Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

I came to visit my cousin. She is 86 years old, owing to her actually being my grandmother’s first cousin and my first cousin twice removed. She lives in a convent in Brentwood, as she is a nun. She is my sole remaining female relatives. How many relatives have I watched slowly die? I sat at my grandmothers’ bedsides. I sat at my mother’s. Now, at my cousin’s. She hasn’t eaten anything in three days and barely takes liquid. She nearly died a few weeks ago. She had an anti-biotic resistant infection in her blood. The nuns called my dad saying that they didn’t think she would live through the weekend, but then she did. My dad didn’t tell me, because I was so far away. I’ve been complaining about this to other people and not him, but actually, I’m not mad. You can’t undo the past. And I’m kind of glad I didn’t know.

It’s been nearly a year since I last came to see her. Last July or August I came by myself. Normally, I came every time with Christi. Now I’m here with my dad. She didn’t open her eyes to recognize me. I’m not sure if she was asleep or awake when I held her hand and talked to her about grad school. I can hear her voice so clearly in my head, being excited when I told her I was going away to school. But now she’s nearly mute. Sister Jeanne said that she can be more talkative around lunchtime.
I didn’t come over fall break or thanksgiving or winter break or spring break. Now, I’m finally here. And she. like everyone I love, will die or leave. I expect to be back here soon.

Our country is currently controlled by moneied interests who donate vast sums to both major parties. Corporate money now has greater voting power than humans in the United States. Legal systems have been set up that make this situation difficult to combat. This is a bit about how they work and where they’re vunerable

• What is a Corporation? – Definitions
• Corporations are People too
• What does it mean for corporations to have human rights?
• Corporations have too many rights
• Things are bad, but we can undo them

What is a Corporation? – Definitions

The Daytrader’s Glossary defines a corporation as a “form of business organization characterized by a state charter or articles of incorporation enabling certain rights separate from its owners. Common features of a corporation include limited liability of the owners, issuance of stock in evidence of ownership, election of directors and officers by vote of shareholders and taxation of the corporation separate to that of the owners.” Ok, so what that means is that a corporation is a type of buisiness organization with many owners. The corporation is considered a legally seperate entitiy from it’s owners. It is a thing that exists in the world, seperate from it’s owners. Corporations limit liability of the owners. What this means is that the owners are not personally responcible for the debts of the corporation. If the company runs out of money and owes many debts, the company can go bankrupt, but the owners are not responcible for the debt. So if Mitch and I own a corporation that owes $50,000 to Sophie, and the corporation only has $20,000 in assets, Mitch and I personally don’t owe the remaining $30,000 and too bad for Sophie.

Corporations issue stock. A stock is a share of ownership in the corporation. A person who owns one or more stocks (also called “shares”) is a stockholder. The percentage of the corporation owned by any stockholder is the number of shares owned divided by the total number of shares issued. Stockholders get to vote on resolutions and on the directors and officers of the corporation. One share is one vote (except in special cases, like the Google IPO). So if you own 50 shares, you get 50 votes. Corporations also, as a seperate legal entity have tax liability. The organization owes taxes, but since liability is seperated, the owners do not owe those taxes.
Corporations are chartered. This means that some state causes them to come into existance. People who want to start a corporation file paperwork in some state and pay some fees and then they have a corporation. The state could, at some point, decide to revoke the charter of a corporation and then it would cease to legally exist.
Ok, so corporations are collectively owned and the owners have no liability. They are chartered in some state. Under law, corporations exist as things in the world. what sort of things?

Corporations are People too

In 1886, the supreme court of the Unites States decided that corporations were legally people. There was a case about corporate taxation before them. SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD CO., 118 U.S. 394 (1886) And they decided that the 14th Amendment and Equal Protection applied to corporations, as they were legally people. An excellent explination what what this means and how it came about. This is called a “legal fiction.” So when corporations are in court, judges employ a fiction and pretend that corporations are people. This means that corporations, as people, get all the rights that people get. Free speech. The right to bear arms. Protections against unlawful search and seizure. The whole bill of rights and every other constitutional right too. All the rights that were written for actual, real-life, non-fictional people.
But corporations have limitted liability. You can’t send a corporation to jail, obviously. And the owners can’t lose more than their stock. So coporations are super-people. They have all the same rights that you and I do, plus they don’t get sick, fall and break their arm, go to jail, die of old age, or have any human frailties. The only bad things that can happen to corporations s that they can run out of money or they can have their charter revoked.

