THE IDEAS PAGE

What solutions, ideas and experiments can you come up with to solve the problems/challenges below?

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COMPANIES CAN COMMIT CRIMES, MURDER, HAVE
THE RIGHTS OF PEOPLE AND ARE UNACCOUNTABLE

In a recent Forbes magazine article, Forbes lamented the fact that two decisions by the US Supreme Court have effectively "destroyed the true nature of the corporate entity - a legal fiction created by government with no capacity to possess feelings, beliefs, emotions, etc. while existing solely as a piece of paper filed away in a drawer in the Secretary of State's office... A corporation now not only enjoys many of the same protections as a person under our law but is crafted to remove obligations a person would ordinarily have but for the shield of the corporate entity such as personal liability for a corporation's bad behavior."

While initially this would appear to be bad news, in the world of justice, not law it is wonderful news for these decisions recognize the direct connection between the beliefs of the people in a corporation and the actions of the corporation itself. Now the court was careful to try and narrow the decision to a closely held corporation (a corporation owned by a single family) so as not to allow the expansion of the argument to publicly held companies. For example if a single family's religious prejudice is confined to a corporation the family runs the court says that is fine, but a public corporation cannot act similarly.

However that logic is like saying if a person regularly shows up at Ku Klux Klan meetings, wears the robe and lynches people members hate, it does not show they share their beliefs, which is nonsense. If you are a director and shareholder in a corporation, you are part of the mind and management of that corporation.  Your brain helps it make decisions either by commission or omission, its investors' money is the blood and oxygen it cannot operate without, and the arms and legs of all of the people in the corporation perform its tasks. It is a fiction that the people in the corporation are not personally responsible and liable for the actions of that corporation, and the court's decisions strip away the facade of limiting liability.

I have owned a number of corporations in multiple countries and used one of North America's top law firms in designing an offshore structure. Corporations are paper fictions that previously laws give certain rights. A corporation can be used to create income separate from its shareholders, gain favorable tax treatment, attract investors, limit liability, provide a path to succession and so forth. However I have never sat in a bathroom stall next to a corporation or run into the bush with a corporation to relieve myself on a hunting or fishing trip. I also do not remember signing any documents authorizing my companies to murder or rob anyone, bribe politicians and judges, or conduct other criminal acts without responsibility. That is an idea that must be hidden in paperwork I have not seen.  

A corporation is the sum of the human beings behind it, a kind of Frankenstein made up of human body parts and brain cells, attached by agreement. A Frankencorp has no mind at all, it is a monster directed and controlled entirely by the people it is made up of. If a Frankencorp has all of the rights of the people in it then the actions and thoughts of the Frankencorp are the actions and thoughts of all of the people directing and controlling it in each and every circumstance or action of the corporation. 

Human Beings and Crime

Consider the case of the convicted serial killer Robert Pickton.  Pickton is said to have killed at least 49 women, disposing of the bodies of some of his victims by chopping them up and feeding them to his pigs.

If Pickton stabbed a person and put his victim alive in the pig pen, as a jurist would you allow Pickton to claim he did not murder that person and blame the pigs for it, or would you find him responsible for the murder of the victim?

Or in another example let's say Pickton used an axe to kill one of his victims. Would you allow Pickton to say the axe, a completely inanimate object like a company, is guilty of the murder? The axe cannot move without someone or something to pick it up and swing it at the victim.

Or, what if Pickton set the axe up on a device activated by a trip wire which releases the axe to kill a victim when the unsuspecting person tripped the wire? Would you allow Pickton blame the axe, the spring or the tripwire for killing the victim?

In a another example, let's say Pickton owns the pigs, the axe and set up the spring contraption but he claims he did not kill anyone, that his arm did it together with his hand and the rest of his body knew nothing about it?  Is that a defense?

Or what if Pickton claimed 400 of his brain cells conspired against the rest of his body and those brain cells alone were the murderer? Would you accept a lawyer arguing a defense on behalf of Pickton's body that the 400 brain cells directed and committed the murder using Pickton's body as a tool like a robot, and therefore Pickton's body and the remaining brain cells that did not commit the murder should be set free once the 400 murderous brain cells were identified and removed from his body by a surgeon?

