Why not add onto the amendment a few other things that ought to be taken care of?For instance, why not add a provision forbidding corporations to hire lobbyists? Or maybe we should specify that all corporate books have to be open to public inspection, or at least open to inspection by any shareholder. We could say that, once you are hired by a corporation, you have a right to that job, and the corporation would have to go to court and show cause if it wanted to fire you. Or we could say that all corporations have to distribute all their profits annually to their shareholders, and that if the corporation has a loss, the shareholders have to make it good; in other words, we could require annual corporate budgets to be balanced as many state government budgets are now balanced. We could require a corporation to be separately incorporated in each state in which it does business. And so on. The reasons that none of these provisions are included as part of the amendment are that each provision separately might be a bad idea and that the provisions collectively would sink any chance of the amendment being made a part of the Constitution. Each separate provision, if the amendment does pass, could and perhaps should be considered in the Congress and in the state legislatures. If any of the provisions then became law and proved to be a really, really bad idea, the provision could be junked without having to repeal the entire amendment that made it possible. A constitutional amendment should just set up a basic principle which later legislative and court decisions have to follow. It should not include specifics which at best can become outdated and which may be impractical from the beginning. We want a Human Rights Amendment which can be supported by libertarians and liberals, by entrepeneurs and ecologists, by the broadest possible spectrum of people who are not cheerleaders for corporatism. We want an amendment which has a realistic chance of getting passed. We think this is it. What would this amendment accomplish? Why should any organization work on getting it passed? Who is this "ad hoc committee"? |