What does it mean for corporations to have human rights?

The idea that corporation deserve human rights, and, in fact, deserve more rights than humans is deeply troubling. One of the “rights” they have is freedom of speech. This means that a corporation can officially say whatever the heck it wants, just like a person can. Nike argued that this meant the have the right to lie about whether or not their shoes are made with sweatshop labor. It also means that corporations have the right to political speech, such as trying to influence the outcome of a poltical contest. Donating money to a politician is cirrently viewed as a type of “speech,” so corporations have the right to give money to candidates that they agree with. Many coporations have way more resources than individuals. This means, practically, they have more freedom of speech than us lowly humans. And they’re basically feudal. Corporations are heirachical. your boss tells you what to do. You, as an employee don’t get to elect leadership or have any influence in anything aside from worrying whether or not you’re going to get fired. Yeah, some employees own stock, but in their role as an employee they do not have any rights in influencing the direction of the corporation aside from what the corporation chooses to grant them. Which means that a textile company which employees 1000 people at minimum wage and 100 highly paid managers and who has 100 rich stockholders can use it’s wealth to lobby to have the minimum wage reduced. It can publish ads in newspapers saying the minimum wage is too high. It can give sums of money to politicians that want to elmininate minimum wage entirely. It can put posters on the walls telling emplyees that minimum wages are a bad idea and unions are evil. It can make them watch videos saying that. So there would exist a company where 200 people controlled the wealth generated by 1000 (or 1100) people and decide in what political direction the money should be thrown. The 1000 workers could all decide to vote in favor of minimum wage increases, but they proabbly don’t have much money to give to politicians, and the corporation does. A politician in favor of minimum wage increases would be at a financial disadvantage. And many the company gives equal sums to both major parties as long as they keep wages down. Then the workers can either vote Green or it doesn’t matter who they vote for, because the company, working against their interests, bought the major parties.

Corporations have too many rights

and they keep getting new ones all the time. All these weird trade organizations, like the WTO have secret ruling councils that periodically decide that corporations should have more and more rights. Ones that humans don’t get. As citizens, you and I can’t vote about the WTO. So we work for feudal institutions who are given extra rights by pseudo-government bodies made up of the same people who own the corporations. Oh, and your pension fund? It’s invested in those same corporations. The fund managers want the stock of the companies to go up. So they vote to lobby for lower wages. What this means is that your own retirement fund money is controlled by a financial manger who is activelly lobyying to lower your wages. You own money is being used as a weapon against you. when coporations have too many rights, we are serfs. The product of our labor is being sued to harm us. Our own prpoerty is a weapon against us. And our laws can be overtuned by super-national bodies, like the WTO, which we get absolutely no say in.

Things are bad, but we can undo them

The proplem is this stupid legal fiction. Corporations exist to make money for their owners. That’s not a person! First of all, people can’t own each other! What should happen is that SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD CO should be overturned. Stupid descisions have been overtunred before. The will of the people does influence the court. So step one is letting people know about this. Human people. And human people need to let their voices be heard, corporate personhood was a bad idea and needs to stop now.

Way back in January or February, I put an ad up on Yahoo personals. Today, I cancelled it. They asked me why. I said something about having a girlfriend and the Connecticut lesbian dating scene being unfathomable. But they asked me again to take a survey.

What did you like most about your Yahoo! Personals service?

um, honestly, mocking the ads of the other users.
 

What did you like least about your Yahoo! Personals service?

 going to coffee shops to meet women with mullets who think /i’m/ weird

What changes would you suggest we make to the service that would improve the experience?

This is a large problem which requires a multi-facetted approach. First of all, personal ads are still viewed with suspicion by members of the lesbian community, especially in New England. It might be a good idea to advertise in MetroLine, a gay publication that seems to be popular. This would make people less embarrassed when their lurker friends found their ad and would increase the size of the population placing ads.

Secondly, many people have poor written communication skills, which makes their ads subliterate or causes misunderstanding in their ad-realted correspondence. You may want to lobby for better writing programs in highschools. The whole on-line industry depends on the reading and writing skills on the general populace, so it’s in your best interests to improve education.

Um, I really don’t know what you can do about the over-representation of TV-addicted women with mullets. Maybe start offering free haircuts with a subscription?

But gos, that makes me sound like an asshole. And while I’m not really into northeastern suburban lesbian hair fashions, it’s not so auful as I make it out. And while I really had little in common with the women I met, they were actually nice people and some I would like to keep around as friends. Maybe I bare some blame for the oddness of my internet-dating experiences.

