The city wants to tax large corporations to pay for homeless housing, but Jeff Bezos isn’t pleased.
This article by Michael Hobbes appeared in the Huffington Post, May 12th, 2018.
Brief commentary by Community Rights US Director and Founder Paul Cienfuegos: Corporate boards of directors are holding citizens hostage all over the US and around the world. But there are clear pathways out of this crisis. Unfortunately, very few journalists (including this one) have any background in the history of how corporations came to be such legally and politically powerful actors, so their news stories are usually missing the very historical context that is exactly the information citizens need to think strategically about how We can solve these ever-growing crises. And because that critical context is missing, readers will end up feeling quite hopeless that anything can be done. Isn’t this exactly the opposite of what journalism should be about?!
It is urgent that We the People become knowledgeable about early US history regarding the business corporation. In a nutshell, for the first century in this country, corporations had no constitutionally protected “rights”, only the privileges granted to them in their charters (which we now call their Articles of Incorporation). Which means that….
* corporations had no First Amendment free speech rights, so their directors had no permissible public voice whatsoever to lobby the government for lower taxes, or to threaten to move their offices or warehouses somewhere else, etc.
* corporations had no constitutionally protected privacy rights, so their financial records were public, so their directors couldn’t lie about their finances.
* corporations were subordinate to We the People – required to each serve one specific social need and to cause no harm.
* when a corporation violated its charter, it was commonly dissolved by the state that had created it, assets seized, and directors sometimes imprisoned.
With these historical facts in mind, read this article and then ask yourself – is there really very little we can do to stop Amazon Corporation’s leadership from holding the City of Seattle hostage? I think not. The problem is not one mega-corporation. The problem is what We the People now allow corporations to do and to become. And THAT is something we have all the authority we need to transform this situation, once we understand who We are in relation to OUR subordinate corporate entities. We could require – at the local or state level – that Amazon Corp and all corporations pay a living wage to all of their employees. We could require Amazon Corp and other online retailers to pay sales tax. And much more.
What would it take for our independent journalists to learn and then share this larger contextual perspective with their readers? Because without it, we’re all going to drown in our despair.
SEATTLE ― The 9:30 a.m. meeting of the Seattle City Council’s Finance and Neighborhoods Committee ― the most boring name imaginable ― was overflowing. People in the crowd held up signs: “Don’t vote our jobs away” or “Tax the rich.”
The committee was taking public comment on the proposed Progressive Tax on Business, a fee on Seattle’s largest corporations to support homeless services. Last week, Amazon — the employer of more than 45,000 Seattleites that is on the hook for an estimated $20 million under the tax — announced it was pausing construction planning on a tower downtown and would consider renting some of its office space to other companies if the fee goes through. MORE…
