Time to reinstate the corporate death penalty

This is a reply to a post on Democratic Underground about how do deal with renegade corporations, particularly those conglomerates like GE, Disney, Time-Warner and Murdoch's News Corp. who own media empires that control more than 90 percent of everything you see, hear and read in the US. My post follows:


I'm really starting to like the idea of corporate charter revocation. Basically, if they consistently act like felons and their business practices routinely include befouling local ecosystems, clear-cutting, releasing toxic chemicals into the water, air or ground, screwing the community out of legitimate taxes, laying off half the workforce and replacing them with H-1b visa holders, moving some or all of their operations overseas and so on... If they're going to claim the privileges of "personhood," then they should damn well be subject to the same legal sanctions and criminal penalties any other person would incur for such behavior.

Or, more to the point here, corporate death for giant holding companies buying up all the country's information outlets, replacing news with infotainment and propaganda and claiming First Amendment protections apply to broadcasting this nonstop drivel.

Just think for a second about which media outlets have pissed you off in the past week. I'll start with NBC for the Kucinich lockout, then CNN, Fux, CBS, ABC, the History Channel, the NYT, the WaPo, my local rag, AM radio motor mouths (for the three seconds it took to hit the mute button) and even ESPN. All of them peddled lies, distortions, disinformation, government-approved spin, told breathless tales of D-class celebrity idiots and engaged in actions harmful to the continued survival of the republic -- i.e., promoting and perpetuating the brain-dead culture of Dumbfuckistan. And that's just a normal week. The big six media conglomerates are also in probable violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but that's another subject.

Media companies are particularly sensitive to charges of malfeasance, since they have a special obligation to be of service to the public in return for being allowed to use our priceless airwaves on the cheap or for free. To the extent that they ignore that mandate, they're vulnerable to charter review at the very least, and revocation if warranted. The FCC actually used to care about such things until St. Raygun deregulated everything he could find, a practice continued by all his successors, no exceptions, and reaching epic proportions with the Codpiece in Chief.

Obviously, it would take a new and fairly progressive administration to take on the GEs and Viacoms of the world -- one whose figurehead hasn't accepted massive bribes from those very same companies in return for favorable legislation and minimal regulatory oversight, and which the corrupt liars characterize as merely "buying access." Of the possible finalists, only Edwards seems to have any desire to take on these cancerous monsters. The GOP will remain worse than useless, Clinton and Obama are too heavily invested in corporate values and stuffed with corporate money to fight for the peasants against the oligarchs and Kucinich has been judged "unelectable" by people so much smarter than us that we really should just accept their word for it.

So as usual, it's up to us, and we can decide pool our talents and combine skill sets and work to revoke their corporate charters. The rewards are huge. If successful, the corporation ceases to exist as a legal entity. You can then seize their liquid assets and divide them among the corporation's creditors -- which, in the case of a relatively solvent company, means the workers and contractors -- and auction off anything not nailed down, with proceeds again going to the workers and small creditors. The shareholders just lose their investments, the execs may or may not be subject to civil or criminal liability and when a new business moves in to occupy the old facilities, they're compelled to hire the former occupant's workers first.

I think it's long past time for people to begin harassing these unaccountable fiefdoms and either dissolve them entirely or cripple their ability to operate in secret and outside the laws and ethical constraints the rest of us are subject to.

Here's some background material. Unfortunately, successful revocation hasn't happened for decades, so there are no contemporary "how-to" case studies. But several of these links outline circumstances that could result charter revocation, along with citing precedents and legal arguments. Others contain the processes and templates needed to create the proper paperwork and get it into the hands of the right (i.e., more sympathetic) government officials. Fortunately, it's not as boring as it sounds.

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02oct-nov/oct-no...

http://www.duhc.org/rethinking_revoking.html

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Controlling_Corporati...

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1810

http://www.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/news2003/1230-0...

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/de...

http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/corporatedeath103...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-drobny/the-best-u...

http://www.corporations.org/afd-paradigm-shift.html

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/cases/clcc.html?c...


That's probably enough for starters. For more, search Google for any combination of "corporate charter revoke procedure case study"... and so on.

Happy hunting.