The Unocal Burma lawsuit also established that the state of California had the power to 'execute' the aforementioned corporation as well. One wonders what it will take for the California Secretary of State (the state office that issues corporate charters) to actually do so.

The 99% have drafted a Declaration that ought to be published as its own item here at CD so I don't have to spam every article with the URL as I'm now going to do, https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/

Here's a simple rule. Any corporation no matter the size that cannot survive on its own and needs taxpayer subsidies or bailouts should be out of business.

The list could be long. Here's a few more: Lockheed Martin, GE, XE, Monsanto, Johnson and Johnson, General Mills, and, of course, the thinly disguised corporate thugs: CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security.

I saw the same sign in Occupy Phoenix on October 15. Wonderful!

Beyond corporations, do we really need the parasitic casino of a stock market? Wouldn't we all be better off with pensions and better paying Social Security? Wouldn't it be better for government loans to help businesses that meet certain criteria like living wages, ecological sustainability and worker ownership than to simply benefit share holders at the expense of worker rights and health?

Capitalism as a system has outlived its time. We can no longer have a profit & growth-based system of exploitation. We need a sustainable system that meets the needs of society, not one that feeds on it.

Did you see DemNow today...O takes in double than romney/more than all gop combined dispite (faked) antagonism from ws...he's their man, for now?

Corporate capital punishment was normal a century ago and the crimes they commit today are far worse than then plus they've been deemed to be people thanks to Citizens United. It's high time we bring it back - http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2011/09/coporate-death-penalty.html

Nice article Russ!

The big owners should be stripped of their excess shares, to be distributed among qualifying cultural, scientific and educational organizations. The same corporations under new ownership might begin to act on motives other than share price and quarterly profit. Separating rich people from their assets would also make it more difficult for them to control public policy.

"In 1983, the Attorney General of Virginia asked the state’s corporation commission to dissolve a book company convicted of possessing obscene films."

.........What could be more obscene than a Banking Cartel bringing down the global economy?

Another corporation that more than deserves it's charter permaently revolked in Monsanto.

They were involved with DDT. They have dumped so much PCP into rivers world wide that each and every one of us has it our bloodstreams. They were involved with Agent Orange and millions of birth defects in Vietnam. Today they are involved with shaking down each and every soybean farmer world wide for royalties on their "patented genes," making farmers contractually obligated to pay for their seed every year instead of keeping seeds for the next year's crop. Their push for factory farming is also pushing subsistence farmers off their land. Each and every step of the way they have fought to make sure that the truth not be heard about how they run their business.

If you want one of the baddest actors on the corporate stage, Monsanto is one of your top picks.

I second Monsanto, terrible people, if you can call them people. 250,000 Indians farmer have committed suicide in the past 15 years mostly due to Monsanto's BT Cotton failures and price gouging.

We need a practical, testable measure by which the value of a corporation is measured and if they fail, the corporate charter is removed. They can then either leave the state or remain, wherein all stock holders become liable, in both criminal and civil actions, for the debts and action of the corporation. Meaning stock holders could be sentenced to, say, 1 day in prison for each 100 shares of stock held and a $1.00 fine for each share of stock held.

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I'm not interested in eradicating particularly egregious bad apples. Besides, the death penalty list would be way too long. The system of corporations itself is inherently economically unjust and ecologically unsustainable. Our economic system needs to be fundamentally restructured, and corporations are right in the middle of that.

Very well done. And see also “The Fallacy of Corporate Personhood?” at Open Salon.com http://open.salon.com/blog/f_arouete/2011/09/18/the_fallacy_of_corporate_personhood

I hope you do not mind my adding the photo as it makes my point so perfectly. It's their argument. Demand they live by the rule they bought and paid for. Give Shylock his 'pound of flesh' and may it be his own.

The article left out BP, for murdering the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Hammurabi's Code, written 3700 years ago, if a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

Now that corporations are officially people, that sort of logic should apply. Problem - they are not really people. But if they want to call themselves people, then who is responsible? The CEO, the Board of Directors, the shareholders? Any of those would do.

On the death penalty, give corporations a choice. Face the death penalty or stop being a person. In other words, give up the Supreme Court decision on the nefarious Citizens United case or face the Federal Death Penalty. Crimes against people trigger the death penalty. We want single payer, and other useful provisos in other issues, but we don't have to get there to impose the death penalty.
David Cohen,
Washington DC

has nobody yet suggested oil companies and oil exploration companies for the list?
they're big enough to cause billions in damages and rake in billions in profits, but 'tiny' enough to demand government subsidies, while avoiding reparations for the havoc they cause. even their lobby and propaganda departments are the size of corporations. off with their heads!

