Accountable Capitalism and the Right to Own Oneself

Responsible Corporations or Pirates?

Elizabeth Warren introduced an act called:

The Accountable Capitalism Act — real citizenship for corporate persons

Vox Source:

Warren Accountable Capitalism Corporations

Matt introduces his article in Vox with “Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism.” and “She’s unveiling a bill to make corporate governance great again.” And the kewl thing is that Warren is drawing on the work of Scandinavian rights theorist Ernst Wiggforce and labor rights activists and theorists who were able to save Scandinavian Capitalism from itself.

This act seeks to address some of the concerns most of us have about corporate charters, their powers and immunities and the highly undemocratic institution. So this post follows My Post "The Right to Own Oneself" and addresses matters that relate to basic rights theory.

This act introduces some basic rights based articles into the economic dialogue. Matt Yglesias has been in a vigorous, and somewhat personal, debate with people who oppose the act, many of them distorting what Warren, Yglesias and other defenders are saying. I hadn't heard of the act until I saw an article shared on twitter making an ad hominem on Matt Yglesias. I really doubt the act will be passed given the privateering power of our financial capitalists and their Republican proxies, but the ideas have a lot of merit. Indeed her argument hinges on accepting the premise of the Gilded Age Supreme Court that extended 14th amendment protections of "personhood" to chartered corporations, and subsequent decisions that blurred the lines between artificial persons and natural persons. Essentially her argument hinges on the hypocrisy and inequity of extending the rights of personhood to corporations while exempting them from the duties and obligations any of the rest of us would be held to. If they are going to have personhood rights and privileges, they must do the duties. They need to accept:

“the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.”

This is a stub. I wanted to start this, but to give it justice will take some more work. I'm going to go ahead and publish it in case anyone wants to read the links.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/15/17683022/elizabeth-warren-accountable-capitalism-corporations

The Right to Own Oneself:

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/06/TheRightToOwnOnesSelf.html

http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/case-based-on-ordinary-norms.pdf

https://cosmosandtaxis.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/ellerman_ct_vol5_iss3_4.pdf

Why the Right Wing recruit Authoritarian followers

I was looking for more information on how the right wing recruit people for a post I'm still working on when I found an article that cited research by Strathearn and Berger that found that Extremist groups consist of:

• 90 percent are lurkers and rarely contribute,
• 9 percent contribute some of the time,
• 1 percent do most of the talking and effectively control the conversation. [wired]

They claimed that was "good news" because they claim that it is good news because:

“They are casually involved, dabbling in extremism, and their rhetoric has a relatively minimal relationship to the spread of pernicious ideologies and their eventual metastasization into real-world violence.” [wired]

The 26 Point Plank of the Falangist Party

Parallels between the Falangists and the American Right wing

There are major similarities between the American Hard right and 30s Falangist Parties in Spain. In my next series of posts I'll be referring to the 26 point Program of the Falange Party, it's meaning, and comparing it to the current platforms of the hard right here and in other countries. It is hard not to see the similarities and contrasts. The Falange 26 point program, Hitlers Nazi Program, all have points of similarity. This is obvious to almost anyone who looks at them, except for those trying to gaslight the subject.

This is part of a series:

Parallels between Falangists and US Fascists

The Life of Garcia Lorca and Fascist Spain

What is going on has been so dark, I thought I'd take a break from #Trumpenführer's effort to inject fascism into the USA. So what do I do? I start reading a bio of Federico Garcia Lorca, by Ian Gibson. If I wanted to ease my mind about Fascism, he was exactly the wrong person to read. Or maybe it was my destiny and the emergence of imminence that was speaking to me that "now is the time to finish reading him." Unfortunately, the book reveals parallels to current times.

Branding a Dictatorship

Trump practices these methods of the "Big Lie"

Trump's Five Principles of Autocratization

Further he also practices the 5 principles of Autocratization that propaganda that others have used before him. Amazingly, Steve Schmidt, who I remember shilling for GW Bush years ago when GW was doing some of these things, recognized and had enough with #Trumpenfuhrer's methodology that even he is raising the alarm. His formulation of the 5 Principles of totalitarian propaganda, restated in my own words, is as follows:

1. He uses Big Lie techniques to incite ferver in his base of fervent followers.
2. branding scapegoats and rivals as enemies; affixing blame for complex problems to them and them alone.
3. Further, he gaslights his followers by alleging conspiracies, hidden, nefarious and linked to those scapegoated populations
4. He spreads a sense of victimization among them.
5. He asserts the need to exert heretofore unprecedented power to protect his victim fans from those conspiracies and scapegoated populations.

