CORPORATIONS AS PERSONS

Week 11, G205 - Gendered Ads & Global Consumer Identity

Bose and Lyons and The Corporation

Upcoming, Week 12

Read Naomi Klein:

Ch. 16 on Tues./18 on Thurs.

No Blog #5 – Please turn in all outstanding work and extra credit by the end of next week or no credit.

Corporations as “Natural” Persons• In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to

contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, decided in 1819.

• In the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, the Supreme Court recognized that corporations were persons for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.

• The Corporation asserts the initial legislation interpreted by the court in 1819 was intended to apply to freed slaves. “307 law suits were brought before the court: 19 by freed slaves and 288 by corporations.”

• Some critics of corporate personhood, such as Thom Hartmann in his book "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," claims this history was an intentional misinterpretation of the case inserted into the Court record by reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis. Bancroft Davis had previously served as president of Newburgh and New York Railway Co.

What is a person?• A human being regarded as an individual;

• a category to denote a speaker (example first, second, third person writing)

Oxford English Dictionary

• Category used to denote a corporation which is an artificial person.

1 Bl. Com. 123; 4 Bing. 669; C. 33 Eng. C. L R. 488; Woodes. Lect. 116; Bac. Us. 57; 1 Mod. 164.

Definition of Corporation

A corporation is a legal entity created by state law to accomplish a stated purpose.

Three Types:

1. Corporations for profit

2. Corporations not for profit

3. Government owned corporations

Privileges of Corporate Personhood• Corporations are distinct legal entities which exist

separate from shareholders as shareholders have limited liability.

• Corporations can engage in civil litigation. • Corporations can own property (called “islanding” in

transnational real estate interactions, Bose and Lyons).• Corporations are immortal.

Is this an ultimate way to escape gender?

How have we understood personhood (subjectivity) thus far?

Ponderous• How have we understood personhood (subjectivity) thus

far?• Binary opposition• Body as visible proof of difference (inherent/innate/essential)• Sexed as male/female • Sexed body experienced through adherence to gender norms.• Gender is experientially different for males and females via their

various embodiment of and associations with masculinity and femininity.

• Sex, Gender are assumed to be dimorphic and mutually exclusive, invariant, fixed, and constant across time and space. Heterosexuality or a sexual attraction to the “opposite sex,” is a condition of this norm.

The Corporation (QW#6) Discussion• What role do corporations play in your life?• What kind of person is the corporation, according to the

filmmakers?• Do you agree/disagree?

• Should corporations have the same rights as individuals?

• Other questions from your worksheet?• Other questions in general?

Madonna’s African Charity Displaced Villagers and Wasted $3.8 Million

March 28, 2011

Source: The Atlantic

It seemed like a wonderful plan. Madonna would build a $15 million academy for 400 impoverished girls in Malawi. Her charity, Raising Malawi, collected $18 million and the project had the support of elite Hollywood circles and the Jewish mysticism group Kabbalah Centre International. Unfortunately, it ended up doing more harm than good, reports The New York Times. According to a damning audit, the manager’s of the school project, which was abandoned in January, wasted $3.8 million on lavish purchases such as cars, chauffeurs, golf course memberships and free housing.

“The project has not broken ground, there was no title to the land and there was, over all, a startling lack of accountability on the part of the management team in Malawi and the management team in the United States,” said Trevor Neilson, a philanthropist recruited by Madonna to examine problems at the charity. “We have yet to determine exactly what happened to all of that $3.8 million. We have not accounted for all the funds that were used.”• Making matters worse, The Guardian notes that the 117-acre construction site had forced

Malawian villagers from their ancestral land for what they thought would be a thriving school. Upon learning that the project had been scrapped in January, village elders were furious and the Malawian government summoned Madonna to explain herself.

At the time, Madonna said her plans changed because “I want to reach thousands, not hundreds of girls” referring to a new plan to build high schools across the country. But, according to the Times, that’s not what her adviser, Trevor Neilson, is recommending she do. “He told her that building an expensive school in Malawi was an ineffective form of philanthropy, and suggested instead using resources to finance education programs though existing and proven nongovernmental organizations,” writes the Times. In response to the audit, Madonna issued the following statement:

There’s a real education crisis in Malawi. Sixty-seven percent of girls don’t go to secondary school, and this is simply unacceptable. Our team is going to work hard to address this in every way we can…While I’m proud of these accomplishments, I’m frustrated that our education work has not moved forward in a faster way.

de Certeau

Strategies of Producers

(1) The "proper" is a triumph of place over time.

(2) It is also a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and "include" them within its scope of vision. To be able to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space.

(3) The power of knowledge is the ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces.

Tactics of Users of Products

• procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time--to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms, etc.(38)

MULTINATIONAL & TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS

• First MNC was Dutch East India Co (1602), granted monopoly in colonial trade. Today, UN estimates about 62,000 MNCs with 900,000 affiliates.

Review:• Modernity in America occurred over

several hundred years and is most often associated with the rise of industry (factories, urbanization, etc.) in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

• Globalization describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through globe-spanning networks of communication and trade; a process whereby an increased portion of economic or other activity is carried out across national borders.

