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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (64196)	5/7/2008 4:23:25 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542893

Just a few examples. Methinks you have a strange definition of "rights."

To: Cogito who wrote (64196)	5/8/2008 11:40:10 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542893

They have the legal right to shelter income from taxation by opening tiny branch offices in foreign countries, and declaring that they are no longer US corporations. That isn't some special right that's just incorporating elsewhere. The equivilent of an individual emigrating, and changing citizenship. Then, they can sell their assets (the data network) to banks to raise money and come out of bankruptcy, simply declaring the stock they sold to buy those assets to be worthless. That's just an issue of debt being senior to equity, again I wouldn't call it a right, at least not of the corporation in question, more like a contractual right of the debt holder. On another front, there are people who have been trying to give corporations special protection from lawsuits - protections that individuals don't have. I have never met such a person. More typically corporations are the targets of lawsuits, however tenuous there connection to the injury. They have deep pockets, so it may not matter if they are "1% at fault", they are the ones who get sued. I know someone who was sued by Mattel because of a work of art that they claimed infringed the Barbie copyright. The case was frivolous, and my friend would almost certainly have prevailed in court. But Mattel's lawyers kept flooding the court with motions, each of which had to be defended. My friend could not afford to pay the legal bills to keep fighting, and was forced to simply give up. That's not a right of corporations. Non corporate holders of IP can sue under similar circumstances. That's just an issue of courts being very expensive, and Mattel having more money and lawyers than your aquaintence.