Beyond Seizing Parks, New Paths to Influence

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-organizers-consider-value-of-camps.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 8:23 AM
Subject: re: Beyond Seizing Parks, New Paths to Influence
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:
  The battleline of Occupy Wall Street now moves from Zuccotti park to cyberspace. In the 21st century, that's the obvious venue for the exercise of our Freedom of Assembly. But the visceral excitement of chanting and marching must now be replaced by the hard work of institutionalizing change.  Any concrete demand risks trivializing and fragmenting the movement, but there's one plank that I think will keep almost everyone on board. We should now turn to working for a constitutional amendment constraining corporate personhood. For our first century, we allowed that corporations were  "legal persons"with whom one could enter contracts, but were not "natural persons" endowed with rights. That distinction was lost in 1886; it's past time that we put it back.
Barry Haskell Levine