Discussion Questions:

• Why do nations trade goods and services? What are gains from specialized production?

• How economically important are foreign direct investments of multi- and transnational corporations? Who benefits most from FDI (Foreign Direct Investments)?

• Is a sinister network of interlocked firms dominating the world economy, using its political power to oppress?

• Who can compel MNCs to become more accountable corporate citizens?

Where’s the Gender?

Producers Consumers

Bose and Lyons, Critical Corporation Studies

MODERNITY & GLOBALIZATIONCITIZENSHIPCONSUMERISMIDENTITYGENDER

Review from first eight weeks (A. Berger, Peiss, Rooks)

Gender

Personhood

• Peiss and gendered spaces: women at home, men = work, then shopping = Woman as consumer = Leisure (feminized, docile, not work)

• Women as a mass

Citizenship

• “way of life” or ”lifestyle”=class status= respectability =consumer citizenship (p1, Peiss)

• Corporate Citizens?

Racialized Spaces / Gendered Spaces (Lutz & Collins)

First world• “Real” people• Machine usage• White• Active

Third World• Space of “fantasy”• Ritual practices• Passive• Colorism by activity (dark

skin=more labor, poor, infantile)

• Women represent “women of the world”

• Women signify “Universal Human powers”

Corporation for President?• On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court overturned a

20-year-old ruling that had previously prohibited corporations and unions from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads.

The CorporationBoard notes• Modernity – Industry • Productivity - Capitalism

• 1st v. 3rd World• Democracy ?

“a form of government in which the people have a voice in the exercise of power, typically through elected representatives.” (OED)

• Subjectivity/Citizenship• How do we understand economics as a gendering or gendered

process?

Gender• Established psychological, social, and representational

differences between men and women. • The socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and

attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women, often approached through masculinity and femininity. 

• Gender is far more than a synonym or euphemism for the biological distinction between the sexes. It is a fundamental framework for how we view, know, and categorize the world in general.

Citizenship

• “Way of life”=class status=respectability=feminine identity through leisure=consumer citizenship (Kathy Peiss)

• Peiss argues that women held up respectability as a part of their identity through class status, however, she fails to note the ways in which racial constructs are constitutive of that “respectability.”

• Black elites' response and challenge to white supremacy.  It was a seemingly contradictory position as both an aspiring social class and a racially subordinated caste denied all political rights and protections, struggling to define themselves within a society founded on white dominance.

• accompanied by a practical methodology of self-help.  Self-help sought to refute the view that African Americans were biologically inferior and unassimilable by incorporating "the race" into ostensibly universal but deeply racialized ideological categories of Western progress and civilization.

• black elites claimed class distinctions -- indeed, the very existence of a "better class" of blacks served as evidence of what they called race progress.  They believed that the improvement of African Americans' material and moral condition through self-help would diminish white racism.

• Through racial uplift ideology, elite blacks sought the cooperation of white political and business elites in the pursuit of race progress.

Rooks & Racial Uplift

Citizenship & Citizens

Citizenship• a native or naturalized member of a state or

other political community• the status of a citizen with rights and duties

conduct as a citizen; "award for good citizenship"

Citizen• A person that is a legally recognized as a

member of a state, with associated rights and obligations;

• A member of a state that is not a monarchy; used as antonym to subject;

• A person that is a legally recognized resident of a city or town; A resident of any particular place to which the subject; a native or naturalized member of a state or other political community

Consumer and Consume• What is a consumer?• –noun • 1. a person or thing that consumes. • 2. Economics . a person or organization that uses a commodity or service. • 3. Ecology . an organism, usually an animal, that feeds on plants or other animals. •  • To consume:• –verb (used with object) • 1. to destroy or expend by use; use up. • 2. to eat or drink up; devour. • 3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning: Fire consumed the forest. • 4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully. • 5. to absorb; engross: consumed with curiosity. • –verb (used without object) • 6. to undergo destruction; waste away. • 7. to use or use up consumer goods.

White House aims to 'install' democracy in Libya

The White House is shifting toward the more aggressive goal in Libya of ousting President Moammar Gadhafi and "installing a democratic system," actions that fall outside the United Nations Security Council resolution under which an international coalition is now acting, according to a conversation between President Obama and Turkey's prime minister.

Obama and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke late Monday and "underscored their shared commitment to the goal of helping provide the Libyan people an opportunity to transform their country, by installing a democratic system that respects the people's will," according to a White House report on the phone call. 

The rhetoric matches Obama's reiteration on Monday that it is still U.S. policy that "Gadhafi needs to go.“

But it is a marked contrast to the U.S.-led military mission as defined by the U.N. resolution.

"There's not a U.N. Security Council resolution mandating regime change in Libya that we're acting to enforce," national security aide Ben Rhodes said Monday. "We're acting to enforce a resolution that has the immediate goal of protecting civilians." 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/print/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/03/white-house-aims-install-democracy-libya

By Hayley Peterson

Created Mar 22 2011 - 11:32am

Published on Washington Examiner (http://washingtonexaminer.com)