Her: what popular bands do you like?
me: i don’t listen to popular music
her: oh, um, what tv shows do you watch?
me: i don’t watch tv
her: what kind of car do you drive?
me: i prefer bicycling due to the general unavilability of vegetable-based fuels in this area
her: uh…. ok… so what do you study?
me: I compose experimental electronic music with my laptop.

Phillip K dick wrote in Radio Free Abelmouth that once you become a Berkeley radical, you can never leave. Thishas happened to me. I can really never leave Berkeley. I can go to visit other places anywhere in the world, but always as a foreigner. They sell t-shirts on Telegraph Ave that say “The People’s Republic of Berkeley.” I could never decide if I wanted one or they were too touristy and deserved to be mocked. I think I might get one for East Coast wearing.

So a few weeks ago, I went to a music festival and symposium at Wesleyan, called the For a Long Time festival. One of the symposium speakers was Michael Schumacher, who runs the Diapason Gallery in New York City. This gallery specializes in sound installations. One of their current projects is sound installations for people’s homes. People who really like such things pay a fee and get an installation put into their homes. Depending on the amount of money they put in, they get a certain number and quality of speakers put up around their house. So somebody might pay a few thousand dollars and get a killer sound system and some pieces to play on it. The deal, though, is that it’s an installation. It’s self-directing art. The customer does not controll the art. Meaning, they don’t know what they’re getting ahead of time. Furthermore, there is no volume control. It plays what it plays when it plays it, which might be just on the full moon or something, who knows. If you don’t like the installation, you can turn it off, but you can’t turn it down. Schumacher told us of an early customer who said that it completely changed her life. I bet it would.

Personally, I wouldn’t want an installation in my home, because I work in my home. It would be hard to write stuff for my own installation if there was one already going. But if I were not a composer and I really loved sound art, I could totally see getting one. Fortunately, Cola has an installation in her apartment of the same sort by accident. Her intercomm is freaking out. (Read her account of it.) Sometimes it plays street sounds into her apartment. No volume control. It’s even more hardcore than Diapason’s venture, since there’s no off switch. I kind of liked it as it reminded me of this project. But sometimes, randomly, it will switch and play sounds from the apartment to the street. This is a bit more distressing because, well, few people would want all the sounds from their studio apartment to be played out of a speaker on the stoop. No. Not good.
Cola, however, is a good sport and while she was upset about this (I would be upset too), she is willing to let me take advantage of this situation. The stoop speaker masks everything with a bad 60hz hum. A bad hum. Something is clearly ungrounded. Well, I mean, obviously the wiring is screwed up or this wouldn’t be going on. So anyway, what we did was duct-tape a speaker over the intercom and then set my computer to play out of the speaker. It’s playing my tuning ratios but retuned to be overtones of 60hz, the same frequency as the hum. The effect is subtle. (Maybe a bit too subtle, but when it was louder, it ended up alarming the other tennants…. anyway, I turned it down.) It’s kind of nice. However, I was unwilling to sacrifice my laptop during the day, so it’s not going when I’m not there. What I clearly need is a second laptop that can run osx so I can leave this up 24/7 until the intercom is fixed. Really. heh. I am too pleased with myself about this.

This post killed.
I am keeping casaninja.com as is.

I got some audio of Ann Coulter from MediaMatters.org and I was struck by how everybody kept talking on top of each other so you can’t even tell what’s going on. You get bombarded with bombasticness and somehow, at the end, feel like information has been communicated, but none has. It’s fake news. It’s a media machine trying to pass itself off as the news story. “Hey, look at me!” the media says. So I thought, what if this got layered more and more of the same stuff on top? And not having much more ranting handy as I don’t have cable, I just layered the same clip. And I think it sounds like a machine after several layers. How Ironic! What do you think?

http://www.xkey.com/~celesteh/music/wesleyan/media-machine.mp3

That is a picture of Cola aka Nicole, whose apartment I’ve frequently been lurking in. Cola is nifty. I know her from my undergrad days. She’s a geek. Was a history major and a CS minor, now works at the seond largest toy company in the US programming toys and also takes nifty pictures. She is also my new girlfriend. Say hi.

anon commenting should be working now…

Yes, my blog looks different. I wanted to take advantage of new blogger features and unfortunately, the easiest way to do that was to pick a new look. My old look was also designed by blogger, but, i dunno, this one feels so corporate to me. i tweaked the colors, but it’s still dull. oh well. the content is what matters, right?