Wednesday, October 12, 2011

We Demand Separation Of Corporation And State

by Juhm

(...and the reinstatement of Glass-Stegall?)
I saw this on twitter and thought it represented what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to accomplish.
From what I've gathered (and this is a lowly eastern-european high-school student's viewpoint) what OWS is trying to achieve is the removal of corporate influence from politics.(edit: not deregulation as some have assumed, read the post before commenting)
Because corporations have amassed so much wealth and power that they've managed to corrupt the highest echelons of your goverment and both of the political parties. By using their wealth they've created a sort of neo-feudalistic society where a small portion of the population controls nearly all of the wealth and the rest are essentially serfs, forever indebted to the 1% that make all the decisions and reap all the profits. This has been achieved by privatizing the gains of banks while at the same time socializing their losses.
Am I on target so far?
I didn't mean it as a call for complete separation - more like the separation of corporations from influencing the legislative process. I think the point I made this point pretty clear. I'm not a libertarian and I'm not for complete deregulation - I think that would be lunacy. I just proposed an idea for discussion, if you don't like it, improve on it and spread it or scrap it. This is how democracy works. People propose ideas and slogans and the rest discuss them and improve on them, spread them or ignore/criticize those ideas if they're unfeasible.
Someone claimed that Thomas Jefferson was a supporter of this idea:
Thomas Jefferson, along with James Madison worked assiduously to have an 11th Amendment included into our nation’s original Bill of Rights. This proposed Amendment would have prohibited “monopolies in commerce.” The amendment would have made it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, or to give money to politicians, or to otherwise try to influence elections. Corporations would be chartered by the states for the primary purpose of “serving the public good.” Corporations would possess the legal status not of natural persons but rather of “artificial persons.” This means that they would have only those legal attributes which the state saw fit to grant to them. They would NOT; and indeed could NOT possess the same bundle of rights which actual flesh and blood persons enjoy. Under this proposed amendment neither the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, nor any provision of that document would protect the artificial entities known of as corporations.
Not sure if this is legit but it sounds good like a good idea to me.

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