PCP should have been PCB.

The thing is that most of what they have done is perfectly legal. When you buy the politiicians who make the laws that enable you to make more money to buy more politicians, you can eventually arrange for pretty much anything you want to do to be legal- it may be immoral, indecent, obscene, and completely disgusting, but if you can buy enough politicians, you can make the laws to make it legal. Case in point--Citizens United.

Ok, if corporations are "persons" then they should have the same statistics of death rate that people do. We could apply life insurance tables to decide each year if a corporation lives or dies. It would have some element of randomness to it but certainly investors would think long and hard about investing in an old corporation. When old corporations could not attract investors they would die of old age.

Let's gain political control and end corporate personhood forever. So many other societal problems will be solved if that happens.

This abuse of the law has been traced to court reporter (and former railroad head) who simply injected that interpretation into case law, namely, Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Here's a synopsis: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/13-corporate-personhood-challenged/

Also, check out POCLAD articles: http://www.poclad.org/

When one uses the word “corporation”, it is very important to clarify that you refer to a tiny, not-necessarily-US-national, minority of demographically identical 'people-with-pulses' who populate the inter-locking boardrooms and corner offices operating behind the fascade of "corporation".

(That's the nice way to say it...insert "sociopaths" and "Anti-Christ" in the appropriate spaces, for the juicy version.)

Seriously, each time we fail to make that distinction, we re-enforce the fiction of corporate personhood. 'We' are up against a flesh-and-blood global oligarchy using the "corporation" as a front to concentrate wealth and power in ways that will result in the destruction, of not only society and all that's been accomplished, but also, the ecosystem itself.

We are in a struggle for survival. Support #OWS.

"Under this death penalty proposal corporations like Aetna, CIGNA, UnitedHealth, and Wellpoint would be put out of business."

He's saying the Harvard Buziness School professors who corrupt the curriculum with the ideas of such predatory buziness plans will have to change their tune, i.e. trash their tune, waste their tune, burn it, grind it underfoot.

Their ideas are tried but not true. And their students will have to throw away their defunct lessons. They will be confused by their defunct elite educations. They will have to change their tunes too. They took the wrong course. The wrong choice. Failed choice. Can they afford to choose failure again?

Meanwhile, we on the far left have stood on the same rock solid ground since the beginning, and that ground will stay solid. It's the ground of universal equity/justice. You have to orient all of your curricula and procedures accordingly, if you want permanence, stability, peace. As much as liberalism tries, it will never deliver a workable alternative.

We all know the adage, one rotten apple...well, I think it is up to the good apples in all the corporations and banks and churches and insurance companies and medical people...to step up to the bench and state their belief that the rotten apples are adversely affecting their business reputation. Until the good apples get their proverbial heads out of their so-called American dream delusion and FOX taught bs, it remains up to us as we OWS OE OCCUPY IN THE STREETS..........and BOYCOTT THE BAD APPLES
most of the bad apples are in the big apple...many in DC

There was a company called Union Carbide - whose poorly supervised and poorly compliant pesticide factory in the central city of Bhopal in India resulted int the death of some 10000 poor people and maiming for life of another 100,000 and many more who are born after the incident in 1984. In order to keep its liability off the books, this company was dissolved and later absorbed by Dow Chemicals. Dow Chemicals never admitted the culability nor owned up to this grossest one-time crime in the history of mankind.

Point is - executing the name of a corporation will not dispell the evil they cast upon the people. They simply morph with other names, other ownerships and continue their devilish death dance. The same players, inviduals and owners continue their acts under other names and charters. This is the precise reason how corporations get away with all their excesses. Fire the CEO to retire in some filthy rich place like the Bahamas and bring in another one; all traces erased. Corporation can continue to pretend that it was the job the previous CEO who is at large.

I presonally prefer apportioning corporate penalities to the executives and stock holders. Every stock holder forfeits all his or her stock to the public good (not necessarily the government) when found culpable. Assets of all executives will be confiscated by government. In the case of Bhopal, all net stock holder worth would have been deposited in a trust fund that will benefit all the victims of the ghastly gas leak in the November of 1984.

I would like to add private armies like Xe and any and all members of the private incarceration industry.