Corporate Misalignment and the Circle of Human Concern

1. Corporate Misalignment and the Circle of Human Concern Professor john a. powell Executive Director, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion University of California, Berkeley Union Theological Seminary| New York August 31, 2013

2. Overview • Domains of space: public/private? • Non-public/non-private • Corporate prerogative • Circle of human concern

3. Domains of Space

4. 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

5. Addressing the Misalignment of Power • The issue isn’t public/private, but public/corporate • Expansion of corporate prerogative • Corporate space diminishes public & private space Private

6. Domains of Space: Characteristics

7. Non-public/Non-private Space • This space is misleading for individuals who enjoyed neither public rights nor private freedom • Today: immigrants, incarcerated, disabled, and other marginalized racial subjects

8. Historicizing Non-public/Non-private Space • Arizona SB 1070 • Immigration Reform Bill • Melenderes vs. Arpaio (2013) from the past… to the present Immigrants Slaves • Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857) Incarcerated/formerly incarcerated

9. Historicizing Non-public/Non-private Space cont. 1851 2010

10. 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… • Have higher percentages of black populations • Are more likely to have a Republican governor • Have a higher incarceration rate and a larger number of law enforcement agents • Have higher poverty rates

11. Corporate Prerogative

12. Expansion of Corporate Domain When and how did the expansion of the corporate domain occur?

13. 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

14. Expansion of Corporate Domain “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 The purpose of the 14th Amendment, known as equal protection, was really focused on citizenship

15. 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)

16. Legal Fiction Slaveryis the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.

17. Corporations, Race, & the Fourteenth Amendment 19 288 Just as the Court extended standing rights to corporations, it denied those rights to blacks. For example, from 1890-1910…

18. The Reconstruction Court = Doctrine of Corporate personhood Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Separate but equal

19. Corporate Prerogative & Civil Rights 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

20. Citizens United 1970s:Justice Powell argued on behalf of corporate speech Citizens United v. FEC (2010):distorts the democratic political process

21. Example – Corporate Misalignment 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

22. Globalization • Realignment of structures • The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 • Structural disadvantage • Strategic Oterhing

23. Effects of Corporate Misalignment • Excessive corporate prerogative distorts the democratic process • Super PACs, Koch Brothers, etc. • Tea Party • 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 http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/we-the-people-corporations-are-not-people-money-is-not-speech1.jpg

24. The Circle of Human Concern • What are the effectsof this misalignment of power? • How does it impactwhere people are situated within public imagination? • What work does othering do for whom? • Marginalization: What use?

25. The Circle of Human Concern Sexual Minorities Mass Incarceration Citizens Children Mothers Elderly Undocumented Immigration Muslims 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

26. The Circle of Human Concern Corporations LGBTQ persons Felons Mothers Citizens Undocumented immigrants Muslims Elderly Children Non-public/non-private space

27. Impacts on Racialized Disparities • 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

28. 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

29. Understanding Structures as Systems We are all situated within structures but not evenly • These structures interact in ways that produce a differential in outcomes

30. Situated Different in Structures People are impacted by the relationships between institutions and systems… … but people also impact these relationships and can change the structure of the system. Not only are people situated differently with regard to institutions, people are situated differently with regard to infrastructure

31. Realignment of Corporations • 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

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

33. Larry Summers

34. Impact Achieving Transformative Change

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36. Institutional Corruption Map – Government Representative Legislation Distorted Legislation Value/Harm The Public Representatives Special Interest Elect Gifts, Contributions To Monitor Watchdog Groups , Media, etc. Depends on Funding