What about if Pickton was charged with poisoning his victims, albeit slowly and in a way that was not immediately apparent to them and death took years instead of murdering them quickly the way he did? Would you find him any less guilty of their murders?

Or what if Pickton deliberately ignored structural defects in the slaughterhouse building on his Port Coquitlam farm where he ran raves for up to 2,000 people including prostitutes and their guests, allowing it to collapse on them, killing hundreds? Is that not murder too?

And finally, knowing Pickton committed all of the murders he was charged with, would you allow Pickton to pay a fine for the murders without jail time and allow him not to have to enter a plea for the murders? Perhaps his excuse might be that it was too costly to engage in a lengthy trial and therefore he will just agree to pay a fine?

It is obvious Pickton cannot blame his arm, the axe, the pigs or his brain cells for the murders of 49 women and have the court separate his body parts from his entire person. Even if a court agreed Pickton's brain is damaged by mental illness, he still gets locked up.

If Pickton Were A Corporation

The murders would still be the responsibility of Pickton as owner of the corporation. The only question might be the degree of involvement the other people in the corporation had. In Pickton's case that might be easier to determine.

Now let's look at Robert Pickton in corporate form in the company DuPont. The people that ran DuPont knowingly made and sold products that caused cancer and killed people exposed to them. The executives, directors and managers of DuPont were aware of this for at least 40 years and developed specific strategies to lie and cover it up.  Hundreds of people over the years were involved. And the case of Kerr-McKee Chemical Corporation is similar.  The people  involved are collectively are no different from Pickton; responsibility is just spread among more people. The argument that the managers, investors and shareholders of Dupont did not know what is going on does not hold water, nor does attempts at limiting liability.  They are murderers just like Pickton. A recent German court decision moves the bar in that direction.

The people that make up corporations have demanded corporations be given free speech and the right of religious behavior, which requires conscious effort by them, so they must assume responsibility for their corporations' right to speech along with all of its other actions. Would the courts convict DuPont executives, directors and managers of murdering Dupont's victims? Probably not because the courts have been corrupted by big money and political influence. I cover that in a section under development, but it does not matter.

Research it, and if you decide Dupont is guilty, render your decision by finding every product they make and refuse to buy it again, ever. See Protest to understand the impact of your decision.

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PROTEST AND PROFIT AT THE SAME TIME

A huge amount of time and money is spent protesting, signing petitions, marching in the streets, writing political representatives and so on. Although all of these forms of protest may be effective to one degree or another, the world's existing political, financial and legal systems have been designed and modified to absorb and deflect protest, in the end to change little or nothing.

There is an incorrect assumption that change brought about by protest is somehow implemented in the same way new ideas are created and developed. However creation of anything completely new benefits from the fact that initially there are no rules surrounding it, minds are open and no one is yet profiting from its establishment. 

An existing system however over time gathers a lot of vested interests and those with vested interests in it and who have mastered exploitation of the system for their own benefit will be highly resistant to changing it. In fact changing what exists might to the system attacked by change be the same thing as disease entering a body. The entire body fights the disease. The other problem is people are reluctant to change because of homeostasis. I can explain why, but overcoming the resistance to change is as much work as protesting.

In thinking about the ineffectiveness of changing existing infrastructure, consider the people of Iceland. The people of Iceland got together to change their Constitution as a result of corrupt bankers and corporations robbing the country blind and destroying the economy. Alcoa for example hired economic hit men to screw the country and its citizens so it could provide Alcoa with cheap power.

Icelanders were so mad they refused to pay the billions in debt the bankers created, and threw their bankers in jail.  Throwing their bankers in jail seems like a wonderful solution, except for the fact that as stated above, in the back of all this, the infrastructure that they tried to change with a new constitution was protected by entrenched interests that had backstops in the form of judges and elected officials who benefit by leaving things as they were. I suspect Brexit may prove to be exactly the same.

