GET ME OUT OF THIS LISTS, PLEASE!...
________________________________________________
_____________________________________
Prof. Antonio Almeida Serra
ISEG/UTL (Fac. Economics and Management)
R. Miguel Lupi, 20
1200 LISBOA
PORTUGAL
tel: ++.351.(0)1.392 59 83
fax: [...] 396 64 07
e-mail: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
http://www.iseg.utl.pt/html/uips/cesa/serra.html
-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Mueller [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Terça-feira, 13 de Abril de 1999 1:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [Fwd: The Socialist, the Communist, the Nihilist]
Does Weissman want to outlaw the corporation? In the U.S., we have just
over 20 million business enterprises--proprietorships, partnerships, and
corporations. Obviously, most of them in all categories are quite small
and, indeed, it is precisely the small ones that are the source of the
country's economic vitality. President Clinton rightfully boasts that some
18 million new jobs have been created since he took office 6 years ago,
virtually all of them the work of SMALL firms--newly-created and having
fewer than 10 employees. (The Fortune 500 have systematically LOST workers
over the past couple of decades.)
Weissman's complaint is obviously aimed at the very LARGE corporation--not
at the millions of SMALL ones that are the economic backbone of every
affluent nation.
In other words, his real objection is to MONOPOLY, not simply to the
corporate form of doing business.
Charles
_______________
At 07:28 PM 4/12/99 -0400, you wrote:
>I believe Robert is on the precisely right track. I was particularly
>struck by the observation about of the obviously corrupt worldview that
>ASSUMES that corporations are necessary for commerce.
>
>Question assumptions is always the ultimate element of critical intellectual
>thinking and essential to true knowledge and eventually understanding. Alas,
>it is oft forgotten by progressive analysts, but even more by the
academicians
>and practitioners whose livelihoods, "reputations," and perhaps even
>identities depend on having been "right."
>
>Doug Hunt
>Aspiring Stone in the shoe of Dominance Cultures . . . .
>
>
>Robert Weissman wrote:
>>
>> There is a new breed of activist roaming the land. These are activists
>> who believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the large
>> corporation itself -- that it is not what corporations do wrong that is
>> the problem, it is corporations themselves that are the problem.
>>
>> These activists believe large corporations as they exist today are
>> fundamentally undemocratic and cannot be reformed. These activists
>> question whether corporations should be considered legal persons with the
>> same rights of you and I and other living human beings. They question the
>> very nature of the corporation.
>>
>> Richard Grossman and his colleagues at the Program on Corporations,
>> Law and Democracy are travelling the country, encouraging activists of all
>> stripes to begin asking fundamental questions about citizen control of
>> corporations, to research the history of corporations, and to begin to
>> question corporate control over the citizenry.
>>
>> In 1996, Grossman was in Columbus, Ohio, where he met with 25
>> activists from around the state for two days. One activist who attended
>> was Greg Coleridge.
>>
>> Coleridge was born and raised and spent most of his life in Akron,
>> Ohio. For the past 17 years, he has been an activist with the American
>> Friends Service Committee -- the Quakers.
>>
>> After hearing Grossman speak, Coleridge and fellow activists in Ohio
>> began researching the history of corporations in Ohio.
>>
>> They found a speech given by Williams Jennings Bryan to the 1912
>> Constitutional Convention in Columbus, Ohio. Ask yourself: Who today
>> would speak in such a manner?
>>
>> This is what William Jennings Bryan had to say in 1912:
>>
>> "The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural
>> person and the fictitious person, called the corporation. They differ in
>> the purpose in which they are created, in the strength which they possess,
>> and in the restraints under which they act. Man is the handiwork of God
>> and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose. The corporation
>> is the handiwork of man and was created to carry out a money-making
>> policy. There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men. A
>> corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times
>> stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of
>> conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in the future life. A
>> corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter."
>>
>> They found that the Ohio Supreme Court stripped Standard Oil of Ohio
>> of its charter for monopolizing the oil industry. The Standard Oil Trust
>> fled to New Jersey, the Delaware of its day. And Standard Oil wasn't
>> alone. The Ohio state legislature and courts had stripped dozens and
>> dozens of corporations of their charters for wrongdoing. Don't do as we
>> tell you and you're out!
>>
>> They found that the much ballyhooed Sherman Antitrust Act was a bone
>> thrown to activists. The act was named after John Sherman, the Senator
>> from Ohio. This is Senator Sherman urging his fellow members of the Senate
>> to pass his legislation into law: The people "are feeling the power and
>> grasp of these combinations, and are demanding of every [state]
>> legislature and of Congress a remedy for this evil, only grown into huge
>> proportions in recent times. . .You must heed their appeal, or be ready
>> for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist. . .Society is now
>> disturbed by forces never felt before. The popular mind is agitated with
>> problems that may disturb the social order. Among these, none is more
>> threatening than the inequality of condition, wealth and opportunity" that
>> has emerged from "the concentration of capital in vast combinations to
>> control production and trade and to break down competition."
>>
>> Coleridge and his friends pulled together this information in a nifty
>> little booklet called: Citizens Over Corporations: A Brief History of
>> Democracy in Ohio and Challenges to Organizing in the Future.
>>
>> "Corporations are a different kind of creation," Coleridge told us
>> recently. "There is no surprise that corporations have ended up working
>> against the human interest and against the common good."
>>
>> So Greg, if not corporations, what?
>>
>> "If we can ever get to the point of asking that question, we will
>> have moved forward," Coleridge says. "Just as fish think water is
>> necessary for existence, human beings have come to see corporations as
>> necessary to economic existence. It is so much accepted as a given that we
>> don't tend to believe that there is any other way."
>>
>> Right now, Grossman, Coleridge and like minded activists around have
>> a lot of questions and few answers. They are busy researching how we got
>> ourselves into this soup -- from a situation where we controlled
>> corporations, to where corporations are controlling us.
>>
>> For his part, Coleridge is not ashamed to admit that he doesn't know
>> the answer to corporate power. "The corporate culture is a century or more
>> in the making," he said. "It is going to take a few years for us
>> collectively and democratically to understand where we are, how we got
>> here, and how to turn it around."
>>
>> [Greg Coleridge can be reached at the American Friends Service Committee,
>> 330-253-7151, Humanity House, 513 West Exchange St., Akron, OH 44302.]
>>
>>
>> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
>> Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
>> Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
>> Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy. For more information,
>> see <http://www.corporatepredators.org>.
>>
>> (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>>
>> Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
>> and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or
>> repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on
>> a web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us
>> ([log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]).
>>
>> Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve
>> [log in to unmask] To subscribe to corp-focus, send an e-mail
>> message to [log in to unmask] with the following all in one line:
>>
>> subscribe corp-focus <your name> (no period).
>>
>> Focus on the Corporation columns are posted on the Multinational Monitor
>> web site <www.essential.org/monitor>.
>>
>> Postings on corp-focus are limited to the columns. If you would like to
>> comment on the columns, send a message to [log in to unmask] or
>> [log in to unmask]
_________________
Charles Mueller, Editor
ANTITRUST LAW & ECONOMICS REVIEW
http://webpages.metrolink.net/~cmueller
____
Moderator, MUELLER'S ANTIMONOPOLY LIST
([log in to unmask])
____
Mueller's Poverty of Nations List
([log in to unmask])
____
Mueller's Land-Reform List
([log in to unmask])
____
(To UNsubscribe:
Add 'un' to 'subscribe' in above commands)
____
Archives at:
http://www.egroups.com/list.antimonopoly
http://www.egroups.com/list.poverty-nations
http://www.egroups.com/list.land-reform
____
|