Corporate Misalignment and the Circle of Human Concern

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Corporate Misalignment and the Circle of Human ConcernProfessor john a. powell

Executive Director, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive SocietyRobert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion

University of California, Berkeley

Union Theological Seminary| New York August 31, 2013

+Overview

1. Domains of space: public/private?

2. Non-public/non-private

3. Corporate prerogative

4. Circle of human concern

+Domains of Space

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What’s the Fuss?

Theology/spirituality respond to some collective problem

Hubris/Islam Sin/Christianity Forgetfulness/Yoruba Ignorance/ Buddhism

Power/political Greed and stuff/economics Being/theology/spirituality

Self

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The issue isn’t public/private, but public/corporate

Expansion of corporate prerogative

Corporate space diminishes public & private space

Private

Addressing the Misalignment of Power

+Domains of Space: Characteristics

Public Private Corporate Shared/

communal space Limited Privacy Everyone

welcome/permitted

Rules and regulations

Individual space Maximum

privacy Ultimate freedom Minimal

government regulation

Minimal surveillance

Not your space No public space Definitely not

private space No freedom It is neither

private nor public space

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This space is misleading for individuals who enjoyed neither public rights nor private freedom

Today: immigrants, incarcerated, disabled, and other marginalized racial subjects

Non-public/Non-private Space

+Historicizing Non-public/Non-private Space

Arizona SB 1070 Immigration Reform Bill

Melenderes vs. Arpaio (2013)

Incarcerated/formerly incarcerated

ImmigrantsSlaves

from the past… to the present

Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857)

+Historicizing Non-public/Non-private Space cont.

1851 2010

+Detention & Mass Incarceration as “New Jim Crow”

Stop & Frisk

Floyd, et al. v. City of New York (2013)

Stand-Your-Ground laws. States that have these statutes…

1.Have higher percentages of black populations

2.Are more likely to have a Republican governor

3.Have a higher incarceration rate and a larger number of law enforcement agents

4.Have higher poverty rates

+Corporate Prerogative

+Expansion of Corporate Domain

When and how did the expansion of the corporate domain occur?

+Expansion of Corporate Domain cont.

The Gilded Age (1870s – early 1900s)

Lochner decision (1905) Court said that legislatures couldn’t regulate the economy Reminiscent of Tea Party today

Time period was also the era of Jim Crow

Populist and Progressives fought corporate power and lost

Strategy was not racially inclusive

The purpose of the 14th Amendment, known as equal protection, was really focused on citizenship

“We doubt very much whether any action of a State not directed by way of discrimination against the Negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision.”

— Chief Justice Miller

Expansion of Corporate Domain

Corporate Personhood Corporate attorneys used the 14th Amendment to argue that

States, which had chartered them, were restrained from exercising powers over them Started in the 1870s and culminated in Santa Clara

(1886)

+Legal Fiction

Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal

fiction that property is a person.

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Just as the Court extended standing rights to corporations, it denied those rights to blacks. For example, from 1890-1910…

Corporations, Race, & the Fourteenth Amendment

19288

+The Reconstruction Court

Doctrine ofCorporate personhood= Plessy v. Ferguson

(1896)Separate but equal

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The Gilded Age/Jim Crow decisions are part of a common social structure

The exercise of social power through property rights continues to mask the concomitant disempowerment of people of color

The Reconstruction Amendments have been hijacked to expand corporate prerogative

Narrows the rights of those marginalized through a variety of legal doctrines, including corporate personhood and through a discourse of public/private

Corporate Prerogative & Civil Rights

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1970s: Justice Powell argued on behalf of

corporate speech

Citizens United v. FEC (2010):distorts the democratic political

process

Citizens United

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The repeal of Glass-Steagall

1933 law which separated investment banks from commercial banks

This law prevented commercial banks from gambling ordinary deposits on risky financial instruments and speculation

Example – Corporate Misalignment

Realignment of structures

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977

Structural disadvantage

Strategic Oterhing

Globalization

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1. Excessive corporate prerogative distorts the democratic process Super PACs, Koch

Brothers, etc. Tea Party

2. It effects “discrete and insular minorities” as markets, banks, and corporations fail to serve people as they were intended to do and instead only focus on profit for very few

Effects of Corporate Misalignment

http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/we-the-people-corporations-are-not-people-money-is-not-speech1.jpg

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1. What are the effects of this misalignment of power?

2. How does it impact where people are situated within public imagination?

3. What work does othering do for whom?

4. Marginalization: What use?

The Circle of Human Concern

Citizens

Elderly

MothersChildren

Mass Incarceration

Undocumented Immigration Muslims

Sexual Minorities

The Circle of Human Concern

Who inhabits the circle of human concern as a full member and who is

pushed out of it as a result of expanded corporate prerogative?

Non-public/non-private space

Corporations Citizens

Non-public/non-private space

Elderly

Mothers

Children

Felons

Undocumented immigrants Muslims

LGBTQpersons

The Circle of Human Concern

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Race serves as a way of understanding how people are positioned within structures (education, housing, etc.)

How does the expansion of corporate prerogative impact racialized disparities in structures? For example: housing foreclosures due to subprime

lending, which occurred 5 times more in African American neighborhoods than in white ones

Impacts on Racialized Disparities

+Perspective: Bernard Harcourt

Relationship between race, mass incarceration, & social control

Michelle Alexander (2010) identifies a linkage between civil rights backlash and increasingly draconian drug laws

Even more explicitly than Alexander, Harcourt (2011) demarcates what we consider spheres of appropriate and inappropriate regulation dating back to the sixteenth century

Even if not so much in theory, a connectionexists between the penal sphere and theso-called “private sphere”

Conservative position is in support of ahighly regulated sphere of social controlwhile maintaining limited or weak controlof markets

+Understanding Structures as Systems

We are all situated within structures but not evenly These structures interact in ways that produce a differential in

outcomes

+Situated Different in Structures

Not only are people situated differently with regard to institutions, people are situated differently with regard to infrastructure

People are impacted by the relationships between institutions and systems…

… but people also impact these relationships and can change the structure of the system.

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Corporations make good servants, but bad masters

Need for a realignment of corporations in a liberal democracy

Need for a transformative wave of individual, judicial, and legislative actors

To build an inclusive democracy with a sustainable economy of shared responsibility and prosperity

Realignment of Corporations

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http://www.aclu.org/big-profits-broken-dreams

Example – Realignment

Adkins et. al. v. Morgan Stanley (2012)

Filed by ACLU because of discriminatory practices in the secondary housing market

Addresses the uneven racial consequences of making discriminatory lending profitable

Larry Summers

ImpactImpact

Achieving Transformative Change

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The PublicRepresentative

s

Watchdog Groups ,

Media, etc.

Special Interest

Representative Legislation

Distorted Legislation

Elect Gifts, Contributions

FundingDepends on

To Monitor

Value/Harm

Institutional Corruption Map – Government