In point 4 of the attached constitution change link above, comes the warning:

"Do not try to bypass entirely other existing representative institutions.
The members of the Constitutional Council saw themselves as outsiders to the system fighting entrenched elites. That stance may have played out well just after the crisis, but on the long run it harmed their legitimacy and jeopardized their work. The Icelandic process thus suffered from the antagonism of several key players: The Supreme Court, which struck down the first elected constitutional assembly in January 2011 for what seemed like minor procedural irregularities in the elections; the liberal party, which decried the whole process as illegitimate from the beginning; the academic community, which kept voicing skepticism about the process as "too complicated"; and the media, who ignored it for the most part. The success of any constitutional process is largely dependent on rallying major political actors and maintaining legitimacy throughout."

Short of a civil war, there may be an easier way to effect change that is similar to using the body's defensive mechanism against it.

The film in this link was developed by an Italian American billionaire named Ray Dalio. Dalio was the 30th richest person in America and the 69th richest person in the world with a net worth of $15.2 billion as of October 2014. Dalio runs Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, and his film gives you all you need to know about citizen power.

There are only two things in the world the 1% fight over, money and power. Power without money is what happens when you beat the crap out of someone weaker than you, or you come up with some way to have someone else or a gang beat up others because you can influence them. At the end of the day however, all of them have to eat while they are beating up people, and if they go home, they might have kids to feed.  Even muscle needs money, so power without having access to money may be pointless. 

Bottom line, it all ends up being about money, and as Ray Dalio's film shows, you are the source of all money. Even the tiniest bit of what you spend or borrow keeps the system going. So the real way to exert your personal power is to hold back whatever you make and stop borrowing.  Not all of it, but if 1,000 people hold back 10% of spending or borrowing, the economic impact is huge. Both on you, because it stays in your pocket, and everyone else that does not get it. And, unlike freezing in the cold, boiling in the sun, or getting soaked in the rain, it is a strategy you can employ from your living room. 

A 20% reduction in purchases in the economy is like an atomic bomb going off. I am not going to sit here and tell you how to do it, get together with others and plot it out. But a company like Volkswagen deserves a little economic destruction for rigging their cars systems to falsify fuel ratings. Oh sure, the government promises they will prosecute VW, and everyone knows about it, which impacts their sales, but in another article I will show you how rigged prosecutions destroy democracy and rob you blind. The real class action settlement you want is to never buy another VW again. That is a payoff the lawyers never dip into.  If you really want change, start shuttering companies by withholding spending and borrowing.

A bonus reason to do so is to rid yourself of propaganditis. Propaganditis is a serious form of mental incapacity created by seeing too many advertisements, listening to too many politicians speak, and blindly living on faith buying useless crap you do not need.  One thing you will notice is no one ever advocates is to stop spending your money or borrowing.  Every ad you ever see is about how you will be better as a person with a new something.  That is called brainwashing.  Even saving for your old age is an incidental process to spending whatever you make and can borrow.

Does withholding spending work? Absolutely. Well enough that the BDS movement which has targeted Israel's treatment of Palestinians is now being attacked by Israel using every trick in the book to stop it. Search BDS and read the articles and you will see what I mean. If you read the Dalio Bridgewater link above Dalio understands and says he is fearful of how powerful the masses are if they change their way of doing things, as his film explains. You and billions like you hold the nuclear trigger to the control of capitalism, unless you are so broke you cannot afford to cut back on anything.

"It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion." - Aristotle in Politics (J. Sinclair translation, pg. 226, 1962)

or for a slightly less intellectual observation:

If withholding spending did not work there would not be such great resistance to it, and there is huge resistance to BDS, calling it anti semitic, it will damage the Palestinians and so forth.  Regardless, saving your money works and moreover, it is good for you. Watch How the Economic Machine Works until it sticks in your mind as to why it does.

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THE WORLD AS AN ISLAND

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THE ISLAND'S FOUNDING VALUES