorders that isn’t about being compulsively unable to control oneself, but is instead is about thoughtfully (some might even say rationally) planning and executing on actions that prevailing social norms would normally forbid.

The usual explanation one might expect from a corporation is that the so-called prohibition is in fact not legally forbidden, and therefore is allowed, perhaps even encouraged. (For more on this disturbing line of reasoning, see my essay, “Whatever Should Be, Should Be,” about the perils of the world “should” as a term of specificational requirement.) This fits in perfectly with the item “Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.” After all, if you don’t believe that social norms are a rule or obligation, it’s easy to see how “incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience” can result.

I sometimes find myself wondering how the world would be different if there were a Three Laws safeguard built into corporations. Something like:

The Three Laws of Corporations

1. A corporation may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A corporation must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A corporation must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It sounds a bit harsh, and in fact I doubt all possible consequences of every action could be so thoroughly worked out. Even a modest start, replacing “human beings” with “its employees” would be a big improvement. That wouldn’t fix everything, but it would be a big step forward over what we have now. Among other things, that would mean that employees could freely contribute to the success of their company knowing that that company had their best interests at heart. In the modern world, that’s not the case. It’s not just that it’s unlikely. It’s that it’s not even allowed by law.

Of course, the more pragmatic among us might suggest the even simpler idea of removing the notion of “legal personhood” from the law in the first place.

Author's Note: Originally published February 2, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

The graphic was added in June, 2025. It was created at abacus.ai using Claud Opus 4 and GPT Image and substantial post-processing to rearrange parts of the resulting image using Gimp.

See also my related posts: Losing the War in a Quiet Room and Rethinking Mega-Corporations.

Tags (from Open Salon): fiduciary duty, fiduciary responsibility, sociopath, three laws, three laws of robotics, three laws of corporations, corporation, liability, rights, responsibility, legal person, legal people, natural person, natural people, legal personhood, natural personhood