Tuesday 13 March 2018

Frankenstein's corporate monster

In recent years, the legal abomination of free speech rights for those artificial entities known as corporate persons has broken fee of its bounds and gone on a terrible rampage:
According to a recent study, corporations and their trade groups are behind nearly half of all free-speech cases these days. Businesses have used the freedom of speech to overturn laws requiring tobacco companies to put graphic warnings on cigarette packages, publicly held companies to disclosure of the use of conflict minerals, and food companies to notify consumers of genetically modified organisms.
If you don't agree that this is a monstrous perversion of laws intended to stop real humans being silenced by the powerful, I don't think we can ever be friends.

Having said that, it all started with the best of intentions. Just as Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein started off as a well-intentioned idealist, who wanted to free the human race from pain, suffering and death, the road to free speech for corporations was paved with good intentions, as Adam Winkler points out:
Huey Long was Trump before Trump. The fiery populist governor elected on the eve of the Great Depression had an aggressive agenda to make Louisiana great again—and little tolerance for dissent. Long set up a state board to censor newsreels and another to decide which newspapers would be allowed to print profitable government notices. When the student paper at Louisiana State University published an unflattering editorial about him, an outraged Long—referring to himself, as autocrats often do, in the third person—sent in the state police to seize copies, saying he wasn’t “going to stand for any students criticizing Huey Long.”

After Louisiana’s larger daily newspapers came out against him, “the Kingfish” declared war. “The daily newspapers have been against every progressive step in the state,” Long said, “and the only way for the people of Louisiana to get ahead is to stomp them flat.” To do so, in 1934 Long’s allies enacted a 2 percent tax on the advertising revenue of the state’s largest-circulation newspapers. Long said the tax “should be called a tax on lying, two cents per lie.”

Led by the Capital City Press, the publisher of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the newspaper companies challenged the advertising tax in court. They claimed the tax was an effort to silence those who questioned Long’s policies...

... In 1936, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspaper corporations and struck down Long’s advertising tax.
So the monster wasn't the dumbed-down Hollywood version, born bad because the mad scientist's lab assistant goofed up and accidentally gave it the brain from an evil dead person.* This is more like Mary Shelley's infinitely more nuanced, humane original, created good, but doomed by unforeseen consequences and the neglect of his creator.

So, if you're talking about the attempted censorship of media corporations, corporate free speech isn't necessarily such an abomination. But not every attack on media corporations' unfettered freedom to print whatever they damn well like, no matter who gets hurt, is as obviously pernicious as Long's attempt to silence critics. There is, for example the "Stop Funding Hate" campaign in the UK, which also seeks to hit media corporations where it hurts - an example, IMO, of where the corporate media are the bullies, not the bullied, and deserve all the pushback they get.

You could say it's a grey area, although that's more than you could reasonably say about, for instance, the free speech "right" of a non-media corporation, like a tobacco company, to apply as much unfiltered public relations spin as it likes, regardless of the costs to the rest of society. That's still monstrous.







*I really don't like the managerialist subtext of the incompetent menial screwing up in the James Whale version. In the book, Victor Frankenstein is completely responsible for both his own good intentions and for his flaws, so his fall is a real tragedy. In the film, Dr Frankenstein is kind of let off the moral hook by a dumb "honestly, you just can't get the staff"-type accident. This always seems like a cop-out to me.


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