Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says

Relative to how many of them actively campaign against our basic interests, I would say people disproportionately love billionaires.

The only things that make Bentonville "pretty great" are available in all of the surrounding cities.

Rogers, Lowell, Springdale, Fayetteville, Bella Vista. ALL OF THEM are better than Bentonville in spades. Bentonville is riding on their coattails.

Bentonville DOES NOT have a single national retailer other than Walmart in its city limits. Walmart makes sure of it by owning over half the land in town. The only competing grocer is an employee owned co-op that Walmart could not succeed in starving out like they did all the IGAs and local markets.

It is car centric as hell, despite the meager efforts they've been making with the NWA Regional Greenway (which was started by Rogers and Fayetteville and Bentonville initially resisted). They destroyed a long standing low income community so they could widen 8th for Walmart. You might think, well they're courting mountain bikers with the greenway and the mountain biking trails, but actually try to get anywhere and live on a bike. I did. The greenway gets you around completely separated from anywhere you might want to go. You WILL have to get on city streets or ride in the grass, hoping that it's not hiding a 2ft deep ditch. If you get on city streets, you WILL be used for target practice. They might have built infrastructure, but the people haven't changed, and for 25 years I heard people joking about running down cyclists for shits and giggles. People in huge lifted trucks will turn right on red over you while you have a walk sign to cross.

It has gradually developed downtown to be a little more urban, but not without major consequences. They have in the past decade destroyed innumberable small apartment complexes, triplexes and duplexes in downtown so that out of town executives and magnates can come buy megamansions on Central Ave, the literal main street through town. There can be no thriving downtown, no business to support the square and its tax base, when these mansions are eating the density that was supporting the tax base.

But they added few bike paths and MTB trails, a building you can ride a bike up, and a bunch of Private Equity owned restaurants, so I guess that's worth the systemic displacement of longtime residents and the short sale of the city's future for some biking tourism dollars. OH, and that gaudy display of wealth Alice Walton built, Crystal Bridges. It's nice that they put an installation in specifically to remind the locals just how far above them they are. Crystal Bridges is the Walton's "Bezos Balls". I would have preferred that the woman spend that money at the time paving the ditches in town so people can walk around without stepping in the street. OR JUST PAY LOCAL TAXES!!!!

You want retail? Dick's Sporting Goods, Target, Best Buy, Whole Foods, Marshalls, B&N, Pier 1, Staple, Lowes, Kohls, Office Depot, Petco, Ross, Northwest Arkansas Mall and The Pinnacle Hills Promenade are all in Rogers.

You want a night out? Good fucking luck in Bentonville, it's a company town, people are gone in the evenings and your options for dinner suck. There are basically no entertainment options in town. There's the movie theater that serves drinks, and I think Great Day Skate Place might count if you don't mind being sober and surrounded by families with kids. Fuck you if you want a club or lounge though. Double fuck you if you can't afford to pay rent in Bentonville (don't forget Walmart has spent half a century depressing real wages in Northwest Arkansas) and have to live in Centerton, Gravette, or Highfill. All the bars and night life are in Springdale and Fayetteville.

Want a fancy night out? Ruth's Chris, Theo's, Oak, Bordinos, and Atlas are all in either Rogers or Fayetteville. River Grille technically counts for you, but you have to drive like you're leaving Bentonville for Pea Ridge to get there.

Wanna go hiking? Fayetteville. Wanna go golfing? Bella Vista and Rogers. Wanna see a movie that isn't the top 4 newest releases? Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville. Wanna buy health food? Whole Foods or Cook's in Rogers.

You want local history? Go to Pea Ridge National Military Park. Go to the Daisy BB gun museum in Rogers, go to the Shiloh Museum for Ozark History in Springdale. Go to the Siloam Springs museum. Go to the Clinton House in Fayetteville. The Museum of Native American History has only been there for a few years. All these other museums have been entrenched. I guess the Amazeum is cool for kids but you probably look weird if you try to go in yourself.

Rogers has the water park, the aquarium, the AMP (major concert venue). Fayetteville hosts the performing arts at Walton Arts Center and the UofA Theater. Fayetteville has all the live music at small bar venues like George's Majestic Lounge. All the karaoke is on Dickson St.

There is not even a bowling alley in Bentonville.

Bentonville is not great. Bentonville is a shitville void smack dab in a region it refuses to participate in. Bentonville is a puppet of the Waltons and they make it no secret in the Walmart Home Office orientation, that Sam Walton wanted the city to remain small and the lack of any resources to actually live life has been by design. Only in the last 10 years have they even sort of kind of started to renege on that and start to actually build it up some, and that was only because there was major brain drain because no one wanted to live there.

Whatever caused you to think Bentonville is great has been the result of a relentless marketing push.

That's not really correct. Corporations are recognized as distinct entities as a legal fiction to make application of law to them easier, but the law "pierces the corporate veil" routinely where that legal fiction is not applicable, and in those cases, recognizes the factual nature of corporations merely as methods of coordination employed by the underlying people using them.

> You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.

No, this is definitely not correct. Limited liability implies that you can separate your financial accounts from that of the business, such that creditors can't target your personal assets to cover the debts of the organization, but doesn't necessarily shield you from legal liability for the actions you personally undertake in with in the context of the business.

The idea that the organization has no rights insofar as it is being regarded as an entity unto itself is also false, as a great deal of extant jurisprudence demonstrates.

If those thirty companies reconfigure their holdings so they each own one thirtieth of each of thirty parcels, under your model all of a sudden each company has thirty votes.

I believe if you tried to exploit the ambiguity in the law in a way that mattered enough for anyone to care, you would catch a lawsuit predicated on the idea that the one entity/one vote concept was violated by this trick. I think a court would approve of the idea.

I still agree with you that this law is poor, I just don’t think this exploit flies in court. But no one knows until they try.

No, because this is exactly what "one entity/one vote" directly limits. Each entity is still limited to a single vote.

I think if an outsider overtly bought a parcel, created hundreds or thousands of Delaware entities, titled that parcel over to all of them jointly, and tried to register them all to vote, we'd end up with a test case that the court might strike down. But I'd think someone exploiting it at scale, or a politically connected insider for whom the voting registrar looked the other way might get away with it.