The Right to bear Arms According to Sam Adams

Auxiliary and Subordinate Right

This post enlarges points made in:

The Second Amendment is an Auxiliary and Subordinate Right

As I've said elsewhere owning and using weaponry for self defense is an "auxiliary and subordinate" right. Samuel Adams quoted Blackstone and Parliament when he wrote, referring to the Glorious Revolution when English Parliament overthrew the Stuarts:

“At the Revolution, the British Constitution was restored to its original principles, declared in the bill of rights; which was afterwards passed into a law”

Note the wording "restored" and "afterwards passed into a law", is expressing the principle that these human rights existed all the while in their denial, which is the reason that any right to own and use arms other than in the military is actually linked to the 9th and 10th Amendments and the product of hundreds of years of resistance by Citizens against Government Oppression. The right to bear arms is the right to participate in the defense, and by logical extension, the governance of the country.

This was a principle that dated back to "Old England." Samuel Adams in an essay published in the Boston Gazette during the early stages of the rebellion in New England that became our Revolution referred to the right to “have and use” arms as part of a list of "auxiliary and subordinate" rights that only apply;

• “When actually attacked”

Which are rights that people have auxiliary, to resisting oppression:

1. “first to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law”
2. “the right of petitioning the King and parliament”
3. “having and using arms for self-preservation and defense ”

These are only rights in a context of protecting the primary rights of:

1. “personal security”
2. “personal liberty”
3. “private property”

In Britain, only those with real estate property, "the gentry" were permitted to bear arms in the Militia. The Gentry were afraid of "the rabble" being permitted to bear arms, and as a result, Sam Adams said that:

“having arms for their defense” ... “a public allowance under due restrictions of the natural rights of resistance and self preservation, when the sanction of society and society are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”

This right to bear arms is an auxiliary right necessary to resist "the violence of oppression", not a right of mere disaffection, or to engage in oppression or ethnic cleansing. If there is no oppression and no occupying military, there is no need to possess and sue arms. Hence the word "auxilliary." To the nascent Rebellion, it also was a response to the presence of “Military Troops” due to the fear that;

“Violence is always to be apprehended from Military Troops”

If you talk to any gun nut, they know full well this history, and that the great fear of "Standing Armies" was what drove the founders of this country to create a second Amendment. But they interpret that fear the way Southerners did in the antebellum period before 1865. They saw it as a right for the Free Men (they expanded the franchise from the Gentry) and Gentry to defend their property, which included other people. They didn't see slaves, peasants, indentured servants and the property-less worker, as full equals in society. But their arguments saying "All Mankind" meant that this was a deluded attitude.

On Standing Armies:

http://files.libertyfund.org/pll/quotes/192.html

Related Posts:

National Emergency Service and The Militia

https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/02/second-amendment-sophism-and-militia.html

https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-second-amendment-is-auxiliary-and.html

How the Militia of the Whole Failed in the 19th Century

What Founders Meant by Militia

DC versus Heller wrongly decided

Militia Second Amendmen & Democracy

Select Militia, National Guard and 2nd Amendment

Thoughts on Defending Democracy and Second Amendment

The Palladium of Liberty

The Case for Expanding the National Guard

The Right of the Individual to himself

The Trouble with "Baumol's Disease"

One con argument against welfare in general and government supplied health care in particular is the notion that healthcare costs can't be controlled because they are labor intensive. This notion reflects the general disrespect for human beings and labor that is behind elitism and the push to replace people with machines in more and more businesses. It sounds plausible from a micro-economics view, but from a macro-economics view it reflects misplaced causality and misidentification of the culprit for cost increases. Especially in healthcare. Actual Labor costs are not the issue with healthcare. Profiteering, speculation, bureaucracy and administrative inflation are.